风萧萧_Frank
以文会友
zgainst the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)?
罗纳德·基瓦·安兹（1961 年 9 月 20 日生）美国技术企业家、政治活动家、作家和出版商。安兹曾是一名商人，后来成为金融软件领域的千万富翁，之后进入政界。 1994 年，他以共和党人身份竞选加州州长，但均以失败告终。2016 年，他又竞选美国参议员，但均以失败告终。他发起了多项投票提案，推动结构化英语浸入式教育，以及竞选财务改革和提高最低工资。
安兹于 2007 年至 2013 年期间担任《美国保守派》的出版商，自 2013 年以来担任《安兹评论》的出版商和编辑，该网站自称提供“美国主流媒体基本上不予接受的有争议的观点”。反诽谤联盟批评《安兹评论》刊登种族主义和反犹太主义内容，南方贫困法律中心将其列为白人民族主义出版物。
早年生活和职业生涯
罗纳德·基瓦·安兹于 1961 年 9 月 20 日出生于加利福尼亚州洛杉矶，出生于一个犹太裔乌克兰家庭。他的家人在 20 世纪移民到美国，在北好莱坞长大。他的母亲是一名反战活动家[8]，独自抚养儿子长大。安兹说，作为一个没有父亲的单亲家庭的孩子，安兹的童年依靠公共援助，这让他“感到尴尬和不适”。[8]
他就读于北好莱坞高中，高三那年，他在 1979 年西屋科学人才选拔赛中名列第一。[7] 他就读于哈佛大学，1983 年获得物理学和古代史文学士学位。[6][9] 随后，他在剑桥大学攻读物理学研究生课程，并在斯坦福大学攻读博士学位，之后放弃了该课程。[8][9]
安兹在学习期间曾在银行业工作，并为抵押贷款证券编写软件。1988 年，他在纽约市创立了华尔街分析公司，五年后将其迁至加利福尼亚州帕洛阿尔托。[8][9] 2006 年，该公司被评级公司穆迪收购。[10]
政治生涯
安茨在 1994 年加州州长选举中挑战现任州长皮特·威尔逊，竞选共和党提名，但未获成功。他以保守派身份竞选较为温和的威尔逊，并得到保守派加州共和党议会的支持。他以 707,431 票（34.3%）排在威尔逊之后，位居第二。报纸将安茨的竞选称为“书呆子的复仇”，并经常引用他自称的 214 智商。
1998 年，安茨发起加州 227 号提案，旨在将该州的双语教育改为可选择的结构化英语教育系统。该提案得到了选民的批准。[14] 227 号提案并未寻求结束双语教育，因为如果父母愿意，学生可以特殊豁免继续留在英语浸入式课程中。然而，豁免是有限制的（例如年龄限制），并且有规定对拒绝仅用英语或以英语为主教学的教师进行纪律处分。227 号提案于 1998 年获得批准，但于 2016 年被 58 号提案废除。2002 年，安兹支持了一项类似的倡议，即马萨诸塞州公立学校英语语言教育倡议，得到了 61.25% 选民的支持。他还支持其他州的投票倡议，包括亚利桑那州第 203 号提案和科罗拉多州第 31 号修正案。
1999 年初，安兹提出了一项竞选财务改革投票倡议，即加州选民权利法案（第 25 号提案）。该提案由加州民主党人托尼·米勒共同发起，并得到参议员约翰·麦凯恩的支持，提案要求 1,000 美元以上的竞选捐款必须在 24 小时内在线申报，个人捐款不得超过 5,000 美元，禁止企业向候选人捐款，并允许全州候选人在选举前 12 个月内筹集资金。1999 年末，安茨曾短暂加入美国参议院竞选，挑战现任参议员黛安·范斯坦[23]，他于 10 月宣布参选[20]，并于 12 月退出，专注于为第 25 号提案筹款，该提案最终在 2000 年 3 月的初选中被否决。
2012 年和 2014 年，安茨致力于一项投票倡议，旨在将加州最低工资从 10 美元提高到 12 美元，但他的竞选失败了。[26][27]他的提议得到了经济学家詹姆斯·加尔布雷斯的支持。
2016 年，安茨组织了“自由哈佛，公平哈佛”运动，五名候选人竞选哈佛大学监事会（哈佛大学管理委员会）的席位。候选人包括他本人、记者斯图尔特·泰勒二世、物理学家史蒂芬·许、消费者
倡导者拉尔夫·纳德 (Ralph Nader) 和律师李成 (Lee C. Cheng) 组成了竞选团队。竞选活动旨在废除哈佛的学费，并提高招生过程的透明度。[28][29][30] 五名候选人中没有一人当选为 30 人董事会成员。
安茨在 2016 年初选中以共和党候选人身份在加利福尼亚州竞选美国参议员，打算接替民主党人芭芭拉·鲍克瑟 (Barbara Boxer)。此前他支持移民，现在他提议“大幅减少移民，可能减少 50% 或更多”。虽然不希望赢得提名，但他还是主动提出挑战当时提议废除 227 号提案。他得到了前美国众议员罗恩·保罗 (Ron Paul) 的支持。[35] 最终结果显示，他获得了 64,698 票（1.3%）。
写作和出版
《美国保守派》和“亚裔配额”争议
他是《美国保守派》的投资者，2007 年至 2013 年期间担任其出版商。[37] 他还撰写了关于移民、最低工资和城市犯罪等话题的评论文章。[16] 在一封泄露给《国家评论》杂志的电子邮件中，编辑丹尼尔·麦卡锡写道，昂兹表现得好像他是《美国保守派》的编辑一样，并威胁说，如果该出版物的董事会不支持他而不是昂兹，他就会辞职。[38]
2012 年，昂兹在《美国保守派》上发表了一篇题为“美国精英统治的神话”的文章。他认为，常春藤盟校持有不言而喻的录取配额，为亚裔/亚裔美国申请者提供名额，类似于早期的犹太配额，而且犹太学生的比例比成绩所表明的要高，他声称这是由于管理人员无意识的犹太偏见造成的。[39][40][41]文章称，这些大学的“明显偏见”可能归咎于犹太管理人员。[42][43] 他关于亚裔配额存在的论点随后在《纽约时报》的特别辩论专栏“常春藤盟校对亚裔配额的担忧”中得到转载。[44][45] 耶鲁大学的学者对昂茨的招生分析提出质疑，他们认为他的数据“严重低估了亚裔美国人的比例”。[46] 白人至上主义者大卫·杜克称赞了昂茨关于常春藤盟校招生的文章，他说这证实了哈佛大学“现在受到了强大的犹太人影响”。著名反犹太主义者凯文·B·麦克唐纳 (Kevin B. MacDonald) 表示，这与他自己的观点类似，即犹太人“与绝大多数非犹太裔白人美国人的价值观不一致”。
Unz 档案
Unz 还编纂了 Unz 档案 (UNZ.org)，这是一个可搜索的在线期刊、书籍和视频集合，到 2012 年，它已收录了 120 多种出版物的约 25,000 期，包括《美国水星报》、《文学文摘》、《调查》、《科利尔》、《今日马克思主义》、《新政治》以及各种低俗小说和浪漫杂志。Reason 的 Nick Gillespie 称其为“互联网上最伟大的档案项目之一”。
Unz 评论
2013 年 11 月，Unz 推出了网站 The Unz Review，他担任该网站的主编和出版商。
《安茨评论》自称呈现的是“美国主流媒体基本上不予接受的争议性观点”。 安茨说，他主要发布已经发表的文章，“我甚至都不读我发表的大部分文章，当然也不会编辑它们。我很忙。”美联社将其描述为“左右两翼观点的大杂烩”,纽约时报则将其描述为“极右翼”。 反诽谤联盟 (ADL) 在 2014 年称，该网络杂志是“某些作家攻击以色列和犹太人的渠道”。 南方贫困法律中心将其称为白人民族主义出版物。2016 年，反诽谤联盟的一名研究员表示：“我没见过罗恩·安茨本人写过任何反犹太主义的东西，但他确实为反犹太主义者提供了平台。”
2017 年，《安茨评论》受到公众关注，当时前中情局特工瓦莱丽·普拉姆在推特上发布了专栏作家、反恐专家菲利普·吉拉尔迪在网络杂志上发表的一篇文章，题为“美国的犹太人正在推动美国的战争”，遭到批评。
China’s academic performance has been just as stunning. The 2009 Program for International Student Assessment(PISA) tests placed gigantic Shanghai—a megalopolis of 15 million—at the absolute top of world student achievement.[1] PISA results from the rest of the country have been nearly as impressive, with the average scores of hundreds of millions of provincial Chinese—mostly from rural families with annual incomes below $2,000—matching or exceeding those of Europe’s most advanced and successful countries, such as Germany, France, and Switzerland, and ranking well above America’s results.[2]
These successes follow closely on the heels of a previous generation of similar economic and technological gains for several much smaller Chinese-ancestry countries in that same part of the world, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and the great academic and socioeconomic success of small Chinese-descended minority populations in predominantly white nations, including America, Canada, and Australia. The children of the Yellow Emperor seem destined to play an enormous role in Mankind’s future.
Although these developments might have shocked Westerners of the mid-20th Century—when China was best known for its terrible poverty and Maoist revolutionary fanaticism—they would have seemed far less unexpected to our leading thinkers of 100 years ago, many of whom prophesied that the Middle Kingdom would eventually regain its ranking among the foremost nations of the world. This was certainly the expectation of E.A. Ross, one of America’s greatest early sociologists, whose book The Changing Chinese looked past the destitution, misery, and corruption of the China of his day to a future modernized China perhaps on a technological par with America and the leading European nations. Ross’s views were widely echoed by public intellectuals such as Lothrop Stoddard, who foresaw China’s probable awakening from centuries of inward-looking slumber as a looming challenge to the worldwide hegemony long enjoyed by the various European-descended nations.
The likely roots of such widespread Chinese success have received little detailed exploration in today’s major Western media, which tends to shy away from considering the particular characteristics of ethnic groups or nationalities, as opposed to their institutional systems and forms of government. Yet although the latter obviously play a crucial role—Maoist China was far less economically successful than Dengist China—it is useful to note that the examples of Chinese success cited above range across a wide diversity of socioeconomic and political systems.
For decades, Hong Kong enjoyed one of the most free-market, nearly anarcho-libertarian economic regimes; during that same period, Singapore was governed by the tight hand of Lee Kuan Yew and his socialistic People’s Action Party, which built a one-party state with a large degree of government guidance and control. Yet both these populations were overwhelmingly Chinese, and both experienced almost equally rapid economic development, moving in 50 years from total postwar destitution and teeming refugee slums to ranking among the wealthiest places on earth. And Taiwan, whose much larger Chinese-ancestry population pursued an intermediate development model, enjoyed similar economic success.
Despite a long legacy of racial discrimination and mistreatment, small Chinese communities in America also prospered and advanced, even as their numbers grew rapidly following passage of the 1965 Immigration Act. In recent years a remarkable fraction of America’s top students—whether judged by the objective winners’ circle of the Mathematics Olympiad and Intel Science competition or by the somewhat more subjective rates of admission to Ivy League colleges—have been of Chinese ancestry. The results are particularly striking when cast in quantitative terms: although just 1 percent of American high-school graduates each year have ethnic Chinese origins, surname analysis indicates that they currently include nearly 15 percent of the highest-achieving students, a performance ratio more than four times better than that of American Jews, the top-scoring white ancestry group.[3]
Chinese people seem to be doing extremely well all over the world, across a wide range of economic and cultural landscapes.
Almost none of these global developments were predicted by America’s leading intellectuals of the 1960s or 1970s, and many of their successors have had just as much difficulty recognizing the dramatic sweep of events through which they are living. A perfect example of this strange myopia may be found in the writings of leading development economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, whose brief discussions of China’s rapid rise to world economic dominance seem to portray the phenomenon as a temporary illusion almost certainly soon to collapse because the institutional approach followed differs from the ultra-free-market neoliberalism that they recommend.[4] The large role that the government plays in guiding Chinese economic decisions dooms it to failure, despite all evidence to the contrary, while America’s heavily financialized economy must be successful, regardless of our high unemployment and low growth. According to Acemoglu and Robinson, nearly all international success or failure is determined by governmental institutions, and since China possesses the wrong ones, failure is certain, though there seems no sign of it.
Perhaps such academics will be proven correct, and China’s economic miracle will collapse into the debacle they predict. But if this does not occur, and the international trend lines of the past 35 years continue for another five or ten, we should consider turning for explanations to those long-forgotten thinkers who actually foretold these world developments that we are now experiencing, individuals such as Ross and Stoddard. The widespread devastation produced by the Japanese invasion, World War II, and the Chinese Civil War, followed by the economic calamity of Maoism, did delay the predicted rise of China by a generation or two, but except for such unforeseen events, their analysis of Chinese potential seems remarkably prescient. For example, Stoddard approvingly quotes the late Victorian predictions of Professor Charles E. Pearson:
Does any one doubt that the day is at hand when China will have cheap fuel from her coal-mines, cheap transport by railways and steamers, and will have founded technical schools to develop her industries? Whenever that day comes, she may wrest the control of the world’s markets, especially throughout Asia, from England and Germany.[5]
A People Shaped by Their Difficult Environment
Western intellectual life a century ago was quite different from that of today, with contrary doctrines and taboos, and the spirit of that age certainly held sway over its leading figures. Racialism—the notion that different peoples tend to have different innate traits, as largely fashioned by their particular histories—was dominant then, so much so that the notion was almost universally held and applied, sometimes in rather crude fashion, to both European and non-European populations.
With regard to the Chinese, the widespread view was that many of their prominent characteristics had been shaped by thousands of years of history in a generally stable and organized society possessing central political administration, a situation almost unique among the peoples of the world. In effect, despite temporary periods of political fragmentation, East Asia’s own Roman Empire had never fallen, and a thousand-year interregnum of barbarism, economic collapse, and technological backwardness had been avoided.
On the less fortunate side, the enormous population growth of recent centuries had gradually caught up with and overtaken China’s exceptionally efficient agricultural system, reducing the lives of most Chinese to the brink of Malthusian starvation; and these pressures and constraints were believed to be reflected in the Chinese people. For example, Stoddard wrote:
Winnowed by ages of grim elimination in a land populated to the uttermost limits of subsistence, the Chinese race is selected as no other for survival under the fiercest conditions of economic stress. At home the average Chinese lives his whole life literally within a hand’s breadth of starvation. Accordingly, when removed to the easier environment of other lands, the Chinaman brings with him a working capacity which simply appalls his competitors.[6]
Stoddard backed these riveting phrases with a wide selection of detailed and descriptive quotations from prominent observers, both Western and Chinese. Although Ross was more cautiously empirical in his observations and less literary in his style, his analysis was quite similar, with his book on the Chinese containing over 40 pages describing the grim and gripping details of daily survival, provided under the evocative chapter-heading “The Struggle for Existence in China.”[7]
During the second half of the 20th century, ideological considerations largely eliminated from American public discourse the notion that many centuries of particular circumstances might leave an indelible imprint upon a people. But with the turn of the new millennium, such analyses have once again begun appearing in respectable intellectual quarters.
The most notable example of this would surely be A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark’s fascinating 2007 analysis of the deep origins of Britain’s industrial revolution, which was widely reviewed and praised throughout elite circles, with New York Times economics columnist Tyler Cowen hailing it as possibly “the next blockbuster in economics” and Berkeley economist Brad DeLong characterizing it as “brilliant.”
Although Clark’s work focused on many different factors, the one that attracted the greatest attention was his demographic analysis of British history based upon a close examination of individual testaments. Clark discovered evidence that for centuries the wealthier British had left significantly more surviving children than their poorer compatriots, thus leading their descendants to constitute an ever larger share of each generation. Presumably, this was because they could afford to marry at a younger age, and their superior nutritional and living arrangements reduced mortality rates for themselves and their families. Indeed, the near-Malthusian poverty of much ordinary English life during this era meant that the impoverished lower classes often failed even to reproduce themselves over time, gradually being replaced by the downwardly mobile children of their financial betters. Since personal economic achievement was probably in part due to traits such as diligence, prudence, and productivity, Clark argued that these characteristics steadily became more widespread in the British population, laying the human basis for later national economic success.
Leaving aside whether or not the historical evidence actually supports Clark’s hypothesis—economist Robert C. Allen has published a strong and fairly persuasive refutation[8]—the theoretical framework he advances seems a perfectly plausible one. Although the stylistic aspects and quantitative approaches certainly differ, much of Clark’s analysis for England seems to have clear parallels in how Stoddard, Ross, and others of their era characterized China. So perhaps it would be useful to explore whether a Clarkian analysis might be applicable to the people of the Middle Kingdom.
Interestingly enough, Clark himself devotes a few pages to considering this question and concludes that in contrast to the British case, wealthier Chinese were no more fecund than the poorer, eliminating the possibility of any similar generational trend.[9] But Clark is not a China specialist, and his brief analysis relies on the birth records of the descendants of the ruling imperial dynasty, a group totally unrepresentative of the broader population. In fact, a more careful examination of the Chinese source material reveals persuasive evidence for a substantial skew in family size, directly related to economic success, with the pattern being perhaps even stronger and more universally apparent than was the case for Britain or any other country.
Moreover, certain unique aspects of traditional Chinese society may have maintained and amplified this long-term effect, in a manner unlike that found in most other societies in Europe or elsewhere. China indeed may constitute the largest and longest-lasting instance of an extreme “Social Darwinist” society anywhere in human history, perhaps with important implications for the shaping of the modern Chinese people.[10]
The Social Economy of Traditional China
Chinese society is notable for its stability and longevity. From the gradual establishment of the bureaucratic imperial state based on mandarinate rule during the Sui (589–618) and T’ang (618–907) dynasties down to the Communist Revolution of 1948, a single set of social and economic relations appears to have maintained its grip on the country, evolving only slightly while dynastic successions and military conquests periodically transformed the governmental superstructure.
A central feature of this system was the replacement of the local rule of aristocratic elements by a class of official meritocrats, empowered by the central government and selected by competitive examination. In essence, China eliminated the role of hereditary feudal lords and the social structure they represented over 1,000 years before European countries did the same, substituting a system of legal equality for virtually the entire population beneath the reigning emperor and his family.
The social importance of competitive examinations was enormous, playing the same role in determining membership in the ruling elite that the aristocratic bloodlines of Europe’s nobility did until modern times, and this system embedded itself just as deeply in the popular culture. The great noble houses of France or Germany might trace their lineages back to ancestors elevated under Charlemagne or Barbarossa, with their heirs afterward rising and falling in standing and estates, while in China the proud family traditions would boast generations of top-scoring test-takers, along with the important government positions that they had received as a result. Whereas in Europe there existed fanciful stories of a heroic commoner youth doing some great deed for the king and consequently being elevated to a knighthood or higher, such tales were confined to fiction down to the French Revolution. But in China, even the greatest lineages of academic performers almost invariably had roots in the ordinary peasantry.
Not only was China the first national state to utilize competitive written examinations for selection purposes, but it is quite possible that almost all other instances everywhere in the world ultimately derive from the Chinese example. It has long been established that the Chinese system served as the model for the meritocratic civil services that transformed the efficiency of Britain and other European states during the 18th and 19th centuries. But persuasive historical arguments have also been advanced that the same is even true for university entrance tests and honors examinations, with Cambridge’s famed Math Tripos being the earliest example.[11] Modern written tests may actually be as Chinese as chopsticks.
With Chinese civilization having spent most of the past 1,500 years allocating its positions of national power and influence by examination, there has sometimes been speculation that test-taking ability has become embedded in the Chinese people at the biological as well as cultural level. Yet although there might be an element of truth to this, it hardly seems likely to be significant. During the eras in question, China’s total population numbered far into the tens of millions, growing in unsteady fashion from perhaps 60 million before AD 900 to well over 400 million by 1850. But the number of Chinese passing the highest imperial exam and attaining the exalted rank of chin-shih during most of the past six centuries was often less than 100 per year, down from a high of over 200 under the Sung dynasty (960-1279), and even if we include the lesser rank of chu-jen, the national total of such degree-holders was probably just in the low tens of thousands,[12]
a tiny fraction of 1 percent of the overall population—totally dwarfed by the numbers of Chinese making their living as artisans or merchants, let alone the overwhelming mass of the rural peasantry. The cultural impact of rule by a test-selected elite was enormous, but the direct genetic impact would have been negligible.
This same difficulty of relative proportions frustrates any attempt to apply in China an evolutionary model similar to the one that Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending have persuasively suggested for the evolution of high intelligence among the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe.[13] The latter group constituted a small, reproductively isolated population overwhelmingly concentrated in the sorts of business and financial activity that would have strongly favored more intelligent individuals, and one with insignificant gene-flow from the external population not undergoing such selective pressure. By contrast, there is no evidence that successful Chinese merchants or scholars were unwilling to take brides from the general population, and any reasonable rate of such intermarriage each generation would have totally swamped the genetic impact of mercantile or scholarly success. If we are hoping to find any rough parallel to the process that Clark hypothesizes for Britain, we must concentrate our attention on the life circumstances of China’s broad rural peasantry—well over 90 percent of the population during all these centuries—just as the aforementioned 19th-century observers had generally done.
Absence of Caste and Fluidity of Class
In fact, although Western writers tended to focus on China’s horrific poverty above all else, traditional Chinese society actually possessed certain unusual or even unique characteristics that may help account for the shaping of the Chinese people. Perhaps the most important of these was the near total absence of social caste and the extreme fluidity of economic class.
Feudalism had ended in China a thousand years before the French Revolution, and nearly all Chinese stood equal before the law.[14] The “gentry”—those who had passed an official examination and received an academic degree—possessed certain privileges and the “mean people”—prostitutes, entertainers, slaves, and various other degraded social elements—suffered under legal discrimination. But both these strata were minute in size, with each usually amounting to less than 1 percent of the general population, while “the common people”—everyone else, including the peasantry—enjoyed complete legal equality.
However, such legal equality was totally divorced from economic equality, and extreme gradations of wealth and poverty were found in every corner of society, down to the smallest and most homogenous village. During most of the 20th century, the traditional Marxian class analysis of Chinese rural life divided the population according to graduated wealth and degree of “exploitative” income: landlords, who obtained most or all of their income from rent or hired labor; rich, middle, and poor peasants, grouped according to decreasing wealth and rental income and increasing tendency to hire out their own labor; and agricultural laborers, who owned negligible land and obtained nearly all their income from hiring themselves out to others.
In hard times, these variations in wealth might easily mean the difference between life and death, but everyone acknowledged that such distinctions were purely economic and subject to change: a landlord who lost his land would become a poor peasant; a poor peasant who came into wealth would be the equal of any landlord. During its political struggle, the Chinese Communist Party claimed that landlords and rich peasants constituted about 10 percent of the population and possessed 70–80 percent of the land, while poor peasants and hired laborers made up the overwhelming majority of the population and owned just 10–15 percent of the land. Neutral observers found these claims somewhat exaggerated for propagandistic purposes, but not all that far from the harsh reality.[15]
Complete legal equality and extreme economic inequality together fostered one of the most unrestrained free-market systems known to history, not only in China’s cities but much more importantly in its vast countryside, which contained nearly the entire population. Land, the primary form of wealth, was freely bought, sold, traded, rented out, sub-leased, or mortgaged as loan collateral. Money-lending and food-lending were widely practiced, especially during times of famine, with usurious rates of interest being the norm, often in excess of 10 percent per month compounded. In extreme cases, children or even wives might be sold for cash and food. Unless aided by relatives, peasants without land or money routinely starved to death. Meanwhile, the agricultural activity of more prosperous peasants was highly commercialized and entrepreneurial, with complex business arrangements often the norm.[16]
For centuries, a central fact of daily life in rural China had been the tremendous human density, as the Middle Kingdom’s population expanded from 65 million to 430 million during the five centuries before 1850,[17] eventually forcing nearly all land to be cultivated to maximum efficiency. Although Chinese society was almost entirely rural and agricultural, Shandong province in 1750 had well over twice the population density of the Netherlands, the most urbanized and densely populated part of Europe, while during the early years of the Industrial Revolution, England’s population density was only one-fifth that of Jiangsu province.[18]
Chinese agricultural methods had always been exceptionally efficient, but by the 19th century, the continuing growth of the Chinese population had finally caught and surpassed the absolute Malthusian carrying-capacity of the farming system under its existing technical and economic structure.[19] Population growth was largely held in check by mortality (including high infant mortality), decreased fertility due to malnutrition, disease, and periodic regional famines that killed an average of 5 percent of the population.[20] Even the Chinese language came to incorporate the centrality of food, with the traditional words of greeting being “Have you eaten?” and the common phrase denoting a wedding, funeral, or other important social occasion being “to eat good things.”[21]
The cultural and ideological constraints of Chinese society posed major obstacles to mitigating this never-ending human calamity. Although impoverished Europeans of this era, male and female alike, often married late or not at all, early marriage and family were central pillars of Chinese life, with the sage Mencius stating that to have no children was the worst of unfilial acts; indeed, marriage and anticipated children were the mark of adulthood. Furthermore, only male heirs could continue the family name and ensure that oneself and one’s ancestors would be paid the proper ritual respect, and multiple sons were required to protect against the vagaries of fate. On a more practical level, married daughters became part of their husband’s household, and only sons could ensure provision for one’s old age.
Nearly all peasant societies sanctify filial loyalty, marriage, family, and children, while elevating sons above daughters, but in traditional China these tendencies seem to have been especially strong, representing a central goal and focus of all daily life beyond bare survival. Given the terrible poverty, cruel choices were often made, and female infanticide, including through neglect, was the primary means of birth control among the poor, leading to a typical shortfall of 10–15 percent among women of marriageable age. Reproductive competition for those remaining women was therefore fierce, with virtually every woman marrying, generally by her late teens. The inevitable result was a large and steady natural increase in the total population, except when constrained by various forms of increased mortality.
Remarkable Upward Mobility But Relentless Downward Mobility
The vast majority of Chinese might be impoverished peasants, but for those with ability and luck, the possibilities of upward mobility were quite remarkable in what was an essentially classless society. The richer strata of each village possessed the wealth to give their most able children a classical education in hopes of preparing them for the series of official examinations. If the son of a rich peasant or petty landlord were sufficiently diligent and intellectually able, he might pass such an examination and obtain an official degree, opening enormous opportunities for political power and wealth.
For the Ming (1368–1644) and Ch’ing (1644–1911) dynasties, statistics exist on the social origins of the chin-shih class, the highest official rank, and these demonstrate a rate of upward mobility unmatched by almost any Western society, whether modern or premodern. Over 30 percent of such elite degree-holders came from commoner families that for three previous generations had produced no one of high official rank, and in the data from earlier centuries, this fraction of “new men” reached a high of 84 percent. Such numbers far exceed the equivalent figures for Cambridge University during all the centuries since its foundation, and would probably seem remarkable at America’s elite Ivy League colleges today or in the past. Meanwhile, downward social mobility was also common among even the highest families. As a summary statistic, across the six centuries of these two dynasties less than 6 percent of China’s ruling elites came from the ruling elites of the previous generation.[22]
The founding philosophical principle of the modern Western world has been the “Equality of Man,” while that of Confucianist China was the polar opposite belief in the inherent inequality of men. Yet in reality, the latter often seemed to fulfill better the ideological goals of the former. Frontier America might have had its mythos of presidents born in log-cabins, but for many centuries a substantial fraction of the Middle Kingdom’s ruling mandarins did indeed come from rural rice-paddies, a state of affairs that would have seemed almost unimaginable in any European country until the Age of Revolution, and even long afterward.
Such potential for elevation into the ruling Chinese elite was remarkable, but a far more important factor in the society was the open possibility of local economic advancement for the sufficiently enterprising and diligent rural peasant. Ironically enough, a perfect description of such upward mobility was provided by Communist revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, who recounted how his father had risen from being a landless poor peasant to rich peasant status:
My father was a poor peasant and while still young was obliged to join the army because of heavy debts. He was a soldier for many years. Later on he returned to the village where I was born, and by saving carefully and gathering together a little money through small trading and other enterprise he managed to buy back his land.
As middle peasants then my family owned fifteen mou [about 2.5 acres] of land. On this they could raise sixty tan of rice a year. The five members of the family consumed a total of thirty-five tan—that is, about seven each—which left an annual surplus of twenty-five tan. Using this surplus, my father accumulated a little capital and in time purchased seven more mou, which gave the family the status of ‘rich’ peasants. We could then raise eighty-four tan of rice a year.
When I was ten years of age and the family owned only fifteen mou of land, the five members of the family consisted of my father, mother, grandfather, younger brother, and myself. After we had acquired the additional seven mou, my grandfather died, but there came another younger brother. However, we still had a surplus of forty-nine tan of rice each year, and on this my father prospered.
At the time my father was a middle peasant he began to deal in grain transport and selling, by which he made a little money. After he became a ‘rich’ peasant, he devoted most of his time to that business. He hired a full-time farm laborer, and put his children to work on the farm, as well as his wife. I began to work at farming tasks when I was six years old. My father had no shop for his business. He simply purchased grain from the poor farmers and then transported it to the city merchants, where he got a higher price. In the winter, when the rice was being ground, he hired an extra laborer to work on the farm, so that at that time there were seven mouths to feed. My family ate frugally, but had enough always.[23]
Mao’s account gives no indication that he regarded his family’s rise as extraordinary in any way; his father had obviously done well, but there were probably many other families in Mao’s village that had similarly improved their lot during the course of a single generation. Such opportunities for rapid social mobility would have been almost impossible in any of the feudal or class-ridden societies of the same period, in Europe or most other parts of the world.
However, the flip-side of possible peasant upward mobility was the far greater likelihood of downward mobility, which was enormous and probably represented the single most significant factor shaping the modern Chinese people. Each generation, a few who were lucky or able might rise, but a vast multitude always fell, and those families near the bottom simply disappeared from the world. Traditional rural China was a society faced with the reality of an enormous and inexorable downward mobility: for centuries, nearly all Chinese ended their lives much poorer than had their parents.
The strong case for such downward mobility was demonstrated a quarter century ago by historian Edwin E. Moise,[24] whose crucial article on the subject has received far less attention than it deserves, perhaps because the intellectual climate of the late 1970s prevented readers from drawing the obvious evolutionary implications.
In many respects, Moise’s demographic analysis of China eerily anticipated that of Clark for England, as he pointed out that only the wealthier families of a Chinese village could afford the costs associated with obtaining wives for their sons, with female infanticide and other factors regularly ensuring up to a 15 percent shortfall in the number of available women. Thus, the poorest village strata usually failed to reproduce at all, while poverty and malnourishment also tended to lower fertility and raise infant mortality as one moved downward along the economic gradient. At the same time, the wealthiest villagers sometimes could afford multiple wives or concubines and regularly produced much larger numbers of surviving offspring. Each generation, the poorest disappeared, the less affluent failed to replenish their numbers, and all those lower rungs on the economic ladder were filled by the downwardly mobile children of the fecund wealthy.
This fundamental reality of Chinese rural existence was certainly obvious to the peasants themselves and to outside observers, and there exists an enormous quantity of anecdotal evidence describing the situation, whether gathered by Moise or found elsewhere, as illustrated by a few examples:
‘How could any man in our village claim that his family had been poor for three generations? If a man is poor, then his son can’t afford to marry; and if his son can’t marry, there can’t be a third generation.’[25]
… Because of the marked shortage of women, there was always a great number of men without wives at all. This included the overwhelming majority of long-term hired laborers… The poorest families died out, being unable to arrange marriages for their sons. The future generations of poor were the descendants of bankrupted middle and rich peasants and landlords.[26]
… Further down the economic scale there were many families with unmarried sons who had already passed the customary marriage age, thus limiting the size of the family. Wong Mi was a case in point. He was already twenty-three, with both of his parents in their mid-sixties; but since the family was able to rent only an acre of poor land and could not finance his marriage, he lived with the old parents, and the family consisted of three members. Wong Chun, a landless peasant in his forties, had been in the same position when he lived with his aged parents ten years before, and now, both parents having died, he lived alone. There were ten or fifteen families in the village with single unmarried sons.[27]
… As previously mentioned, there were about twenty families in Nanching that had no land at all and constituted the bottom group in the village’s pyramid of land ownership. A few of these families were tenant farmers, but the majority, since they could not finance even the buying of tools, fertilizer, and seeds, worked as “long-term” agricultural laborers on an annual basis. As such, they normally were paid about 1,000 catties of unhusked rice per year and board and room if they owned no home. This income might equal or even exceed what they might have wrested from a small rented farm, but it was not enough to support a family of average size without supplementary employment undertaken by other members of the family. For this reason, many of them never married, and the largest number of bachelors was to be found among landless peasants. Wong Tu-en, a landless peasant working for a rich peasant for nearly ten years, was still a “bare stick” (unmarried man) in his fifties; and there were others in the village like him. They were objects of ridicule and pity in the eyes of the villagers, whose life [sic] centered upon the family.[28]
Furthermore, the forces of downward mobility in rural Chinese society were greatly accentuated by fenjia, the traditional system of inheritance, which required equal division of property among all sons, in sharp contrast to the practice of primogeniture commonly found in European countries.
If most or all of a father’s property went to the eldest son, then the long-term survival of a reasonably affluent peasant family was assured unless the primary heir were a complete wastrel or encountered unusually bad fortune. But in China, cultural pressures forced a wealthy man to do his best to maximize the number of his surviving sons, and within the richer strata of a village it was not uncommon for a man to leave two, three, or even more male heirs, compelling each to begin his economic independence with merely a fraction of his father’s wealth. Unless they succeeded in substantially augmenting their inheritance, the sons of a particularly fecund rich landlord might be middle peasants—and his grandchildren, starving poor peasants.[29] Families whose elevated status derived from a single fortuitous circumstance or a transient trait not deeply rooted in their behavioral characteristics therefore enjoyed only fleeting economic success, and poverty eventually culled their descendants from the village.
The members of a successful family could maintain their economic position over time only if in each generation large amounts of additional wealth were extracted from their land and their neighbors through high intelligence, sharp business sense, hard work, and great diligence. The penalty for major business miscalculations or lack of sufficient effort was either personal or reproductive extinction. As American observer William Hinton graphically described:
Security, relative comfort, influence, position, and leisure [were] maintained amidst a sea of the most dismal and frightening poverty and hunger—a poverty and hunger which at all times threatened to engulf any family which relaxed its vigilance, took pity on its poor neighbors, failed to extract the last copper of rent and interest, or ceased for an instant the incessant accumulation of grain and money. Those who did not go up went down, and those who went down often went to their deaths or at least to the dissolution and dispersal of their families.[30]
However, under favorable circumstances, a family successful in business might expand its numbers from generation to generation until it gradually squeezed out all its less competitive neighbors, with its progeny eventually constituting nearly the entire population of a village. For example, a century after a couple of poor Yang brothers arrived in a region as farm laborers, their descendants had formed a clan of 80–90 families in one village and the entire population of a neighboring one.[31] In a Guangdong village, a merchant family named Huang arrived and bought land, growing in numbers and land ownership over the centuries until their descendants replaced most of the other families, which became poor and ultimately disappeared, while the Huangs eventually constituted 74 percent of the total local population, including a complete mix of the rich, middle, and poor.[32]
The Implications for the Chinese People and for American Ideology
In many respects, the Chinese society portrayed by our historical and sociological sources seems an almost perfect example of the sort of local environment that would be expected to produce a deep imprint upon the characteristics of its inhabitants. Even prior to the start of this harsh development process, China had spent thousands of years as one of the world’s most advanced economic and technological civilizations. The socioeconomic system established from the end of the sixth century A.D. onward then remained largely stable and unchanged for well over a millennium, with the sort of orderly and law-based society that benefited those who followed its rules and ruthlessly weeded out the troublemaker. During many of those centuries, the burden of overpopulation placed enormous economic pressure on each family to survive, while a powerful cultural tradition emphasized the production of surviving offspring, especially sons, as the greatest goal in life, even if that result might lead to the impoverishment of the next generation. Agricultural efficiency was remarkably high but required great effort and diligence, while the complexities of economic decision-making—how to manage land, crop selection, and investment decisions—were far greater than those faced by the simple peasant serf found in most other parts of the world, with the rewards for success and the penalties for failure being extreme. The sheer size and cultural unity of the Chinese population would have facilitated the rapid appearance and spread of useful innovations, including those at the purely biological level.[33]
It is important to recognize that although good business ability was critical for the long-term success of a line of Chinese peasants, the overall shaping constraints differed considerably from those that might have affected a mercantile caste such as the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe or the Parsis of India. These latter groups occupied highly specialized economic niches in which a keen head for figures or a ruthless business sense might have been all that was required for personal success and prosperity. But in the world of rural Chinese villages, even the wealthier elements usually spent the majority of the lives in backbreaking labor, working alongside their families and their hired men in the fields and rice paddies. Successful peasants might benefit from a good intellect, but they also required the propensity for hard manual toil, determination, diligence, and even such purely physical traits as resistance to injury and efficiency in food digestion. Given such multiple selective pressures and constraints, we would expect the shift in the prevalence of any single one of these traits to be far slower than if it alone determined success, and the many centuries of steady Chinese selection across the world’s largest population would have been required to produce any substantial result.[34]
The impact of such strong selective forces obviously manifests at multiple levels, with cultural software being far more flexible and responsive than any gradual shifts in innate tendencies, and distinguishing between evidence of these two mechanisms is hardly a trivial task. But it seems quite unlikely that the second, deeper sort of biological human change would not have occurred during a thousand years or more of these relentlessly shaping pressures, and simply to ignore or dismiss such an important possibility is unreasonable. Yet that seems to have been the dominant strain of Western intellectual belief for the last two or three generations.
Sometimes the best means of recognizing one’s ideological blinders is to consider seriously the ideas and perspectives of alien minds that lack them, and in the case of Western society these happen to include most of our greatest intellectual figures from 80 or 90 years ago, now suddenly restored to availability by the magic of the Internet. Admittedly, in some respects these individuals were naïve in their thinking or treated various ideas in crude fashion, but in many more cases their analyses were remarkably acute and scientifically insightful, often functioning as an invaluable corrective to the assumed truths of the present. And in certain matters, notably predicting the economic trajectory of the world’s largest country, they seem to have anticipated developments that almost none of their successors of the past 50 years ever imagined. This should certainly give us pause.
Consider also the ironic case of Bruce Lahn, a brilliant Chinese-born genetics researcher at the University of Chicago. In an interview a few years ago, he casually mentioned his speculation that the socially conformist tendencies of most Chinese people might be due to the fact that for the past 2,000 years the Chinese government had regularly eliminated its more rebellious subjects, a suggestion that would surely be regarded as totally obvious and innocuous everywhere in the world except in the West of the past half century or so. Not long before that interview, Lahn had achieved great scientific acclaim for his breakthrough discoveries on the possible genetic origins of human civilization, but this research eventually provoked such heated controversy that he was dissuaded from continuing it.[35]
Yet although Chinese researchers living in America willingly conform to American ideological restrictions, this is not the case with Chinese researchers in China itself, and it is hardly surprising that BGI—the Beijing Genomics Institute—has become the recognized world leader in cutting-edge human genetics research. This is despite the billions spent by its American counterparts, which must operate within a much more circumscribed framework of acceptable ideas.
During the Cold War, the enormous governmental investments of the Soviet regime in many fields produced nothing, since they were based on a model of reality that was both unquestionable and also false. The growing divergence between that ideological model and the real world eventually doomed the USSR, whose vast and permanent bulk blew away in a sudden gust of wind two decades ago. American leaders should take care that they do not stubbornly adhere to scientifically false doctrines that will lead our own country to risk a similar fate.
Ron Unz is publisher of The American Conservative.
