WITH ANDRE VLTCHEK AND JOHN COBB JR

The author (left) with John Cobb, Jr.

Commemoration of Communist victory in Beijing.

There is no time for long introductions. The world is, possibly heading for yet another catastrophe. This one, if we, human beings will not manage to prevent it, could become our final.

The West is flexing its muscles, antagonizing every single country that stands on its way to total domination of the Planet. Some countries, including Syria, are attacked directly and mercilessly.  As a result, hundreds of thousands of people are dying, millions left literally homeless and countryless—apatrides.

Political and potentially military disaster is simultaneously 'complemented' by the ecological ruin.  Mainly Western multi-national companies have been plundering the world, putting profit over people, even over the very survival of the human species.

'Political correctness' is diluting the sense of urgency, and there is plenty of hypocrisy at work:  while, at least in the West and Japan, people are encouraged to recycle, to turn off the lights in empty rooms and not to waste water, in other parts of our Planet, entire islands, nations and continents are being logged out by the Western corporations, or destroyed by unbridled mining. The governments of the West's 'client states' are getting hopelessly corrupt in the process.

Western politicians see absolutely no urgency in all that is taking place around the world, or more precisely - they are paid not to see it.

So, are we now dealing with the thoroughly hopeless scenario? Did the world go mad? Is it ready to get sacrificed for the profit of the very few? Are people simply going to stand passively, watching what is happening around them, and die, as their world goes literally up in flames?

It appeared so, until few months ago.

Then, one of the oldest cultures of Earth, China, stood up and said "No! There are different ways to go forward. We could all benefit from the progress, without cannibalizing, and fully destroying our Planet."

China, led by President Xi, accelerated implementation of the concept of so-called Ecological Civilization, eventually engraving it into the constitution of the country.

A man who did tremendous work in China, working tirelessly on the Ecological Civilization concept in both China and in the United States, John Cobb Jr., has been, for years, a friend and close comrade of mine.

A 93-year-old Whiteheadian philosopher (and many believe, one of the most important living philosophers), one of the most acknowledged Christian progressive topologists, and self-proclaimed 'supporter of Revolution', John Cobb's is a brave 'alternative' and optimistic voice coming from the United States.

We first met on a bus from Pyongyang to DMZ, in DPRK, several years ago, and became close friends, presently working on a book and a film together.

In this difficult, extremely dangerous, but also somehow hopeful time for our planet, it is clear that John Cobb's voice should be heard by many.

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CHINA’S GROWING COMMITMENT TO ECO-CIV

Ancient Xidi village in China

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] recalled our meeting in Claremont, when John expressed worries that China and its leadership could go 'either way', in regard to the "Ecological civilization", possibly even against it. Inside China and her leadership, there were apparently voices defending 'pure economic growth' approach. Now the Chinese Parliament has written the goal of ecological civilization into the national constitution. 

I wanted to know what does it mean, practically? Is there a reason to celebrate?

John replied via email:

"Something like fifteen years ago, the Chinese Communist Party wrote the goal of an ecological civilization into its constitution.  Although the formulation is remarkable, the motivation is not hard to understand.  The Party was responding to the distress of hundreds of millions of Chinese who longed for clean air and blue skies.  To maintain the popularity of the party, it had to assure the people that it shared their concerns.  Everyone agreed that lessening pollution was a good thing.

Nevertheless, the phrase meant more than just trying to minimize the ecological damage done by rapid economic growth.  It expressed an understanding that the natural world was constituted of ecologies rather than just a collection of individual things.  And it clearly indicated the desirability of human activity fitting into this natural world rather than replacing it.

Many who supported this goal, however, did not suppose that announcing it committed China to major changes in the present.  Many have argued that China’s first task was to modernize, meaning especially industrialize, and become a wealthy nation.  Then it would have the luxury of attending to the natural environment.  Few, if any, thought it meant that China would turn away from the goal of economic growth to pursue something different.

However, Chinese leaders did recognize that simply postponing the work for clear skies and a healthy environment would not work.  The nation needed to work on economic growth and a healthy natural environment simultaneously.  It began evaluating the success of provincial governments by their achievements in these two distinct realms.  Growth goals were set below what would be possible, so that it could be channeled in less environmentally harmful directions.  Experiments with ecovillages received encouragement.

The talk of moving toward an ecological civilization also encouraged reflection about “civilization” alongside “market.”  That supported those Chinese who were concerned that the narrow concern for wealth at all costs was not healthy for human society.  Marxism had always emphasized economic matters, but it was concerned to move society away from competition toward cooperation.  It was always concerned with the distribution of goods, so that the poor would be benefited, and workers would be empowered.  The idea of recovering traditional Chinese civilizational values gained in acceptance.

The extent to which the health of the natural environment and cultural goals gained status as policy goals bothered some party members.  For them China’s wealth and power were crucial.  An observer could not be sure that the extent to which the goal of ecological civilization was broadening the aims of government would continue.  Leadership is subject to change every five years.

However, the changes at the recent Party congress tended to strengthen commitment to ecological civilization.  President Xi, who has been central to the moves toward ecological civilization was given another five years.  He and others reiterated the goal and affirmed steps in its direction.  Now it seems likely that in the next five years he will not be a “lame-duck” president since the limitation to two terms has been removed.

To reinforce the Chinese commitment, the Parliament has written the goal of ecological civilization into the national constitution.  Since the national government is regularly guided by the Party, this may not seem to make much practical difference.  But the way it occurred does make clear that the nation, on the whole, is not resentful.  The Chinese people do not feel that the Party’s commitment is oppressive or foolish.  We can have considerable confidence that China as a nation in genuinely committed and that the people share a hope for becoming an ecological civilization.  Predicting the future is never safe, but as these matters go, we can have confidence that China is committed.  Given the likelihood that it will supersede the United States as the global leader, this can give us grounds for hope."

JOHN COBB'S ROLE IN CHINA

[dropcap]J[/dropcap]ohn Cobb is a well-known figure in the PRC. His thoughts are having great impact on an influential group of Chinese leaders. But how would he, personally, summarize his involvement in the "Ecological Civilization" project? What impact did he have, personally, on what is happening in China, in this particular field?

"Through most of my life, the last thing I anticipated was to have a role in China.  As a Protestant theologian, any hope for influence went in quite different directions.  Although my theology is deeply shaped by the prophetic tradition of ancient Judaism, and I understand Marx also to have been deeply informed by that tradition, I did not expect Chinese Communists to recognize that kinship. Yet in the end, I consider that, through a remarkable sequence of chances, my role in China has been the most important part of my life.  I will first describe my trajectory, then the trajectory of China, and then the wholly “improbable” intersection.

In my studies at the University of Chicago in the late nineteen forties, made possible by the GI bill, I was introduced to Alfred North Whitehead.  Over the years, I was more and more impressed by the way his “philosophy of organism” answered my questions and provided me the holistic vision that I craved, one quite contrary to the mechanist and materialist thinking that dominated American education and culture.

In the late sixties, I was awakened to the fact that the dominant modern culture was leading the world to self-destruction, and my attachment to Whitehead, as one who offered a far more promising alternative, was confirmed and deepened.  Meanwhile interest in any alternative to mechanism was fading in American universities.  Together with David Griffin, I seized an opportunity in 1973 to create a center to keep Whitehead’s thought alive and display its relevance to the crises of our time.  This Center for Process Studies has sponsored conferences and lectures and publications displaying how Whitehead’s organic and processive thought provides a more promising pattern of thinking in many fields.  Ecological concerns played a large role throughout.  Although many individual scientists and professionals worked with us, the universities tightened their commitment to the modern vision we were trying to get beyond.  We sometimes called ourselves postmodernists, but when that term was given wide currency by French intellectual deconstruction of modernity, David Griffin began calling us “constructive postmodernists.”

By the opening of the twentieth century, thoughtful Chinese saw that the Western colonial powers together with Japan were nibbling away at China and that classical Chinese culture was unable to compete with the West in science, technology, and military power. To maintain Chinese independence, China must modernize. It adopted the dominant Western form of modernity, bourgeois capitalism.  The suffering of the poor led many to seek a better form of modernity in Marxism, and during and after World War II the Marxists replaced bourgeois democracy with rule by the Communist Party.

Mao Tse Tung made a serious effort to end China’s class society in what is called then “Cultural Revolution.” This evoked so intense an opposition from the urban middle class, that it was a painful failure, never repeated.  When the Communist Party repudiated this Marxist goal, what was left was rule by the party and commitment to rapid modernization as the road to national wealth.

Chinese intellectuals were not comfortable with this total commitment to the modern in view of the deconstruction of the modern by French intellectuals.  Some of them followed the French in calling themselves postmodernists, but the French postmodernists gave little guidance in relation to China’s biggest problem with modernization -- the pollution and degradation of the environment.  When they discovered that there was another form of “postmodernism” that made positive proposals for change and gave a great deal of attention to the natural world, many of them were interested.  One Chinese postmodernist, Zhihe Wang, came to Claremont to complete his studies, and it was his leadership that led to the intersection of developments in China with my life. He decided that he could be most effective living in the United States and frequently visiting China. His wife, Meijun Fan left a prestigious professorship in Beijing to work with him.  As a result of their effective introduction of “process thought” to China, thirty-five universities established centers focusing on the relevance of Whitehead’s thought to a wide range of topics, such as education, psychology, science and values, the legal system, and so forth.

Meanwhile, partly, I assume, to assuage the distress of many urbanites with the pollution of the air, the Communist Party wrote into its constitution the goal of becoming an “ecological civilization.”  Because of the reputation of the Chinese leadership in Claremont, they were encouraged to hold conferences on this topic here, primarily for Chinese scholars.  These gave me and other American constructive postmodernists an opportunity to participate in shaping the meaning of the initially rich and suggestive, but rather vague, term. This has probably been our major contribution.

There has been one very important shift in Chinese policy due to the commitment to “ecological civilization.”  As part of its goal of modernization, China planned to industrialize agriculture.  At many of the conferences here and at others in China, we argued that China could not build an ecological civilization on an industrial agriculture.  The Communist Party was persuaded to shift its policies from the continuing depopulation of rural China to the development of the thousands of villages that were slated for destruction.  Policies have changed, and in 2016 for the first time, more people moved from cities to countryside than from countryside to cities.  Development of villages has been emphasized along with the goal of ecological civilization in last fall’s crucial meetings of the Communist Party.  And the Chinese parliament has written the goal of ecological civilization into the national constitution.  It seems highly probable that this important shift in Chinese society will endure.

Obviously, the shift was primarily due to the work of many Chinese.  However, harsh criticism by Americans of the consequences of industrializing agriculture in the United States played a role.  Again, my voice was only one of many.  Partly, no doubt, because of my age, I am given far more credit than I deserve.  But I am very proud of whatever contribution I made to this shift that affects hundreds of millions of Chinese and gives some concrete meaning to “ecological civilization”. 

CENTRALIZED POWER

Lotus lake and Chinese girl—ecological paradise.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n many ways, China became the leader, when it comes to ecology, as well as combining traditional culture with modernity. It is determined to build the entire civilization around its ecological and cultural concerns. It appears that in the future, the 'markets' and financial considerations may play important but secondary role. Is it mainly possible because of the centralized/Communist nature of the Chinese political and economic system (including the central planning)?

"I have neither study nor experience qualifying me to address this question.  But I still have opinions; so, I’ll share them.

Clearly in China it has been the leadership of the central government that has set the course, done the planning, and implemented what it planned.  For those of us who believe the world needs urgently to move toward ecological civilization, this has worked well.  Prior to the meetings last fall, I remained unsure about whether everything depended on a particular leader who might be replaced.  That he emerged from the fall events with increased power was reassuring, especially because he strongly expressed determination to implement steps toward achieving the civilization China and the world needs.

There was still the possibility that representatives of other factions in the Communist Party, who sought to replace Xi, might treat him as a “lame duck.”  Now that the impossibility of a third term has been removed, that danger also is gone.  An extended period of leadership can probably make some policies so identified with the nation that they will continue even if a successor is not personally committed to the goal of ecological civilization. 

All of this is to say that centralized power is currently working in a remarkably promising way not paralleled by other countries with less centralized political power.

Some European countries achieved a considerable move toward ecological civilization earlier than China.  That they are not currently leading may be because they are already farther along on the needed trajectory.  They have made significant desirable policy changes without centralized power.  In these countries, the public as whole is well informed and capable of making wise decisions.  Governments are sufficiently democratic that they express the public desires.  In some cases, commitment to sustainable practices and meeting the basic needs of all citizens has become the “common sense” of the people sufficiently that it is likely not to be radically abandoned by changing officials. It was impressive that, when Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Accords, there was very little interest in withdrawal in Europe, even though the reasons for withdrawal applied equally there.  Apparently, the corporate world in Europe has adjusted to new needs and expectations as it has not in the United States.

Even so, I have more confidence in endurance in China with its centralized control than in European countries more directly subject to popular opinion.  Thus far European countries have been fairly prosperous.  Pollution control has not led to unemployment or economic immiseration.  Thus, the level of commitment to ecological needs has not been seriously tested.

In contrast, the need to accept large numbers of refugees has been sufficient to weaken consensus on a range of issues.  It is not hard to imagine that corporations that have thus far been cooperative with good policies might take advantage of dissident public opinion to seek the kinds of changes that the United States is currently experiencing.  These corporations often control the media and thus can shape public opinion to support their ends.

As I compare China’s success in giving serious attention to the well-being of its natural environment and needy citizens with that of European countries, my reason for betting on China is that I have some confidence that it will maintain governmental control of finance and of corporations generally.  If it does this, it can also control the media.  Thus, it has a chance of making financial and industrial corporations serve the national good as perceived by people not in their service.  Less centralized governments are less able to control the financial and other corporations whose short-term interests may conflict with the common good.

Of course, the concentration of power in countries like China does not guarantee the continuation of governmental service of the common good.  There is an old adage in the West: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  I think the Communist Party in China works hard to socialize its members to resist corruption.  I think it has been largely successful.

My hero, Jesus, asserted that no one can serve God and money.  If we understand that God’s desire is for the common good, we can translate, no one can serve both money and the common good.  I think that at the present time, the Chinese Communist Party is more successful in cultivating a commitment to the common good than are the churches in the West.  That may be more important than the question of how centralized the power may be.

COMMITMENT TO THE COMMON GOOD

Wuxi—medieval ecological village.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] wrote to John that during our recent encounter, he stated that one of the reasons why China succeeded in so many fields, is because it can count on many people in its leadership, who are truly concerned about the well-being of their country. This fully coincided with my own experience that I gained in the PRC. But how does John see the West? How different is it in the West? Is the Western leadership constructed on thoroughly different principles? He replied immediately:

"Near the end of my answer to the previous topic I made the statement that I believed the Chinese Communist Party was more successful in eliciting concern for the wellbeing of China and all its people than the Western churches were in eliciting commitment to the common good.  For many Christians, this is surprising.  Christians have tended to think that we need belief in God to ground our ethical commitments.

No one supposes that a theistic ethic is the only way that people can be socialized with respect to action.  Earthly rulers have often considered their will as the grounds of law and ethics.  The deepest commitment should be to the ruler and hence to advance the ruler’s wishes.  But from the Christian point of view, true ethics must transcend obedience to political power.  Might does not make right.

How to live can also be determined by tribal or national culture.  This often overlaps with obeying the ruler, but it can even conflict with that.  The interpreters of the culture may be identified as priests or as sages.

Philosophers have sometimes attempted to ground ethics in a purely rational way.  Kant developed a “categorical imperative.”  Whether that is truly free from particular cultural shaping is questionable, but many still think so.  Certainly, it may be supported in more than one culture.

For theists, none of these forms of ethics really work.  For some of them the alternative is belief that the Creator is also the giver of law, and rewards those who obey in a life after death if not here and now, and punishes those who disobey.  

Other theists reject this legalism and emphasize that we owe our being and all that is good in our lives to the Creative and Redeeming God.  This God loves all people and seeks the good of all.  Our grateful response is to serve those whom God loves, namely, at least, all human beings, and especially those whose needs are greatest.

For many theists, right and wrong are so bound up with God that when they hear that Marx was an atheist, they assume he had no ethics.  So, for me to say that Marx’s followers do a better job of evoking commitment to the common good than do Western theists strikes some as implausible.  They think that if there is no God to serve, one will serve something less than God, and therefore less than the “common” good.  Many theists assume that if one does not serve God one is likely to look out only for one’s own good.  This assumption is foundational to the academic discipline of economics.

In fact, however, Marx derived from Hegel a sense of a movement in history that should be served.  It is a movement that works for a classless society in which the needs of all are met.  To work for that society is certainly a way of serving the common good.  I believe this sense of participating in a process that works for good is more convincing to many people than serving what has been more conventionally called “God”.  The percentage of Western people who take seriously belief in a God who calls us to serve the common good is probably less that the percentage of Chinese who understand themselves to work with the dialectic of history to overcome the class society that leaves so many abused and oppressed.

Neither Christianity nor Marxism has a history of great moral achievement.  Both need to be honest about their failures. I will comment on Western Christianity in the modern world.  Two Western developments have greatly weakened it.  One is the development of science on the basis of a metaphysics that systematically excludes any possible role for God.  The other is the development of capitalism which assumes and celebrates individual self-interest as the one all-controlling motivation.  Even faithful churchgoers are likely to be influenced by both of these developments.  Among the actual determinants of behavior, theism now plays a small role.

Among Americans, the “American exceptionalism” into which the school system socializes youth plays a larger role.  It can lead to heroic acts thought to be in the service of the nation, and even to great passion for the preservation or restoration of the natural beauty with which the nation is endowed.  But its primary function is to persuade Americans to accept much profoundly evil activity on the part of their country by assuring them that in the long run this will enable others to share in the great benefits of Americanism.

I am attributing to the American educational system the inculcation of American exceptionalism.  However, it officially eschews even this value.  Its goal is to be “value-free,” which means in practice, in the service of money.  The whole culture celebrates the value of being rich.  Economic theory is the national ideology.  That Americans are becoming increasingly nihilistic is the natural result of a nihilistic system of schooling.

Sadly, China is going all too far in copying this nihilistic schooling.  My view is that the commitment of the government to Marxism has not been allowed to shape the academic curriculum, but that it does provide some important values to supplement the curriculum.  And, alongside the general culture, in the Communist Party, a substantial number of people are socialized in Marxist thought and values. It is because Marx has more influence in China than Jesus has in the West, that the chances of China to lead the world toward salvation are better than the chances of the West to do so. 

All US presidents are members of a very exclusive club, privilege, sycophancy, and fame writ large, but also, unpunished Nuremberg class criminality.

If there is one thing the election of Donald Trump showed the United States it's that there is an enormous urban-rural divide. 

That’s not true at all….

The US “discovered” this exact same problem following the elections of Bill Clinton and Dubya Bush: rural voters found Clinton immoral, urban voters found Bush immoral - open support for either president made one immoral. Both were vilified as totally unacceptable leaders by either the city mice or the country mice. 

Both presidents were atrociously immoral and unacceptable modern leaders, of course. However, 2018’s unprecedented animosity towards Trump only shows that undeserved self-righteousness has temporarily swung back to the urban sector.

But the reality is that anger is simply what American mice do: they are angry, and they think that the venting of anger equals power, when most everyone else knows it equals the opposite. But this anger is a phenomenon endemic across today’s West: the French public is aggressive, culturally chauvinistic and incredibly rude, England trails only the US in an assumed sense of superiority, Canadians are the kings of passive-aggressive behaviour, and the list goes on.

The capitalist-imperialist West’s enormous political dysfunctions, faulty presumptions and roads they refuse to take…I cannot offer a remedy to all these things, but this article does discuss real solutions to their unbridged urban-rural divide.

Due to the mass urban migrations of the 20th century, this divide is felt more acutely by rural inhabitants, but it is clearly a cultural and political dysfunction which must be immediately remedied…and which China has already remedied.

I explained China’s solutions in the 3rd part of this 8-part series: When Chinese Trash saved the world: Western lies about the Cultural Revolution. It’s an article which is not that popular, probably because it lacks the sensational appeal of discussing the Great Leap’s famine or the personal appeal of discussing Mao, but the Cultural Revolution is surely the most important Chinese event since 1949.

There can be no remedy to this divide if we don’t acknowledge how timeless and universal it is: the urban-rural dichotomy is as fundamental to human society as male-female, old-young, home life-social life, science-faith, etc. Creating a satisfying cultural synthesis is thus a difficult but necessary undertaking.

China had a big leg up in this particular dichotomy thanks to the Confucian hierarchy of scholar-farmer-tradesperson-merchant-soldier, in that order, but the West gives no such value to the rural producer of everyone’s food. The West has advantages in other cultural dichotomies, but this article does not examine them.

At some point, the West’s urbanites (often effete, annoying, condescending, ultimately intolerant) are going to have to realise, accept and appreciate the timeless fact that this dichotomy is indeed valid and sensible, because different values are needed to thrive in rural settings than in urban areas; therefore, rural values must be as equally promoted as urban values in the overall national culture, in stark contrast to the current policy of denigration and exclusion.

A problem is that urbanites insist that their values are at the crest of the wave…but very often it is a wave of mere fashion. Another problem is that urbanites view their wave as an all-erasing tsunami rather than just one moderate-sized wave on one side of the island. But there is little doubt that the values of rural areas are more enduring because they are more adapted to nature, which certainly runs a longer timespan than the those of powerful cities and their cultures.

Just as men and women must get along despite their natural differences, so must urban and rural - here are some definite answers.

How do we solve the urban-rural divide? Change the culture

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] have a very simple solution for the West: have their version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which had the bridging of this urban-rural divide as one of its main tenets. 

Of course, my idea will be met (unfairly) with shock and horror, because Western propaganda is that the Cultural Revolution was an unceasing cavalcade of horrors and injustices. The 3rd article of this series overcomes that dominant propaganda simply by discussing the true, known and factual motivations, policies and results of the Cultural Revolution, which are ignored in favor of tabloid, self-serving coverage in Western media and academia. The dominant Western view of the Cultural Revolution is thus a reactionary, prejudiced view, and I encourage you to please read that article in order to appreciate this one - it may go so far as to prepare you to at least consider the possible need for certain aspects of China’s Cultural Revolution in your country.

(Iran doesn’t need a Cultural Revolution - we just had one, and there are legislated polices and rules which truly ensure that it is rather permanent and self-refreshing, but that is a whole different series of articles….)

China, as I detailed in the first part of this series, is largely geographically unsuited for farming and yet they have always held the global championship belt for “World’s Best Farmers”.  As I mentioned with the Confucian hierarchy, their esteem for rural life made it easier for China to solve this divide, and also made it only natural that Maoism was the first socialist philosophy to place the farmer on a perfectly-equal basis with the modern industrial worker.

In short, just as the West in 2018 so fervently believes its problems are caused by the racist hicks of rural areas, Maoism so fervently believed the opposite.

The question we should be asking is: Why did Mao believe in the cultural worth of rural values?

Well, he spent years in the countryside, so he knew how they lived. He was not in an ivory tower, nor stuck in a bohemian part of the city, nor surrounded by like-minded factory workers. He actually went to the country (and made a rather Long March around it, too).

But in the West how many people have lived in the countryside for more than a weekend?

I prefer not to make my articles about myself, but: I'm an urbanite, and prior to about 20 years old I could count the number of times I had seen a cow on one hand. But then I lived exclusively on a farm for more than 1.5 years.

To say that it was an eye-opening, humbling experience is an understatement. I quickly perceived how shallow my worldview truly was, having been limited to urban areas. I realised how very rich is the life of the rural people whom urban culture told me to disparage and feel superior to.

I often compare the experience to someone who lived in strict gender segregation until the age of 20: how full and rich is life alongside our other gender, and how empty without it? Male-female, yin-yang, city-country - all of these represent two opposites of perfectly equal, yet different, powers.

But in my discussions with Western urbanites I have rarely come across people who claim to have had genuine experiences in both urban and rural settings.

So when the Communist Party sent everyone from mild reactionaries to city-kid students to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, I am personally certain that it was most often a positive thing, and I am not surprised that it is reported that the era is fondly remembered in rural areas. The Party knew it would be reforming and supremely enlightening because it would increase the scope of one’s understanding of the world, affirm the experiences of other people and thus increase one’s love of humanity and of life itself.

The West’s problem becomes even more profound when one realises that the West’s leaders have not had these types of necessary and rounding experiences…and that China’s leaders have had them:

China’s President Xi spent seven years in the poor countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Xi lived with lice & hard rural labor, and spent nights reading to illiterate farmers. That’s even though his father was the Party bigwig who created the first Free Economic Zones across from Hong Kong - no nepotism there, for sure, eh? Emmanuel Macron, in contrast, spent time at Goldman Sachs. Hillary spent time doing looking down on the people of Little Rock and callously planning her success / her opponent du jour’s downfall.

My political enlightenment on the rural-urban issue came through talking with others - not just watching the corn come in and go out. Without the rural friends I made, and without their patience in correcting my uppity, uniformed city slicker bullplop…I would be a far, far worse person today, and certainly a far, far worse journalist.

What we need to realize is that the only remedy for urban elites is indeed to get them out into the country long-term – enlightenment cannot be a short-term project. China’s Cultural Revolution should start appearing not so drastic, but as the only solution to a universal cultural problem.

A simply policy to make this change in the West are obvious: Civil service programs and public propaganda campaigns to support them. Compulsory service in the armed forces provides another way for people to see how the other half of their country lives, and to provide necessary emergency services (such as China’s People’s Liberation Army).

Of course, this will take the ever-so-incredibly-valuable time of suburban high schoolers away from all those after-school programs they need so desperately to get into capitalist-restricted higher education; the discipline, humility and slogging work such a program requires and creates will also conflict with the “hustler” capitalist mentality promoted on every urban street corner and in every media.

The propaganda battle will require just as big a cultural change: Phrases such as “flyover country” will have to be seen as what they are - signs of reactionary thought, whereas they are instead bizarrely seen as some sort of signifier of leftism/liberalism.

The old rural values - and I don’t need to list them because they’re largely the same - must be promoted with at least equal vigor as the modern urban values of detached alienation, disregard for home life and “be cool, cool, cool” even at 75 years old (which is really quite Parisian, where you truly see 75 year-old men wearing skinny jeans, LOL).

Clearly, something like a ”cultural revolution” would be required to make this long-term and lasting change in the West. Hmm, I wish somebody had thought of that earlier…..

The bottom line is: I just don’t see how the urban-rural divide can be crossed without crossing over? The mass migration of rural to urban during the 20th century makes it clear which side has to make the move.

How do we solve the urban-rural divide? Change the land

This section takes an unexpected tack - let’s not worry about rural land ownership, but urban land ownership.

A reason why there is so little ability for urbanites to spend serious time in the country learning about the country side of life is because they are under such constant financial pressure…to pay rent. The cost of living, and especially housing, is far greater in urban areas, of course.

A fascinating cross-cultural study was issued last year, which found that Paris and London had the highest rates of social psychosis. What I found of great interest was that owning your home - or not - was found to be the single biggest indicator of mental and emotional stability.

Research published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association found, "the strongest area-level predictor of high rates of psychotic disorders was a low rate of owner-occupied housing”.

It is quite logical: When a person is constantly worried about being able to pay the rent, or when the rent will be raised without warning or limits, a person cannot feel themselves to be truly stable; in societies where only the rich can afford housing without concerns, then the myriad small neighbourhoods which compose a country necessarily become full of unstable people:

"People in areas that are socially deprived (i.e. not rich) may have more social stresses, which could predict psychosis incidence, as suggested by other studies," said a researcher."An alternative explanation could be that owner-occupied housing is an indicator of social stability and cohesiveness, relating to stronger support networks.”

The researcher is right on both counts: “land poverty” (i.e., not having a stable, long-term home) is a stress which creates psychosis, be it mild or severe. And non- “owner occupied housing” (i.e., forcing to hand over 1/3rd to 1/2 of our paychecks every month to a rich, two-home owning bastard (which the landlord probably just inherited from his parents)) means that people are forced to move a lot, have shorter ties to the community and get into debt. The land issue means that capitalist communities thus have inherently reduced “social stability and cohesiveness”.

And also, the lack of a stable home shoots the whole “civil service program” in the foot: What is the point of making a multi-year cultural revolution if people have no place to return to where they can implement and share what they have learned?

This study was the first of its kind in 25 years, and I highly doubt it was geared towards proving the necessary of socialist housing for urbanites, but it clearly does. China did not need such a study to prove what is clearly just common sense – that housing laws must massively favor renters and not landlords, and that is at the very least.

So pity poor Western millennials: 70% of Chinese people aged 19-37 own their own home, double Western rates. Number 2 in the study is Mexico, at 46%. Just 69% of French millennials plan to buy a home in the next 5 years, the highest in the study. Of course not - have you seen Paris real estate prices?! I have no plans to do so, and I’m 40 years old - who is going to pay for it / force housing prices lower?

Western culture thus has to actually spin this lack of stability as some sort of positive: Western young people are supposed to be considered lucky for being “free, flexible & unencumbered”. In reality they have no job security, no stable home, massive debt, are untethered to society and thus suffer from endemic alienation.

“Bread, peace, land”  can be translated to “Bread, peace, a decent apartment” in modern times.

But it’s not only China and not only Maoism which has solved this issue, proven by their 90% home ownership rate: 80% of Cubans own their own home and thus pay no rent or mortgage. Can you guess the common denominator here?

How do we solve the rural-urban divide? Central economic planning 

The socialist way is “central control but not central management”. The capitalist way is “local control and no management (except for market forces) ”…and history repeatedly proves that this puts rural areas at a fundamental disadvantage: There is simply no way to safeguard the rural half without central economic planning - they will always be left behind because helping hillbillies will never turn an immediate profit.

Except for politically advanced places like Cuba (where fuel shortages provoked by the international blockade required the mass creation of urban food gardens) food, the ultimate currency, is produced in the country…but the money flows to the cities via their middlemen, distributors, commodity exchanges and banks, and it stays there. Therefore, rural societies wind up being perennially poorer than urban societies.

While this fact should be well-known already, the structural causes of the natural exploitation inherent in the rural-urban divide is supplied in multiple eras of Chinese history.

I quote from the Western establishment’s “doyen on China” John King Fairbank’s “China: A Modern History”, which I have referred to many times in this series. Whether he realized it or not, the right-wing Fairbank makes the case for central planning as the only solution to end the urban-rural economic divide:

"Deng and his successors realized that in order to move to the market, it was necessary to decentralize and to reduce the concentration of political and economic power in the central government; but they did not foresee the extent to which such an economic and political decentralization would result in a decrease in the flow of taxes to the center. This diminished the reach of the party state authority and fostered an informal federalism. In the short run, decentralization helps economic development by allowing more tax revenue to stay in the local areas to stimulate growth. But in the long run, as occurred in the late Qing Dynasty, it leads to a relative decline of central government revenues and thus decreasing expenditures on education, health, and infrastructure, eventually undermining economic growth, especially in the countryside."

Whether it is in Qing-era feudalism or modern neoliberalism, without economic central planning to redistribute revenue money will flow in a largely one-way direction from country to city in the long run, creating an economic rural-urban divide.

Fairbank continues, and Deng-era capitalist failures will sound very 21st century:

"As revenue declined, the government shifted much of the responsibility for investment to the local governments and enterprises. But while they were prepared to invest in economic projects, local governments were less ready to invest in education and health....Likewise, with the abolition of the communes which had provided the funds for healthcare, education, and infrastructure development, particularly public irrigation networks, rural communities could no longer finance their own public activities. Evidence indicates that rural health, education, and public works gradually deteriorated in the 1990s.”

And this is exactly where the EU and US find themselves today: without central planning in order to fund unprofitable rural infrastructure it simply never gets constructed, and thus the urban-rural divide is never bridged. Socialism differs from capitalism in that the government exists in large part to provided needed services, and not to turn a profit.

Crazy Americans say that unprofitable rural towns deserve to die and that rural citizens don’t need opportunity and equality but simply “need U-Haul” in order to move somewhere else. This is not a humane, intelligent, or culturally-sustainable solution, and it justifiably increases the anger of rural residents towards the urbanites who propose such a “solution”.

Furthermore, in the modern and universal context of increased absentee landlordism - the 19th century phenomenon of landlords moving to the city, thus divorcing themselves from rural society, and thus drastically increasing rural exploitation (this is discussed in greater detail in the next article of this series) - only the government can play the role needed to fully protect rural societies from urban exploitation. The urban-rural divide may be timeless, but what goes ignored is that it has been exacerbated in the past two centuries by industrialism and modern capitalism, and that it is being manipulated even further during the digital era.

The irony is that the great Western breadbaskets - the Midwest for the US and France for the EU - already do have major subsides to protect their farmers, but the subsides are mainly for their farming corporations and not small farmers. Central planning is thus not at all new to the West, but socialist (non-corporation centered) central planning certainly is….

The urban-rural divide is not existential - it can be addressed 

The Western view of the urban-rural divide seems to be: “take no prisoners in this cultural war”. That’s a problem, because I don’t know how we could eliminate one without the eliminating the other.

Wait – what?

“What” indeed, my rigid Western friend!

The unity of yin-yang, male-female, urban-rural and other “opposites” is only irreconcilable in Western contexts - they are viewed natural, inevitable, desirable complements in Chinese-influenced societies. Until Westerners learn to respect the “other” - such as other races or religions, for example - their unbalanced self-centeredness can only continue to manifest itself violently.

In the globalist era of “the modern person is a proud citizen of no nation”, perhaps whether one identifies as “urban” or “rural” is actually the 21st century’s most fundamental “nation”? This modern intolerance between urban and rural is not a major problem for everyone, however: as Fidel said, a divided society is an ideal society for imperialists.

Certainly, making these fundamental shifts - in national popular culture for humility towards rural areas, resolving the land issue, and economic planning to defend rural areas (and not just multinational farming corporations) - requires nothing less than a cultural revolution.

I am not expecting one tomorrow in the West, but nor do I see a solution without one.

China provides the example…but China’s example was more than a bit violent - if the West could study and learn from the Cultural Revolution, perhaps theirs could be less bloody? But too many find the Cultural Revolution as boring as watching the cows come home - they need to find the revolutionary poetry in both.

The main step, I believe, is to realize that there is no getting over the rural-urban divide - it is too fundamental to human existence - there is only synthesizing and celebrating it. China is way, way, way further along on this issue than the West.

Maybe you don’t like my solutions to the West’s rural-urban divide? At least I am providing an attempt at a mutually-beneficial cultural synthesis based on mutual respect, rather than fomenting intolerance. Turn on your TV - how many Westerners are promoting that?

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This is the 5th article in an 8-part series which compares old versus new Western scholarship on China.

Here is the list of articles slated to be published, and I hope you will find them useful in your leftist struggle!

Old vs. new scholarship on the continent of China - an 8-part series

Daring to go beyond Western propaganda on the Great Leap Forward’s famine

When Chinese Trash saved the world: Western lies about the Cultural Revolution

Mao’s legacy defended, and famous swim decoded, for clueless academics

The Cultural Revolution’s solving of the urban-rural divide

Once China got off drugs: The ideological path from opium to ‘liberal strongman’ Macron

Prefer the 1% or the Party? Or: Why China wins

China's only danger: A 'Generation X' who thinks they aren't communist