In his New Year address, Chinese President Xi Jinping reiterated his commitment to “building a Moderately Prosperous Society in all aspects.” As far as I can tell, no Western media made a note of this comment. Come to think of it, Xi’s address at the 19th National Congress, delivered on October 18, 2017, was also called “Secure a Decisive Victory in Building a Moderately Prosperous Society in All Respects.” In the speech Xi mentioned a Moderately Prosperous Society no less than 15 times. It was all over Chinese headlines, even though hardly any outside observer commented on it. What is going on?
The little-mentioned term is in fact the key to understanding the contradiction lying at the heart of the Chinese Communist Party.
The Chinese term for a Moderately Prosperous Society is xiaokang. The term originally appeared in the Book of Rites, a Confucian classic. Confusingly enough, according to Confucius’s account, xiaokang was a rather selfish society: “People take care only of their own parents, and favour only their own children. People hoard wealth and exploit others’ work.” At best it was a society which maintained order through rigorous application of the rules of propriety (i.e. law) because selfish people could not be counted upon to govern themselves.
Confucius saw xiaokang as a precursor to datong, the Great Unity, an ideal society where the Great Way prevails -- a society so filled with trust that “people don’t lock their doors at night.” In modern times Kang Youwei, the reformer of the late Qing dynasty, recaptured the ideal in his signature work Datong-shu, the Book of Great Unity. Chairman Mao was a particular fan of this work because Kang basically equated the ancient ideal of datong to the modern ideal of communist utopia.
Why, then, does the Chinese Communist Party hold up xiaokang rather than datong as the social vision? The legend has it that Deng Xiaoping told the visiting Prime Minister Masayoshi Ohira of Japan in 1979: “Our concept of the four modernizations is not a modern concept like yours, but a moderately prosperous society [xiaokang].” Deng further elaborated his vision when he later met another Japanese Prime Minister, Yasuhiro Nakasone: “To quadruple the GDP per capita to 800 US dollars -- that is what it means to realize the moderately prosperous society by the end of this century in China.”
The GDP per capita of China back in 1979 was just under 200 US dollars. Deng was saying China should first achieve moderate prosperity (xiaokang) by raising the GDP per capital to 800 US dollars -- an ambitious goal back then -- before the Chinese Communist Party could achieve its mission of realizing communist utopia (datong). What Deng meant was: Let’s get rich first, before we can redistribute the wealth. In order to do so, China had to temporarily embrace the selfishness of human nature and implement capitalist reforms.
Now we see the context in which Deng chose the term xiaokang as a social vision of China. It was meant to be an interim vision before the Party could go back to its stated mission of realizing datong. One could easily imagine the debate that raged behind the scene in December 1978, at the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee Congress of China, between communist hardliners and market reformers. Deng managed to convince the hardliners of the need for market-based reforms, by arguing that the reforms were only an interim measure meant to bring about a moderate level of material prosperity. By portraying the ancient xiaokang as an intermediate stage preceding the final goal of communist utopia, Deng could sidestep the inherent contradiction of a communist party pursuing market-friendly policies.
The problem is, China realized Deng’s vision a long time ago. Specifically, China’s GDP per capita surpassed the original goal of 800 US dollars circa 1998 and today it stands at over 8,000 US dollars. The Chinese Communist Party should by now have reversed market-based reforms and reverted to communism, but it has not done so. Instead the Party keeps moving the goal post further ahead. Now President Xi is talking about achieving a “comprehensive xiaokang”, a.k.a. “Moderately Prosperous Society in all respects,” by 2020. Who knows what new slogan the Party will come up with after 2020, when the nominal GDP per capita will surpass 10,000 US dollars?
To its credit, the Party has continued to refine its social vision. In the aforementioned New Year speech, Xi emphasized the concrete goal of eradicating poverty by 2020. Over the years the term xiaokang has come to encompass not only material prosperity but aspects of social justice and environmental protection. I don’t see anything wrong with that, even though the discrepancy between the official ideology and super-charged economy is becoming ever more glaring. Beijing today has more billionaires than New York. An impressive feat, to be sure, but it is a far cry from Marx’s vision of a workers’ paradise.
What might be an alternative? I suggest the Party abandon the outdated vision of the proletariat dictatorship and redefine datong as what Confucius originally meant by the term: a moral society where public-mindedness prevails over selfishness.
Confucius says: “While people still value things, they don’t just hoard things for themselves. While people still value their work, they don’t just exert every effort for themselves. Selfishness is suppressed, and there are no thieves who filch or rebels who disrupt the society. So people don’t lock their doors at night. This is called the Great Unity [datong].” Isn’t this a universal vision which could appeal to different cultures around the world? My new-year wish is for the Party to embrace it as the true China model.
Jung-kyu Kim has co-authored The Great Equal Society: Confucianism, China and the 21st Century with Dr Young-oak Kim of Hanshin University.