OU on the BBC: Reith Lectures 2008: Chinese Vistas - This year's themes

Thanks for sending in your questions over the past few weeks. With the last lecture about to be recorded the time has come to close down this request for your questions. You can hear the first of the new series of lectures next week on Tuesday 3rd June at 09:00 on Radio 4.

As ever, we're looking forward to discussing the lectures online over the coming weeks. In the meantime you can find out more about the series on our Reith Lectures 2008 site.
Michael.

As the Reith Lectures 2008 are broadcast on delayed basis by BBC World Service, we in Singapore heard the first of the lecture series on Sunday, 8 June 2008. Hence, may I suggest that the BBC with the grace of Prof Spence allow the diaspora of Chinese to be engaged post-lecture? Perhaps, we could post our questions on BBC's discussion thread and Prof Spence could post his replies selectively based on what he thinks are "intelligent questions" and "courageous questions"?

I listened to professor Jonathan Spences first lecture with great interest. If you would forgive my impertinence for a long response I would like to express my views. My reactions to this great debate was that there is a link between the confucian view of society as well as of china and the modern maosit and marxist project and the post maosit project of deng tsao ping and hu jintao. The confucian project was about self improvement and finding harmony with society and nature in a turbulent and unstable world as a way of finding stability , partially expressed through conformity to the rules of man ( the emperor) while striving for the rules of heaven. What it lacked was a notion of economic and social progress and development which would need to underpin this striving and deal with the turbulence and stability continously imposed by material poverty and the competition for resources including greed. the maosit crtique emphasised that poverty and backwardness continously undermined this transcendance to harmony of the self as well as the collective. The maosit project was also about stability , which was declared unachievable without resorting to the instability of large social upheavals to guarantee the creation of material wealth which underpins the harmonious society that a confician world required. The maosit sleight of hand was a throw back to the need for the marxist primitive accumulation of capital which kick starts this process. whereas the industrial revolution in the west was able to achieve this process through market forces and international trade, the maosit/ marxist view was that incumbency, of the imperial powers which controlled global trade and resources made this impossible for late comers like china and a basic requirement of the process was a detachment from global trade and its controllers so that primitive accumulation could take place. this was combined with authoritarian control internally to ensure or to police that the surplus created went into accumulation rather than consumption, which, they argued, it would have done under market forces. It also required a leftist vision of absolute equality as a marxian version of the confucian notion of virtue to enable society to accept the deprivations of a rigidly controlled extraction of primitive accumulation. But this maoist notion of the dialectics of instability leading to harmony failed to deliver the material base for a sustained search towards social harmony and transcendence. It is arguable that the stability created by this authoritarian structure in a nation of an autarchic mass of 1.3 billion kickstarted the process and achieved its historical mission of creating the primitive accumulation through delinking from global trade. the transition to a harmonious society failed for the same reason that the stalinist notion of socialism in one country failed to free the soviet people and instead lead to a kind of absolutism of the middle ages. The confucian project of harmony and transcendence of the self ( as summarised in the canons) was revived by Deng tsao ping who argued that it doesn't matter wether the cat was black or white so long as it catches mice. This unleashed the most far reaching transformation of hundreds of millions of people out of poverty that any one country based social system in history has ever delivered. The party dispensed with communism by ensuring that capitalist leaders run the party and the process through a new poicy of the three represents while guarding through monopoly of political power , the fragility of this transition in a world market dominationed by the huge forces of globalisation and preventing its derailment. The maoist notion of absolute equality was replaced by the slogan of it is glorious to get rich. While this corrected the earlier maoist obsession with absolute equality , as the process became successfull through 30 years of frog marching it became a problem in itself in that it deviated completely from the notion of harmony and the creation of individual space for the idea of self improvement as well as the nurturing of balance with nature. it was time for another correction and enter Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao with the slogan of a harmonious society. Another thirty years of the frog march was envisioned to complete the process but this process was deemed vulnerable to a new Truman doctrine of encirclement , the cheney doctrine. Taiwan, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Mongolia and Nepal were deemed as key points of this containement. It became necessary to ween North Korea away from the label of the evil empire to enable it , hopefully to join this containement effort. A colour revolution was required in Myanmar and mongolia to achieve this. But none of these containment points were deemed as crucial as the Tibetan loci by both the encirclers as well as the encircled. The chinese ferocious response to an attempted colour revolution in tibet skillfully nutrured and coordinated by the US national Endowment for democracy was cosidered as perhaps the only way that the chinese confucian and maoist project of harmony and self improvemnt could be derailed. In the process the party has literally ceased to be communist with more millionares as memebres than either the UK abour or US democrtaic party can marshall. With the solution of the Taiwean question it is quite likley that the party will dispense both with ideology or the monopoly of political power by law as a no longer useful instrument to achieve harmony. a single thread of fundamental canon runs in chinese polity and society from confucianism, to maosim or the reform and opening movement of Deng and Hu: avoiding dogmatism and using pragmatism and dialectics to translate the mandate of heaven into peace and harmony.

W Lakew
student of modern chinese history