‘Risk Society and Fiscal Transformation’
Our last episode raced ahead to delve into the rising importance of baseline thinking, a policy rubric emanating from General Secretary Xi Jinping himself. This, we suggested, was a subtext of the recent Sixth Plenum and the Historical resolution it brought down.
December was really the right time for it: kites are flown at this time for any important policy shifts planned for the forthcoming year. We prepared a presentation of this particular kite for a Zoom seminar with CEBRI, the Brazilian Center for International Relations. You can see my presentation here (and its overhead here), along with detailed analyses of three policy domains by some colleagues.
Days later, a powerful essay appeared by Liu Shangxi 刘尚希 (1964 - ), a recently retired director of the Research Institute for Fiscal Science, Ministry of Finance, but still very active in senior advisory roles. My translation of his essay, entitled Risk Society and Fiscal Transformation is here.
The idea of a ‘risk society’ derives from Ulrich Beck’s hugely influential book of that name, published in German in 1986. Liu Shangxi’s executive summary to his essay reads,
General Secretary Xi attaches great importance to the issue of risk. In his speeches, he often cites the 'barrel principle', warning the whole Party that baseline thinking is needed, not only to make up for short staves (curved wooden slats forming a barrel’s walls; a single short one spells leakage) but also to reinforce the base. He regards prevention and resolution of major risk as such a base, placing the issue of risk in a central position in today's society. In our fiscal work, to prevent and resolve major risks, we must grasp finance by rising above it: formulating an overall concept, and considering the direction of fiscal policy transformation based on the uncertainties of the risk society.
This essay analyses the implications and challenges brought by the risk society; it explores how, based on this, to transform finance and improve fiscal policy; and proposes a direction for fiscal reform during the '14th Five-Year Plan period.
But it’s nearing time to return to the multiple implications of sincerity and rationality. I have told this episode’s story once before, as a chapter in Lu Hsün in Australia, a book edited by Mabel Lee et al. It poses some of the issues lurking in the binary…
A fair exchange: meetings with Xu Fancheng
In the spring and early summer of 1988, I spent some three months in Beijing. I was at that time a research fellow in the Contemporary China Centre of the Australian National University. This was my first lengthy visit to China since my year spent studying Mandarin in the Beijing Language Institute (now the Beijing University of Language and Culture) in 1975-76. Most of my trips in the 1980s had to be kept short: we had a young family.
On this occasion, I had a fellowship to the Department of Philosophy at Peking University. A series of events led me to meet the remarkable Xu Fancheng. Our meetings were few, though warm and infused with shared interests. But as I now think back about those meetings, it is with regret for the many things I failed to find out from and about Fancheng, prior to his death in 2000. Several works have now appeared celebrating his remarkable life—his early encounter with the great modern writer and spiritual leader, Lu Xun (1881–1936), whose favourite disciple he became; his translations of key works of Nietzsche at Lu Xun’s insistence; his departure for India in 1943, joining the faculty at Auroville, the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo; his devotion to Sri Aurobindo and to the latter’s spiritual associate, the Mother;1 his long sojourn in India and ultimate return to China in the 1980s, where he helped establish the Institute for World Religions of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
My doctoral thesis had dealt with broad philosophical themes, touching on the impact of Nietzsche on Chinese intellectuals in the New Culture Movement of the 1910s, 20s and 30s.2 On my 1988 trip, I was officially pursuing more material for this project. This had to be put aside for a number of reasons, one being that Nietzsche was still officially designated the “arch-philosopher of capitalism,” and his impact on then officially-approved writers like Lu Xun, Guo Moruo, and Mao Dun was treated as scandalous and, indeed, politically incorrect. As a result, my topic had become sensitive, and the surviving figures, very obscure. Very little material came to light.
Even worse, in the course of a Fulbright Fellowship to the University of Chicago in 1983-84 I had been diverted from Chinese intellectual history, my starting point, into the field of political science, and had become wrapped up in researching a movement known as the New Enlightenment, which became a big part of the atmospherics heralding the Tiananmen movement of 1989. In those three months in Beijing, I met people with New Enlightenment connections, some of whom became friends.
The political developments that interested me were of course beyond the pale for the educational authorities administering the exchange scheme; they later appeared in my co-edited journal article with Barry McCormick, ‘The limits of anti-liberalism’, and book co-edited with Anthony Reid, Asian Freedoms.3 My old thesis research was, given a vague, neutral title, a more acceptable flag of convenience. I tried to fulfil it while grasping every opportunity to pursue the developments that were so riveting at that time. The New Culture Movement and its Nietzschean undertones were in fact very much part of the democratic movement, as I have documented in the case of Liu Xiaobo, who many years later was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while serving an 11-year sentence for state subversion.4
I don’t recall clearly who made the introduction to Xu Fancheng for me; at a guess, it followed an interview with a Nietzschean-impact scholar in CASS. I remember Xu, already approaching his 80s, had a very refined spiritual air. His years in India, where he had published four books in English, made him very unlike anyone I had so far met in China. Having avoided the “intellectual remoulding” (brainwashing) of the 1950s and above all the Cultural Revolution, he was very much a relic of an earlier age—the era of China’s greatest freedom of thought and expression since the late Warring States.
The extensive library Xu had built up in the 1930s in Shanghai had, he said, been destroyed by Japanese bombing during the war. He had left for India. The opportunity never arose to renew his knowledge of the works of Nietzsche. Would I help him by ordering a copy of the authoritative German edition? He would pay me from his stock of foreign currency. Buying it himself would at the best have involved a good deal of red tape and delay, especially given the suspicions surrounding the name of Nietzsche.
Knowing how impecunious Chinese scholars were at that time, I was unwilling to let him pay. So we struck the following deal: I would buy the works of Nietzsche in German for him, and he would repay me with a Collected Works of Lu Xun. The latter, priced in renminbi, was a lot easier on his pocket than the equivalent works of Nietzsche, but Xu was willing to agree to it. A fair exchange is after all no robbery. We completed the exchange before I left Beijing.
Thus it happens: a chance encounter, a dash of serendipity, quite a bit of affinity—then the moment has passed. In the 1980s we had no Google, so I could not dive deeper into Xu’s background. And with politics spiraling into the 1989 crisis, I as soon distracted and let my chance acquaintance with him drift out of my mind. Now, with Sun Bo’s Biography in hand,5 I must pick up this dropped stitch, and do justice to a great representative of Chinese high culture.
Now, with more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle in hand, I’m aware of the scale of the cultural forces I had stumbled into contact with. Two facts had attracted my attention long before. The first was Nietzsche’s insistence, through his avatar Zarathustra, on truth as a supreme value. This provided a foil for his explorations of the bad faith of Christianity and other cultural formations. The other fact was Lu Xun’s scathing critique of Chinese culture in terms of a lack of sincerity (cheng) and love (ai), wrapping this up in what Chinese scholars later labelled a doctrine of ‘inherent depravity’ (劣根性 liegenxing).6
Some modern Chinese readers are deeply disturbed, not to say infuriated, by Lu Xun’s criticism of depravity as a lack of sincerity and love. Why does he use the terms of abuse of the colonial invaders, who, themselves thieves and liars of the first order, delighted in describing China as a land of thieves and liars? But when read alongside Nietzsche, Lu Xun’s writings are his, simply expressions of cultural auto-critique, a very ancient genre indeed, exemplified in the Western tradition in the Old Testament prophets, and in China’s in the writings of the Daoists and Mohists. Nietzsche’s affinities with Zhuang Zi were indeed a popular topic in the New Enlightenment salons of the late 1980s.
A student at Fudan University in the 1920s, Xu visited Lu Xun frequently. The latter’s diaries have many entries along the line of ‘What’s up with Fancheng? He’s late with his translation of Thus Spake Zarathustra.’ But he often did turn up, with drafts of essays, stories, and poems. With the master’s encouragement, Xu began publishing them. Shanghai was rich in periodicals and Lu Xun’s good word sped up the process and got him through many doors.
Lu Xun had in his student days in Japan been a disciple of Zhang Binglin 章炳麟(1869-1936) when the latter was in exile there; there is much continuity in the two master-student relationships. Both Zhang and Lu were at one and the same time cultural modernisers and fastidious restorers of classical learning, renowned for mastering ancient and difficult prose styles. Xu represented the coming generation, who not only lived up to their high Chinese literary standards but added to them the unprecedented skills of linguists capable of mastering German, English, Sanskrit, and more.7
Zhang Binglin, once an ardent anti-Manchu revolutionary, was a reactionary in old age, lending support to Yuan Shikai’s imperial ambitions. Lu Xun and Xu Fancheng kept up a love of the ancient master-disciple institution and sought to revitalise its archaic symbols. But the antiquity they loved was not that of absolutist monarchy, but eras when individualism, and often eccentricity, flourished. In other eras, the monarchical mindset had taken extreme forms, requiring scholars to abase themselves before the throne, which was credited with supreme wisdom as well as power. This valuation of hierarchy above equality led, they thought, back to the feudal mire.
This is a clue to the link they shared through Nietzsche, which continues to resonate with me and in which I feel I have a stake, however indirect and serendipitous. It is widely agreed that one plus one equals two; but the truth-status of Yu Keping’s dictum, ‘democracy is a good thing’, is hugely more uncertain. Truth, as Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere says, is ‘rarely pure and never simple’: definitions of it given in Philosophy 101 textbooks are often difficult to apply in real life. Most difficult of all are statements about people’s states of mind, values, commitments or preferences. Chinese philosophy actually defines chéng-sincerity as ‘the absence of self-deception’.8 But what are the objective criteria, the evidence that would stand up in a court of law, of self-deception? Taking this perspective further, if the Chinese can be said to ‘lack sincerity’, who has it? Certainly not any of the ‘others’. The very phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ today conjures up collective self-deception and insincerity in the Anglo-American world whose tragic dimensions are not forgotten.
Chéng as a moral ideal was from very early on pitched at an inhuman level, seen in the coating of mystery and promises, in the Zhong Yong and other texts, that its mastery would yield mystical power. This went over the top, into an unattainable perfection of self-knowledge. Lu Xun knew this perfectly well, hence his interest in Nietzsche, who in a sense opened another path: Zarathustra used the language of truth and sincerity, which everyone experiences and uses at some points in their daily lives, to shock a complacent public into a higher self-awareness.
But this is achieved on a new psychological basis. While conversant with antiquity and preserving its tragic insights, it avoids absolute hierarchies, accommodates equality, and relativises temporal power.
Writings about Xu Fancheng in Chinese tend to play up his ‘spiritual’ character as if he were the Dalai Lama or indeed the Mother. My notes on my meeting with Xu include mordant comments on his stay in India; encounters with insincerity, self-deception, downright hypocrisy and fraud had not been too infrequent over that time. Free of Mao-era ideological scar-tissue, he was free of pretension as well. In our exchange of Collected Works of Nietzsche and Lu Xun he was emphatic about keeping accounts straight. In his work in the new Institute of World Religions, he was diligently translating Buddhist sutras; his attitude to this work seemed to me to be free of the odour of sanctity. I was left with an image of intellectual freedom and ease in the world of human thought
David Kelly, Sincerity and Will: the Voluntarism of Li Shicen, doctoral thesis, University of Sydney (1982). Electronic version available on request.
David Kelly and Barrett McCormick ‘The Limits of Antiliberalism’, Journal of Asian Studies, 53:3 (August 1994), 804-831; and David Kelly and Anthony Reid, eds., Asian Freedoms: Journeys of an Idea in the Cultural Contexts of East and Southeast Asia, Cambridge University Press, 1998, 93-119.
David Kelly, “The Highest Chinadom: Nietzsche and the Chinese Mind, 1907-1989,” in Graham Parkes, ed., Nietzsche in Asia, University of Chicago Press, 1991, 151-174.
Sun Bo, Biography of Xu Fancheng (Beijing: Shehui wenxian Publishing House, 2009). My other source is Yang Zhishui and Lu Hao, Mr Xu Fancheng (Shanghai: Shudian chubanshe, 2009), a memoir of meetings with Xu through the late 1980s and 1990s.
This is described, with attention to the recent nationalist hostility to Lu Xun of writers like Moluo, in David Kelly, ‘Approaching Chinese Freedom: A Study in Absolute and Relative Values’, in Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, 42:2 (2013): 141–165.
Scholarship in Sanskrit places Xu Fancheng in the company of Chen Yinke (陈寅恪 1890-1969) and Ji Xianlin (季羡林 1911-2009). Nietzsche, though not a Sankritist, often referred to a buried Indo-European world and its far-flung remnants.
In the classical text Great Learning (Daxue), later one of the Confucian Four Books.