China Rules

August 2008

This weekend, whilst I was walking along a public footpath crossing a beautiful valley in the English countryside, the friend I was with proposed a radical change to UK planning permission laws. He said he believed an ideal government should allow people to do whatever they liked with their own land including allowing them to build housing upon it.

What on earth can you hope to achieve with such a policy I asked. This is what I extracted: cheaper houses, the end of bureaucratic planning permission laws, a vibrant free market in housing and, most importantly, the fulfilment of a basic human right to freedom every government should respect.

Of course it's a hugely flawed viewpoint, but I enjoyed the discussion and it prompted a new level of realisation for me about the China vs Western viewpoint. The free for all vision of my friend would have been appropriate years ago when our population density was very small, but today it's obviously untenable.

I skipped the obvious point that if property owners were given the right to do as they wished with their land we would end up with, as in America, no public footpaths. I also skipped the point that the beautiful empty valley we were crossing would be filled with houses and access roads.

I asked him instead if he though that Paris was more beautiful than London and if so him why?

Of course it was the authoritarian policies of Napoleon III that created what is generally now considered the worlds most beautiful city. Using compulsory purchase orders Napoleon levelled and rebuilt a medieval city of narrow winding streets in order to create a place both more beautiful and more sanitary for its inhabitants (old Paris had suffered repeated cholera epidemics and had a very poor sewer system).

Many objected to the hugely radical rebuilding and the 1860s was a time of intense revolt in Paris. Today, however, the critics, were they still alive, might be ashamed of their lack of vision and NIMBYism, for Paris is clearly one of mankind's greatest accomplishments. Many of us today wonder why accomplishments on this scale don't seem to happen in the West today.

At the other end of scale we have London after the war. At one time London was said to have been one of the most beautiful cities in the world. However, unlike Munich in Germany, penniless Britain could not afford to rebuild their heavily bomb damaged capital and once the beautiful uniform terraces became a chaotic mixture of cheap ugly modernism. In America sprawling soulless Los Angeles proves that without government intervention even money doesn't much help.

Paris was not built by modern Western concepts of human freedom and market forces, instead principles such as design, harmony, symmetry and idealism predominated. Financial Markets, like genetic algorithms, act on selfish next generational improvement of individual components and can not make multiple intelligent simultaneous changes for a better long term future. A strong government would not have allowed five mobile phone companies to build five networks to compete with each other because this has resulted in reduced coverage and increased cost to the consumer. Besides, as the many booms and bust show, we know the markets are often just a place for lemmings to dash themselves against the rocks.

My fiend didn't seem as impressed by Paris as I am, and he repeated his devotion to 'human rights'. I know the Daily Mail reading UK masses, aesthetics are not their thing, so I tested his devotion with examples in crime, environment, heath.

Suppose, hypothetically, we could implant a chip into every person that recorded his location at all times and broadcasted the data to a secure police database. By doing this we could end almost all crime. If someone broke into a house the police could simply access the database and see who it was. Assault, rape, knife crime etc all lead to immediate arrest. Like the Tom Cruise film Minority Report crime would be all but wiped out.

The obvious objection to this is that a Hitler style dictator could misuse the technology, so I added an extra qualification: every person could send a signal to the chip that voiced his disproval and if the majority send this signal the entire system would go immediately offline. Thus the tracking system is rendered useless in the case of unpopular use.

My friend still objected. Despite the admitted enormous benefits he said it would be an unacceptable infringement on our civil liberties. Plato once said we live in a word of irrational opinion and those the philosophers who question and think are few and far between.

On the Environment I asked: Tell me about the positive and negatives of the one child policy in China and if you agree or disagree with the governments decision to impose it.

The chap believed, as most in the West do, that the policy created a major imbalance in the male-female ratio and that having only one child in every family has created massive psychological problems. However, I reassuring him that it's not really a strict one child policy, there are many exceptions, the number of births per mother in China at 1.7 is similar to the UK, the baby girls are not aborted en mass and the male female ratio is pretty average.

I explained to him that because the policy has caused the fertility rate to fall from about 5.5 births per mother, pretty average for the emerging world, to 1.7, pretty average for the highly developed world, China has a significantly smaller population today. I reminded him that population growth, especially in China where it is combined with increasing wealth, is putting huge pressure on the environment via CO2 emissions, food prices, energy prices etc.

Even after all this my friend still opposed the policy. What if a 1.7 child policy in an African country with a fertility rate of 8.0 would simply save 6.3 babies dying of starvation I asked. Again the answer came back: NO.

My third question: Aids is killing vast numbers of people but it can be stopped. With compulsory testing Aids could be virtually eradiated.

My friend, like so many in the West, said this was unacceptable. Saving lives, he believes, is less important that the right not to be tested for Aids.

I said consider the black death in Medieval England. Plague suspects were confined to their home by force, you must at least agree with that! Fired up and in full irrational mode he said this was a violation of freedom as well and he could not agree. Of course you can say he is a fool, but many people I question fall into traps like this.

So I said this principle of freedom must be very important to you if you are willing to reject all these hugely beneficial policies. But is not government a mass of freedom limiting policies designed to make to society function better? Eg we ban drugs, driving while drunk, we force people to wear seatbelts, we take away a proportion of their income to feed the poor etc. How bizarre, I said to my friend, you do not rebel against these and other policies and yet you object to my radically beneficial examples.

After all this madness I got to thinking how people in the UK and in other Western democracies have developed such self destructive and irrational opinions. One hundred years ago people willingly made sacrifices for their country, but not today. "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" said John, but today few would die for their country or their fellow man.

Then I came across an article in 'China Today':

In many cultures it is taboo to raise the topic of death in everyday discourse, but this is not the case with the Chinese people. To them life and death are a common conversational topic. Their matter of fact approach is illustrated in the sayings: "Human life is nothing but a stage over which the sun and the moon function as two spotlights"... "Life is not to be rejoiced as death is not to be resented".

This could be construed as negative on the grounds that it encourages hopeless passivity at the prospect and inevitability of death, viewing life as something to be muddled through in the comforting knowledge, as described in the Chinese saying, that "The misery one suffers in life is no worse or greater than the death of their heart". Waiting for the Damocles sword of death to fall and make an end of it means that to be or not to be is no longer a question, as living life this way is in itself a kind of death.

From another point of view, however, the Chinese Daoist attitude toward death can engender a positive life stance. Acceptance of death's inevitability gives rise to a sense of meaning and purpose in the natural passage from birth to death that motivates a person to make the most out of it, treasuring every minute. The knowledge that time is on the wing and can never be recaptured creates a sense of mission and social commitment. The resultant redoubling of effort and hard work so as to live life to the full extends the significance of an existence within society into history. Transcending the mortal limitations that arise from the mystique of death thus makes it possible to handle hardship, difficulty, misery and suffering. This, in turn, creates a particular mindset, most obvious in revolutionaries and religious martyrs, who willingly devote their waking hours to worthy causes and sacrifice themselves for the sake of their ideals. In Confucianism there is also the idealized character junzi (superior man), who is expected to give up his life unthinkingly in the interests of preservation and advancement of humanity. Such a spirit of devotion can arise only from a positive conception of death.

China is chasing the dream we have forgotten - human evolution by self sacrifice for worthy causes. Of course the Government there is not perfect, nothing is, but for me living in this sad decaying democratic world it is beautiful and gratifying to watch them growing.