Whatever you hate about your own country, China has too, with fewer ways out.
Make a list of what Western critics agonize over. Political correctness weaponized by mediocrities to defame the worthy? Worse in China. Loss of beauty in public life, in art, architecture and everyday existence? Worse in China. A self-satisfied cultural elite that despises the masses, crass materialism, children guided from one resume-builder to the next by hovering parents, a bureaucratic leviathan unaccountable to the people it serves, a government hostile to religion? All worse in China.
That is Tanner Greer’s list, and it invites an obvious conclusion: the West is better, so stop complaining. Greer draws a different one, about what the list asks of the people living inside it.
The integrity test
In America you can secede from the mainstream and follow a different course. In China the cost of nonconformity is closer to total exclusion than to social awkwardness. As Greer puts it, what must be sacrificed to live with integrity in America is nothing compared to what honest Chinese must sacrifice to do it in their own land. “My admiration for the Chinese who do manage to keep their integrity intact is boundless. They have succeeded in a test of character few Americans will ever face.”
Consider what that test looks like at work. For men over thirty, visiting prostitutes with colleagues is not just acceptable but expected, because a boss cannot trust his underlings until they have spent time sinning together. So refusing is not a private moral choice; it marks you as someone who can’t be trusted. The family runs the same test, where the ten commandments of harmony make wanting your own life a betrayal.
A tradition that knows
None of this surprised the Chinese tradition. If there is one theme that threads through the great sweep of the Chinese tradition, it is a tragic recognition that the world we live in is not designed to reward the life most worth living.
That recognition is not cynicism, because it doesn’t conclude that virtue is foolish. The Confucian scholar who retreats to the mountains, the poet who refuses to serve a corrupt court, the official who speaks truth and is exiled: these are not failures of the system but its most honest products. The tradition has always known that success and integrity are separate tests, and it has never stopped saying so.
The mirror
The obvious objection is that every item on the list exists in the West too, and that a foreigner is projecting. Greer concedes his vantage point: he lived in China because he was “foreign, single, and young,” and so “somewhat immune to the pressures of the Chinese scramble for success.” But the objection proves less than it seems. The difference is not in kind but in degree, and in the margin available for those who refuse.
That is why China is a stress test for every theory in this garden. Take Hirschman’s exit, voice and loyalty: exit is blocked by capital controls and family bonds, and voice is punished, so the pressure has nowhere to go. Whatever pattern you find in Western life, you will find in China, amplified and with the safety margins removed.
Which suggests an uncomfortable reading: the hard version of the integrity test may be the default condition of civilization, briefly and partially relaxed by the historical accident of Western liberalism.
It is not a test I would choose for my children.
References:
- Tanner Greer, Everything Is Worse in China, The Scholar’s Stage