VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 14
Where This Book Stands
Last chapter compared the seven core claims, covered the book's highest vision, and put democracy back inside the frame of enfeoffment. What this book says is now all laid out. What remains is how it says it, and where it stands to say it. This chapter is the close of the Part and of the whole volume, answering three of the deepest questions: this book's posture toward concrete issues, this book's distinctive tool, and where this book actually stands. Three sections. They start from one of the most disputed issues in the world today and step back one step at a time to the very end, to make clear where this book comes from, and the one who wrote it.
Section One gives China's institutions an objective account and clears away five simplifications of mainstream Western discourse: the one-party system, authoritarianism, autocracy, state capitalism, and the China threat. China is discussed on its own not because China is special, but because the gap between the discourse built around it and how it actually runs is one of the widest gulfs in political understanding today. Take the one-party system: the label misses that China has eight democratic parties taking part in governing the state through the political consultative conference. Then the seven restorations are presented again: democratic centralism; collective leadership, with standing-committee members managing different fronts; multiparty cooperation plus political consultation; official selection drawn mainly from the common people; layer-by-layer selection with seasoning across many provinces; the ability to improve continuously plus reduce inner drain. At the same time it speaks honestly of the cost, and makes clear that this posture of restoration applies equally to the study of the United States and of any country. The cost is that inner opposition finds it hard to gain institutionalized expression, and the mechanism for correcting decision error is relatively slow. This restoration is not saying China's institutions are better than the West's.
Section Two gathers the book's two most important things together: cross-domain centralized authority, a tool for seeing the world, and laying out both sides, a posture for writing about the world, the latter carrying on Sima Qian's tradition of writing the record straight. First the tool. The great thinkers of five hundred years basically confined centralized authority to the category of politics. The Western liberal tradition has a root assumption that public and private are separate, so applying it to the family is seen as crossing the line. The Chinese tradition thinks of family and state as the same structure: cultivate yourself, order the family, govern the state, bring peace to all under heaven; the family is a small state, the state is a large family. So extending centralized authority to every organized group is, for this book, carrying on what the ancestors said twenty-two hundred years ago. In your hands, it means looking at your company and your family through five angles: ask whether it is enterprise type or enfeoffment type, ask to whom each of the five powers belongs. Now the posture. Almost every one of the great thinkers of five hundred years had a standpoint of his own. Hobbes defended absolute monarchy, Locke defended limited government, Marx defended proletarian transformation. This book chooses to lay out both sides, as Sima Qian kept an objective record of both Xiang Yu and Liu Bang, strengths and flaws side by side. This is not fence-sitting. It is deliberately letting the standpoint give way to the facts.
Section Three is the close of the whole volume. It makes clear that this book is not a continuation of the Western Enlightenment and not a development of Marxism; it is carrying on what the ancestors said twenty-two hundred years ago. The ancestors are three. Han Feizi taught that affairs are in the four quarters but the key is at the center, the theoretical founding of centralized authority. Li Si, in that court debate of enfeoffment against commanderies and counties, set the root choice firm. The First Emperor, with his five foundations, made the institution real. Add to these the thirteen-century tradition of the examination. The one who wrote it is a real person, born in Guangzhou in nineteen sixty-two, an ordinary person of this age. This book is a gift free forever, for sale nowhere, updated continually for as long as he lives. Last come a few words to the reader five hundred years from now: please go on from where this book left off; the work this person does today is only one leg of a long relay.
In this chapter you will see clearly that the posture of this book is the same from beginning to end: the credit goes to the ancestors, and the judgment is handed to the reader. Volume IV, four Parts, thirty-seven layers, formally closes here. What is handed to you is not a conclusion, it is a set of tools for understanding. Once you have the tools, your own study and judgment are only beginning. Turn this page and you reach the Afterword, where the one who held the pen sets aside the lecturing voice and says a few homely words to you. When you have read the Afterword, please open Volume V, Legal Institutions, and read on.
Chapter contents
Section One. An objective account of China's institutions, clearing away five simplifications
Section Two. Centralized authority across domains, and the method of laying out both sides
Section Three. What this work is, to the reader five hundred years from now
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section One. An objective account of China's institutions, clearing away five simplifications