While I was traveling in European cities, what impresses me the most is not their places of interest, but those three or four-story ordinary residential buildings with a history of hundreds of years. They are tall and thick, and can be seen everywhere, in stark contrast to the low and thin bungalows that abounded in Chinese cities before the Reform and Opening up - and there are still many these days. That made me think, an affluent life, in the second half of the twentieth century, is still quite far away from ordinary Chinese.
This can be attributed to the generosity of European royalties and the stinginess of Chinese emperors in the first place. Although European royalties have all kinds of palaces and manors, they don't mind their subjects living a prosperous life. The emperor of China is not the same. No matter how luxurious his own life is, he is extremely jealous of any good life of his subjects. Even in the affluent Jiangsu and Zhejiang areas, the houses had been also very modest or conservative, because if they are too ostentatious, they will get the emperor's notice and incur bad things to happen. For another example, the hunting ground of the Royal England had become a public park in the 18th and 19th centuries, but the garden of Cixi can only be enjoyed by herself. The stinginess of the Chinese emperor is ultimately for his own status and safety, "I would rather give things to foreigners than my domestic slaves", because giving to foreigners can enhance their aura, while giving to domestic slaves will make them less dependent on the emperor.
The more fundamental reason why the lives of officials and people in China is so different compared with the West is in their attitudes regarding what is a human. Chinese emperors or officials all feel that they are proper human beings and the people are not. This kind of thinking that "only when a person is a master is a proper person" has caused "no matter who gets the power and becomes rich, they will forget the people from which they come." The only ones they don’t forget are their relatives and group of common interests, not those poor people they came from. Humans and their inherent dignity are not properly recognized, and like ants, people only live to serve a small group of superiors.
Such a realm has never been surpassed. Dynasties changed and went round and round, and only until 1978 there was a change. That year Deng Xiaoping said: You are a human being, and you have a desire to improve your living conditions. Since I cannot deny you this, I allow you to become rich.
That was the biggest change in Chinese history. It has a profound impact on the lives of thousands of ordinary people. During more than 30 years of reform and opening up, the never-ending construction tells people how strong the human desire to improve their lives is. As long as they are given the freedom to work hard to get rich, they can work tirelessly to change their situation.
Although this is so plainly obvious, traditional Chinese thoughts do not agree with it. Confucius often talked about wealth and morality in his teachings, and the relationship between wealth and etiquette, such as "poor without flattery, rich without arrogance", "poor but happy, rich but polite". Although the words are beautiful, to say the two so contradictory is to deny people the legitimacy of pursuing a rich life. Being rich is no more likely to be immoral than being poor, and being poor is no more likely to be morally good than being rich. Moreover, not everyone has to reach a high moral level. If you raise the realm of human beings too high, what you will achieve in the end is nothing more than treating some people as human beings and others not. The standard way for Chinese scholars of "study to excellence makes you an official" also means this: you can be a proper human only if you learned and become an official, otherwise you are not a person.
In Chinese history, every peasant uprising demanded "equalization of the rich and the poor", but the people were still poor and the society was still unequal. This is inevitable, because if the people do not have the freedom to pursue wealth, no one will try their best to create wealth, and the whole society will be poor, and in the context of this poverty, some people with power are relatively rich. "In rich courtyard wine and meat stinks, and on wintry roads lie frozen and hungry corpses" is indeed hateful, but "equalizing the rich and the poor" is more evil, because people lose even the freedom to pursue wealth. Moreover, the smell of stinky wine and meat in rich courtyards is generally because the ruling class does not regard people as human beings, so they cannot change their lives, and the society only cares about the privileged interests of a few people. Such society is inevitably extremely poor.
The foundation of modern civilization lies in the acknowledgment of one thing: everyone should have the right to protect their life and property from infringement, and to pursue freedom and happiness. From birth, a person's greatest desire is to improve his own living conditions until he enters the grave, and thus he should be given the freedom to release his own energy, realize his wishes, and live a prosperous life. Such a society is a modern society. Such a civilization is a modern civilization. Any society and civilization that hinders the realization of this desire is backward and barbaric.
Around 1762, when the steam engine and big machines began to change the course of human society, Adam Smith told the students at Glasgow University in Scotland: freedom and opulence are two blessings that a person can enjoy. It was not easy for him to say this, because before him, both ancient Greek philosophers and religious authorities generally believed that if a person wants to become a real person, he must get rid of the shackles of material life. They said, if people are bound by material life, how can there be freedom?
Such an idea is still shared by many people today. True, the wise will realize that material abundance alone does not make one happy. However, for most people, to deprive them of the right to pursue material life is to deprive them of the right to pursue happiness. The right to pursue material freedom is the premise of pursuing spiritual freedom.
Any economy that interferes with people's freedom in the name of morality is actually a privileged economy. It is a shackle imposed on the masses by the will of a few. This "moral economy" aims to set a moral price for all kinds of products. As a result, some people have the privilege to set prices, dictate what to produce, and in what form to produce. Such people are the privileged class. To maintain their privilege, they say it would be immoral not to do as they say. Therefore, only those who have this privilege are human beings, and the others are not. How can we talk about freedom if people have no say in pricing their products, what to produce, how to produce, and how much wealth to accumulate?
The Enlightenment replaced monopoly power in various moral economies with human freedom, emphasizing the basic rights endowed by God. What Adam Smith and other Enlightenment thinkers of the time advocated was a new economic order in which prices were determined by the needs of different people in the market. As determined by Newton's law, the result of the action of various forces makes it stay at a balance point. If a price cannot be agreed upon, the price will be adjusted until someone agrees and the sale is concluded. Similarly, in such a society, capable and willing people accumulate wealth through labor, benefiting the country and the people. Without pseudo moral intervention in the market economy, most people would be able to obtain both material and spiritual freedom.
Moral economy has reinvented their appearance many times in history, such as in Soviet Union and China's planned economy before the reform and opening up, which made the people accept poverty in the name of morality, but in fact a few people are enjoying the relatively affluent life brought to them by power. The people are led away by the planned price set by these few people, losing the most basic rights, losing the freedom to accumulate wealth, and losing spiritual freedom. In fact, they are not real people.
The days when the moral economy was implemented in China were the darkest times. People's most basic desire to improve their own destiny and pursue a prosperous life has been suppressed.
If people's desire to improve their own destiny is brought into play, what everyone wants to do must be exchange what they produce, and society will inevitably become a commercial society. From the perspective of self-interest, people must abide by certain moral rules. The total wealth of the society can also be increased. If people cannot change their own destiny, how can this society have the motivation to create wealth?
Any politician, as long as his policies are detrimental to the realization of people's most fundamental aspirations, it is a replica of the moral economy, in effect immoral. In the end, what people lose is not only a rich life, but also personal freedom in all aspects.
In such a fake moral society, a hero is a powerful person, possibly a soldier, a revolutionary, someone who leads some to overthrow another, someone who takes a powerful position. Businessmen are looked down upon. But in the commercial society, heroes are people who realize their own wishes and create wealth for the society, such as entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs.
The commercial society would also stumble, because the market mechanism will never be completely transparent, with its own internal cycle, fraud, greed, and crisis. But in many cases, the reason for the crisis is actually because of the intervention of the black hand of the fake moral economy. For example, the main perpetrators of the 2008 financial crisis in the United States were not capitalists or Wall Street as people think, but politicians from both parties. The presidential candidates from both parties, Clinton and Bush all asked that people should own their own houses regardless if they can actually pay, and you not stop selling them houses because they do not have a down payment. Financial regulation then began to loosen in such a political climate, and Wall Street began to exert its greedy instinct under such demands. But after all, they are only government or market instruments, tools that can be both of service and greedy, not the instigators. And when a crisis occurs, the government, that is, the perpetrator of the moral economy, would blame the market economy and play innocent.
Relatively speaking, China at the time of reform and opening up was the real golden age in its history, because its people were able to work to improve their own destiny in a legitimate way. This is a very big improvement. However, this is still quite far from the opulence and freedom that Adam Smith talked about. The people are not free in many ways, that is, they have not yet become modern humans.
May 2008
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