What Makes China Run?
Tea or Qi . . . ??
The answers to the title question pose a dichotomy between two non-exclusive assessments of China (and the East): Tea-based (TBA) and/or Qi-based (QBA).
TBAs represent conventional assessments of China (and the East in general), linked historically to the West’s (especially England’s) appetite for tea, as well as well as other coveted commodities. TBAs have shaped the West’s overall political perspective of China (and India as well), epitomized by the cliché “all the tea-in-China” as an answer to questions of supreme value (e.g., I wouldn’t sell my vintage Corvette Stingray for all the tea in China). This materialistic focus of TBAs intensified during the Enlightenment and subsequent rapid advances in material science and technology that spread to the East largely through Japan and its imperial ambitions. As a result, TBAs have acquired a bean-counter characteristic that continues to dominate China analysis with obsessive interrogations and calibrations of the destructive capability of weapons: military (bullets, tanks, planes, subs, and nukes), economic (sanctions), financial (currency manipulation and now digital currencies), and social (media). These analyses over-focus on the perception of “belligerent China,” which in turn directs attention to data such as “the buildup of artificial islands to control sea lanes in the South China Sea,” “the imminent seizure of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands,” “social credit mechanisms as a way to insure population enslavement,” “draconian Covid lockdowns as a dry run for total behavioral control of the people,” and the perennial “impending threat that Taiwan is about to be invaded.”
As necessary as TBAs may be, they are limited. They cannot answer, for example, the question of why the Communist Party of China (CPC) has mandated that Party School students study five ancient Daoist books and additional Confucian and Buddhist commentaries on those books. On the surface, this mandate appears to be an intellectual strategy to help new cadres develop a sense that they are contributing to Xi’s grand plan to restore China’s glorious past and re-secure its place as global hegemon. Though probably true, such a reading is a shallow one. Qi (QBA) better answers why the CPC has effectively instituted the study of Daoism in the Party School, as well as “What Makes China Run?”
The Five Classic Daoist Texts
The five classic Daoist texts taught to students of the Party School are (from oldest to most recent): 1. He Tu Luo Xu (The River Map Book of Luo), 2. Yi Jing (The Book of Changes), 3. Huang Di Nei Jing (The Yellow Emperor’s Internal Book), 4. Shennong Bencao (Shennong’s Materia Medica), and 5. Dao De Jing (The Book of the Virtuous Way). Only a relative handful of Westerners—close to none working in government or international business—have a passing familiarity with three or four of these works, and that familiarity is based on Western alphabetic translations, which often fail to capture the deeper subtleties contained in the Chinese logographic language (a fault often attributed to modern simplified Chinese by advocates of classical Chinese script). Only the most recent of the five, The Book of the Virtuous Way, has an author, Laozi, for whom there is some documentation of him ever having existed. It is the best known of the five in the West and can be credited with spreading the Taiji Tu (Great Boundary Map), better known as the Yin/Yang diagram.
The common thread connecting all five books is Qi, most often simplistically translated as “breath” but actually closer to meaning “animating force.” Qi permeates the physical universe—the heavens and all the elements of the Earth—and life forms, and human beings are its greatest sensors, capable of collecting, dispersing, directing and diverting Qi to achieve harmonious balance in the individual, the collective, and nature. The geomantic practice known as Feng Shui (literally Wind Water) is concerned with balancing Qi in a natural environment, and its foundational principles are the subject of The River Map Book of Luo. The book contains gua—rectilinear arrangements of lines and black and white dots—described as “river maps” for taming the notoriously flood-prone Yellow River and its tributaries. These gua are more fully developed in the second text, The Book of Changes, which is generally characterized as having the oracular capacity for unveiling the configuration of the great Dao, the most basic disposition of natural forces, in order to make tough choices in planning. The third and fourth books deal with Qi in human health, determined by rivers of Qi (acupuncture channels) flowing in and on the body, assisted by medicinal-plant concoctions. The fifth book, Laozi’s Book of the Virtuous Way, is generally credited in the West for associating Qi with the Taiji Tu.
Summarizing these five books merely scratches the surface of what CPC leadership may be up to with them, but that is more than can be said for the bean counters concerned with the markers of “belligerent China.” Consider the possibility that the well-publicized Belt-Road Initiative (BRI) is not simply an infrastructure plan to commercially dominate the Eurasian landmass and the Indian and South China Sea lanes, but also a stunningly ambitious exercise in Feng Shui: the construction of a hemispheric, human-servicing Yin/Yang encompassing the Eurasia landmass to the North and West and the waterways to the South and East, a massive “River Map” designed to manage a chaotic Dao that operates through Qi.
The CPC also has been working both openly and secretly to harness individual Qi management through exercise and meditative practices. Broadly classified since the founding of the PRC in 1949 as Qigong (Qi-skill), these practices have been an integral part of Chinese culture since pre-Scribal history, but under Mao they were researched and developed in ministerial institutions. In the late 1970’s, following Mao’s death, some of these practices were allowed to leak out into public spaces in Beijing, and from thereon, they flourished and competed for participants in Chinese society, especially in the larger cities. By January 1999, the Ministry of Sport had taken on the overseer role of Qigong and had established two criteria for legitimizing Qigong practices: 1. demonstrate physical effects, especially in terms of health, and 2. explain themselves in either Western scientific or traditional Chinese theory. The second criterion suggests that the Chinese leadership considered the traditional theory of Qi a rival Chinese “science” that was missed by the Western Enlightenment. Continuous dismissals of Qigong by leading Western medical scientists based at Harvard and the like appear to have confirmed rather than undermined this consideration.
The infamous Falun Gong (FLG) protest and crackdown of May 1999 changed the leadership’s approach to Qigong. Public practice became severely restricted and was replaced around 2015 by a government Taijiquan (Tai Chi) program in China, with an international arm for spreading the practice as an expression of traditional Chinese culture. But research into Qi as a special form of energy unknown to the West continued in secret. This was noted by non-mainland East Asian scientists and philosophers with ties to counterparts in the mainland.
The result has been a refreshed embrace and understanding of Qi in the East through Western quantum theory. This, in turn, has led to the development of new technologies that are certainly combining with digital technology’s ability to gather and sift biodata for patterns.
Perhaps the Chinese know things the West doesn’t. Perhaps it is time for the West to do its own deep dive into Qi in order to vie effectively with China’s efforts to manage “the Dao.”