The paper highlighted today, from Hilton L. Root of the George Mason University is not an easy read, which makes it especially hard to summarize; but I’ll try…
In short, it goes back to the earliest formation of Chinese and Western societies and suggests the Christian Church in the West and the Confucian top-down family-oriented system in China account for profoundly different developmental outcomes that continue to shape societies to the present day.
The world has many kinship-based societies that have failed to launch and in this respect China is an outlier in preserving parts of this habit but at the same time managing to escape the shortcomings of such a system [But…].
Or, as the author puts it; ” ..the deficit of trust-building capacity extending beyond kinship is a legacy China shares with many developing nations, making the coordination of complex economic activities dependent on the state.”. It’s that last part that’s one of several legacy problems that, unhelpfully, persists in China up to today.
A good example of how the past is still firmly embedded in the present the author discusses how Xi Jinping’s war on corruption can’t be won and is better described therefore as a ‘forever war’; “The historical weakness of China’s financial institutions and the endemic corruption of its governance protocols derive from the regime’s implicit strategy of political domination, which substitutes state oversight and ideology for civil society capacity and leaves society without independent legal and judicial facilities. When guanxi is “implicitly” allowed to continue because it is “useful,” the battle against the personal enrichment of officials becomes, a forever war.”
..and so on.
I have a reflexive suspicion of broad-sweep-of-history summaries that attempt to simplify complex issues through lenses of contemporary understanding [Remember ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’? And here, why no mention of Islam, also a multi-country/institution networking faith?].
However, this is a well written piece, not at all shouty and doesn’t end with flamboyant claims as to how the analysis can predict what happens next; for those reasons I’d recommend the longer read. You can access it via this link Religion and the China-West divide.
Happy Sunday.