The epidemic of addiction, combined with the ensuing Opium Wars, accelerated the fall of the Qing Dynasty and led to the Century of Humiliation in which China was subject to harsh and unequal terms by Britain and the US.
Mao is credited with eventually crushing the opium epidemic, and since then the view among many in China has been that Western liberalism leads to decadence and that authoritarianism is the cure. But one man has done more than anyone to turn this thesis into policy.
His name is Wang Huning, and, despite not being well known outside China, he has been China’s top ideological theorist for three decades, and he is now member number 4 of the seven-man Standing Committee — China’s most powerful body. He advised China’s former leaders Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, and now he advises Xi Jinping, authoring many of his policies. In China he is called “guoshi” (literally, “teacher of the nation”).
Wang refuses to do press or to even speak with foreigners, but his worldview can be surmised from the books he wrote earlier in his life. In August 1988, Wang accepted an invitation to spend six months in the US, and traveled from state to state noting the way American society operates, examining its strengths and weaknesses. He recorded his findings in the 1991 book, America Against America, which has since become a key CCP text for understanding the US.
The premise of the book is simple: the US is a paradox composed of contradictions: its two primary values — freedom and equality — are mutually exclusive. It has many different cultures, and therefore no overall culture. And its market-driven society has given it economic riches but spiritual poverty. As he writes in the book, “American institutions, culture and values oppose the United States itself.”
For Wang, the US’s contradictions stem from one source: nihilism. The country has become severed from its traditions and is so individualistic it can’t make up its mind what it as a nation believes. Without an overarching culture maintaining its values, the government’s regulatory powers are weak, easily corrupted by lobbying or paralyzed by partisan bickering. As such, the nation’s progress is directed mostly by blind market forces; it obeys not a single command but a cacophony of three hundred million demands that lead it everywhere and nowhere.
In Wang’s view, the lack of a unifying culture puts a hard limit on the US’s progress. The country is constantly producing wondrous new technologies, but these technologies have no guiding purpose other than their own proliferation. The result is that all technological advancement leads the US along one unfortunate trajectory: toward more and more commodification.
Many, if not most, would agree with this view of the US.
Or, as another way of putting it, the people of the US do not feel a suitably strong need for enlightened statesman such as Wang. How dare they?!?
”the lack of a unifying culture puts a hard limit on the US’s progress. The country is constantly producing wondrous new technologies, but these technologies have no guiding purpose other than their own proliferation. The result is that all technological advancement leads the US along one unfortunate trajectory: toward more and more commodification.”
This paragraph is incoherent. It begs the question of what constitutes “progress”, it pretends to assume that technologies can give themselves a “guiding purpose”, and it seems to think that commodification is is a fate worse than communism.
America’s proliferation of cultures is the best thing about it and a source of constant renewal. If there is a spiritual vacuum in our lives, it’s up to us as individuals to fill it – and fortunately, we have the freedom here to do that.
We all hate wokeism and the current political binaries, but America’s ongoing cultural churn will eventually deliver us.
Wang is right, mostly. The American empire is not ruled by Americans, hasn’t been for a century or more. American culture isn’t the official culture of the empire, and is under attack by the empire.
LOL. Then the Chinese understand nothing. The United States is the least decadent, most authoritarian society on Earth.
“The United States is the least decadent, most authoritarian society on Earth.”
The two things are not mutually exclusive. The US is simultaneously authoritarian and decadent — particularly and self-evidently decadent in matters of culture and public discourse. Consider the following: These days, Noah Smith is what passes for a public intellectual.
Least decadent? Watch the Grammys. Most authoritarian? Try chaotic.
“America is the only nation that has ever gone from barbarism to decadence without an intervening period of civilization.” ~ Oscar Wilde
Adept: “The two things are not mutually exclusive.”
Granted.
Adept: “The US is simultaneously authoritarian and decadent.”
I think that there is a very compelling case to be made as to how exactly the United States is minimally decadent as well as maximally authoritarian, but not yet.
Adept: “These days, Noah Smith is what passes for a public intellectual.”
Who?