 I'm Salvatore Bobonis, and today's lecture is Communism versus Confucianism in Contemporary China. Communist China claims to be a democracy, but a democracy of a very different, and it claims better, kind, than western liberal democracies. Yet, Communist China itself is rapidly giving up on Marx and Engels in favor of its homegrown philosophy for Confucius. Vietnam is similarly de-emphasizing Marx and Engels in favor of the revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh, who may be seen more as a nationalist than as a communist. China's resurgent Confucianism in many ways provides a philosophical basis for China's illiberal approach to non-representative technocratic democracy. Inscribed at the entrance to Communist Party of China headquarters off Tiananmen Square in Beijing is Mao Zedong's slogan, serve the people. It's not only there, but it's there with an honor guard, representing the motto of the Communist Party of China, its very reason for existing. Chinese Communism, like Russian and other Communisms, had its origin in modern democratic theories. Now, not the strain of liberal democratic theory that comes to us from England and the West, but a more social democratic theory that comes from continental Europe and the East. Two of the leading lights being Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. Karl Marx, of course, is well known as the co-author with Friedrich Engels of the Communist Manifesto and the author of Capital, Critique of Capitalism. Vladimir Lenin, of course, was the leader of the Bolshevik Party in the Russian Revolution. What most people today forget about these two leaders is that both of them were fighting autocratic, highly non-democratic leaders in their own countries. Neither of them started out as revolutionaries against England or America. In fact, Karl Marx lived in England and Vladimir Lenin lived in Switzerland at the time the Russian Revolution started. These were people who were idealists fighting against autocracies and authoritarianism in their home countries, not people who spent their days fighting for revolution in England, America and the West. Just to put this into context, the leader of Germany, Karl Marx's birthplace at the time of his early adulthood, was Kaiser Wilhelm I. Kaiser Wilhelm I was an autocratic absolute ruler whose prime minister was Otto von Bismarck. In war after war, Wilhelm I conquered Austria and then France and later Denmark. This was an expansionist, militarist leader from the old feudal aristocracy of Prussia, not a modern representative democratic leader who Karl Marx was born under. Nicholas II, czar of Russia, was even more absolutist until he was forced to allow some vestige of democracy after the disastrous war with Japan. In 1904, he had ruled as a complete autocrat even after that. He had much more absolute power than any king or queen of Central or Western Europe. So the government that Lenin successfully overthrew in Russia was far from any kind of liberal democracy. Similarly in China, democratic ideals arrived in 1911 with the overthrow of the last Manchu emperor. The Manchurian emperors were foreigners from Manchuria who ruled over China under the Qing dynasty from 1648 until 1911. The Chinese Revolution in 1911 was considered not just democratic but also nationalist. It was a rising of the Chinese people against foreign emperors who again had at least some theoretical absolute power of life and death over them. The Chinese Revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, like Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, spent time in the West. He was born in China but educated as a child in Hawaii and later in his 20s in British-administered Hong Kong. All three of these revolutionary leaders, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Sun Yat-sen, can be seen as, well, people inspired by western democratic ideals even if they did not embrace western liberal principles of government. They all wanted to replace autocratic, non-democratic, non-liberal governments with governments that were more oriented toward the benefit of their people even if the replacement governments that they wanted to put in place were not themselves liberal governments. Sun Yat-sen in particular had a theory of government that might be called, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, government of the people by the people for the people. In Sun Yat-sen thought, they are known as Min Zhu, Min Xuan, and Min Sheng. Min Zhu, a government based on the people as sovereign, not on dynastic rules. So government from the ground up of the people. Min Xuan, the idea that power derives from the people through constitutional mechanisms. So government by the people through constitutional rule of law. And Min Sheng, government for the people, government that was intended to ensure that the welfare of the people was the main objective of rule. Now as in western Europe, Marx was very influential in republican China, and Marxian and Leninist principles were part of the broad intellectual background of republican Chinese thought. The Chinese republic under Sun Yat-sen and later under Chiang Kai-shek was not a communist government, it was not explicitly Marxian. But it did draw its ruling ideas from people like Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. In fact, after the Communist Party victory in 1949 in the Civil War in China, mainland China became the people's republic of China and officially communist. The Republic of China continued to exist on the island of Taiwan. And you might think, given the Cold War contrast between Mao Zedong and the People's Republic of China versus Chiang Kai-shek and the Republic of China, you might think that this would be a contrast of communist versus capitalist. It was nothing of the kind. In both the mainland and on Taiwan, the state-owned major industries, just as the communists did on the mainland, the nationalists, the Republic of China on Taiwan, nationalized, that is brought under government control, all of the large, heavy industries of the island. Both countries had land reform to break up big feudal land honings. On the mainland, in communist China, this initially resulted in land being given to small peasant holders, just as it did in Taiwan. Only later did Mao Zedong enforce the collectivization of farms into big publicly owned farms, something that never happened in Taiwan. Both countries had one party rule in the interests of the people on the mainland. It was the Communist Party on Taiwan. It was the Nationalist Party. And both were governed illiberally by unelected military dictatorships. Neither Taiwan nor China had anything resembling liberal democracy in the era of their founding rulers, Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek. After the deaths of Chiang and Mao, both countries changed dramatically. One might even say both countries liberalized, but in very different ways. Taiwan went on to become a vibrant liberal democracy, and today freedom of speech and freedom of expression run rampant in Taiwan. Taiwan is an extraordinarily vibrant democracy where people express themselves en masse in the streets anytime they want, with little regard to what the government may feel about it. In fact, just a few years ago, students seized the legislature of Taiwan in what was called the Sunflower Movement, and they did this without any deaths or without any protesters being shot by police. It was one of the world's great manifestations of the Occupy spirit that started in Occupy Wall Street in New York's Suzukati Park. On the mainland, there has been liberalization of the economy, but little to no liberalization of politics. Under China's post-Mao leadership, in particular Deng Xiaoping, China moved to a kind of post-communist capitalist authoritarianism. The government of China since 1978 has resembled the kinds of capitalist military dictatorships that were sponsored by the United States during the Cold War, places like Brazil under its military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s, or Indonesia under Suharto. These are pretty much the models for today's China. One of Deng's first acts when he became leader in 1978 was to invite Coca-Cola back into China. This was highly symbolic that Deng was signaling he was going to rule as an authoritarian leader, but not as an anti-capitalist leader. And in fact, Coca-Cola was made legal in mainland China one day after Deng Xiaoping took office. It was virtually his first act to have a coke and a smile. This represented a move to what he called socialism with Chinese characteristics. And in fact, it's become a trope in contemporary China to the point of becoming a joke that anything that is western but adopted in China has to be called such and such with Chinese characteristics. It's a mark of irony that liberalism and socialism and China, even capitalism, don't really mean what they sound like in the rest of the world. Deng's guiding philosophy was summarized in the epigram. It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice. He wanted growth and development, and if that meant some people getting rich before others, he was very happy to have it. Since 1978, China has in fact experienced massive economic growth, one might say unparalleled economic growth in the history of the world. China has come nowhere near catching up to the rich economies of western Europe and North America, but in a brief four decades, China has gone from being one of the poorest countries in the world on a par with the poorest countries in Sub-Saharan Africa today, places like Malawi, to Malawi, Chad, Central Afternoon Republic, Congo, on a level with the very poorest countries in the world, to being a middle income country. China today has roughly the same income per capita as Mexico, Brazil, or Poland. The difference is that while other countries have liberalized, China has experienced continued political repression. Today's Brazil and Indonesia and Poland have much more open liberal regimes than they did in the 1970s and early 1980s. China does not. There was a brief moment of political opening in 1989, but this was crushed by the People's Liberation Army in the June 4th Tiananmen Square Massacre. The context for the Tiananmen Square Massacre was the collapse of authoritarian communist regimes all across eastern Europe. Now this photo here of the destruction of the Berlin Wall, this actually dates from November 1989. The Wall came down after Tiananmen Square, but nonetheless the change was in the air in eastern Europe. Poland's solidarity movement was already running in elections, and it was clear already by mid-1989 that eastern Europe was on the road to massive liberalization. This is something that China's leaders did not want. Now, some people put it the other way, that eastern Europe's liberalization was to some extent inspired by the outpouring of liberal sentiment in China in 1989. We'll never know for sure what caused what, but it does seem certain that China's leaders were very afraid of eastern European-style liberalization, and as it turned out they were right to be. All of the regimes that existed in eastern Europe in 1989, including the communist government of the Soviet Union itself, have now disappeared into history. The Communist Party of China is still in charge. Mao Zedong had warned that Deng Xiaoping was secretly a quote-unquote capitalist rotor, and he turned out to be right. China today most resembles an authoritarian capitalist country, not any kind of communism as was expressed in the theories of Marx and Engels in the 19th century. China still pays homage to Mao Zedong. Here is Mao on the Chinese currency, and in fact Mao appears on all of the Yuan notes, most visibly here on the 100 Yuan banknote. But even if China embraces Mao's memory, it does not embrace his thought, and in fact Mao is being steadily erased from Chinese memory to be replaced by perhaps an unlikely candidate, the Chinese philosopher Confucius. I say unlikely because under Mao's rule in communist China, Confucius was explicitly prescribed. Confucian temples were desecrated, public statements of Confucian thought were outlawed, Confucian books were burned. Confucius was viewed as a representative of the old feudal China. Confucius told people, don't question your position in the world and don't challenge the government, and Mao's message was a revolutionary, we should be challenging the government all the time. Now, of course, the subtext to Mao's challenging the government was, you shouldn't challenge Mao, but nonetheless Confucius himself was persona non grata in communist China. Today, Confucian principles are widely quoted in support of continued Communist Party rule. Respect for authority, the importance of family, Communist China wanted to get rid of the family and instead replace it with loyalty to the state. Today's Chinese Communist authorities promote respect for the family so much that they've actually passed a law saying that parents can sue their children if their children don't call and visit on a regular basis. Confucian thought put heavy emphasis on hierarchy in society, those below should defer to those above, and most important at all from the standpoint of the Communist Party, obedience to the government of the day. That whoever is in charge deserves the obedience of those who are ruled, even if the person in charge has gained power in an unjust or illegal way. That kind of philosophy that people should obey the government just because it's the government is obviously very attractive to an authoritarian government that has no real democratic legitimacy. Central to the Communist Party of China's neo-Confucianism is the concept of Tiansha or All Under Heaven. The idea of Tiansha is that when there is one ruler, all of society is at peace. Even if the ruler does not deserve to be the ruler or is a bad ruler, the fact that society is united under one ruler means that there is no conflict in society. And that kind of peace is worth the sacrifice made in living within justice. In the Tiansha concept, individuals should not seek to upset the balance of society by challenging the government. They should work with and through the government if they want improvements, not challenge the government or attempt to bring it down. Because if the government comes down, that would result in disorder, disharmony and civil conflict and potential death and destruction. China is now busily building or rebuilding or renovating Confucius temples all over China, beginning with the Temple of Confucius itself in Shufu, the temple that was built at the final resting place of the philosopher himself. The Temple of Confucius in Shufu, once abandoned and vandalized, has now become a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a heavily promoted tourism destination, especially for domestic Chinese tourism. There are also Confucius temples in major cities all over China. The entire center of Nanjing is given over to a Confucius temple district celebrating the life and principles of Confucius. In addition to promoting Confucius inside China, Confucius has become the public face of China to the rest of the world. Universities all around the world have Confucius institutes that are funded by the Chinese government for the learning of Chinese language and culture. Contemporary Confucianism preaches a creed that is diametrically opposed to classic Western liberalism. And yet the kinds of resistance that we saw in 1989, like this June 5th photo of the Tank Man standing up to tanks in Beijing's Tiananmen Square just one day after the Tiananmen Square massacre, this kind of glorification of the individual resistance to authoritarianism is not just banned in China. I think it is also disappearing in the Western liberal democracies as well. Many of us in the West may applaud the Tank Man for standing up to Chinese authoritarianism, yet how many of us applaud Westerners who similarly stand up for freedom and openness in Western societies, the Chelsea Mannings of the world, who have sacrificed their own lives and freedom in order to challenge our Western governments and to challenge them to respect our own ideals of liberalism, openness and democracy. I think it is very easy for us to condemn Communist China for its very transparent battle against liberalism, while we ourselves let our own governments fight a much more sophisticated, much more light-touch battle against transparency and liberalism. When our own governments are monitoring all of our communications, it is very difficult for us to vilify Communist China for doing exactly the same thing. Key takeaways. First, the Chinese revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen had a philosophy that was based on three Lincolnian principles of Min Zhu, Min Zhuang, Min Sheng, loosely translating as government of the people, by the people, and for the people. China's post-Mao ruler Deng Xiaoping was instrumental in setting up today's capitalist authoritarian society in China. And finally, contemporary China's neo-confucianism is an illiberal governing philosophy that stresses respect for authority over individual freedoms. Thank you for listening. You can find out more about me at salventorbobonus.com, where you can also sign up for my monthly podcast on global affairs.