Seeing Future China from Max Weber
Max Weber wrote extensively on world civilizations, their religious mentality even when the said civilization seems to be secular and void of a strong prophetic religious creatural worldview, and the close tie between the economic consequence and social organization manifested as an outcome of the religious and cultural ethos. Most familiar to contemporaries was his work on Protestant Ethics and the Capitalism Spirit, in which the this-worldly asceticism provided pivotal leverage, albeit unintentionally, to the accumulation of profit in the Protestant world through a spirit of frugal Puritanical work ethics and the concern of salvation through non-sacramental means.
I ignored Weber since the Protestant Ethics book, largely owing to his idiosyncratic writing style and my naïve suspicion that Weber’s digging into historical materials ad nauseam made him more of a historian than a social scientist who could provide us a useful systematic theory with verifiable empirical data. Then not until I started teaching classical theory to students did the scientific, or robust, organization of ideas related to historical dynamics of different societies in a systematic and ideal-typical manner slowly manifest in his writing. Basically, his conceptualization of sociology as a study of historical patterns with a priori theoretical construction of ideal types distinguished his scientific investigation from historians who, in his argument, studied historical events with a meticulous concern to uncover the causal links between individual events and persons. This distinction is eminently persuasive, although modern time social scientists who have been growing up basked in the micro-econometrics and causal analysis would find it strange.
At the time when Auntology had become popular beyond the insular Chinese Internet after Liu Zhongjing went on exile in Arizona since 2016, some remaining feud between his fans base and myself slowly dissolved. Mutual friends and followings that existed between us means at least some intellectual commonality was evident in our thoughts. I noticed the general framework of Auntology has certain elements in common with the Weberian analysis of civilizations. Although Liu was trained a historian, Auntology emphasized certain cultural genetics inherited through centralized autocracy shaped the proper China culture to be one that is destined to fail in economic and scientific innovation if western technology and culture, or that via Inner Asian, is cut off from China’s ability to acquire them through borrowing, exchange with material goods, or intellectual theft.
After re-reading Weber’s The Religion of China, almost 20 years after first time read it in high school, surprisingly incisive statements and conclusions are found all over the place. Not being a sinologist, Weber sure made factual errors on some historical facts about China, which he borrowed and read from second hand sinology works of his contemporaries. But in any social science work, a small amount of factual errors are randomly generated noise that doe not distract the overall pattern produced from a correct data-generating process. Many would also mistake Weber’s use of idiosyncratic historical data and anachronical presentation of them as unscientific and unsystematic. Instead, using anachronical data from all over the historical course of China is a similar deed as a data scientist who collects a sample from the broader population: the intention is to reveal the pattern through randomized data points in the entire course of the sampling frame — in this case, Chinese history itself. Notice that the critical difference for Weber between history and sociology is that sociology is not interested in the detailed causal link among concrete historical occurrences. Instead, a sociological investigation attempts to reveal the underlying pattern behind a large number of chaotic historical occurrences and make a typology of them.
Zhao Dingxin (2015) has also noticed this misunderstanding many Chinese scholars had about Weber. Zhao pointed out that the historical factual errors and exceptions against Weber’s conclusion about China are simply within-group errors. All analyses that compare several groups will show you there is internal variation within a group, which can be exemplified as the exceptional cases in the Chinese society that challenge the Weberian conclusion, such as the phenomenal existence of many literati and aristocrats who abhor Confucianism and embraced mysticism during the Eastern Jin era. However, when the variation between different groups is significantly larger than that within each group, we must prefer an explanation devoted to a theoretical construction of the between-group difference over a deconstruction of the patterned difference citing internal exceptions in each group.
Because Weber used empirical evidence from history to construct a general theory that places the Chinese society in a typology of civilizations, not to present a historical investigation of certain phenomena during a specific temporal duration, his conclusion should stand longer and apply to contemporary China. In other words, the Weberian methodology should allow him to develop a grand theory about the Chinese civilization based on the “spirits of the Chinese culture”. Here are his reasoning to verstehen the deep logic of the Chinese religion and civilization and conclusions about the economic ramifications.
Politically:
>The Chinese central administration (the master central stratum) needs to maintain the operations of a large bureaucracy.
>But this proved inefficient because the empire is too large, population too dense, and local strata are very strong. The attempt to unify monetary unit is often unsuccessful.
>The real fortress that self-governs lies in the local provincial officials, who in turn rely on the village sibs. On the other hand, cities always remain a venue for imperial administration without much autonomy.
>>>the villages are self-governing bodies without a mandarin, and the cities are mandarin presiding bodies without self-governance.
>>this led to strong traditionalism at the local level supported by both officials and the sibs against reform efforts from the central administration.
>>The central administration also favors traditionalism to maintain the large corp of officialdom. Both the central and the local relied on the rigid bureaucracy to manage resources and resist changes.
>>economic innovation is impossible because it endangers the existing structure on which the locals rely on to maximize income and the central relies on to manage the locals.
Culturally:
>China is a pacific empire due to the religious ideas that the middle kingdom is a ritualistic center, emperors are more concerned with their management of the existing territories, and relational harmony presides over profit-making.
>Confucian pacificist religious ideas prevent profit making through warring, also prevent the growth of more autonomous military sections apart from the central.
>>such religious ideas led Chinese culture wary of irrational and emotional activities: war making, hero figure, dancing, drinking, supra-mundane salvation, etc.
>>no supra-mundane religion means a this-worldly personality of the Chinese people. True adventure for the sole sake of theoretical knowledge is impossible.
>>>business and scientific activities are purely mundane and relational.
Now, one must recognize that the Weberian conclusions are not stereotypical observations based on the induction of numerous evidence. Weber did not simply gather some contingent facts that are highly subjective and variable to the changes of time and context. Instead, there is an implicit but very apparent grand theoretical strategy if one has cross-examined his other works on other civilizations.
Conclusions about the political constraints in Chinese societies were drawn from his analysis of how different parties of power interact: those with and without power; and those with and without economic resource, and those with and without cultural legitimacy. The dynamics between central administration and local officials are just reflection of Weber’s analysis on power authorities. In the Chinese case, central power authority and local power authority, together, created an institutional gridlock that serves best their economic and legitimacy interests.
Conclusions about the religious ramification of Confucianism and Taoism parallel Weber’s analysis of the orientation of religions towards this mundane life. People socialized by a religion, will surrender at least a considerable portion of their rationalization process to this religion. This is how culture transforms one’s action, quite evident in his other work Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism.
So far the prerequisite mental condition and economic structure for capitalism are all absent in the Chinese civilization: accumulation for the sake of accumulation, and self-organizing interest groups that maximize wealth for themselves alone.
The marvelous paradox was how China’s huge population growth under the Manchurian rule and large size of the economy in Jiangnan never spawned real capitalism. Instead of economic innovation and science revolution, involution and more intensive extraction of resources by the central administration happened. Under Weberian theory, this is not a paradox because capitalism did not grow out of the abundance of resources or human capital. Capitalism is the unintended consequence of the capitalist spirit (anti-thesis to Confucianism) that fed on an accumulation-friendly social structure (anti-thesis to traditionalism and bureaucracy). Textile industry in some periods in Chinese history bore the resemblance of capitalism form, but it never was born out of a capitalist spirit.
Many other incisive comments on the nationality of China can be found and readily explained along with the Weberian conceptualization of civilization. These phenomena have persisted to this day. For example, the Chinese do not value knowledge or commerce for the sake of itself, they do it out of achieving a harmonious existence with the natural world (in the case of scientific knowledge) or accumulating resources to corroborate political or communal establishment (in the case of commerce). This mundane pursuit comes out of the political constraints of the everyday power structure and Confucian religious influence. The merchant class of China does not expand their business to accumulate wealth, but to accumulate political influence and gain imperial favor (red-capitalists, Hu Xueyan, etc.). It also explains why the once-glorified merchant group in China, the Zhejiang tradesmen, stopped operating business en masse in the recent decade and started to encourage their children to pursue official posts. Also, the reform since 1980s has now proved another exception to the pattern. According to Weber, any economic reform in China was never about innovating the economy as it is intended by the central administration to extract resources from provinces. For another example, Confucian religious teachings are not only disenchanted, they do not leave any room for otherworldly supernatural exploration of the relationship between the individual and the world, between inner personhood and behavior. Thus, the concerns that an ideal-typical Chinese individual has for the above realm have little to do with the conceptual and causal mechanisms that may lie behind it. Instead, he or she ponders about these philosophical questions to the extent that it works in reality, or to have the theory fit as closely as the reality may benefit him. Contrary to conventional wisdom, both western and Chinese people like social networking and benefit from social networking. However, the Chinese develop and maintain social networks because relations are quintessential to the personhood of a Chinese; whereas a Christian develops social networks because they may benefit him, either by bringing material goods or fitting his personal taste — the benefits are concrete and revolve around the beneficiary’s own interest. Therefore, Weber maintains the Chinese people are without personality, at least in the sense of a self-maximizing ego. When David Card advocated for affirmative action for non-Asians citing “bad personality”, Asians know the truth hurts. I found most Chinese people are borderline autistic automatons embedded in a web of relational establishments. Thus, you don’t look at the Chinese as individuals for proof of characteristics or personality, you should turn to their occupation, relationships, family, political affiliation for a more accurate depiction.
The Chinese ethics, just as the Protestant ethics, engender how Chinese people think and act out their desire. The Chinese political gestalt, just as the Medieval feudalism of Europe, channels how the economy will freely develop and whom does it benefit. Nothing will change in the coming years because the spirit is the seed that only grows larger and manifests an even clearer imprint of the seed.
Now if we apply the principles of the Chinese civilization as crystalized in Weber’s writing, we found an amazing parallel in Auntology’s narrative and theory about China. There are a few key propositions in Liu’s Auntology:
>China is a fictitious political entity. It consists of a huge central administration (da yitong) stretching its arms to the vast but loosely connected regions in East Asia and pretending its legitimate sovereignty over the subjects in these regions. The loosely connected regions (zhuxia) possess separate independent cultures and traditions that would have been mutually unintelligible to each other. Zhuxia often develop a mutual-aid relationship to resist the central administration, they appear more often in the form of a confederate.
>>there is a perpetual tension between the central admin and zhuxia. Zhuxia always have a tendency to declare de facto or legitimate independence from the central admin. This happened over and over in the history of East Asia.
>China is an empire with superior commercial capacity but it does not innovate. Scientific and technological innovation has always been exported to China from Inner Asia. In recent times, the Inner Asian import took another route via the seas by western influence, but the essential feature that China has to rely on pastoralists or sea nations for technological upkeep has remained intact.
>>without external input, wafangdianhua happens, which is a destined process of technological degradation and bastardization of the original advanced knowledge.
>Central admin (da yitong) inevitably encloses the nation and causes wafangdianhua. Not only this, da yitong also exhausts the resources of zhuxia, leading to the ultimate upheaval and disasters. Da yitong wishes for atomized individuals without an organic community. These atomized individuals may find their proper place when the central admin still can extract resources. But during the disastrous times, atomized individuals become zhang xianzhong and start things like cannibalism.
>>Independent zhuxia, on the other hand, brings renaissance.
At this stage, the parallel between Weber and Liu Zhongjing becomes apparent. That is, the central admin of China is only interested in extracting resources, but regional traditionalism remains an undead ghost to haunt. The reason China will never innovate systematically is due to the tension and the resultant traditionalism at both central and local levels.
