China: Erratic State, Frustrated Society

Lucian W. Pye

From Foreign Affairs, Fall 1990

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Summary:  "Chinese civilization has produced a distinctive and enduring pattern of relations between the state and society", which contains the seeds of enduring problems in domestic and foreign policy. Within a general 'conspiracy of make-believe', Chinese central authorities issue 'absolute' orders, with which provincial and local authorities feign compliance, while Chinese society at large continues its tradition of passive and introspective focus on the private domain. China's modern political development has failed to create the cultural building-blocks of pluralist democracy, having retained the absolutist mentality in walks of life (notably science and technology) where independent critical thinking, and tolerance of 'probabilistic' thought, are essential. Moreover, decades of communist denunciation of "just about every feature of Chinese culture as a feudal abomination that should be obliterated" has produced a situation in which it is now "not easy to articulate what exactly are the Chinese qualities that should now be defended". Chinese society is left with an ideological façade by which group-interest is supposed to prevail over private interest, but does not, and an arrogant political elite which disdains the serious tasks of foreign policy planning.

Lucian W. Pye is Ford Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and immediate past President of the American Political Science Association.

Why does China thwart, frustrate and even embarrass those who are only trying to help? For all who befriend China, the story is the same: high hopes, then disappointment. The exhilaration of the Beijing Spring followed by the rage of the Tiananmen massacre was only the high-theater version of the countless commonplace ways China continually brings hope and then despair to its well-wishers. All governments, whether democratic or communist, have had their special problems in maintaining smooth relations with Chinese authorities. But it is of course the Chinese people themselves who are most hurt and frustrated.

China seems to evoke in others, particularly Americans, an irresistible desire to serve as China?s teachers in the ways of the modern world, and thereby presumably help China improve itself. Yet, from the time of Lord Palmerston?s efforts to get the Chinese to accept the conventions of Western diplomacy, to President Bush?s humiliating attempts to alter the behavior of Beijing?s current rulers, China seems impelled to reject the helping hand and to act in ways that seem perversely self-damaging in the eyes of those who believe they have that country?s interests at heart.

Western frustrations with the conduct of Chinese officials began with the first efforts to "open" China. Even after 1842, when the Qing court agreed in the Treaty of Nanking to establish state-to-state relations, the British were driven again to using military muscle, in part to get the Chinese to establish a foreign office and conduct "normal" diplomatic relations. Faced with force majeure the Chinese reluctantly gave up their tradition of "managing barbarian affairs" through the offices of the Board of Rites, where specialists in protocol could teach uninformed foreigners the "usages of the empire," including how to get down on all fours when kowtowing to the August One. They did indeed set up a crude facsimile of a foreign office. The British, however, were driven to exasperation, for it seemed to them that in staffing the new office, the Tsung-li Yamen, the Chinese must have diabolically scoured the imperial bureaucracy to find the most dimwitted of officials. Additionally the Chinese had placed the foreign office on a back street in a rundown building, where passers-by could press their noses to the windows to watch Western diplomats attempt to lecture Chinese mandarins on why foreign affairs should not be treated as a mere nuisance.

It is of course understandable and hardly noteworthy that cultural differences should arise in relations among people with different traditions. The problem of disappointment with China, however, is of a more troublesome sort. Indeed the difficulties are particularly frustrating because outsiders often have an easy time establishing comfortable, even warm, relations with individual Chinese. Problems almost invariably arise out of the actions of the government and, specifically, from the ways in which power and authority operate in China. Chinese authority causes trouble not just for foreigners but for the vast majority of the Chinese people. Just when all appears to be going well, Chinese officials create problems ...

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