03/15/09
Max Weber, the Protestant Ethic, and the Economy in ChinaTheodore Tin-Yee
Hsieh |
|
This is a paper
presented at|
Chinese academics are increasingly interested in uncovering the differences between the market economy practiced in the United States under a democratic political system and the market economy practiced in China under the communist political system. This paper examines the concerns expressed by a young Chinese government economist, Zhao Xiao, and his observation of the fundamental differences between the “market economies with churches and market economies without churches.” Last year on my way back to Chicago from China, I couldn’t help noticing Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in both English and Chinese on display front and center in the airport book store in Shanghai. A sales clerk told me that the Chinese edition has been a best seller for several years among the university teachers and students in China. Many of them would buy both English and Chinese versions for comparison. A casual Google search of “Max Weber economist” yields 415,000 references, “Max Weber sociologist” 1,240,000; and “Max Weber Chinese economy” 919,000. There seems to be a massive interest on both sides of the Pacific in Weber’s theory on the religious impact on the development of modern capitalism. In light of the practice of capitalism without Protestant Ethic in the blooming economy in China, there is a good reason for this developing interest of the Weber thesis at this particular time. Considered by many as a social science masterpiece, Weber’s book is described as “the most famous sociological tract ever written” by the international political economist Francis Fukuyama.1 The book has also been subjected to serious criticism for some 90 years. Many scholars disagree with Weber’s view and some question his methodology.2 And still others tend to fault his giving religion, especially the Protestantism, too much credit in the development of capitalist economy in the West.3 This article will not address the controversy of the Weber thesis. Instead, the article will delineate three prominent themes found in Weber’s book and use them as a backdrop in a discussion of current Chinese economy and business practices. On January 22, 2007, Time Magazine proclaims on its cover “China: Dawn of a New Dynasty.”4 The article describes the China’s economic success as “astonishing,” declares it “already a commercial giant, and predicts the 21st century as the Chinese Century, just as Newsweek did in its May 9, 2005, cover.5 Barely seven months after the Time story, Business Week put a broken plate of China on its cover. “Can China be Fixed?” is its special report.6 In it, the article gives an accounting of dangerous products produced by the spectacular Chinese manufacturing machine, the endemic corruption even at her highest bureaucratic level, and the spreading environmental crisis.7 Experts inside and outside of China tend to agree that there are dangers on a spectacular scale in the Chinese economic system in spite of her equally spectacular productive power. What lessons can be learned from these changing headlines about Chinese economy? To what extent is Weber’s notion of the Protestant ethic helpful in understanding the critical situations in China? The current economic system in China is an adoption of Western capitalism under a Marxist/socialist political structure. Because the term “capitalism” is antipathy to the Marxism historically, the Chinese Communist Party, in control of China through a one-party system, chose the term Market Economy to describe the 180-degree turnaround when China discarded the socialist economic system in 1978 under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. A brief history of the economic life under the old system before 1978 is necessary to achieve a measure of understanding of the complicated problems facing China today. The Chinese Economic System Less than twenty years ago in 1990, historian Julia Ching was asking this rhetorical question: Why has China remained so poor?8 She then related an incident in 1988 when a research team was sent to investigate the financial conditions in Xinguo, Jiangxi, a prefecture where Mao Zedong had personally conducted an investigation into the lives of poor peasants in October, 1930, during the days when he was directing Communist activities there. The researchers found that little had changed in these families after the passage of fifty-eight years and thirty-nine years under the Communist rule since 1949. All eight families investigated still struggle under the poverty line, living in debt after yielding their crop allotment to the government. In 1930, the six persons questioned by Mao had gone to school for an average of 5.25 years. In 1988, the nine individuals questioned had gone to school for an average of 5.1 years.9 Twenty-eight years of socialist economy under a communist government had not improved the life of peasants. Mao Zedong, of course, had a vision of an egalitarian communist utopia when the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949. The Korean War in 1950 delayed his land reforms but agricultural cooperatives abolishing land ownership were introduced as soon as the war was concluded in 1953. In just a few years, farm production fell by 40 percent in a country that had historically been struggling to feed itself even in good harvest years. In 1958, Mao began his Great Leap Forward campaign by forcing citizens to turn in any metal from homes including bicycles and cooking pots and melting them down in backyard furnaces to make steel. He also formalized the system of communes of about ten thousand people each in the countryside as agricultural and industrial production units. These revolutionary policies in the name of communism between1959 to 1962 led to a famine that claimed more than twenty millions lives.10 It is important to understand the economies of the commune system because the current system of Market Economy bears a high degree of its resemblance and therein the same seed of its problems. Within Mao’s Great Leap Forward program, the local Communist Party members had the total control of the communes in terms of what crops to plant and when and where. In return, commune workers were promised food, medical care and other necessities. Each commune was to turn over about a third of the grain harvested to the state as a form of tax used to feed the cities. But the ambitious local Party members in charge, in competition with each other, reported wildly inflated harvest to please Mao by confirming that his collectivization was a brilliant idea. But the grain levy based on the imaginary harvest was so high that some of the communes had to turn in all their grain to the state and still failed to meet quota. As the workers starved, the cadres won praise.11 Also, during this same period, many farmers were told to produce steel instead of taking in the harvest, letting good grain rot in the fields.12 As shall be seen later, it is this same ambition of the local government officials to meet the centrally-planned economic goals that would lead to all kinds of corruptions, defective and dangerous products and ecological disasters.13 The apparent disaster of the Great Leap Forward and collectivization led to a series of internal struggle within the Communist Party. As Mao’s support within the party waned, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was introduced by his supporters (led by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing) to purge his potential political rivals. Those in disagreement with Mao were labeled bourgeoisie anti-revolutionary intellectuals or “capitalist roaders.” They included many of Mao’s comrades during the Long March years (1934-35) such as Peng Dehuai, Liu Shaoqi, Lin Biao and Deng Xiaoping. Millions of young people roamed the country as Red Guards to do the purging.14 Schools and universities were closed, books and arts burned, churches and temples destroyed and contacts with the outside world severed. The only education allowed was Mao’s Little Red Book and Party propaganda. The country was in ruin.15 Mao’s death in 1976 signaled the end of the Cultural Revolution. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping reemerged as the head of China. This France-educated communist who was twice purged by the Maoists for being a “Capitalist-roader,” realized that something drastic would have to be done He began the economic reform by opening the market in China to the West.16 The moving from the centrally-planned socialist economy to a market-oriented economy contributes to an amazing change in China, from a third world country that was not able to feed itself as recently as 1980 to become the “factory of the world.” China in 2007 is not only the world’s biggest exporter of manufactured goods but also of agricultural products.17 This turnaround is due to the change in economic policy under Deng Xiaoping. How did he do it? The speed of the turnaround and of the economic changes in China is truly historically un-precedent. President Jimmy Carter officially recognized China on January 1, 1979. On January 28, Deng flew to Washington, D.C. for a state visit that would include visits to Atlanta’s Coca Cola Company, Houston’s astronaut training center, and Seattle’s Boeing product facilities.18 He was practically taking a field trip on this capitalism heart-land where, in the words of Weber, the pursuit of wealth had reached its highest development.19 Deng had no time to waste and he would lead China to move forward as if “to compress the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Industrial Revolution into a single decade.”20 As soon as Deng returned to China, four Special Economic Zones were established in Southern Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Fujian. They were carefully chosen for their geographical locations in order to attract foreign investment and foster export trade while limiting foreign influences to the coastal areas.21 Shenzhen, a sleepy fishing village of several hundred people just north of Hong Kong, still a British colony at the time, would soon become a great business and commercial center of ten millions. Zhuhai borders on Macao, a Portuguese colony since 1557, where over 450,000 people were packed in an area a little larger than six square miles. Overshadowed for years by Hong Kong but surviving nicely from its legal gambling business, Macao prospers since it was returned to China in 1999. In 2006, the amount of money waged in its casinos totaled greater than that in Las Vegas for the first time in history. Shantou and Xiamen are across straight from Taiwan and designed as partners in trade with the prosperous island.22 By 2006, China has hundreds of central-government-regulated economic zones like the four mentioned above and thousands more regulated by local governments. 23 The economic growth in China is fueled by a phenomenal inflow of foreign investment. Companies from America and Europe are not just attracted by the cheap labor in China. They are also attracted by the huge market of 1.3 billion people. China not only keeps the price low for American consumers but it also cut the expense of American business by 40%. Wal-Mart not only imports goods from China to sell them less expensively to Americans at discount, it also opens up stores and sells China-made goods to the larger and larger middle-class Chinese. The Newsweek reports that Wal-Mart alone imported $18 billion worth of goods from China in 2004 and of 6,000 of its suppliers, 80% were in China.24 An Internal Expression of Concern Zhao Xiao is considered one of the most active and influential young economists in China today. 25 He is a government economist, currently serving in the Chinese State Department as the director of macro-economic research in Beijing. But the most significant contribution to the theme of this article is not Zhao’s many writings but a brief essay of his reflections on a visit to the United States published on a blog. 26 In 2002, Zhao spent several months in the United States. In his own words, he was looking for the differences between Chinese and American society. Roaming in North America was for the purpose of reading a wordless book, to have the chance to gaze at the heavens from a foreign land. In that country that has the most prosperous material civilization in the history of human society, a question that frequently occupied my thoughts was, where does the greatest differences between China and America lie? 27
While he admits that China lags behind America in skyscrapers, in wealth 28, in science and technology, in the financial strength, and political and legal systems; he concludes the ultimate difference is not in these areas but in churches. “Only in this area is the difference between China and America not a question of numbers, but rather an essential difference between presence and absence.” 29 In a market economy without churches, Zhao further reflects, it is able to discourage idleness but it cannot discourage people from lying or causing harm. In fact, the market economy without churches like the one in China “may entice people to be industrious in their lies, industrious in bringing harm to others, and to pursue wealth by any means…. To a degree, China’s market economy currently has fallen into this trap. In the mind of a majority of Chinese people is the simple understanding that the market economy means getting rich, and to get rich any means may be used.” 30 Is Chinese economy trapped in a different kind of “iron cage?” 31 Zhao did not illustrate with examples of the means commonly used to get rich in present-day China. But he did not have to. Social observers are familiar with the steep price paid with human lives and in social relationship, in environment and in consumer protection for the tremendous economic growth and the philosophy of growth at all cost. 32 The main problem is that the economy in China is not actually capitalism but a mixture of government-planned and government-owned economy with market orientation. The current economic system has as its model Mao’s Great Leap Forward program discussed in previous section. Local party officials are given great latitude in managing economic development. Beijing has only two requirements: party loyalty and high economic-growth targets. An official’s annual performance is based on GDP growth. So there is the same intensity of competition among China’s 657 municipalities, 2,867 counties, and 41,636 townships in meeting the economic targets in 2007 as the competing communes in meeting their harvest quota in 1957. To get businesses, the cadres would offer potential investors with various perks in the forms of cheap credit, free land, easy license, exemptions from regulations and protection from competitors. In return, they receive graft and kickbacks. More business activities they can generate, more opportunities for graft and kickbacks. Many of these local party members are called “local emperors” to describe their great power in making life miserable or easy for people doing business in their sphere of influence. 33 Although almost 30,000 officials were prosecuted for corruption in 2006 alone, this bureaucratic economic machine is so deeply entrenched that the central government in Beijing seems impotent in reforming it. With worldwide publicity of unsafe products as a backdrop, Premier Wen Jiabao labeled the Chinese economy “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable” in March, 2007. 34 Perhaps it is with a dramatic vision of prophecy that Zhao Xiao laments in 2003 about the future of a “market economy without churches”: From the groans of present-day China’s market economy, we can see that danger draws near. We have already bid farewell to humanity’s most costly planned system, but because we lack a reasonable set of market ethics, we may be trapped in humanity’s most costly market system. 35
Can Protestant Ethic Work in China? In his 2007 book, Democratic Capitalism and Its Discontents, Brian Anderson argues that religious traditions and institutions, specifically Christianity and Judaism, provide egalitarian capitalist societies with the moral and spiritual stability.36 In a high-paced, competitive capitalist/market economy, a cooperative ethic of goods and service is essential in establishing a voluntary and stable rational social order. This religiously-derived ethic seems to be more essential in the vast emerging world such as China where the traditional controls and hierarchies are somewhat removed in favor of a freer market economy. According to a Business Week article, three daunting issues are facing China: dangerous products, endemic corruption, and spreading eco-crisis.37 But dangerous products and spreading eco-crisis are rooted in endemic corruption which, in turn, is rooted in a lack of basic honesty and a self-centered willingness to do harm to others and the environment.38 As practiced in the United States, Democratic Capitalism, as Anderson calls it,39 is not perfect. But the capitalism’s religious foundation prevents widespread dishonesty and corruption as witnessed in China.40 A change of religion from Catholicism to Protestantism, according to Weber, gave birth to the “spirit of capitalism.” Weber used the term “worldly asceticism” (the Protestant ethic) to describe the fundamental change in thought and behavior about work and money.41 He called it “worldly” because the change represented a movement from the other-worldly monastery in Catholicism to this-worldly marketplace in Protestantism. Christian asceticism, at first fleeing from the world into solitude, had already ruled the world which it had renounced from the monastery and through the Church. But it had, on the whole, left the naturally spontaneous character of daily life in the world untouched. Now it strode into the market-place of life, slammed the door of the monastery behind it, and undertook to penetrate just that daily routine of life with its methodicalness, to fashion it into a life in the world, but neither of nor for the world.42 Weber’s Protestant ethic as related to work and money consisted essentially three elements: hard work, thrift, and individual salvation. Weber followed the doctrine of predestination taught by Protestant Reformer John Calvin. Basically, Calvinism taught that God predestined some people to be saved from hell. Church membership or a felt relationship with God could not guarantee their salvation. So, how could Calvinists know for sure that they were saved? They could never be sure except that they could reduce their intense anxiety by living as if they were predestined to heaven— by working hard to create wealth to prove God’s blessings on them and by living a moral life in frugality. The wealth accumulated through hard work and the money saved through frugal living provided the capital for investment, which led to a surge in business expansion and production. Weber, based on various writings by the Protestant theologians, made the following observations (emphases added): For the saints’ everlasting rest is in the next world; on earth man must, to be certain of his state of grace, “do the works of him who sent him, as long as it is yet day.” Not leisure and enjoyment, but only activity serves to increase the glory of God, according to the definite manifestations of His will.43
Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins. The span of human life is infinitely short and precious to make sure of one’s own election. Loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than is necessary for health, six to at most eight hours, is worthy of absolute moral condemnation.44
Labour is, on the one hand, an approved ascetic technique, as it always has been in the Western Church, in sharp contrast not only to the Orient but to almost all monastic rules the world over.45
Man is only a trustee of the goods which have come to him through God’s grace. He must, like the servant in the parable, give an account of every penny entrusted to him, and it is at least hazardous to spend any of it for the purpose which does not serve the glory of God but only one’s own enjoyment.46
[A]sceticism condemned both dishonesty and impulsive avarice…. [T]he religious valuation of restless, continuous, systematic work in a worldly calling, as the highest means to asceticism, and at the same time the surest and most evident proof of rebirth and genuine faith, must have been the most powerful conceivable lever for the expansion of that attitude toward life which we have here called the spirit of capitalism.47
Clearly, the Protestant ethic of hard work, thrift, and individual salvation that led to capitalism has been fading. Weber was able to make in the early 20th Century his rather prophetic observation: To-day the spirit of religious asceticism…has escaped from the cage….In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport. 48 Anyone who has followed the cable business television CNBC will be able to see immediately the sport analogy of the mundane passions in the pursuit of money. It is also interesting to contrast the frantic pace of money-making in China today with the previously “ascetic” Communist planned economy. Amazingly, in a brief visit to the United States, a young Chinese economist, born and trained in an atheistic socialist system, was able to see the fundamentally different way in wealth accumulation between the “market economies with churches” and the “market economies without churches.” Although capitalism has long been dismissed as a corrupted system of the west by many social scientists beginning with Karl Marx, as least from one perspective as presented in this paper, capitalism, properly understood and practiced within the framework of its Protestant root, might just be an antidote for the illness of the “market economics without churches” in China. References
United States (P) $16,880 Italy $9,102 Canada (P) $15,486 Spain $8,735 Sweden (P) $13,566 Ireland $7,182 Norway (P) $13,321 Argentina $6,417 Australia (P) $12,673 Portugal $5,853 Finland (P) $11,603 Uruguay $5,134 New Zealand (P) $9,719 Chile $4,808
newspaper in Hong Kong, and cited by Julia Ching.
|
|
This Page hosted by 
Get
your own Free Home Page
