China Road

by Rob Gifford

  I had checked into the Xi’an YMCA, surprised to see a Bible verse inscribed above the front desk, and even more surprised to find a pack of condoms placed beside my bed and listed on the minibar price list. After a good night’s sleep, I got up and headed out to see the sights of Xi’an.

  With a population of nearly 3 million, Xi’an today is, on the surface, just another large Chinese city, trying to pull itself up by the bootstraps. Throughout the city, though, glimpses of the past poke through the veneer of modernity: the original city wall, down which you could still march an army, and the old mosque, built with flying eaves and archways and without minarets, completely in the Chinese architectural style. Xi’an’s modern architecture is somewhat less pleasing. Architects here, as in every Chinese city, have outdone themselves in overlooking their own marvelous heritage and putting up some monstrous pastiches of what they think is modern. Despite that, though, it’s a pleasant enough city to walk around, another island of moderate prosperity in a sea of rural problems. After a morning’s wandering, I head off to see Xi’an’s main tourist attraction, an hour’s bus ride northeast of the city, a site visited by thousands of people every day.

  The Terracotta Army was created to guard the grave of Emperor Qin Shihuang, a crucial figure in Chinese history. Qin was the first man to unify China, in 221 B.C., and as such is remembered as China’s First Emperor. He standardized China’s writing system, its weights and measures, and its coinage and began to build parts of the Great Wall. It is from his name (pronounced Chin, and previously spelled Ch’in) that the English name China derives.

  The army of Terracotta Warriors has been turned into one of China’s major tourist attractions and is displayed in three massive buildings. There are tourists from every land, and many Chinese too, crammed onto the long metal walkway that skirts the edge of the largest exhibition hall. The hall is a hangar as big as a football field, and the life-size figures of the soldiers, all made from clay, are lined up in rows in the huge open area below the walkway.

  There are about eight thousand warriors in all, and they make a spectacular sight. They stand in the long corridors in which they were found, their heads in line with the tops of the trenches, some of which are up to ten feet wide. Some soldiers have fallen, some have been smashed, but the majority of them are standing up, as though in military formation. There are several types of figures—archers, infantrymen, and crossbowmen—each assigned his place in the ranks, and each figure has a different facial expression, which strikes me as a startling degree of individualism for the third century B.C.

  The terracotta figures were discovered in 1974, inside an underground chamber, by a group of farmers digging a well. Subsequently, two more vaults were found, which are housed in neighboring hangars. There are terracotta horses too, and richly adorned chariots made of bronze. Weapons were also found, cast from an unusual thirteen-element alloy, which means they are still sharp today. They are all extremely impressive, like works of Roman art that leave you thinking how advanced those ancients were, all those years ago.

  Archaeologically speaking, the Terracotta Army was just the appetizer. The entrée of the feast is reputed to be the tomb of the emperor himself. The tomb is said to be a vast underground palace that took about 700,000 conscripted workmen more than thirty-six years to complete, with models of underground palaces and pavilions, and even seas of mercury to emulate the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers. I say “reputed to be” because, for some strange reason, it has not yet been excavated, even though the authorities know exactly where it is.

  Anyway, the point is not so much what the tomb is like, because the First Emperor of China was clearly going to give himself something more than just a quiet funeral for close family and friends. The point is that this man Qin succeeded in carrying out one of the crucial acts of early Chinese history, namely the uniting of China for the first time.

  In 230 B.C., he was the ruler of just one of seven states that existed in northern China, states that had themselves been formed from dozens of smaller ones. China as we know it today had never been unified, and in fact the period from 403 B.C. until Qin’s unification, in 221 B.C., was known as the Warring States period. His unification is still hailed by the Communist Party.

  I’m not convinced it was such a wonderful event, though. Qin’s unification is the first reason, the political reason, why China’s system never developed the checks and balances that eventually emerged in Europe. Qin unified the states not through skillful negotiation or cunning diplomacy, but by banging a lot of heads together rather hard and with a less than selective use of those thirteen-element-alloy weapons. The doctrine he espoused in both conquest and ruling was known as Legalism. Not a doctrine of laws in the modern sense, it was more a doctrine of rules, rewards, and punishments that brought about obedience. Qin’s violent, heavy-handed means of conquest, however, did not prove the best method for ruling the newly united territory, and when he died suddenly, aged forty-nine, in 210 B.C., the Qin dynasty ended after just eleven years.

  But Qin Shihuang (pronounced Chin Shuh-hwahng) had set a very important precedent, which has survived to this day: that China should be united. It has fallen apart many times between then and now, but each time, someone has said, “China must be reunified,” and set about doing so. Chairman Mao was just the most recent in a long line of reunifiers, and if Emperor Qin were to return to China today, he would recognize the mode of government used by the Communist Party.

  I have to say I find this idea rather scary, that two thousand years of history might have done nothing to change the political system of a country. Imagine a Europe today where the Roman Empire had never fallen, that still covered an area from England to North Africa and the Middle East and was run by one man based in Rome, backed by a large army. There you have, roughly, ancient and modern China. The fact that this setup has not changed, or been able to change, in two thousand years must also have huge implications for the question Can China ever change its political system?

  The Roman analogy is an apt one. The tendency is to think of contemporary China in terms of the United States, because of their similarity in geographical size. Actually, to understand China today, the best comparison by far is Roman Europe two thousand years ago: lots of people with different languages and dialects, different customs, different artistic styles, even different cuisines, all with a shared heritage but ultimately held together by force. It makes no more sense to say you’re going out for a Chinese meal than to say you are going out for a European one.

  The laments you constantly hear in China that the country is too big and that there are too many people can both be blamed on Qin Shihuang. At one fell swoop he not only created both of these problems but made sure they would be perpetuated throughout Chinese history. He created a “country” that needed a strong man at the top in order to hold it together, and that requirement precluded any constraints on his power. On top of that, he burned all the books of the scholars, then killed the scholars themselves, thus setting another precedent for how to deal with anyone who challenged the power of the ruler. This is, of course, an attitude toward dissent that still holds today. The only times when intellectual ferment and discussion were possible were when China was not unified (such as the Warring States period before Emperor Qin, or during the 1920s and ’30s after the failed 1912 Revolution). At all other times, including now, intellectual orthodoxy has been enforced.

  The second reason that restraints upon the power of the Chinese state never developed is more of a philosophical one that emerged during the Han dynasty, which followed Qin. The Han also had its capital at Chang’an, current-day Xi’an, and lasted until A.D. 220. Aware of the problems that ruling too harshly had caused, the Han took elements of Qin’s Legalism, necessary for control, and added an ideology that, crucially, could legitimize the power of the state. That ideology was Confucianism. In 124 B.C. an imperial academy was established that taught the Confucian classics and made them the basis for written examinations used
to choose scholars to serve in the civil service.

  This philosophical double act of Confucianism plus Legalism was an early Chinese version of speaking softly but carrying a large stick. It put down roots throughout the Han dynasty, took even deeper root during the Tang dynasty at Xi’an, in the seventh and eighth centuries, and lasted for another twelve hundred years after that, until the beginning of the twentieth century.

  One of the crucial consequences of this philosophical fusion was that, unlike in Europe, just about all educated Chinese men were in the direct service of the state. This was achieved through the examinations on the Confucian classics and also by the weakening of the power of the Buddhist church. (The existence of the Christian church in Europe, often outside the power of the kings, was crucial in the development of checks and balances on European royal power. It also created educated men who were not sworn in loyalty to the monarch.)

  Philosophically, Confucianism distrusted the concept of law. Based on the teaching of a man named Kong Fuzi, or Master Kong, who died in 479 B.C., a decade before the birth of Socrates, its premise was that society should be brought into harmony with the cosmic order by adhering to certain ethical principles. These principles were supposed to be exemplified in the behavior of rulers and officials. Western historians have called this “rule by virtue,” or “rule by example,” and it was directly in contrast to the courts and juries and the focus on “rule by law” and then “rule of law” that grew up in the West. Confucius said, “When a prince’s personal conduct is correct, his government is effective without the issuing of orders. If his personal conduct is not correct, he may issue orders but they will not be followed.”

  Leadership in China has always been more about trying to live your life as a moral example and less about standing up and telling people what they should do. The written word has always had more power than the spoken word. It’s probably why there have never been any great Chinese orators. Even today, public or television addresses by leaders are rare, and important policies are more likely to be propagated through an editorial in the People’s Daily than through an address to the people by the president.

  One of the big problems with Confucianism as a governing philosophy, though, was its insistence that man is by nature good, and therefore educable and perfectible. The individual should police himself (“rectify himself” in Confucian terms) in order to become more virtuous. An admirable goal, no doubt, but human nature being what it is, the lack of external checks and balances on power led to the gradual corruption of dynasties all through history, down to the Communist Party of today. The Party is rotten to the core with corruption, but of course it can do nothing about it, because if it instituted any independent checks and balances, it would lose its monopoly on power.

  The other major problem was the nature of Confucian orthodoxy. Unlike Christianity, which looks forward to a Judgment Day sometime in the future, Confucianism looks backward to a Golden Age in the past and tries to mimic and re-create that time. Whereas Christianity, especially Protestant Christianity, wants to overcome evil and put an out-of-kilter world back on track, Confucianism tends to accept the world as it is and try to order human relations within it. So although the Tang dynasty saw so many amazing inventions, they remained what China scholar Joseph Levenson called “a brilliant cluster of scientific aperçus, but not a coherent tradition of science flowing into the universal stream.” Explaining why Chinese scientific discoveries didn’t flower into a scientific revolution, Levenson wrote, “It is not because their forebears were constitutionally unable to nurture a growing tradition of science, but because they did not care to.” Science had no social prestige, he says, and it would never have occurred to traditional Chinese scholars that kudos was to be gained from claiming discoveries or inventions. The ancients didn’t turn such inventions into world-changing technologies, so why should we?

  If it’s even permissible to look for a silver lining to the very dark cloud of Chinese Communism in the twentieth century, you could say that it has acted as Reformation and Enlightenment for the Chinese, in destroying the constraints of the old orthodoxy and setting them free to develop. Perhaps it is not permissible to say that, because the cost has been so very high, but it was easier for China to ditch its orthodoxy than it is for, say, the Muslim world to do so, because Chinese orthodoxy was not believed to be divinely inspired.

  With the power of the church reduced and Imperial Confucianism in place, there remained just one problem group of people who might try to cramp the style of the emperor and his Confucian elite: the aristocracy themselves, China’s equivalent of the pesky barons who had stood over King John and forced him to sign Magna Carta at Runnymede. And this, finally, is the third reason, the social reason why no checks arose on imperial and bureaucratic power. The emperor and his mandarins destroyed the aristocracy.

  The barons could challenge King John at Runnymede only because they had substantial power, as a result of the feudal setup of thirteenth-century England. Eighth-century China was the same, and the Tang dynasty was initially an age with a powerful aristocracy. But regional rebellions and general aristocratic misbehavior persuaded the emperor and his bureaucrats in the later Tang dynasty, and the Song dynasty, which followed (960–1279), to break the strength of the aristocracy, which never again regained power. Amazingly for such a hierarchical society, the government decreed that a family’s land be divided up equally at the death of a father to prevent the consolidation of large landholdings in private hands. This is why there are no big country houses and estates in China as there are all across Europe. After the Tang dynasty, such families were simply not allowed to emerge.

  Europeans built not only country houses but different roads to prosperity and respectability—the church, the law, business, the military. But in China by the end of the eleventh century, despite the fact that China was the most commercialized and urbanized civilization on the planet by far, becoming an official through the Confucian examination system became the primary, and almost only, route to prosperity and respectability.

  Although China is criticized for its history of autocracy, ironically, the erosion of aristocratic power and the establishment of the Confucian bureaucracy meant there was a lot more social mobility in China than in medieval Europe. Power was not hereditary. It was allocated through examinations, which anyone could take.

  This must be one reason why there is still so much attention paid to education (and exams) in China and in all Confucian-based societies, just as there is in the similarly meritocratic society of the United States. This is very different from Britain and Europe, where the university was historically just preparation for the church or a finishing school for the (hereditary) upper classes. When I told people in England that I was going to the United States to attend graduate school, the response was generally “Why? Haven’t you been in school long enough already?” No Chinese or American would ever ask such a question.

  The big question now, though, is whether China will change and allow the independent rule of law to take hold. Having collided with a civilization that does have a rule of law, and having been dragged kicking and screaming into a globalized world where contracts and courts and judicial independence are important, will the Chinese government start to allow some restraints on governmental power?

  Or, more important, with all that historical and philosophical baggage, can it allow such restraints? I’m not sure that it can. I think restraints on government power may be contradictory to the whole concept of China, and its existence as a state. I think perhaps the need for autocracy just to hold China together may make the country fundamentally unreformable, and sooner or later the modern economic juggernaut is going to slam up against the immovable wall of Chinese history.

  But I’m not sure. And if there were such a thing as a Chinese jury, I think it would still be out on that one.

  Su Zhongqiu opens his laptop to show me some digital versions of his favorite modern Chinese art. He clicks on one link, a
nd up pops a photo of the corpses of two human babies, propped together like store mannequins, on display at an exhibition in Beijing.

  I shy away from it, disgusted.

  He smiles. “See. You Westerners are too fragile, too delicate,” he castigates me.

  Su is an avant-garde artist who also teaches art at a university in Xi’an. We meet in a tearoom in the center of town. He is a tall man with a goofy smile, but you would not know from his unremarkable appearance about his startling taste in modern art.

  I had arrived in Xi’an thinking I would take the opportunity to explore the city’s cultural scene, and through a friend of a friend, I had come across a bunch of artists and photographers, including Su Zhongqiu (pronounced Soo Jong-cho).

  Like so much else in the country’s history, art had been a victim of Chinese orthodoxy. Sometime around the Tang dynasty of the eighth century, the official style had been set, and Chinese artists had for the next twelve hundred years gone about trying to emulate it. Not that it was a bad style of painting. Like the Confucian bureaucratic system of government, it was very good, and certainly far ahead of what was going on anywhere else in the world. The problem, with the art as with the government bureaucracy, is that it stayed that way for more than a millennium.

  Certainly, there were periods of reinvigorating Chinese traditions through the ages, but generally speaking, there was no perception of a need for a Renaissance, because the whole of Chinese life was already one big rehash of the art, literature, and teaching of the ancients.

  Traditional Chinese art said much about the Chinese worldview. While the person of Christ had focused so much of Western art upon the human form, Chinese art was always more about the landscape—the mountains, the rivers—with human figures often playing just bit parts in the natural drama and grandeur of the painting.

  As Confucian orthodoxy crumbled, and everything traditional came under attack, modern art had enjoyed a brief flowering in the big cities in the heady days of the 1920s and ’30s. But then art, like everything else, was subjugated to the needs of the new Communist orthodoxy, and art for art’s sake went out the window.