Comment

The rhetoric of ‘China’

THESE days ‘China’ has become much more than the proper noun corresponding to a real entity – a political-economic system. ‘China’ by now stands equally for a rhetoric, a performative discourse that seeks to effect or legitimize certain types of changes in economic policy, shaping our understanding of the how, what and why of development.

‘China’ is, above all, a rhetoric deployed by the Communist Party to bolster support by making a certain type of ‘development’ into the cardinal guiding principle of the nation’s will to regain its former grandeur, strength and eminence. Hence the enthusiasm for hosting the Olympics, the obsession with the look of its booming mega-cities (glass office tower-blocks, high-rise condominiums – in avid mimicry of the latest architectural and urban design fads of the West.) The ‘rhetoric of China’ is designed to pre-empt and disarm thought and action by disaffected citizens who want, or could want, a more plural, a fuller specification of national purpose (not just growth but also equity/ecological health/greater democracy/ spirituality…)

Chinese developmental nationalism is a continuous performance by the party and the state meant to exorcise both the ghosts of Maoism and the more liberal-democratic strands of the 4 May 1919 reformist legacy. Chinese state-capitalism depends critically on such rhetorics. In part because it simply isn’t producing enough jobs (Chinese hyper-growth has in recent years been almost ‘jobless’), is responsible for what is nothing less than an ecological holocaust, and is brutal in its treatment of migrant workers as well as of those being peremptorily displaced by the gigantic projects that are so popular among Chinese political elites. It is also producing regional and class inequality at a rate that has already made China into one of the most inequitous countries anywhere. It has been doing a poor job of welfare-state activities, instead diverting its buoyant state funds to the armed forces, the teetering public sector (especially banks) and to the gratuitous provision of over-supplied and heavily subsidized physical infrastructure for firms and the urban upper- and middle-classes. The rule of law remains weak while contacts, connections and informal networking, often corrupt, are all important. All this without sufficient open, pluralistic public argument and reasoning about the costs and benefits, about who wins/who loses in the process of breakneck economic growth.

Chinese state-capitalism and its successes, then, are not just about market-oriented reforms, institutional design and infrastructure – they depend on and cannot function without rhetorical discourse, ideology, ‘culture’. It would not be incorrect to claim that economistic, aspirational nationalism is the ‘spirit’ of the Chinese state-capitalist system, an example of how the ostensibly purely material, objective worlds of money and markets are also, so to say, ‘spiritual’ or cultural. This spirit motivates and coordinates the local, provincial and national elites of the Communist Party and, more importantly, legitimates and authorizes its stewardship of the Chinese nation and helps keep the citizenry pacified.

Of course there is a material price to be paid – developmental nationalism needs to spend money to some degree, however minimal, in order to be plausible to citizens, especially those less favoured. The party under President Hu currently feels compelled to buy off a restive peasantry with promises of a new rural ‘socialism’, and spending billions of dollars on rural welfare and infrastructure. No matter how uni-focused on GDP growth rates and the like, the developmental-national ‘spirit’ always carries with it egalitarian promises, expectations and potential. After all, it is hard to endow ‘China’ with a nearly religious charge, orienting it towards an aspirational future-as-mission, without implying that all Chinese will/should benefit. There cannot be too large a gap between the promises made by the national grandeur-seeking ‘rhetoric of China’ and the everyday, grassroots realities, especially in those parts of the country and among those social segments who are being left out of the economic mega-boom. This is why nationalism is the preferred register in which the disaffected and the left-out are increasingly beginning to speak out.

‘China’ is also a rhetoric for business and political elites around the world, most notably India. China is the name of the ‘spectre of international comparisons’ invoked to suggest why the Indian polity must see ‘development’ and modernity in exclusively or primarily economic terms; why catch-up ‘development’ is pretty much the only thing that truly matters in public affairs; why what is good for Indian business houses and even FDI-bringing multinationals is necessarily and unproblematically good for everyone; why social and human development concerns (equality, social justice, environmental protection…) are somehow effeminate, moralistic, romantic concerns that are passé; and why we (workers, middle-classes, politicians, bureaucrats, consumers and nay-saying argumentative Indians in general) should all unite in a disciplined manner behind the Indian corporate elite who are determined to do right by their country, restoring its self-esteem and pre-eminence.

This rhetorical use of ‘China’ is not necessarily a yearning for an authoritarian solution to the problems that businessmen face. It is more a yearning for the sort of ‘spirit of capitalism’ function that Chinese nationalism serves so successfully (for now). Implicit in this view is the idea that Indian nationalism is far too open to the contentious play of multiple identities (class, caste, region, religion…) and plural public concerns. In this view, Indian nationalism lacks its Chinese counterpart’s uni-focus on economics; it is too ‘cultural’. That is, the achievement of collective prosperity is not seen to be the only or most important way to redeem our battered national self-esteem. Rather than urgently try and achieve rapid ‘development’ to attain self- and international respect, we have taken the easy way out by telling ourselves tall tales of our ‘cultural’ ancient-ness, wisdom and superiority. Compared to ‘China’, our collective penury doesn’t shame and embarrass us enough because we feel we have sufficient ‘culture’ to make up for our economic debilities. This view of Indian nationalism, usually left implicit by a focus on ‘China’ as exemplar, is perhaps not so much wrong descriptively as it is evaluatively one-sided.

In using the rhetorical figure of ‘China’ there is, then, a severe economizing with the truth. For example, amid all the talk of Chinese excellence at labour-intensive manufacturing it is never mentioned that, on average, China produces only around half as many jobs per percentage point of GDP growth as India. Nor when arguing the case for how business-friendly the Chinese system is relative to the Indian one, that the average profitability of Indian companies is far higher than that in China. It is only now being recognized that the Chinese model of political-economy is actively and, arguably, deliberately hostile to domestic entrepreneurship, which is why it is so over-dependent on FDI from the Chinese diaspora, Japan, and the US. It is rarely pointed out that Chinese banks are nearly dysfunctional with non-performing asset ratios of, in some cases, more than 40%, or that the Chinese economy is a clearly over-saving and under-consuming because the government spends too little on social welfare. Those advocating China as a model of an ambitiously muscular nation-state avoid mention of its dependence on American hyper-consumer markets or that its monetary policy is pretty much decided by the US Federal Reserve. If mention were also made of the horrific scale and pace of environmental destruction underway in China, and of the near-barbaric treatment of migrant labour, as also the perverse effect of the one-child policy on the country’s sex-ratio, the truth of the real China begins to appear at considerable variance from that of the rhetorical ‘China.’

No doubt the ‘rhetoric of China’ will grow louder, both there and elsewhere in the world-system, most notably India. But, here at least it isn’t likely to be all that effective. The Indian political system and culture seem to be getting enough things right – profits, investment and consumption are soaring; growth is racy; middle class wages and spirits are rising; interest-group gridlock is evidently not nearly as much of a constraint on growth, especially at state level, as was once feared, and so on. Admittedly, routine governance and public goods- and service-delivery is, as yet, poor in quantity and quality for there to be a brash, persuasive ‘rhetoric of India’ – ‘India’ as a model of how relative democratic excellence in adverse social and economic conditions can be combined with sustained, high growth rates. But, it can be plausibly argued that we are getting there. That would be of the greatest significance to other aspiring, ‘developing’ nations. The figure of ‘China’ is, as of now, more appealing partly because of its wish-fulfilling simplicity. That of ‘India’ is, so far, too complexly ambiguous to constitute a model like ‘China’ these days and Japan earlier.

Deep down, Indian business elites know too well the advantages the Indian political-economy confers on them to truly believe their own ‘China’ rhetorics. It is becoming clear that Indian capitalisms (there are many) do not really need the sort of simplistic, emphatic and uni-dimensional nationalist ‘spirit’ that businesses in China enjoy. In any case, such cultural and ideological conformity and discipline is just not possible in argumentative India. It takes monumental national trauma or states of extreme emergency to yield such ideological uniformity (in China’s case, western and Japanese imperialism, civil war and the sufferings imposed by Maoism.) India, on the other hand, has been far less crisis-prone. Consequently, our political culture remains plural, argumentative and contentious. To give in to the ‘rhetoric of China’ while ignoring the historical background to contemporary Chinese nationalism is to advocate for India something that simply doesn’t accord with its history.

We do not have to, like ‘China’, ‘go for broke’. All we can and must aspire to is a developmental good-enough-ness, so to say. Why be over-committed to a future-as-relentless-rising-curve of national grandeur when pragmatic trade-offs in the present (among different interest and ideological groups) show signs of doing the ‘development’ job well, and here is that keyword again, enough. After all, ‘development’ shouldn’t become a theology, a (secular) religion of infinite desire as it arguably has in ‘China.’

Vikram Bedi