| 摘要 | “Wherefore,” [Kublai Khan] said, “should I become a Christian? You yourselves must perceive that the Christians of these countries are ignorant, inefficient persons, who do not possess the faculty of performing anything . . . whereas you see that the idolaters can do whatever they will.” —THE TRAVELS OF MARCO POLO, THE VENETIAN
I would build that dome in air
That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware! —SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, “KUBLA KHAN, OR, A VISION IN A
DREAM: A FRAGMENT”
Death of a Dream? The Challenge of China
China Is Near Westerners have discovered and rediscovered China many times since Marco Polo explained the Middle Kingdom to Europeans in a narrative dictated in a Genoese jail in the thirteenth century. Polo may not even have been to China. He certainly did not see all that he described. Nonetheless, although some scoffed at its “million lies,” Europeans copied Polo’s Travels for the next two centuries and passed them around like downloaded music files in the 00s. Christopher Columbus studied a copy in an effort to find his way to Asia. Like Columbus, in the 700 years since Polo dictated his stories, many Westerners convinced themselves that they could grow rich from finding China. Traders, missionaries, soldiers of fortune, and diplomats believed that Westerners could impose their religions, manufacturing output, rule of law, and military power on a vast and impressionable population of Chinese who very much needed these interventions. According to its ethical precepts, Western adventurism has always needed to justify itself.
The Chinese have rarely been empowered to explain themselves to the West. When Secretary of State Henry Kissinger “opened” China to the United States for President Richard Nixon in 1973, he told Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai that China was a “mysterious” country. Zhou responded that after several thousand years of history, the Chinese were not a mystery to themselves. Because Westerners so successfully enriched themselves in the first and second industrial revolutions, they became ever more certain that the comparatively impecunious Chinese were passive, incurious, self-centered, pliable, weak, and serene.
In truth, before the West grew rich, “in the year A.D. 1600, the empire of China was the largest and most sophisticated of all the unified realms on earth.” The Manchu conquest of China in the mid-seventeenth century exceeded in difficulty and scale the European conquest of the New World. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, revolutions shook, and sometimes overturned, kingly rule in the West, but the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–64 dwarfed them all in violence: 20 million died in an anti-Confucian, anti-imperial revolt—an order of magnitude greater than the aggregate casualties of the American, French, and Russian Revolutions. In the twentieth century only the German and Soviet histories compared to the misery and violence of China’s experience.
Ignoring the tumult and the horror, Western businesspeople repeatedly discovered gold mines of opportunity in China. In the eighteenth century, the British imagined the mills of Manchester going “forever” if they could only “add an inch of material to every Chinaman’s shirt tail”—not that anyone knew why shirts might be too short on the other side of the world. In the 1970s, and again in the early 1990s, New York financiers poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the Chinese economy. By and large, the glitter of fool’s gold had lured them. China produced little wealth for itself or others in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Twenty-first-century China, however, struck Westerners as a reincarnation of nineteenth-century America. To Western eyes, the Chinese apparently embraced capitalism rambunctiously, encouraging greed as good. Chinese consumers, now eager to buy not shirts but cell phones, composed the most populous market in the history of consumption. Innumerable Chinese laborers wanted to work prodigiously hard, at dirt-cheap wages, without the intervention of unions or annoying safety and health regulations. Everyone candidly wanted to be rich, and Westerners understood that urge.
Like Marco Polo’s narrative, the new Western perception of China mixed fictions and facts, with the motive of encouraging Asian adventures. The Chinese political rulers think they are, as the proverb put it, riding the back of a tiger. Numbering somewhere between 5 and 500 people at the apex of the 65-million-member Communist Party, this group can barely rule their huge population, even when collaborating with the handful of super-rich Chinese who made their fortunes outside the People’s Republic. Centers of governmental and economic power are emerging in the various regions in rivalry against Beijing, as has repeatedly occurred in Chinese history. New influences threaten not only the existing order but anyone’s ability to exercise order. Perhaps 30 million Chinese can taste the West’s standard of living, and 500 million might hope to enjoy that life in one generation. But a billion are still trapped in desperate poverty. Powerful forces rend the social fabric: international capital, the military strength of the West, an aging population and overwhelming population shifts, the Internet’s disruptive spread of information, the devastating environmental impact of development, massive energy shortages, and the ever-present risk of political instability.
Nor do the Chinese elite believe they have adopted pure capitalism. After Deng Xiaoping cemented control in 1978, in the wake of Mao Zedong’s death two years earlier, the ruling group, under his leadership, began to fuse a welfare state with an integrated business-government sector. The approach resembled the European experiments in statism of the 1930s. Indeed, with its emphasis on nationalism for the masses and wealth aggregation for an elite, it smacked of fascism.
Under Mao, the Chinese ruling group aspired to control labor from cradle to grave. They regulated travel, residence, schooling, and procreation. Under Deng, however, the government eased, or lost the ability to impose, these controls. Millions of Chinese began to live outside the law. As millions began to seek money and communism’s insistence on equality lost its adherents, the central government struggled to maintain control. After the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, the government did succeed in suppressing the growth of civil liberties. Deng and his successor Jiang Zemin channeled the energies of the young into entrepreneurship, and away from political reform. Without a legitimizing political mission, however, the party elite under Jiang and, since 2004, his successor Hu Jintao have been unable to manage the growth of domestic capitalism. They have encouraged foreign direct investment, rigged the currency to expand exports, and pursued more diplomatic engagement with other developing countries, where they have focused on securing access to national resources. However, the elite have shown no significant signs of seeking legitimacy for government by obtaining the consent of the governed. As the historian Jonathan Spence wrote in 1990, “If China was to develop as a modern nation . . . those taking the chances would have to be given some role in the making of political decisions. . . . There would be no truly modern China until the people were given back their voices.”
Nonetheless, projecting its preferences as it had done on the less-developed world since the age of discovery, the West became mesmerized by China’s booming consumerism and rush to capitalism. In the late 1980s and 1990s the Chinese began buying the “Eight Bigs”—“a color television, a refrigerator, a stereo, a camera, a motorcycle, a suite of furniture, a washing machine, and an electric fan.” In the 00s, they added to the list of necessities personal computers and cell phones. Businesses seeking economies of scale identified China as the biggest growth market in the world. Everyone in information technology had to sell there. To do that, they had to put plants and people in China.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, Chinese capitalism was directed about one-third toward meeting domestic demand and two-thirds toward export. In that respect, the Chinese copied some parts of the Japanese challenge to the West of the 1970s and 1980s. Japanese export businesses had perfected new efficiencies in manufacturing. They intended to supplant less efficient American manufacturing facilities. The factories of the United States had produced a very large share of global goods in the time since the Second World War ended with the United States triumphant and the rest of the world in ruins, but from Japan’s perspective that era had ended. Japan’s government and businesses together decided to take market share from Western firms in all global markets, most prominently including the American automobile industry. Japanese manufacturers knew that their own small domestic market could not support economies of scale. They depended on the United States for consumption.
However, unlike China in the 00s, Japan in the 70s and 80s depended on the United States for military protection against the Chinese and Soviet communist threats on the other side of the Sea of Japan. As a result, the Japanese complied when the United States forced Japanese car companies to build facilities and create jobs in the United States. The Japanese government succumbed to the American insistence on revaluing the yen-to-dollar exchange rate so as to reduce Japan’s ability to export. American firms meanwhile overhauled their facilities, broke their unions, fired employees, and became much more productive. In the end, Japan fell into a recession, at least partly induced by the success of the American competitive response to Japan.
The Chinese strategy of the late 90s and early 00s more seriously threatened American firms’ success and American citizens’ standard of living. For all their concerns about domestic order, the Chinese ruling elite had hundreds of millions of new capitalists from the erstwhile Third World to whom their firms could sell. In the 1990s, the Chinese economy began shifting toward a domestic focus. Firms competed vigorously in every market. They used technology to build low-cost manufacturing facilities, and they put their inexhaustible supply of cheap labor to work with breathtaking rapidity. Eventually, the mass of Chinese consumers will define tastes, trends, and technological standards for much of global trade. Meanwhile, unlike the Japanese, the Chinese have no need for a military alliance with the United States. Instead, by the 00s the United States looked for Chinese help in dealing with North Korea.
The table is turning between the West and the East. Westerners wish to manufacture and hire in China. Western firms no longer want to add length to Chinese peasants’ shirts; now they want to increase the length of the Wal-Mart shelf space stocked with Chinese goods. The Chinese no longer struggle for ways to resist Western encroachments on their culture. Now they are bent on enriching themselves by importing Western investment and skills, while learning enough about Western tastes to succeed in exporting to Western markets.
Communist Mercantilism
The Chinese Communist Party apparently plans to craft a state corporatism that will manage the Chinese economic and political strategies for the next several generations. Entrepreneurs are to be part of political leadership. Political leaders, in their own names and through family members, will take a share of entrepreneurial wealth and portions of the state-owned firms as they slowly convert to private firms. Meanwhile, the government will provide Chinese entrepreneurs with the trade policies, educational resources, transportation, and other public goods that let them take on Western rivals in the commercial battles of the century. The entrepreneurs may see the government as an unwanted partner, or even an agent of corruption. But as long as the country’s economy grows at nearly 10 percent a year, everyone will make enough money for the new business leaders and old government elite both to obtain their shares of the country’s wealth creation.
The Chinese leadership intends in the twenty-first century to create a host of champions not only in industrial sectors like textiles, oil, and chemicals but also in information technology. Edward Tian, in 2003 the president of one of the top four communications firms in China, had been inspired a decade earlier by a speech of Al Gore’s about the information superhighway. He started a business with the plan to “wire China.” By the mid-00s, his vision was far on the way to reality. China was first or second among countries in the number of broadband users, PCs, TVs, and refrigerators. China counted more than 300 million cell phone subscribers. Because fewer than 30 percent of Chinese had cell phones, the industry anticipated adding more than half a billion additional users in the future.
The Chinese leadership experienced the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Great Cultural Revolution. They understand that most Chinese are very poor in comparison to citizens of Japan, Korea, Taiwan and certainly the United States. To all appearances, China’s history has demonstrated David Ricardo’s “Iron Law of Wages”—that wages will never exceed subsistence level. The Chinese annual income per capita is only about $900, a mere one-thirtieth the American level. However, while the whole country is poor, the current Chinese paradox is that a populous segment is becoming middle class in a hurry. About 100 million Chinese workers earn at least $5,000 a year. That Chinese middle class equals in size, if not wealth, two-thirds of the total American workforce. Their standard of living in some respects approximates the average for Americans. The Chinese in their own country can buy a great deal more with a dollar—when exchanged for “the people’s currency” of the renmimbi yuan—than can Americans in the United States. Shanghai apartment dwellers pay five dollars a month for cable television, and in most cities people pay about the same for telephone service. Lenovo sells PCs for less than $200. The well-off in Beijing hire help to cook, wash, clean, and run errands for between $60 and $90 a month per employee. In addition, urban Chinese, about 30 percent of the population, obtain at very low cost some level of transportation, housing, health care, and education, although many of these public goods are inferior by most Western standards. (The government provides these public goods on a much broader scale than do the U.S. national and local governments.)
Moreover, Deng’s one-child policy concentrates parental and grand-parental income behind a single member of the next generation. Partly for that reason, members of the youngest generation have a better education than their parents. In addition, where Chinese students in the 1960s lost much of their educational opportunities in the ravages of the Great Cultural Revolution, in the next generation the Communist Party embraced education as the path to increasing the national economy. The Chinese government continues in the 00s to encourage one child per family, especially in rural areas. Such governmental intrusion into conception in the United States would leave Americans on both sides of the abortion debate aghast. In China the policy, coupled with economic growth, has helped ensure that from 2004 to 2014 another 200 million will join the Chinese middle class—and in the decade that follows, another 300 million.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century more than 100 million Chinese moved from rural regions to the 100 cities that had a million or more in population. Indeed, the percentage of China’s population in urban areas nearly doubled from 1990 to 2004. The trend continues: About a half billion Chinese will move from farm to factory in the next twenty years. In about 2025, 700 million Chinese in 100 or 200 cities will be consuming the same amount of goods and services as approximately 300 million urban Americans clustered in perhaps 50 cities. Measured by demand, the economies then will be about the same size. In terms of the number of consumers purchasing globally available products, by about 2025 China will rank higher than any other country.
Total Chinese consumption is already about one-third the size of American buying, measured in terms of what is bought as opposed to how much money is spent. According to this purchasing power comparison, the Chinese, Japanese, and Indians together buy about as much as Americans. These consumers, consequently, influence tastes, trends, and technology standards as much as do Americans. By 2025, Chinese consumers alone will have as much influence over supply as American consumers.
Even though Americans increased their spending every year in the early 00s, in those same years China accounted for about 40 percent of the global economy’s growth. Growing markets set trends and technology standards. If Chinese purchasers sharpen the cutting edge of consumption, then the most creative makers, branders, marketers, and shapers of culture might more likely live and work in China than in the United States.
The new middle class is appearing in many regional clusters, formed around industry leaders. The competition among regional governments and businesses has strengthened the diversity and creativity of Chinese businesses. Different regions specialize in different expertises. They create a broader portfolio of national assets than any Soviet centralized plan ever did. China hosts the world’s largest centers for making ties, shirts, and socks. In nearby cities other firms aspire to create the global centers for making telecommunications equipment. Shanghai, 500 miles to the north, attracts foreign investment in finance, semiconductors, and media. Beijing intends to become the location for headquarters for multinational corporations.
The new middle class exercises new freedoms to work, marry, move, choose clothes and music and even the number of children. However, it is not about to become an active electorate in a functioning democracy. From China’s perspective, the factionalism of Western democracy produces inconsistency from one election to the next. The Western system of judicial review, legislative process, and never-ending opinion polls leads to ineffectual and erratic execution of any strategy. China’s leadership will tolerate some local elections to deal with some local matters. That sort of voting, like union hall elections in the United States, can help make small groups cohesive. Beyond that, a multiparty electoral system will serve no purpose sought by China’s political or business leadership. In both Hong Kong and Taiwan, distinctive democracies have developed, but Beijing regards these cases as warnings of what to avoid, not signposts toward the future.
Much elite thinking in America entertains the improbable hope that the path from capitalism to democracy is a slippery slope that China will inevitably slide down. As before in the history of Western assessment of China, that perspective ignores the Chinese view. It projects onto the Chinese screen a vision, unreal as any motion picture, that the West prefers. Chinese entrepreneurship is very different than anything recognized by that term in America.
Entrepreneurship, for that matter, has had different meanings in the West since the word was coined in eighteenth-century France by the Irish-man Richard Cantillon. For him, the term meant someone who started a business. His own start-up activity was financial speculation. He sold out of the South Sea Bubble before it popped. Today he would be described as a founder of a hedge fund. In the next century, French revolutionary and laissez-faire economist Jean-Baptiste Say turned the word into a theory: an entrepreneur combined someone’s land, someone else’s money, and a third party’s labor to make a product sold in the market. The difference between the sale price minus the rent on the land, interest on the money, and wages for labor equaled the entrepreneur’s profit. In modern America, this sort of entrepreneur would be called a venture capitalist.
The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter went beyond this approach to label the entrepreneur’s work “creative destruction.” The entrepreneur’s activity, Schumpeter believed, “interrupts the continuity of development . . . because [a phase of] development comes to a stop and a new one starts.” Schumpeter’s disruption describes the battle of an entrepreneur to attack an existing hierarchy of power.
Entrepreneurship in China is a different animal. It fills a vacuum once occupied by the Communist state’s system of production. Lip-Bu Tan, a prominent West Coast venture capitalist, says the principal traits of entrepreneurs in Asia are “humility, patience, willingness to learn, and total commitment to the business.” The picture contrasts with American brashness and pride. Chinese entrepreneurs are often famous risk takers, but for the most part, they are not financiers. They make things. They are the engine of the national growth strategy. They are acquisitive, but they believe their wealth will eliminate poverty in a trickle-down fashion. Their capitalism is “creative construction.” They compete fiercely, but unlike American entrepreneurs, they do not seem to come from outside of society.
Like their American counterparts, entrepreneurs in China have contempt for government bureaucracy, corruption, and kleptocracy. Nevertheless they partner with the state. They accept joint ownership of assets and state presence in firms to a degree unimaginable to Americans. Nor do Chinese entrepreneurs advocate democracy. Some had been in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations as students and had learned to fight for money, not political change. According to one survey, some 78 percent of entrepreneurs had joined the Communist Party; other estimates put membership at about 25 percent. (It is inconceivable that 78 percent of American entrepreneurs regularly vote, and unlikely that even 25 percent consider themselves active members of a political party.)
The central and regional governments provide much support for entrepreneurs. The state built whole cities like Shenzhen or Pudong—replete with roads, electricity, housing, and communications networks—for business purposes. Government does not make firms clean up pollution.
The state does not fund health care or pensions. Government pawns them off on business, as in the United States. Chinese employers pay for these safety-net protections, which amount to as much as 50 percent or 100 percent of wages. However, because Chinese workers make so little, foreign employers are scarcely burdened by the costs. Nor do these protections for workers inhibit Chinese employers from obtaining low-cost labor for production of virtually any good or service. Independent labor unions do not exist, because theoretically the Communist Party is the manifestation of the working class, and it has the power to set terms and conditions of employment.
Chinese entrepreneurs need natural resources to build their businesses, but their government intends to obtain those vital ingredients of economic growth from other countries. China’s exports to the United States generate the dollars used by China to buy commodities from other countries. China accounts for most global growth in commodities. It is bent on buying firms that own oil and natural gas resources. The state intends to ensure that Chinese entrepreneurs will not lack the imports they need to compete with American firms.
. . .
Response Time
The Future Is Now In response to rising China, some Americans prescribe laws the government should pass. They want, variously, to alter the currency exchange rate, adjust tariffs for affected industries, and establish common technology standards. Others want more education, communications networks, health care, and science research. Business and government leaders, however, do not agree on the theory of the case. No one seems to know whether, in response to China, the United States should have a more proactive government or a less interventionist government, more or less public spending, more or less dependence on big businesses for employment and economic growth.
Contradictions abound. The government favors free trade but protects the textile and sugar industries. Businesses ask for more educated engineers but reduce the number of jobs available for them. American firms have to increase exports, but some politicians stigmatize those American businesses that focus on foreign markets.
For three centuries, the West believed that it could teach China the secrets of progress, but it concluded that the pupil stubbornly refused to learn. In the twenty-first century, the United States should examine how China discovered, out of the darkness of Maoism, a new way to produce widespread, uncontrolled economic growth. The Communist Party did not order Chinese entrepreneurs to challenge American entrepreneurs for market share. Its rule of law is more an absence of law than an effective framework for seeking trust or justice. Its entrepreneurial practices stem not from its schools but, in large part, from the business experiences of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other overseas Chinese communities. The Internet has not conferred unbeatable advantages on Chinese exporters, but it has lowered barriers to entry in the developed countries. Domestically, the spread of information technology has created a significant base of eager consumers. Chinese business and political leaders, meanwhile, rejected Maoism and celebrated the creation of wealth. They increased the opportunities for profit making, used technology to shape markets, and led the country into supporting the virtue of wealth creation. The combination of these radical changes in law, technology, and leadership has changed Chinese behavior. China has created a culture of entrepreneurship, where only a generation ago a very different culture prevailed.
These three sources of change—law, technology, and leadership—do not themselves constitute culture. Each is an architecture. Each creates some possibilities and limits others in the same way that a door creates an entrance or exit here and not there, a window provides a vantage point in this direction and not in that, a wall creates an inside space for activity and defines other spaces as outside. Individuals and groups choose among the opportunities presented by architectures. The architectures of law, technology, and history support and invite some actions, and thwart others. Individuals act in light of architectures. By attaching meaning to their action, they create a culture.
Meaning lies in distinction. Architectures emphasize distinctions. Actions and meaning together compose culture. A culture is then described in terms of beliefs and values. The government and business elite in China, at least for now, believe in entrepreneurship. Individuals share those beliefs. As entrepreneurship is defined in China, it seems congruent with an amalgam of Confucian emphasis on family and order and Communist Party discipline. It is part of the new Chinese culture.
China demonstrates that the architectures of culture do not remain the same over time. Hardly any big society has rebuilt its architectures as suddenly as China, but cultural change is ongoing everywhere. Every country has engines of change. Law changes when judges apply the law to hard cases. Law changes when factions of society persuade the politically powerful to make changes. In China, dissidents seek the freedom to choose whether to have more than one child. In the United States, the religious right asks the president to appoint Supreme Court justices who will constrain or reverse the constitutional protection of a woman’s right to choose whether to bear a child. In both countries, the legal architecture itself admits of the possibility that it can be changed. In both cultures, scientific discoveries produced new technological architectures that expanded the potential for human action, just as the atomic bomb and the silicon microchip defined the last half of the twentieth century. Finally, in both cultures, individual leaders take actions that alter choices for others. They forge chains of causation that can strengthen or hobble their societies. Deng and Jiang extinguished Marxism and made entrepreneurship the engine of growth. The American administration fought a war of choice and jeopardized America’s standing in the world. The acts of leaders have effects. These outcomes constitute an architecture of opportunities closed and opened.
Although the definition of culture is so broad as to create chronic ambiguity, everyone agrees on its importance. Culture accounts for the success or failure of careers, organizations, and governments. Law cannot mandate, technology cannot enable, and leaders cannot inspire the behavior of individuals to a fraction of the degree that culture does. Culture is a “control mechanism” that shapes people like clay.
As societies alter their architectures, they remake their culture. They reweave continuously the web of meaning that ties their members into a sense of belonging to a society. Anyone who seeks to change the behavior of a society must seek to change culture. In order to affect culture, reform must change some or all of the architecture of law, technology, and the conduct of leaders. Successful and enduring reform changes the web of meaning. It changes how members of a society act. If reform does not alter the actions and thinking of a society’s members, it remains only an unpersuasive idea, or an unachieved program.
China has experienced reform. Its law, technology, and acts of leadership have reassembled ancient structures to create a new web of meaning. The new architectures of China have shaped both action and the meaning of action. They have given form and substance to a new culture. That culture breeds new firms that challenge the American Dream.
For the United States to respond effectively to the challenge from China, Americans need to change their culture. They need to recapture the spirit of the 1990s. They have to revitalize in their society a culture of entrepreneurship. That culture must expand in scale and scope. It has to alter the way people make choices for themselves and for the organizations in which they participate. If the United States witnessed half a million new businesses starting every year in the Golden 90s, that number needs to be much higher in the future. If its firms have always led in information technology, in the future they need also to become global winners in biological, chemical, and even manufacturing markets. If the economy registered 25 million new jobs in the 1990s, it needs to create many more in the next decade. If the top 20 percent enjoy rising incomes, in the future 100 percent need to be on the upswing.
China can provoke Americans to reform the legal, technological, and leadership architecture of the society. The reformed Chinese culture can stimulate Americans to believe in reform. Just a glance at China should persuade any American to fight fire with fire. The purpose of reform in the United States needs to be the renewal of the American cultural commitment to entrepreneurship.
No single law, technology, or act of leadership can ordain that America renew its commitment to entrepreneurship. However, these architectures certainly will change. The nature of these changes will save or doom the American future. No one knows the outcome, but if Asia falls like night on the West’s long summer day, it will look like this: Chinese and other Eastern firms will make almost everything for nearly everybody in the world, and nobody else will be able to say or do much about it. After that, the new rulers of the planet’s productive capacity will decide whether to tolerate democracy, individual freedom, economic growth, or entrepreneurship in other societies. That will be up to them.
Some Past Will Be Prologue America’s Historic Culture of Entrepreneurship Since at least the eighteenth century, American culture supported entrepreneurship with a special passion. By the Second Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, the American culture surpassed every other nation in |
