I expected something else, a place where I would feel less at home, a place whose people, language, culture, and political economy would feel totally different from my own. I expected Eastern civilization to be a stark contrast with the West; but that doesn’t appear to be the emerging China. Here, as well as at home, the pursuit of economic and technological progress reigns supreme; and here, as at home, there are those who worry that people may bargain away their souls in the quest.
True, the pace of the bargaining differs, and the social fallout is swifter. I cannot remember a day in my Western life when a brand-new car and a donkey-drawn hay cart were equally involved in the same traffic jam. Before China I had not seen an adult’s three-wheeled tricycle being pedaled past an Apple computer store. I had never walked from the world’s largest McDonald’s to the fifteenth-century Forbidden City. Modernization that took the better part of a century in North America is occurring here in less than a decade. No wonder that this first Beijing International Conference on Business Ethics attracted so much attention, particularly from journalists here.
The first conference speaker, Mr. Hu Peng, the director of China’s special economic zones, reiterated the themes of the Sixth Plenum of the 14th Communist Party of China (CPC), which met just two weeks earlier. He boldly proclaimed that China is committed to the future of its “socialist market economy”; but the party conference stressed that China cannot be economically successful unless it is equally committed to the simultaneous development of a more “spiritual civilization.” The CPC, in its published resolutions, has made this a central thesis: one cannot develop an effective market economy without parallel progress in moral values.
Mr. Hu is right, of course; and I wish that all of you could hear in memory the Chinese analysis as we reflect on our North American culture. This is not a truth confined to any particular country. It is God’s truth about the interwoven nature of economic and religious life.
The conference continued with a further explication of these two phrases, “socialist market economy” and “spiritual civilization.” China’s leaders have embraced a global economy based on market competition, joint ventures, and decentralized ownership of small businesses. They grudgingly accept profit as a goal (though I would argue it’s a means in a Christian economic construct) but worry about the insidious connections of profit with greed, vice, personal autonomy, and a short-term materialistic mentality. It struck me that Chinese capitalism is somewhat like the “cowboy capitalism” of Russia: rough, tough, free-wheeling. It is not the more genteel, matured, mixed capitalism of the West with a governmental framework and clearer social expectations. Yet the Chinese, like the Russians, are not going back. They know that the global economy is market-based, and they’re determined to participate in its future. Thus, they have moved profit to center stage for the sake of global influence.
However, common grace and traditional culture make the Chinese aware that economic and spiritual life must harmonize. The party congress resolutions urge the pursuit of “the true, the good, and the beautiful.” In the conference, the struggle to connect the emerging economy with the spiritual was clear. Chinese speakers decried the shoddy products, broken contracts, cutthroat competition, deceptive pricing, false advertising, and industrial pollution that they experience with growing frequency; and their voices expressed urgency for change. The Chinese fear their mediocre business ethics will drive international investors toward other global opportunities, places such as Singapore, where economic practices are more transparent. Still, the Chinese leaders also acknowledged that party platforms and legal reform are only partial solutions. The bigger correctives must be rooted in the values that are taught and modeled in families, schools, communities, and business organizations.
Yet what values should be taught? During this phase of the conference I felt as if I were eavesdropping on a Chinese family conversation. Elderly party members called for a recovery of traditional Confucian values, but pragmatic educators argued that such a return was fruitless. Confucius despised the merchant and expected economic life to clash with moral life. In the Confucian reckoning, the scholar is as heavy as a mountain while the merchant is as light as a feather (an interesting parallel to Aristotle, wouldn’t you agree?). So, these educators ask, how could Confucian ideas become ethical foundations for a socialist market economy?
Younger conference registrants showed little faith in moral standards inculcated by political institutions. They expressed a strong desire for personal moral behavior, not slogans or rhetoric. Almost as if in response to this plea, Christian speakers from Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and the United States described their framework for moral values in economic life.
Dennis McCann’s paper, for example, connected Old Testament covenantal theology and contract theory, Aquinas’s economic thinking and Aristotle’s concept of commutative justice, John Calvin’s exegesis about interest and the emergence of capital flows. It was openly absorbed into the conversation. My papers recommending strategies to blend religious/moral teachings with business education provoked a flurry of business-card exchanges. I’m not suggesting that the conference registrants embraced Christianity, but they earnestly explored the option. It became part of the urgent search for a moral foundation that will work with an emerging market economy.
Borrowing from the West has its hazards; and if an incorporation of Western religious ideals requires rejection of Eastern culture and identity, it will never be acceptable. Yet the Chinese seem dissatisfied with cpc resolutions that espouse values based on Marxist-Leninism, Mao Zedong’s thought, and even Deng Xiaoping’s cultural theories. I couldn’t identify any speakers deeply committed to such formulas as workable foundations for moral life. Rejecting official claims about the path to ethical progress, the Chinese continue to look for common truth on which to build a nation-state. They are not yet infected by the postmodernist disease that prompts so many in the West to deny the very possibility of a morally binding consensus.
After this three-day conference I pondered the global future. How could anyone doubt that a country with 1.2 billion people, roughly 20 percent of the world’s population, will be anything less than a dominant global power? The Chinese are busy building a modern technological economy. They will succeed. They have always been among the best entrepreneurs and business managers of Asia. Their economic power will give them global political power as well. No wonder Bill Clinton is focused on Asian trade policies. No wonder the United States has waffled on the juxtaposition of Chinese human rights with most-favored-nation status. What happens in and to China will profoundly shape the world of the twenty-first century.
But I have learned enough to acknowledge how little I know about China and its future. Chinese truth and illusion are subtly mixed. Rhetoric does not always match reality. Public commitments to the common good are often at odds with the exercise of political power. Moreover, it is unclear whether ideology or pragmatic nation-building will be the driving force in China during the coming decades. How immutable is the cpc? On balance, perhaps this is less an ideological organization than a single-party replacement for the imperial dynasties of old. Does the openness to Christian values I saw at the conference reflect a desire for the ripe economic fruits from the Western tree without any intention to transplant this tree’s roots? Finally, how will the everlasting, all-powerful God of history work with China to meet its purposed place in his economy?
Shirley Roels is professor of management at Calvin College and coeditor of the anthology On Moral Business (Eerdmans.
Mrs. Clinton, I Presume?
I had the opportunity to meet Hillary Rodham Clinton recently. (Actually, my wife was kind enough to introduce me after their conversation finished.) And I was surprised by what I was surprised by. It hit me with the force of lightning-bolt revelation that she was a real person.
Duh, you say? Well, yes, I already knew that-theoretically. Yet when I shook the hand of the First Lady, I could not get over the fact that normal conversation was possible (even easy, thanks to her graciousness), that she might dislike some aspects of being First Lady (like shaking hands with strangers), that she might have mixed reactions to all the news stories speculating on the private life of her husband, that she might not experience as humorous P. J. O’Rourke’s up-to-that-point-I-thought-hilarious review of her book, which he titled “It Takes a Village Idiot.”
I had abstracted Mrs. Clinton, I realized. She had lost flesh, become a digitized construct in the ongoing game in my head called How the World Works. There, soulless characters compete for dominance and prominence. The various brands of media score the players. What are her popularity ratings? Where is he in the rankings of Forbes’s wealthiest, People’s most interesting or sexiest, or Time’s most powerful? In this Ayn Rand universe, the game is all important, who is ascending or descending, who is scoring points or taking hits. The goal is entertainment, to please the arena fans.
I’m all too aware of this temptation to abstraction. A lifetime spent in the suburban landscape of the Midwest taught me the technique. I was raised with the omnipresent tube, which mediated and abstracted the world. Everything important happened “out there”; New York, Washington, and Los Angeles seemed like huge properties on the cosmic Monopoly board. When race riots broke out in Detroit, the news program mentioned Woodward Avenue, a street I lived a few blocks from. Still, the anchor might as well have said Papua New Guinea. The race riots were an abstraction, having nothing to do with life on my portion of Woodward Avenue.
Abstractification (which strikes me as the perfect name for the malady) can prey upon all facets of my life. It took a trip to Israel to make me realize that Jesus must have had leg cramps. Only then did it occur to me that he must have often sat on a dusty rock on a side of a Judean hill and pondered the seeming absurdity of being the Son of God, walking one little corner of the world, and no one much catching on.
Despite intellectual vigilance, I fall victim too readily to this tendency to drain the full humanity out of our shared enterprises, to reduce everything to a game board. Theology becomes a contest between the progressives and the traditionalists; church, a tug-of-war over the desirability of our pastor. I try to keep in mind first things, the bigger picture, the original purpose, but I often succumb to the game.
Direct sensory connections can reverse abstractification. In shaking Mrs. Clinton’s hand, I could see her as a wife, a mother, a lawyer, and a Methodist, in addition to the political figure I had reduced her to. The issues surrounding her became both less important and more. I had given her back her soul.
The experience has birthed in me a new appreciation for pilgrimage, to go and see, touch, taste, smell, and hear “holy” sites, to make incarnate that which is abstract. Perhaps I’ll go visit a congressman, have lunch with an actor, tour the world. My intuition says that when I fully fathom Jesus’ Judean leg cramps, then the American Midwest will become the new Promised Land, and my abstractification will be cured.
-Michael G. Maudlin.
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books & Culture Magazine.
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