All for One: China’s New Deal
What appears to be the country’s generous new bargain is actually a move to strengthen the state
By ANDREW BROWNE CONNECT
Updated Nov. 22, 2013 7:53 p.m. ET
China announced both economic and political reforms to pave the way for the country’s future. The WSJ’s Andrew Browne tells Deborah Kan what Xi Jinping’s China is shaping up to look like.
If human figures were represented at all by the ancient masters of Chinese landscape painting, they appeared as black specks—mere spatters of ink on a silk scroll. This rendering of people with the flick of a brush was intended to demonstrate man’s insignificance before the power of nature, but it also mirrored a political reality that has endured to this day. In Chinese civilization, the individual is inconsequential; the state is almighty.
Few cultures have so thoroughly denigrated the individual and venerated the state. In Mao’s day, this hierarchy was illustrated by a population that dressed identically in drab uniform—”blue ants,” as one visitor famously put it, assigned to urban “work units” and rural “production brigades”—and by grand monuments erected ostensibly to glorify workers and peasants, like the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, but actually as shrines of the Leninist state.