Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute.
As a global journal of ideas, Noema receives feedback from readers all over the world that broadens our way of seeing and kindles the further iteration of our thinking. One recent case is a response by Carl Gay, an executive of the Cloudspago consultancy in Australia, to the Noema essay “When The Present Eats The Future: The Achilles Heel of Consumer Democracies.”
In that essay, I contrast post-Mao China’s capacity for reaching a consensus on long-term goals and determinedly implementing them over many years without a break in continuity with the increasing inability of consumer democracies to do so. The example I used in the context of climate change was how China set the goal decades ago of dominating green technology, especially electric vehicles and batteries, and has steadily achieved that objective, while most open societies of the West have sputtered behind. Its “whole dragon” approach brings the resources of the entire system to bear on the challenge at hand.
I pointed out that the strength of China’s system is closely related to its chief flaw: enforcing order and repressing freedom to keep the consensus from fraying. In his note to Noema, Gay makes explicit what I only implied: To the extent China’s determined continuity clogs corrective feedback loops, a policy ordained by the Party can go off in the wrong direction for a very long time, causing damage not easily repaired.
The example he uses is the disastrous one-child policy that held from 1980-2015. It resulted in today’s demographic implosion, where there are not enough young people to sustain the welfare of an aging society. Indeed, blinkered assumptions from the present, projected forward, robbed the future of a balanced population.
Another less calamitous case in point was the 2022 COVID lockdown, which went on well past the patience of a restless public. In that case, the nascent feedback loops of contagious online rants, instances of journalistic exposure and even episodic outbursts of public demonstration resulted in a responsive and more immediate change in policy.
“Deep culture always returns to shape a society in a way similar to how a person’s emotional subconscious is forever biting at the heels of rational cognition.”
The Equivalent Of Market Signals In Politics
The big question for China’s one-party juggernaut is whether it can accommodate corrective feedback mechanisms in politics that are equivalent to the market signals it accommodates to check state-backed economic policy from going too far down the wrong path.
Two developments are emerging that impact this feedback deficit. Paradoxically, the first is that expanded surveillance from the top serves at the same time to register people’s dissatisfaction to the Party guardians listening at scale.
The other is that China’s densely wired society has become a ready platform for surveillance of official behavior from below, or sousveillance. Citizen reports, especially about corruption, rapidly gain virality when posted online.
This dual potential is not lost on the authorities. In a candid conversation in Beijing in 2015, China’s then cyber czar, Lu Wei, openly acknowledged that, in the absence of electoral accountability, an active netizenry can be a critical channel for sending rectifying signals from the grassroots to the Party hierarchy. Even the choice of keyword searches used to invoke censorship can be considered a form of feedback.
Needless to say, if the receiver is not attuned to the signal frequency, the message will go unheard.
Beyond that, a Shanghai entrepreneur I know who was a founder of YouKu, China’s version of YouTube, has told me how the Party is constantly polling down to the neighborhood level to gauge any discontent that may be bubbling up.
China scholar John Keane goes so far as to suggest that China is becoming a kind of “phantom democracy.” By that, he means “the fear of democracy forces a style of political management that in many ways mirrors and mimics electoral systems, where the fear of elections puts leaders in a constant campaign mode” as they feel the need to continually convince constituencies of their worthiness and legitimacy.
But Gay’s key insight in his reply to the Noema essay is more profound and is a larger frame for understanding why China functions as well as it does in contrast to consumer democracies.
“Culture is the substructure upon which the superstructure of ideology, politics and economics are built — the opposite of how modern thought would have it.”
Accumulated Culture Matters Most
As Gay puts it, “power, ideology and culture run at three speeds. Power changes in years, ideology in decades, culture in generations. China’s ‘whole dragon’ approach works because all three are aligned: a power layer that sets fifty-year goals, an ideology that makes its accountability internal and a culture with two thousand years of examination-system deference deposited in it. The continuity you admire is what alignment produces.
“Consumer democracies have the opposite shape: a return channel for error and no continuity. But ‘a governing consensus that sticks’ is a power-layer prescription, and consensus can’t be installed at the power layer when the culture isn’t carrying it. The rules change; the people don’t. Democracies lack a constituency for the future not because opinion is fickle but because the culture hasn’t yet accumulated the consequences that would create one. It will, when the damage becomes undeniable. That is slower than the climate clock allows, but it’s the only route the mechanism offers.”
Gay expanded on this useful frame elsewhere in an essay titled, “Power, Ideology And Culture: The Sediment Beneath Politics.”
“Political order is not one thing but three, moving at three different speeds,” Gay explains in his essay. “There is power — the hard architecture of institutions, coercion, money and command, the layer that can change in a season. There is ideology — the story a society tells about why those with power deserve it and why the rest should comply. And there is culture — the slow accumulation of everything a people has lived through, settled so deep that it is no longer argued but simply assumed. Most of our political commentary treats these as rival explanations: the institutionalist sees only power, the theorist only ideology, the culture critic only identity. Each is holding one limb of the animal.
“The reframe I would urge is this. Culture is not a third thing standing beside the other two. It is mostly the other two — power and ideology accumulated over generations and set hard, the way sediment is only the silt from yesteryear’s flood waters deposited over time, slowly compressing to a firmer sedimentary structure. What a people will accept, resist or demand today is the settled residue of the power arrangements and the justifying stories it absorbed long before anyone now living was old enough to question them. This is why culture is the slowest layer to move, and why, when it finally does move, power and ideology have no choice but to follow.”
Deep culture always returns to shape a society in a way similar to how a person’s emotional subconscious is forever biting at the heels of rational cognition. Culture is the substructure upon which the superstructure of ideology, politics and economics are built — the opposite of how modern thought would have it.
As political orders around the world enter a protracted period of upheaval, Gay’s frame of whether they are aligned or not with their cultural grounding is one of the more compelling paradigms for making sense of it all.
