Charles Horner’s Rising China and Its Postmodern Fate

Charles Horner’s book, Rising China and Its Postmodern Fate: Memories of Empire in a New Global Context, published by University of Georgia Press, was summed up in a review article published in the Asia Chronicle:

Horner’s unconventional approach is an effort to analyze Chinese history not as it is, but as it is understood today by both the West and by China itself. His approach is important because how a country understands its own past guides its future decisions and is often a means of defining its identity relative to its past. In this sense, Horner’s methods echo the postmodernism implied in the title and place him in the burgeoning trend of Western historians employing postmodern approaches to interpreting Chinese history.

The author has granted Danwei permission to run an extract of the book with an introduction. Horner is a Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. As well serving roles in the administrations of President Reagan and the first President Bush, Horner also did graduate work in Chinese history at the University of Chicago, National Taiwan University and Tokyo University.

Considered a China scholar, Horner is writing a two part book; the second part is in the making.

Rising China and Its Postmodern Fate presents a many-sided examination of how China’s sense of itself and of the world has changed profoundly since 1979 and how an ongoing structural, and especially cultural, transformation will both empower and constrain China actions at home and in the world.

For decades, the Chinese themselves and sinologists around the world were heavily invested in a “narrative of failure” that explained the advent of the People’s Republic in 1949. The founding of PRC was thought definitively to have resolved China’s age-old problems and “contradictions” and would therefore be long-lasting and consequential. Instead, after 1979, it became apparent that something radically different had been gestating in China and it was that which needed explanation and explication. China has now “re-started history” by reinterpreting its imperial past, by changing its understanding of the history of the world, by building new regionally-based social and economic structures, and, most important, by creating a culture increasingly less receptive to heroic national undertakings.

Thus, there are new questions to ask and to answer: What are the international implications of the PRC’s growing macro-economic regionalism which allows the Periphery increasingly to bypass the Center and link itself directly to the Global? Of citizens increasingly less intimidated by political authority? Of the spiritual and psychological disorder of astonishingly rapid urbanization? Of the growing salience of “Sinophone Asia,” the “Diaspora” and “Greater China?” Of “identity politics?” Of cultural creations which disdain greatness? How will these shape PRC’s conduct at home and abroad? The usual outlook is solely assume that PRC thirty years hence will be what it is today, only more so. But, by then, it will no longer be Rising China, but Transformed China, and its ever-growing internal incoherence will confound its options.

Deng Xiaoping’s (1904-1997) program has now lasted longer than Mao’s, and it continues to move forward. Indeed, in almost all of the manifestations of the Modern, the pace of China’s grand project has accelerated. Mao had hoped that the Countryside and all that it represented would surround and finally destroy everything that the City was and what it represented — and not only in China, but throughout the world. But the City has more than fought the Countryside to a draw; it is now counterattacking and it will win. China will soon leave behind its past as a predominantly peasant society, and most of its people will live in urban settlements. Soon, there will be no countryside at all. Of course, the countryside will be more than just a memory for a long time; Postmodern China will have within it hundreds of millions of new urbanites who carry the Countryside’s habits of mind with them. The world as a whole may not yet be configured in the way late Qing-era writers of science fiction imagined it, but China’s newest cities — indeed, all the newest cities around the world — resemble the projections of prescient fantasists and pioneering filmmakers. The World City is now more mere metaphor. It is a thing called Megalopolis, and it does not acknowledge national boundaries in its unstoppable sprawl.

Urbanologists and economists study these developments as physical phenomena; they worry about sources of water and power, the construction of transport, the removal of trash and the treatment of sewage. They rightly focus on natural resources, and whether the world will have enough of them to sustain the new World City’s way of life. But we do not think much about the world’s store of cultural, psychological, and spiritual resources — how rapidly the new World City will consume them and how, or even whether, they can be replenished. In these respects, some places in Modern China are already frightening — filled with social and personal pathologies of every description — and Postmodern China is fated to create many more of them.

Deng’s Xiaoping’s blueprint, which set all this in motion, had consisted of “four modernizations” — agriculture, industry, technology, and defense. Though the absence of a fifth — democratization — has long been noted, political change, whatever one decides to call it, is also now a fact of life. In today’s China, political words may still have a Lewis Carroll affect; like Humpty Dumpty, the regime will use them to mean what it wants them to mean. But, if there is still any Marxism left in the Communist Party of China, the doctrine itself makes it plain that that there is a political specter that must eternally haunt China. Marxists believe that the political Superstructure of a society must change as its economic and productive Substructure changes. Today, China’s leaders term their country a “developing socialist market economy country with Chinese characteristics.” However one construes that tortured phrase, it describes a tiger with ever-changing stripes.

Those of us who came in on this story during the mid-twentieth century — at the time of the first episode of madness in Mao’s China — were relieved by what we thought was good news as the twentieth century ended. The great changes in China since l976 seemed to vindicate Western ideas about the way the world worked. Every day, China was coming ever more to resemble what we thought a modern Asian society ought to be — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan. China’s transformation was not yet complete, but it seemed unlikely that China would create a new, unique, variant of modern society that would stand against the irresistible forces of the age. Much reassurance was offered, but it did not overcome the concern, and then the anxiety and, now in many quarters, the plain dread about what today’s Rising China portends for the United States and the rest of the world.

In this, we are not alone, for twenty-first century Rising China itself must now live with the curse of hopes fulfilled. China is rich and powerful, but it is the product of the same modern history which, having created the riches and the power, may also have planted inside the country the seeds of its possible undoing. Should a twenty-first century prophet announce, then, that that there is now a specter haunting Modern China, and that it is the specter of Postmodernism? The next new era in China will need to have a name, however elusive. But it is its very imprecision which makes it a useful catch-all adjective, like Confucian, Modern, or Rising. Still, it will not supersede more enduring terms. Whatever else may happen, there will always be a Left and there will always be a Right, though not at all in the confining way that Mao Zedong understood the words. In fact, the actual content of the programs of both the Left and the Right have changed across the centuries and will continue to do so; it is only that, in some version, the two will continue to oppose each other. Two other conjunctions will also endure. There will always be an Old and there will always be a New; there will always be a Then and there will always be a Now; how people live and think in the Now will always be influenced by how they think people once lived and thought in the Then.

Nor are Westerners are alone in seeing in China a long-sought result which may prove problematical. Rising China has been with us, and with the Chinese, for a generation. Rising China itself is now becoming part of the stuff of memory; today, most Chinese were not born, or were not conscious, when it started. Should we now begin to imagine how Modern Memories will fare in a Postmodern milieu?

The basic geographical structure of Rising China, resting on the great multi-national empire it inherited from the work of eighteenth century Manchus, runs contrary to the twenty-first century’s ideas about identity and autonomy for ethnic groups and their cultures. This newer movement is being helped along by technological innovations which make easier the formation of affinity groups and ongoing communication within them. Rising China’s basic mode of governance — Democratic Centralism, an increasingly creaky arrangement based on a now universally-repudiated Leninist political theory — runs contrary to a worldwide trend, if not toward classic representative democracy, then at least toward greater decentralization. Rising China may very well contemplate a traditional national strategy of traditional expansionism supported by equally traditional nationalism and patriotism. But will this, too, is now coming up against the emerging Postmodern High Culture, whose mission for Cultural Studies is the “deconstruction” of culture as a mainstay of the political order in China and throughout the world. This emerging High Culture is wholly unlike the high culture of previous rising nations in great ages of imperialism; it seeks not to buttress great national projects but to undermine them.

This is a noticeably powerful trend in today’s China, where intellectuals and creative artists of every stripe recall Mao’s brutal efforts to put Politics in command of Culture and believe that it is their bedrock obligation to resist even the half-hearted attempts to do so by China’s government of today. And beyond this, there is a more mundane threat to the inherited political order. It is appearing in the political counterpart of economic globalization — regionalism, multilateralism, trans-nationalism — which works to restrict the freedom of action of major nations and to subordinate them to international organizations, whether governmental or non-governmental.