Issue2 Article9

The Internet in China in 2001: A Confucian Critique Mary I. Bockover Abstract: Unlike Western ethical traditions, which emphasize personal autonomy, Confucian ethics are based on the development of ren (humaneness) and its expression in relationships through li (social ritual). Conflict arising from the spread of the Internet in China is seen as a paradigm for the contrast between the two ethical traditions.

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t the beginning of the year 2000, nine million people were online in China. What is remarkable about this figure is its increase. The number of Internet users in China only two years earlier was a mere 650,000. This still small but rapidly growing acceptance of the Internet contrasts with the traditional Chinese practice of keeping foreign ideas and products at bay. This practice, largely protective, has not been without rational grounds. One glaring example is the Chinese resistance to the importation of opium by the British—a resistance broken only after Britain launched the Opium War. Of course, the Internet is not exactly an opiate, and enforcing free trade does not always require an act of war, but the Internet is nevertheless a potentially harmful foreign product. Only recently brought into China—primarily by American businesses and universities—the Internet could have a disruptive effect on the Chinese. As Americans and as world citizens, we have an obligation to engage in some serious moral reflection about how the Internet stands in relation to the Chinese way of life and the philosophy that way of life has reflected for several thousand years.

The Internet is a supremely effective means for promoting the modern value of personal autonomy, which in America is driven by the ideas of consumerism, free expression, equal opportunity and free trade. It is quite clear that “modernization” in China translates to just this value. A visit to any major Chinese city shows that “prosperity” is taken to hinge not only on increased participation in the global economy, but also on a growing issue 2, june 2002

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mentality of consumerism that America epitomizes. Unfortunately, unless modernization in this form is restricted in China (or in any other developing country), the large majority of people will be increasingly alienated from their cultural roots and their traditional life-sustaining practices. This widespread problem is particularly problematic for the Chinese people because their identity has already been sabotaged by such disasters under Communism as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

China’s future is an open book, for she was to some extent already dislodged from her traditional past during the Maoist period. Now the threat to her identity is subtle but still pressing: the influence from the West to “modernize” is intense and is supplanting many of the values that for millennia were at the center of traditional Chinese ethics. For some Chinese, especially urban youth, the result has been a values vacuum.

In spite of these challenges, traditional Confucian values and customs remain strong, particularly among the vast majority of Chinese who do not partake of city life. The real social stability for China still comes from an ethical system that places familial and social well-being and harmony above all else. Thus the Chinese regard for social integrity and the American regard for individual freedom conflict, for in China one is not taken to have personal and political autonomy. What it means to be a “person” in China is to be a meaningful part of a larger social group—a family, neighborhood or nation. Personal roles are always socially defined. The concept of “person” or “self ” as having a “self-legislating will”—an autonomous, independent agent that stands outside of a social context—is a Western abstraction, not a Chinese reality. In China, then, where the central moral goal has always been harmonious interdependence instead of the autonomous independence we pursue so devoutly in America, the Internet—the perfect embodiment of American values—could present a threat to cultural identity and stability. And as individualist values increasingly take hold, the Chinese government—justifiably, whether we like it or not—may well impose controls in order to prevent what could be great internal turmoil.

In the Confucian view that lies at the basis of Chinese thought and action, we are what we are because we stand in meaningful relation to others. The moral goal for the Confucian is to develop our humanity, and that entails our learning to fulfill the responsibilities that we have to others.

Our natural need and wish to be meaningfully connected to others provides the impetus for our moral development. In effect, one cultivates one’s humanity by cultivating one’s roles. One becomes a good mother, daughter, teacher and friend by living that life consistently and with the dedication that a human so naturally brings to the things that mean the most to her.

Humanity at its best is attained when the goal of promoting social har-

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mony and cooperation is realized. A basic human goodness (ren) is thoroughly embedded in the world through the relationships we have with others, but it also reflects the perfect integrity of the greater cosmos (Dao).

When the human way (ren dao) accords with the natural order and harmony of the greater cosmos, all things will be right on Earth and under heaven. This is how Chinese emperors were expected to rule under the “mandate of heaven,” and this is how families and communities were expected to live peacefully together. These Confucian principles affect every aspect of daily living and are still reflected strongly in the Chinese way of life. We read in the Great Learning (Daxue): Only after the principle in things is fully apprehended does knowledge become complete; knowledge being complete, thoughts may become true; thoughts being true, the mind may become set in the right; the mind being so set, the person becomes cultivated; the person being cultivated, harmony is established in the household; household harmony established, the state becomes well governed; the state being well governed, the empire becomes tranquil.1 Confucius provided a timeless teaching on living a good, humane life in describing what it takes for us to interact in a harmonious, civilized way.

This account is based on two ideas most central to Confucian philosophy: ren, already mentioned, and li. Li has been translated as rite, ritual, ceremony, convention, propriety and right conduct. Ren also has been subjected to various and divergent translations, including goodness, nobility, benevolence, humaneness and human-heartedness. Although they are two concepts, li and ren are essentially related and cannot be understood independently from one another. In the Analects, Confucius sometimes speaks of them separately, but only for the purpose of clarity, as when he draws our attention both to what a good act expresses as well as how it is expressed.

Thus, the reason for distinguishing li from ren is that one can express ren in many different—culturally relative—ways that equally qualify as li.

Ren is the humanity that a good act expresses and that brings people together in ways that are mutually recognized and responded to, and li is how that goodness may be expressed in the vastly different social contexts that people live out each day. For example, a handshake, a bow, a nod of the head, a “high five,” a smile, a hug and a curtsey are each different li or conventions that express the same basic human wish to convey a cordial greeting, which arises from ren. The li depends on context, while the greeting is a universal human expression, one of a myriad of ways of expressing our ren, or humanity. issue 2, june 2002

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Confucius tells us in the Analects that li is essential to living a distinctively human life (ren). What it means to live a distinctively human life is to live in dignified harmony with others. Li is how one establishes ren, through providing the appropriate patterns of conduct which govern the great variety of human relationships. Varying with cultural differences and with the specific relationship at hand, li provides the socially acceptable form that our relationships may take, and that in turn defines the “person” (ren),2 making each one of us a distinctive human being. Clearly, to be a mother, one must have a child; to be a teacher, one must have a student; to be a friend, one must have a friend; and so on. And insofar as one is a mother, a teacher, a friend, etc., she will have to conduct herself in ways that are suited to the roles—ways that are “prescribed by li.”

In general then, li is that part of moral conduct that provides the conventions for being a cultivated human being. This discussion of li must not obscure the magic that Confucius saw in the distinctive human ability to form harmonious and meaningful relationships. For To live a distinctively Confucius, “moral” action could never be just a matter of convention. It involves a sincere and dedicated orientation toward the person or (more rarely) the thing being human life is to live engaged. Confucius saw that interacting appropriately (according to li) requires ren if it is to be sincere, respectful in dignified harmony and dignified. For any “moral activity,” that is, li and ren are mutually entailing. Taken together, li and ren are what with others. allow us to develop good relationships, and these relationships are the essence of being a person. We are able to take this humanity for granted only when it has become “second nature” or when we no longer have to be painfully and self-consciously aware of what we are doing in so many social contexts.

Li is therefore learned. It requires guidance from tradition and cannot exist without a foundation of proper social values. With time and continual practice, however, li becomes wu wei, or actionless activity. In other words, with perseverance and dedication, ritual becomes effortless; we become masters at behaving in ways that initially were not easy for us. We eventually come to take for granted such daily li as our gestures when greeting others and our manner of sharing a meal, but these lessons must be learned, and not without difficulty, as anyone who has raised small children can attest.

To perform li effortlessly, at a level that is wu wei, does not mean that we underestimate its value. In fact, Confucius made it clear that without ren—that magical human quality which is the essence of li—ritual would no longer be proper ritual. Instead, it would be the kind of interpersonal

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fraud that Confucius “could not bear to see.” This is precisely because li, to be good, must express ren: it must be a personally significant, even sacred, gesture made by one human being standing in a meaningful relation to another. This is no small point: the conventions of li must mean something. Li has a purpose that is much more mysterious than mere behavior and cannot be measured as systematically. This is ren: the proper spirit or conscious orientation expressed by the ritual act of li.

Ren is this “human-hearted” orientation toward others expressed by the ritual act. It is more mysterious than li in being li’s conscious aim: that human “spirit” cultivated by and expressed in the meaningful relations we form with others. Li and ren are therefore inseparable. Li comprises forms of conduct done with the right spirit, and ren tells us what that spirit is: to approach others with civility and to treat them with the dignity they deserve. This requires a proper regard for our roles as people, as well as a proper regard for our humanity. In the Analects we read: He who can submit himself to li is ren (12:1) . . . You want to be established yourself, then seek to establish others. You wish to advance, then advance others. Take the analogy from what is near, there is ren’s way (6:28).3 What is near? There is nothing nearer to me than my “self,” but what is the “self ” from a Confucian standpoint? The answer should now be clear: to know who I am, I must look to “what is near”: my children, my husband, my students, my friends. That is who I am, established by the li of those relationships—the appropriate and socially conditioned ways of conducting myself in those relationships. Confucius did not employ an abstract concept of “self,” because he conceived of personal cultivation as inseparable from moral goodness, and of moral goodness as inseparable from the actions, or li, which realize that goodness. For Confucius, one becomes a person through character development or “submission” to the appropriate rituals and roles that make us ren. Our social roles therefore cannot be abstracted from who we are or from the human goodness needed to properly fulfill our roles and hence our obligations to others. We are people precisely in virtue of these relationships, and we are good people insofar as we cultivate and are true to them. This is what living a good life amounts to for Confucius—living a life of li and ren. In sum, the moral priority of Chinese ethics is to cultivate and fulfill one’s social responsibilities. To reconcile one’s obligations to others is the most pressing concern, not to be a “self ” or person qua autonomous agent in any sense of the term. issue 2, june 2002

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How is this ancient culture, in which individuals are defined by their interpersonal relations and judged by their manner of fulfilling social obligations, to respond to the Internet, which, in sharp moral contrast, promotes the primacy of personal autonomy? In the first place, the Internet is a foreign product not easily turned aside at the border; nor can it be easily controlled once admitted. The Internet is regulated only on a local level, so there is no mechanism for regulating the content of another server in another country, or even in the same town.

This is not true of any other form of trade. Commercial, political and even personal wares and behaviors are subject to screening immediately upon entering any foreign country. In contrast, with the trading of information on the Internet, one only has to put material out there to be a published and internationally distributed “author.” There is no peer review or system for screening true information from the vast bounty of fraudulent material that poses as true. Nor is the newcomer to the Internet likely to understand how to interpret the presence of hate sites and pornography or even know how to respond to the deluge of commercial marketing measures. Anyone who has a computer with Internet access can say anything and be heard, and even believed if the presentation is convincing enough.

According to American beliefs and American law, this free-for-all of information and disinformation may be acceptable. But it comes into conflict with the values and political systems of the Chinese. This is not to falsely identify the Chinese people with their government, which is still very repressive by American standards, but rather to cite a deeper cultural difference. The Internet now embodies and perpetuates our American constitutional right of free speech and principles of free trade and equal opportunity on a global level—freedoms which Americans now take to be “basic human goods” and which the Chinese have always guarded against.

Americans assume that personal freedom is good and that it is necessary to our humanity, but these assumptions are questionable. First of all, freedom is a various and complex concept. A sufficient appreciation of how differently freedom can be defined and evaluated should make us hesitate to regard it as a single principle with universal application. It is not even central to most of the world’s philosophies. Where it is central—the Hindu concept of moksha and the Buddhist concept of nirvana come to mind—it has nothing to do with the personal autonomy that is the focus, for example, of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant or of the American Bill of Rights. Kant holds freedom to be the first principle of morality—it is the universally valid principle that grounds and determines moral agency and the moral worth of any action. For Kant, action is given moral worth

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according to whether it entails an intention which has a rational and freely chosen consistency that would in principle allow “autonomy” to be valid for all moral agents. In a word, freedom is an aspect of the moral will and is precisely what makes us moral agents. Autonomy—that is, rational, free agency—is not only morally important but is a “categorical imperative” to uphold, to protect the very fabric of our universal human nature.

Contrast this with the very different view of freedom offered by John Stuart Mill, who holds that freedom or “liberty” is a utilitarian good. Freedom is not categorically imperative at all; it is only a good if it maximizes happiness in general (the grounding principle of morality for Mill). Freedom may not even be morally jus- This free-for-all of infortified if greater unhappiness results from it. Kant’s absolutist view of freedom, compared to Mill’s view of mation and disinformation freedom as a good that is altogether contingent on the social utility it produces, is closer to the American comes into conflict with the view of the centrality of freedom, as enshrined in the Bill of Rights. But even there, the concept of freedom values and political systems has evolved from what our founding fathers envisioned when they wrote the Bill of Rights in order to of the Chinese. protect individual rights, even against the tyranny of a democratic majority.

As a society, we have still not decided what exactly these rights entitle all of us to, nor have we decided which of us out of “all of us” gets them— or which minorities are to be protected from the majority. These judgments continue to change dramatically, as we see in the controversies over abortion, euthanasia and capital punishment. Our uncertainty about the unrestricted application of the right to freedom is seen in the fact that our history has denied some or all of these civil rights to Americans of African descent, to women and children in general, and to homosexuals. Our own very dubious “human rights” record has not been lost on societies upon which we have attempted to impose a standard higher than the one we have met ourselves. It is shocking to confront the hypocrisy of the absolutist position on freedom when we reflect that our own country was built largely on the backs of people who had no rights at all but were treated legally and personally as property that could be bought and sold.

It follows from an absolute commitment to freedom as “autonomy rights for all” that every sovereign nation not embracing the same philosophy, political structure and way of life should guarantee to their people this kind of freedom. Yet these are issues that we have had extreme difficulty resolving even on our own soil. The fact that a concerned body has to make a (democratic) decision about what these autonomy rights are, not to menissue 2, june 2002

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tion who should have them, shows how troublesome an absolute claim to freedom can be, even in the American case. And even the broadest definition of personal freedom does put limits on autonomy. The right to free speech does not give us the right to slander or bear false witness against someone, and the right to trade freely does not mean that we can sell illegal or dangerous items, or take them to another country for trade.

Further, there is no reason that the bases for moral action in other traditions should not be considered as valid as freedom. Confucius, like Mencius after him, held that it is our natural feelings and the cultivation of these feelings that humanize us, that make us moral beings. This is directly at odds with the Kantian view that it is reason and freeWhat should persuade us dom that make us moral. Indeed, Kant would say that natural feelings (e.g., for family and friends) tend to that freedom is more conflict with reason in our attempt to implement what is categorically imperative for us to do. But, according important than compassion to Mencius, what Kant would call the “mere contingency” of compassion is precisely the “basic human when it comes to being feeling” that makes us moral. And what should persuade us that freedom is more important than compassion when it comes to being moral? One can only moral? conclude that our American carte blanche regard for personal freedom is really, in the end, a cultural abstraction which we take on faith, and our assumption that the Chinese, for example, should adopt the same faith is really no more than an expression of chauvinist arrogance.

The Internet now is quite at home in much of Europe and even Japan, but there, too, it reflects and promotes the American love of free expression, our desire for financial gain, and our belief in equal opportunity, in an unprecedented way. Sadly, in 1989 we saw at Tiananmen Square the effect of importing democratic values to China. What many Americans do not know is that one of the central demands of the Chinese students was the right to stay in the modernized cities where they were educated instead of returning home to provinces, which were very underdeveloped by comparison.4 But the Chinese government felt justified in denying this demand, since at present there can be no such equal opportunity in China; one cannot have a right to live and work where he or she wants because the infrastructure of the already staggeringly overpopulated cities cannot sustain it.

This is not to be unsympathetic to those injured or killed. Granted, from the American point of view, controlling where people live may be a human rights violation, but from the Chinese point of view, the students were

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under an obligation to return to their own communities to fulfill their roles under the Confucian ethic.

It would be simplistic to conclude that the argument here is against freedom, or against Internet use. This only misses the point; for clearly, autonomy rights as well as Internet use in the United States are central to how we live and what we value. After all, personal autonomy and the Internet developed here in a form and to an extent found nowhere else. The argument here is, rather, against the view that personal autonomy is an absolute principle that is universally valid for all societies. Unrestricted autonomy, which is so well reflected in the lack of regulation essential to Internet use, may even become a problem in the United States. It certainly may threaten China’s internal stability and could be the cause of political conflict between our two countries if cultural differences and national sovereignty are not respected.

China must continue to regulate the flow of trade and ideas, and it must hold on to its system of Confucian values. The more than one billion Chinese who are already very poor by our standards could face starvation and homelessness if China is not careful with her future. If the business interests and personal freedoms of a few are put before the well-being of the populace in general—by putting faith in the “trickle down” theory of economics—the prosperous may get richer, but the poor will get poorer.

History has shown what such “freedom” offers the Chinese: not prosperity, but potentially the tragedies of Western imperialism and internal upheaval. ❧ Notes This thesis can also be found in a section of a larger comparative work that I coedited with my colleague Robert Snyder, called “The Internet East and West: A Moral Appraisal.” This article can be found in Timothy Shanahan and Robin Wang, Reason and Insight: Western and Eastern Perspectives on the Pursuit of Moral Wisdom, 2nd ed. (Belmont, California: Wadsworth, 2002). In this work, Robert Snyder offers a defense of the Internet in China, in contrast to my critique.

1 Ta-hsueh (The Great Learning), trans. Lin Yutang, in The Wisdom of Confucius (New York: Modern Library, ca. 1938), p. 227.

2 Notice here that a second Chinese character ren means “person.” This character, when combined with the character that means “two,” becomes the character ren, meaning “goodness” or “humaneness.” This clearly signifies that the Chinese concept of humaneness refers first of all to the relationship between two people. issue 2, june 2002

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This is Herbert Fingarette’s rendering of passage 6:28 of the Analects of Confucius in Confucius: The Secular As Sacred (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972), p. 41. Fingarette’s translation relies on Arthur Waley’s translation of the Analects throughout the text, but he sometimes gives his own interpretation of the classical Chinese characters for the sake of clarity and precision, as in this passage. Fingarette’s book has been reprinted by Waveland Press.

4 It is also worth noting that the students in China have been engaged in such “democracy” movements since the early 1970s, and in part as a reaction to the momentous student involvement in the Cultural Revolution in the prior decade.

About the Author Mary I. Bockover is professor of philosophy at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California. She holds a master’s and a doctorate in philosophy from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her undergraduate studies at St. Mary’s College of Maryland were carried out under the direction of Henry Rosemont Jr. Professor Bockover has edited a festschrift titled Rules, Rituals, and Responsibility (Lasalle, Illinois: Open Court Press, 1991) for Henry Fingarette and is represented by articles in Emotions in Asian Thought (Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 1995) and Culture and Self (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997). She continues to publish and present papers in the field of comparative philosophy.

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