Cheng Li grew up in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution. He was an ICWA fellow in China from 1993 to 1995, observing grassroots changes in his native country. In addition to his dispatches, he also wrote a book about his fellowship experiences: Rediscovering China: Dynamics and Dilemmas of Reform (1997). The author and editor of numerous books, Cheng was director of the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center from 2014 to 2023. He is currently professor of political science and founding director of the Centre on Governance of China and the World at the University of Hong Kong, a director of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and a nonresident senior fellow of the Brookings Foreign Policy program.
Cheng Li’s fellowship focused on the growth of technocracy and its impact on the economy of China’s southeastern coast. In this dispatch, he visits Huaxi, founded in 1961 by the investor Wu Renbao and billed as the country’s richest village, a model of Chinese communism. Its residents enjoy a high standard of living, live in identical villas and drive European cars.
SHANGHAI, China (March 1995) — Huaxi, despite its undeniable vigor and vitality, seems like a living machine. No matter how well-off their lives are, people there actually live in a world of alignments and conformities. For me, nothing is more boring than to see all the villagers in Huaxi drive the same color Volkswagen Jettas and about 300 families live in the same style houses. Nothing seems more depressing than to listen to “neo-Confucian doctrines” offered by “know-at-all” Huaxi officials.
Nonetheless, a visit to Huaxi has been a great eye opener for me. It is one thing to know that the rural industrial revolution has changed China’s landscape, but it is quite another thing to see how this revolution has brought about changes at a village level. The economic growth of Huaxi is astonishing. Huaxi’s experience has put to rest any doubts about China’s southern Jiangsu as another economic miracle in East Asia. Yet a more invisible, but no less salient, dimension of Huaxi’s experience is that it has become the model that Chinese authorities use to articulate a new identity and try to justify a neo-Confucian authoritarian rule.
I have come to realize, after this trip, that the Singaporean way of life—and way of thinking as well—has indeed found its way to China, especially in its rich coastal area. It emphasizes communitarianism rather than individualism. The individual counts for little in the society; the individual is far less important than the community. In Lee Kuan Yew’s words, Confucian societies have demanded certain values such as hard work, thrift, discipline, loyalty, obedience and social coherence. Both Lee Kuan Yew and Wu Renbao have suggested that cultural values are the deepest driving force of their successes.
Yet I am still not sure whether the successful stories of both Singapore and Huaxi can really be attributed to these values. Fareed Zakaria, the managing editor of Foreign Affairs, was right when he criticized the cultural explanation for East Asian miracles.
“If culture is destiny,” he argued, “what explains a culture’s failure in one era and success in another?” The Mao era, for example, also emphasized things like hard work, thrift, discipline, loyalty, obedience and social coherence. But a majority of Chinese people, including those in Huaxi village, lived in poverty throughout the Mao era.
Confucian culture, I believe, is more relevant as a tool for political elites to use in order to justify their rule than as a force to achieve an economic miracle. During my journey to Huaxi, I was absolutely astonished by the local officials’ efforts to reenforce Confucian doctrines to villagers. The gigantic image of the dragon, the Filial Piety Pavilions, the Huaxi Development Company of Spiritual Civilization, are just a few cases in point.
One may reasonably argue that there is nothing new about all these activities as exemplified in Huaxi village. In China’s millennium-long history, political elites always relied on these cultural doctrines to maintain their dictatorship. Yet, I believe, there is an important difference between the past and present: China today is on its way to become an economic giant in the world.
Twenty years ago, in 1975, an American writer, Jan Morris, visited Singapore and wrote the following concluding remarks:
I felt I was experiencing, if only vicariously, something new in the world—a new energy of the East with which, sooner or later, the Western peoples will come to grips, if not physically, at least philosophically. It is a sort of mystic materialism, a compelling marriage between principle and technique which neither capitalism nor Soviet communism seem to me to have achieved.
What has happened in the relationship between Singapore and Western countries in the past few years precisely confirms Jan Morris’ prediction.
In a sense, I feel that I experienced the same thing in Huaxi during this trip that Jan Morris did in Singapore twenty years ago. Huaxi, however, is only a village. I don’t want to jump to the conclusion that Huaxi’s today will be China’s tomorrow. In fact, Huaxi does not even represent Sunan. Many other villages in Sunan that I recently visited seemed more lively and less rigid than Huaxi.
Yet, I have a hunch that Huaxi is going to become a model for China in the future, as top leaders such as Li Peng have claimed. As a native Chinese, I wish my motherland to be economically wealthy, politically stable and internationally respected. But honestly, I am not enthusiastic about the arrogance, conformity, the lack of individualism, nepotism and strong family ties in business and politics as reflected in the development of Huaxi village. I am too much an adopted child of a free and democratic society to tolerate the neglect of individualism and the lack of political freedom.
Top photo: Huaxi, in southern China’s Jiangsu province (X: @QuieroEstarAhi)