HOBBES AND MODERN CHINA: A COMPARATIVE STUDY 

By Ainan Liu

Abstract

In this case study, we will examine modern China as a representative of non-liberal states that seem to support Hobbes’ theory in Leviathan. Hobbes’ state of nature in which man wages a perpetual war of all against all is a chilling reflection of war torn China in the early 1900s. However, despite the many par- allels between Hobbes’ theory and modern politi- cal experiences, his proposition that governmental coercion is justified due to the protection it provides to its individual citizens is ultimately unsatisfactory. First, it only justifies the existence of governments in principle but offers no justification for particular governments and their individual acts of coercion after their initial formation. Second, Hobbes does not justify coercion beyond the point where the ba- sic imperatives of security and safety are achieved. At this point, I will introduce the concept of “eco- nomic legitimacy,” claimed by the current Chinese government, as an extension of Hobbes’s justifica- tion of state coercion. This paper puts forward the argument that Hobbes provides a theoretically con- vincing justification of state legitimacy through the state of nature and social contract formula but falls short in explaining state formation in practice and their acts of coercion after the transcendence of the state of nature. Hopefully, through this exercise, we can evaluate Hobbes’ timeless classic in a contem- porary context and at the same time make sense of the fascinating political enigma that is China today.

homas Hobbes, with his cynicism towards human nature and predilection for absolute government, seems almost anachronistic to the modern citizen belonging to a country with cherished

liberal democratic traditions. However, more than three hundred years after the publication of Leviathan, Hobbes’ political vision appears to be given profound expression in other parts of the world today. The experiences of many developing countries follow a familiar trajectory of foreign domination and internecine war, approximating to a primeval state of nature; an equally if not more destructive armed revolution; the eventual establishment of an authoritarian government, when the people are given a strongman leader consensually or otherwise; and finally the gradual loosening of state control as the people transitioned from violent struggle to peaceful development. A common characteristic among such governments is wide-ranging coercive powers over the thoughts and actions of their people, not unlike Hobbes’ hypothetical leviathan. In this case study, we will examine modern China as a representative of such non-liberal states that seem to support Hobbes’ theory. Hopefully, through this exercise, we can evaluate Hobbes’ timeless classic in a contemporary context and at the same time make sense of the fascinating political enigma that is China today.

Despite the many parallels between Hobbes’ theory and modern political experiences, his proposition that governmental coercion is justified due to the protection it provides to its individual citizens is ultimately unsatisfactory. First, it only justifies the existence of governments in principle but offers no justification for particular governments and their individual acts of coercion after their initial formation (Hardin). Second, Hobbes does not justify coercion beyond the point where the basic imperatives of security and safety are achieved. At this point, I will introduce the concept of “economic legitimacy,” claimed by the current Chinese government, as an extension of Hobbes’ justification of state coercion. This paper puts forward the argument that Hobbes provides a theoretically convincing justification of state legitimacy through the state of nature and social contract formula but falls short in explaining state formation in practice and their acts of coercion after the transcendence of the state of nature. For the discussion on the Chinese political experience, I will focus on the period from the demise of the Qing dynasty in 1911 to the present day.

Hobbes’ state of nature in which man wages a perpetual war of all against all is a chilling reflection of war torn China in the early 1900s. While we accept that Hobbes devised the state of nature as a purely intellectual experiment that does not explicitly refer to any particular point in human history, it is definitely not against the spirit of Leviathan to compare it with the experiences of certain historic or extant polities. Hobbes claimed that in mankind’s natural condition, there is “continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.” (Bennett) Compare this to a description of early modern China given by a Rudolph Rummel, a scholar on Chinese genocide:

[The Chinese] experienced every manner of death for every conceivable reason: genocide, politicide, mass murder, massacres, and individually directed assassinations; burning alive, burying alive, starvation, drowning, infecting with germs, shooting, stabbing (Rummel)

More important than the outward manifestation of indiscriminate violence and death is the cause of this orgy of chaos. Once again, we can analyze the cause of the miserable state of affairs in China using Hobbes’ conjecture. He claims that man possesses a “vain sense of one’s own wisdom, which most men think they have more than the common herd.” (Bennett) This egoism, when acted upon in a state of relative intellectual and physical equality among individuals, leads to a destructive struggle for supremacy. Furthermore, another important similarity between China in the 1900s and Hobbes’ state of nature is the lack of “a common power to keep them all in awe.” (Bennett) Rummel claims that genocide in China is motivated by “personal power, out of feelings of superiority, because of lust or greed, to terrorize others into surrendering, to keep subjects in line.” (Rummel) After the fall of the Qing dynasty, during the interlude between the death of military strongman Marshal Yuan Shikai in 1916 and the consolidation of power by the Nationalists in 1928, there was a period of warlordism in China notorious for its fragmentation and chaos. Different provinces and regions operated like independent sovereign nations commanded by local bosses with their own private armies. Marshal Wu Peifu, the Zhili warlord, succinctly captured the political climate of China at the time:

China is...a country without a system; anarchy and treason prevail everywhere. Betraying one’s leader has become as natural as eating one’s breakfast. This is the underlying cause of today’s chaos throughout China. Underlings think of nothing but getting rid of their leaders in order to take their place, so disorder keeps spreading without end. (Rummel)

To quantify the anarchy of this period, there were 216 mutinies from 1919 to 1929 (Rummel). In the absence of the Qing government, which administered China since the 17th century to Yuan Shikai, its most powerful general who inherited the bulk of the imperial troops, there existed a dangerous equality among and within the various factions. And as Hobbes predicted, each tried to overpower the rest by “force or cunning” (Bennett).

Social Contract

Contrary to popular Western belief that the 1949 victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over the Kuomintang (KMT) government was an illegitimate seizure of power (Pepper), Mao Zedong’s forces were actually immensely popular among the Chinese people, especially the peasantry. In other words, the Chinese people actually preferred Communist discipline as an alternative to Manchu domination, Japanese excesses and KMT corruption. This mystical union of party and people is emphatically consecrated in the preamble to the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (PRC):

After waging hard, protracted and tortuous struggles, armed and otherwise, the Chinese people of all nationalities led by the [CCP] with Chairman Mao Zedong as its leader ultimately, in 1949, overthrew the rule of imperialism... [and] won the great victory of the new democratic revolution and founded the [PRC]. (People’s Daily Online)

This official account of the party’s rise to power is really a paraphrase of Hobbes’s account of the social contract:

The only way to establish a common power that can defend them from the invasion of foreigners and the injuries of one another... is to confer all their power and strength on one man, or one assembly of men, so as to turn all their wills by a majority vote into a single will. That is to say: to appoint one man or assembly of men to bear their person. (Bennett)

The people’s conferral of their power and strength to the CCP can be demonstrated by sheer weight in numbers. By April 1945, towards the end of the anti-Japanese war, the CCP effectively controlled an area containing a population of over 95.5 million people (Pepper). This at a time when the total population of China was 455 million (Rummel) and the CCP was not even the legitimate government. With this popular mandate, the CCP could “bear the persons” of their constituents and implement extensive land reforms in the countryside amid violent opposition from intellectuals and landlords (Pepper). The reason for the Chinese people’s support for the CCP also fits Hobbes’s account nicely—a desire for peace and stability under a “common power” after years of continual war and fear. According to John Stewart, the American Ambassador to China in 1949,

The CCP was thus giving the appearance of being a dynamic movement fostering among millions those qualities of which China had stood so palpably in need...These gains included the capacity for organization, strict but largely voluntary discipline...This is no mean achievement, especially in the perspective of [KMT] shortcomings. (Rummel)

It is no wonder that the CCP seemed like an irresistibly attractive source of authority to the people after years of Japanese rapacity and KMT tyranny. Thus, even an authoritarian government like the CCP which went on to murder tens of millions of its own people (Rummel) had its roots in popular consent. Chinese state formation seems, up to this point, to support Hobbes’s social contract model.

Governments in Practice

We now turn from the search for government legitimacy in principle to the justification of state formation and coercion in practice. Here, we will examine the problems with Hobbes’s framework from three perspectives: welfarist, utilitarian and contractarian.

If the social contract model explains reasonably well the philosophical motivations for instituting a central authority, it does not make sense when we examine the formation of actual governments. According to Russell Hardin’s paper Rationally Justifying Political Coercion, Hobbes’s welfarist argument that people consent to government coercion because it contributes to their welfare (by protecting them from one another) is wrong because the very act of choosing a desired coercive government may be so costly from the outset that whatever potential benefits to be had from the said government are outweighed by the transition costs (Hardin). This can be broken up into two related questions. First, what if the people are not transitioning from no government to government but from a less preferred coercive government to a preferred coercive government? Second, what if the costs of transition entail the sacrifice of the very life and limb that the outcome of the transition is supposed to protect? Consider the regime change from the KMT government to the CCP government. The Chinese people already had a coercive “common power” that demanded absolute obedience. The incumbent KMT government was as dictatorial and brutal as any twentieth century regime. In such a situation, the Chinese people were not forming a government from scratch by simply agreeing to the reciprocal renunciation of individual rights. They were instituting a new government by risking their lives. If they were to conform to Hobbes’s laws of nature, according to which man is forbidden to “do anything that is destructive of his life or takes away his means for preserving his life,” (Bennett) the civil war would not have happened and the incumbent government would have always been preferred. The grievous costs to each individual in the struggle for regime change far outweighed the potential benefits of the new regime—1.2 million men died in battle in the Chinese Civil War, close to four times the number of combatant deaths in the American Civil War (364, 511) (Rummel). In history, unfortunately, human life is usually the first casualty in the crafting of the social contract.
The utilitarian reading of Hobbes raises a further issue: actual acts of governmental coercion do not satisfy the Pareto criterion because the coerced party will be made worse off by definition. A move by the government satisfies the Pareto criterion when someone is made better off without anyone being made worse off. But governments rarely if ever consider the utility of the coerced individual or group of individuals when they implement policies. Consider the land reform program that the CCP carried out in exchange for peasant support in the struggle against its Japanese and KMT rivals. Mao Zedong claimed that “The republic will take certain necessary steps to confiscate the land of the landlords and distribute it to those peasants having little or no land...and turn the land over to the private ownership of the peasants.” (Pepper) The upshot of this policy was the forcible transfer of property rights of 114 out of 265 million acres of farmland (Rummel). In the process, 7.5 million people out of a population of 500 million were murdered (Rummel). But one can argue that the CCP was justified in killing the landlords because they did not feature in the communist utopia that the social contract was designed to create. However, the CCP government still considered them party to the social contract because as many as 25% of the landlords and rich peasants were sent to labor reform camps for reeducation (Rummel). This implies that the CCP still treated the undesirable elements of society as part of the body politic. Moreover, the land distribution project not only fails the Pareto criterion but also contradicts Hobbes’s prediction that the absolute sovereign will always be inclined to treat the utility of its subjects as a function of its own. He claimed that laws are not meant to bind the people but to keep them in such a motion, as not to hurt themselves by their impetuous desires, rashness, or indiscretion, as hedges are set, not to stop travelers, but to keep them in the way... For the good of the sovereign and the people, cannot be separated (Hobbes). The experience of the Chinese revolution tells us that a government with wide ranging powers may very well buy over a certain section of society at the expense of another.

The contractarian argument, which claims that the people consent to all future coercion once they have given consent to the government through the social contract, is also deficient because actual governments are almost always above the contract. Here, we establish that the constitution is the closest parallel to the social contract in a modern political context. The legal document is more of a product of governmental policy and political exigency than a binding contract. It only codifies the legitimacy of the government into law without always having the power to limit its actions. Furthermore, Hobbes claims that the government has a monopoly over the power of interpretation: “the sovereign alone has the right of judging, i.e. of hearing and deciding any controversies that may arise concerning law (civil or natural) or concerning fact.” (Bennett) So by simply agreeing to a constitution that enables a government does not automatically imply consent to all of its future coercive actions because the government can change the constitution or interpret it as it deems fit.

In the Chinese constitution, just as Hobbes suggested, the government is the sole authority on truth: “it educates the people in patriotism, collectivism, internationalism and communism and in dialectical and historical materialism; it combats the decadent ideas of capitalism and feudalism and other decadent ideas.” (People’s Daily Online) The string of highfalutin “–isms” belies the flexibility with which the ruling establishment could maneuver between the lines. During the early years of the communist revolution, the CCP redistributed land to be privately owned by peasants, according to the communist tenet of labor ownership of the means of production. After the CCP has consolidated its power, in an abrupt about-face, Mao Zedong emphasized collectivism—one of the most ominous words in twentieth century history. The state now owns everything from land, houses and farming tools to even the peasants themselves (Rummel). The village commune organized and disciplined the peasants in military fashion—they ate in mess halls, slept in barracks and owned not even the shirt on their backs (Rummel). None of the peasant soldiers who joined Mao Zedong’s ranks during the civil war could have signed up for such a monstrous social experiment. Coercion is too often a result of arbitrary human agency rather than constitutional rule that embodies the people’s consent. Although Hobbes glossed over the economic dimension to security, he did not go on to elaborate on the importance of the protection of material security in government legitimacy. He claimed that

By ‘safety’ here I don’t mean mere preservation, but also all the contentments of life that each man acquires for himself by lawful work and without danger or damage to the commonwealth. (Bennett)

So what does this mean in terms of justifying coercion in practice? The Chinese government routinely claims that its unpopular policies are necessary for economic growth. Notwithstanding Mao Zedong’s disastrous economic blunders, the Maoist era exorcised the twin specters of crushing poverty and relentless war that haunted China in the KMT and Japanese occupation periods. His successors, after inheriting a population with greater purchasing power and a demand for a greater choice of goods (Gray), had to find another source of legitimacy in order to strengthen the staying power of the CCP. This took the form of economic liberalization and progress that continues to this day. The fulfillment of the promise of greater material comforts has, at the same time, exacted a heavy price on the people. On September 25 1980, the politburo of the CCP declared an unprecedentedly intrusive policy that sought to control the people’s family structure and sexual practices— the one-child policy (Nie). In order to reduce the burden that China’s gargantuan population exerted on its economy, the CCP literally standardized family size for the Chinese people. The government claims that the policy has helped the country achieve 400 million fewer births in the thirty years since its implementation (Nie). By equating fewer people with fewer mouths to feed, the country solved its demographic problem by controlling the sphere of domestic life with mathematical efficiency. Unarguably, it has succeeded in both social and economic realms. Without provoking a violent backlash, it managed to deny the people of a huge part of their reproductive rights to make way for its evidently effective program for economic prosperity.

Mao Zedong once claimed that political power comes from the barrel of a gun. Perhaps governments act in the way they do not because they are justified to do so but simply because they can. But then are we no better than the Machiavellian prince? In a genius philosophical move, Hobbes devised a new justification for state sovereignty without recourse to the divine right of kings tradition. The social contract and state of nature formulation is bluntly but forcefully effective. We want government—any government—because no government means impalement and anything is preferred to impalement. But sometimes, the switch to a preferred government comes at the price of blood. Just when we think that we have arrived at the optimal stage, the government suddenly goes back on the contract that is supposed to express the people’s will. We saw Nazi Germany emerge from the Weimar constitution. We witnessed collectivization under the same party cadres who espoused peasant ownership of land. The CCP today curtails free speech, practices forceful land expropriation and imposes family planning quotas all in the name of economic security. The CCP’s claim to economic legitimacy seems to sit well with the Chinese for the time being. At the end of the day, the Party may very well prove Hobbes wrong by buying the people’s consent with material rewards.

References

References

Hardin, Russell. “Rationally Justifying Political Coercion.”Journal of Philosophical Research. 15.84 (1990): n. page. Print.

Hobbes, Thomas. “Leviathan.” Some Texts from Early Political Philosophy. Ed. Jonathan Bennett. 58. Web. 18 Sep. 2012.

Rummel, Rudolph. China’s Bloody Century. 1. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1991. Print.

Pepper, Suzanne. Civil War in China. 3. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Print.

“Constitution of the People’s Republic of China.” People’s Daily Online. Web. 18 Sep. 2012. <http://english.people.com.cn/constitution/ constitution.html>.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. 1651. Web. <http://www.gutenberg.org/ files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm >.

Nie, Weiliang. “China’s One-Child Policy-Success or Failure?.” BBC News 24 Sep 2010,. Web. 18 Sep. 2012. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-

asia-pacific-11404623>.