May 9, 2006

Dear Colleague,

    China and India are the two rising powers of the world. They are also seen by the West (and the United States in particular) as competitors. So far as Americans are concerned, there is no question as to who is the favorite--India. As the media repeatedly claim, India is the world's largest democracy, whereas China is authoritarian and ruled by a single party--the Communist Party. American politicians also see China as a rising military power, a threat not only to Taiwan but also to Japan, both American babies that have grown strong under American tender loving care. India is also to be nurtured, given a boost (note the hanky-panky over nuclear cooperation), so that it can play a countervailing role to China's potential hegemony over Asia.

    China is far more successful than India in fighting hunger. In the last fifteen years, China made huge strides in reducing malnutrition among children under age five, while India recorded only modest progress. China reduced its malnourished children by one third, far surpassing the United Nations goal for 2015. India, by contrast, only managed to reduce its share by six percentage points since 1990. In India, a staggering 47 percent of children under 5 are under weight. (The New York Times, May 3, 2006, p. A6).

    Both China and India are in favor of Human Rights. To the Chinese, the most fundamental of all human rights is the right to have enough to eat--to feed one's children well. China, in other words, is pro-life. By contrast, India, a democracy, is pro-choice.

    Can China be a multi-party democracy along the lines of Western democracies? Not likely—not, at any rate, any time soon. And the reason is that multi-party democracy runs contrary to the Chinese world-view, which sees the government as a reflection of a cosmic order in which the ruler rules under the Mandate of Heaven. That the elite did not become despotic—at least, not for long—had two causes. One was Confucianism, a teaching that emphasized benevolence in all human relationships, but especially on the part of those in power. Confucianism was actively propagated by the governing elite to all corners of China and through all layers of society, just as Marxism was so propagated in our time. The second cause or factor was the role of scholar-officials. They had the obligation to criticize. The criticism could be direct and even harsh because the scholar-officials believed that they had their own righteousness—their own access to Heaven and its virtue. Today, these scholar-officials are the intellectuals—teachers and students, editors and writers. They readily attack the shortcomings of the government, but they do so within the system—within the cosmos. That the entire system may be rotten and should be replaced by something else, with quite another set of beliefs and values, still lies outside their purview. The Chinese scholar, Chang Hao, says that an important difference between China and the West lies in their conception of transcendence: Chinese transcendence, with its acknowledgment of Heaven, is a limited transcendence, for the idea of Heaven and of virtue is thoroughly integrated into the structure of government as well as into the daily lives of the people. By contrast, transcendence in the West is of a different order. The God of the Hebrews and of the Christians rises far above all earth-bound political systems. One system can replace another with no danger of total anarchy, for in the end God is the source and guarantor of all order, goodness, and beauty (China Review International, vol. 1, Spring 1994).

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu