by Ned Downie:
Hi, my name’s Ned Downie, ES ’14, and this is my first post as The Globalist Network’s beat blogger on China. I’ll be posting about once every two weeks about what I consider to be one of the most fascinating countries on the planet.
I want to start by linking to a remarkable research project that’s just made its Internet debut. The China Boom draws on interviews and essays with hundreds of scholars, officials, businesspeople, and citizens-at-large to explain the massive changes that have reshaped Chinese society over the last thirty years. Rarely has any project on China provided such a wide range of perspectives on such a broad topic to a general audience.
Of the many fascinating interviews on the website, I’d like to single out that of Yale’s own Deborah Davis, an expert in the sociology of contemporary China. Davis gives credit to Confucianism and its approach to the family as an engine behind China’s success in modern capitalism. Confucianism places heavy weight on strong family ties; such families work well within a capitalist system, she claims, because they emphasize savings over consumption and encourage a long-term perspective. I’m struck by her analysis not because I disagree with it, but because it contrasts so strongly with the myriad cultural clashes that pit Confucianism and capitalism against each other. For instance, consider rural-to-urban migration. Confucianism demands that children stay home to care for their parents in old age. But capitalism has concentrated good jobs in the cities, rendering family farming an increasingly less viable means of living. Of course, without farming, village lose their main form of economic subsistence and collapse. I saw the results of these changes last spring, when I visited a village in the mountains of Guizhou, one of China’s poorest regions. In a population of several hundred, the young males numbered, at most, ten. The rest have left to work in factories near the cities. These men send money home and also leave their children to grow up in the village; but many will never return home, save for holiday visits. Confucian values may have set China up well to embrace capitalism, but, now that capitalism has taken hold, they seem out of place, quaint.
Of course, in addition to Professor Davis, many other interviewees stand out for their commentary. Hu Shuli, dean of Zhongshan University and one of China’s best business journalists, explains how the early 1990s saw a new era in the Chinese government’s economic approach. Zhong Taiyin of Sichuan Province gives an eyewitness account of the disbanding of his commune in 1980, the first commune to be disbanded in all of China. And there are scores of interviews which I haven’t had a chance to see yet. To those of who do check it out, let me know what you think: edmund.downie@yale.edu.