The More Things Change, the More they Stay the Same.
Foshan, Guangdong Province, China, October 9, 2012
Salaroche

While speaking on the phone a few days ago to a friend who lives in El Salvador, I made some comments about the persistent rigidity of China's form of Government which apparently has existed in this country since time immemorial.

Then, just a couple of days ago, while doing my daily morning review of the world, I came across an article on the BBC website that talked about the same subject. I had mentioned to my friend that the totalitarian or authoritarian tradition observed in this country over the past six or seven decades has its foundations in the imperial dynasties of the past millennia.

For example, the Cultural Revolution (approximately between 1955 and 1975) and the millions of Chinese who were exterminated while it raged, was not a phenomenon truly new in the Chinese tradition (except for its magnitude), since many of the methods used to implement such "revolution" had already been in use in the past and are still implemented within existing national traditions today.

Similarly, the arbitrariness of the laws currently imposed on the Chinese people and the vulnerability of the latter which has so far been unable to wrest their destiny from the capricious hands of their rulers, have not changed much over the years either. The hierarchical-totalitarian political structures that have existed in this country for  millennia cannot easily be dismantled from one day to the next, particularly because of China's geographical size and that of its population.

France got rid of its dynasties around 1789 through a revolution gestated in the general discontent of the population, gestation that bore fruit in large part due to the fertile intellectual ground that at the time had already been growing for some years in some European countries.

In addition, that ideological fertility had also been already pollinated by the influx of ideas, ambitions, and political grievances than some American revolutionaries, like Franklin and Paine, had already been sharing with French influential figures such as Voltaire, not setting aside other factors such as the general malnutrition that existed at the moment in France, along with the rise in prices of primary goods of consumption and the exorbitant national debt resulting in large part from France's participation in the American Revolution.

But, much in spite of the ideological fervor that shaped it, the first French Republic did not last long. Before the restoration of the Bourbons around 1814, the country had to go first through a dictatorship, followed by a First Empire, only to engage a few decades later in a second imperial adventure, right after a short-lived second Republic. French hierarchical traditions, therefore, have often been at the base of that country's political upheavals.

In the U.S. the story has never been so agitated. Since the founding of the country, the supremacy of the Democratic thrust has never been seriously threatened within its borders and the civil war was never supposed to be an attempt to return to Royal dynasties, but rather an armed argument between the North and the South regarding the breadth or narrowness of the application of the concept of democracy.

In contrast to the American Revolution, the Latin American example was also unique but in a different way. In El Salvador, for example, as a result of the war of independence, the power of the colonizing hierarchies never passed into the hands of the people, but into the hands of the local landowners' hierarchy, one of its main beneficiaries being one of San Salvador's biggest landowners of the day, the prelate and "Founding Father" José Matías Delgado. And the case of the rest of Latin American countries is not too distant from that of El Salvador.

Hierarchical socio-political traditions in Latin America, therefore, have served as basis for much of the general instability that history has observed in those countries through the decades (the "Indian" down and the whites and the mestizos on top).

In the opinion of this commentarist, one of the big differences between the revolutions of the North and the Centre and the South of the American continent resides in the degree of originality of the ideas that drove them and in the determination of its revolutionaries to truly implement or not implement those ideas once their revolutions had triumphed.

And please note that these words are not intended to refer to any Saints or perfect beings, which allows us to observe that all those revolutions were inspired in ideas whose potential for evolution was much more advanced than the human capability of the time to catch a glimpse of its scope or its possible future applications.

Without going any further, let's just remember that the general concept of democracy that originally emerged in Athens in the 5th century BC referred specifically to the rights of the prominent Athenians of the time, and not to women or slaves.

But, returning to the affairs of the country where I currently live, talking the other day to a Chinese friend she told me, as if half-talking to herself, that what China needed these days was a revolution. Would I agree with that? Well, who knows... because if this political bomb were ever to explode, it would most likely ignite a catastrophe of cosmic proportions, with the disheartening factor that the Chinese people lack the social and political infrastructure to govern themselves, which tells us that, as a result of an armed conflict in this country, we would probably only obtain another totalitarian system very similar or worse than the existing system of Government.

We cannot ask for the impossible. A society that is traditionally accustomed to be dominated by a heavy centralized hand, as China is, lacks the intellectual and ideological tools to implement a radical change of system of Government from one day to the next. Any abrupt political change within such societies would very possibly result in something worse.

On American soil, at the end of the eighteenth century, there was an obvious absence of deeply-rooted traditions. The settlers who arrived in the North of the continent were either people who had been rejected in Europe, or lawless adventurers, or immigrants whose only desire was to give themselves a new and different opportunity in a completely new and different environment.

The relative lack of deeply rooted traditions that has always afflicted the U.S. has been, in the long run, a very influential factor in obtaining the relative political stability that can still be enjoyed in that country. On the other hand, societies as traditional as the Chinese is, may require a long time before being able to afford significant changes in their traditional structures.

In other words, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

To read the BBC article in question, please click on the following link:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19835484

May you be well.

Salaroche