In an essay published in Seiron magazine, Kanji Nishio depicts China as a giant monster with four serpent heads: ancient despotism, modern communist dictatorship, financial-capitalist market economy, and totalitarian fascism. Deng Xiaoping’s “let some get rich first” policy was not a path toward equality, but a system that enabled hereditary privilege and the plundering of the people’s wealth. This essay examines the fundamental problem of the Chinese Communist regime that the Wuhan virus has forced the world to confront.

May 7, 2020

It is the political culture of this country to classify human beings into two groups, those who rule and those who are ruled, and to recognize neither human rights nor wealth for those who are ruled.

The following is the continuation of the previous chapter.

Rejecting Deng Xiaoping’s “Let Some Get Rich First” Theory

China ceased to be a “sleeping great power” and came to the forefront not only in politics and military affairs, but also in the economy and industry, which had been its Achilles’ heel.
It began to be perceived by other countries as a true threat.
This was not so long ago.
I think it was after the Lehman shock of 2008, when the financial order of the advanced countries was greatly shaken.
So only about ten years have passed.
Yet world politics over these ten years has been occupied, morning and night, by the “China problem.”
And the event that can be said to have brought that flow to an end, or to have forced a change in direction, is precisely the reality of this epidemic.
The background to the World Health Organization, WHO, giving it the neutral name “novel coronavirus,” and to the attempt to avert eyes from the fact that it is a “China problem,” lies here.
This is none other than the very issue I am now trying to examine in this essay.
Whatever the name may be, the virus itself will eventually subside.
But what matters is not the extent or course of the disease itself, as in the case of severe acute respiratory syndrome, SARS, or avian influenza.
The time has finally come to ask, without evasion, what the reality of the Chinese Communist Party truly is after these ten years, or after the period since Deng Xiaoping’s theory of allowing some to get rich first, during which it was supposed to have been modified, and whether the world can continue to deal with it in the future.
It just so happened that we were forced to feel this truth concretely and engrave it deeply in our hearts in the form of an epidemic.

I once proposed that modern China should not be viewed as a single body, but treated as a polyhedron.
This was in the December 2010 issue of this magazine.
Please forgive the somewhat anime-like image.
I wrote that China is a giant monster equipped with four serpent heads.
The first serpent head is that it still drags along, intact, the structure of an “ancient despotic state system.”
It is the political culture of this country to classify human beings into two groups, those who rule and those who are ruled, and to recognize neither human rights nor wealth for those who are ruled.
Even today, those with rural family registers are permitted only eternal slave labor, and they cannot become urban residents.
Communist Party bureaucrats have no interest whatsoever in their misfortune.
It is true that modern Chinese people have been given the experience of an expansion of “freedom” in the material sense.
But the viewpoint that the expansion of “equality” is necessary at the same time has been completely disregarded.
There is no such feeling, no such consciousness.
When I questioned a certain progressive Chinese intellectual, who had also been involved in the democratization movement, on this point, he declared:
“Japanese-style equality does not suit Chinese society. It will not exist in the future either.”
It was as if he were saying that equality is, rather, harmful.

The “modernization” led by the West and later followed by Japan is not necessarily an absolute standard.
Nevertheless, a certain balance between freedom and equality, and the principle of majority rule on the premise of democracy with all its foolishness, are conditions of the present world order.
There is no brilliant alternative to replace them, and the world barely manages to exist by enduring their inefficiency.
Yet only the Chinese Communist Party has openly ignored this principle and has continued to boast only of efficiency up to the present day.
Each country has suffered from the contradiction of realizing both “freedom” and “equality,” and has carved the history of modernity through that anguish.
Only China has separated itself from this flow, and for about 30 years has run with arbitrary self-assertion that ignores “equality.”

Deng Xiaoping’s “let some get rich first” theory was said to rest on the practical judgment that, if China waited for the achievement of “equality,” it would never catch up with the advanced countries.
For the time being, the “freedom” of those who could do well, and those who had already obtained strong positions, would be recognized, thereby raising the level of the entire nation.
The international community seemed to understand this and tolerate it, believing that it too could obtain benefits from it.
But in fact, this itself was a great misunderstanding.
What Deng Xiaoping was trying to do was the eternal containment of “equality” and the acceptance of a monopoly by the lucky.
What has actually occurred so far is the hereditary transmission of privileges by the descendants of the famous meritorious figures from the founding period of the Communist Party.
Ordinary people, the masses, were not in his field of vision.
Those who were instructed that “the first to arrive wins,” and whose backsides were slapped to hurry up, were the children of Party executives.
The blatant division and plunder of the people’s wealth were carried out by their hands.

Chinese history, no matter what period one takes, resembles the same patterned candy cut from a long stick.
In Chinese history, there are only antiquity and the present.
Up to the Qing dynasty, it was in effect antiquity.
Without any room to pass through an intermediate period such as the early modern or modern age, in which steps toward “equality” might have been attempted between antiquity and the present, China skipped all intermediate terms and advocated what may be called the second serpent head, the “modern communist dictatorship system.”
While retaining the characteristics of an ancient state, it built layer upon layer of institutional devices for controlling the people.
The fact that private ownership of land is not recognized is also a characteristic of a premodern society that raises the first and second serpent heads.
Farmers can be driven out under the pretext of building a dam, and vast groups of apartment buildings can be constructed without anyone being able to complain.
This often turned into riots, which were suppressed by force.
The actual number of riots reached 200,000 per year.

In this way, China newly added, as its third serpent head, a “financial-capitalist market economy system” to the systems described above, and began asserting itself in the international community.
There was a time when the “let some get rich first” theory gave rise to expectations that it would help modernize this country slowly over time.
For that purpose, the formation of a middle class and the expansion of domestic demand were necessary.
There were also attempts to enact laws intended to improve workers’ labor conditions and living standards.
It seems that some laws were indeed prepared to a certain extent.
For example, laws containing provisions to protect coal-mine workers from danger were also enacted.
But all of this was pie in the sky.
For in China, even if splendid laws exist, no one has any intention of observing them, and in fact they were not observed.

The key industries are controlled by state-owned enterprises, and those state-owned enterprises are operated by powerful Communist Party executives.
Ordinary people cannot grasp who is doing what and where.
When, by chance, a brilliant success story appears in a private company, after some time it is taken over in the dark by a state-owned enterprise.
A renowned local wealthy person who emerged from the private sector is suddenly detained, and the company goes bankrupt.
The people cannot understand what has happened, as if they had been bewitched by a fox.
They can only watch from afar an irrational downfall, the disappearance of a great conglomerate like a daydream.
A huge sum of money may have been carried overseas by a major Party executive, but this too is something no one can know for certain.

What is the center of power in present-day China like?
Many entertaining picture scrolls of power struggles, and many story-like explanations resembling ancient court dramas, have been drawn.
But a convincing explanation of the structure at the center of power has not yet been achieved by anyone.
I think power is maintained by a law before law, by something not codified.
But perhaps it should be compared, in Japanese terms, to the tacit rules of antisocial groups, the yakuza.
Because China is a state that is vague and hard to grasp apart from its vast population and space, I have focused on its multiple aspects, carrying contradictory “serpent heads.”
I believe that the contradiction of forcibly trying to maintain the coexistence of the second serpent head, the “modern communist dictatorship system,” and the third serpent head, the “financial-capitalist market economy system,” is now reaching its limit and is about to burst.

China has long been saying that 200 million of its people have reached a standard of living comparable to that of advanced countries.
It boasts that it will turn this into 400 million and become an economic superpower surpassing even the United States.
Of course, its policy is to keep the remaining 900 million people as slaves.
Since Xi Jinping became president, the characteristics of what should be called the fourth serpent head, the “totalitarian fascist system,” have begun to appear strongly.

The carefree and naive international community, led by the United States, has finally begun to realize the seriousness of the situation.
The two speeches by Vice President Pence tell us this.
However, while nothing concrete was being done, the storm of the new virus struck.
The epicenter was, once again, China.
A strong question has erupted anew: should such a country be allowed to continue doing whatever it pleases unconditionally?
When the virus subsides, the next thing that will surely stir a whirlpool of debate throughout the world will be punishment for China and the expression of modern civilization’s will to “decouple from China.”
It must certainly become so.
That is because modern China had already been placed on the chopping board of doubt before the arrival of the new virus.
U.S.-China trade friction is not the cause of that doubt.
It is the result of the doubt, and only one of its manifestations.
The world that suffered under Hitler and Stalin has finally begun to ask why it has remained silent and folded its arms while a monster equipped with four serpent heads runs wild and tramples others underfoot.
This essay will continue.