Scholar Tang Shiping: When We Are Confident and Proud, How Do We Stay Clear-Eyed About What the World Thinks of Us?

I often use an analogy: modernization is an island. So far only about 30 countries have swum ashore. More than 100 others are still swimming toward it.

More than 10 years ago, Tang Shiping told a friend that he would be one of the most important social scientists of this century. The friend thought he was joking. To this day Tang says he "never thought of it that way," and the goal has not wavered in the slightest — if anything, he is closer to it. At the very least, some people now regard him as one of the most internationally influential Chinese social scientists alive, and one of the best social scientists in Asia.

Tang Shiping, 51, is one of the few open "madmen" in Chinese academia. He calls himself "half a god," and says he "only measures himself against people like Karl Popper." His home field is international relations, but in recent years he has gradually "faded out" of the discipline. His present and future research will "focus essentially on comparative politics (modernization, ethnic conflict, political transition), institutional economics (the institutional foundations of economic growth), industrial policy, and the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences."

He explains why in one of his books: "Because I believe the most fundamental grand theories and empirical questions in this field have already been solved by me (whether or not you agree). Once the questions that most excite me in a field have been solved by me, I leave without hesitation and go looking for the most exciting questions in another field, even one I may not know well at first. I believe I can handle several different fields, and that is the true me."

Look back over Tang Shiping's life and you will find this "madness" is not entirely unearned.

Tang Shiping was born in January 1967 in Woguoshui Village, Linwu County, Chenzhou, Hunan Province. Two months later his father, a middle-school teacher, was branded a "counter-revolutionary" and jailed; one of the charges was that he had used dialectics to deny the existence of "absolute truth." Seven years later the conviction was overturned, but two years after that his father was jailed again for re-investigation. Only in 1978 was he formally cleared and released. Tang Shiping's childhood and adolescence therefore passed under the care of his mother and grandmother, in hardship and poverty. "Before I was ten I had seen what a real prison looks like, and what a letter written in blood looks like, because back then my father could only write to my mother in blood on a handkerchief," Tang Shiping recalled in his essay "My Father."

He started junior high at 10, became interested in the origin of life, and resolved to win a Nobel Prize. In 1981, at 14, he was admitted to the China University of Geosciences to study stratigraphy and paleontology. Later he decided that "studying dinosaurs can't solve the problem of the origin of life," and set his sights on the University of Science and Technology of China. After teaching himself 31 courses in the biological sciences, he was admitted in 1985 to USTC's graduate program in molecular biology. He then went to Wayne State University in the United States for a doctorate in molecular biology and genetics.

In 1996, doing postdoctoral work at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center, Tang Shiping ran experiments for eight or nine months straight, got nowhere, and found himself stuck. At the same time the Taiwan Strait Crisis broke out, cross-strait tensions rose, and many Chinese students abroad were watching closely. Tang Shiping was one of them. He thought at the time that "China still didn't know how to deal with Western democratic governments," which was why the crisis had happened. Digging through the library, he also found that only one or two institutions in China were studying the U.S. Congress — an enormous gap.

So in 1997 Tang Shiping walked away from the biology he had spent more than a decade on and went to the University of California, Berkeley, for a master's degree in international relations. Moving from the natural sciences to the social sciences with almost no grounding, he had to read furiously. He got through more than 1,000 pages of literature a week and more than 50 books a semester.

After finishing the degree in 1999, Tang Shiping returned to China and joined the Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. In his six years there he did a great deal of research, and also spent a year on secondment as assistant to the head of the foreign trade department of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. "A scholar should study fundamental, big questions. The question I care most about is why nations rise and fall. So I wanted to go to the poorest part of China and do some solid research," Tang Shiping said.

In late 2005, teaching a class at CASS, Tang Shiping made a boast: he would write four English-language monographs within 10 years. From 2006 to 2009 he was a senior research fellow at the school of international studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. In 2009 he returned to China, and has been a professor at Fudan University's School of International Relations and Public Affairs ever since. In 2016 the Ministry of Education named him a Changjiang Distinguished Professor.

Also in 2016, all four English books were finished. One of them, The Social Evolution of International Politics, published by Oxford University Press in 2013, set out the basic ideas of a social-evolution approach. Drawing on historical documents and archaeological evidence, and applying the core mechanism of social evolution — mutation, selection, inheritance — it traced three historic transformations of the international system: how humanity's Eden-like paradise turned into a Hobbesian world (offensive realism); how that Hobbesian world became, between 1648 and 1945, a more peaceful world of defensive realism; and how, after 1945, parts of the world became more rule-bound and more peaceful still.

Robert Jervis, the eminent scholar of international relations at Columbia University, praised the book: "In this insightful and important study, Tang Shiping shows how international relations actually evolve. In doing so he revises and reconciles many theories familiar to us, and brilliantly reinterprets the relationship among war, states, and society. A truly magnificent interpretation."

The Social Evolution of International Politics also won the International Studies Association's Book of the Year award, making Tang Shiping the first Asian scholar to take that prize. Founded in 1959, the ISA is the most respected and the largest association by membership in international studies, and one of the biggest social science research associations in the world.

A Chinese edition of the book came out in 2017. In the preface, Tang Shiping made another boast: "Over the next 10 years I will write four more English monographs. The first will be The Institutional Foundations of Economic Growth. I still hope that this time my deadline will not slip too far."

His Weibo handle, fittingly, is "Tang Shiping, Swordsman of Xiaoxiang," and his bio is as swaggering as ever, quoting the Tang dynasty poet Li Qiao's "Seeing Off Luo Fengli to the Army" (《送骆奉礼从军》): "His sword stirs the spirit of three armies; his robe trails dust across ten thousand li." Yet for all the swagger, Tang Shiping does not look down on everyone. He once wrote a series of essays called "Notes of Scholarly Gratitude," thanking senior scholars including Zhang Yunling, Yan Xuetong, and Wang Jisi — with, of course, "a little criticism" mixed in.

These days Tang Shiping works about 13 hours a day, takes no weekends off, and has lost none of his appetite for research. With like-minded scholars at Fudan University, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and elsewhere, he has set up a research group they jokingly call the "Wujiaochang School."

On the afternoon of January 26, 2018, we met him in the liberal arts building at Fudan University. We began with the big topics of the year just past. For China, Tang Shiping said, the event of 2017 with the longest reach into the future was the Chinese Communist Party's 19th National Congress.

"After the 19th Party Congress, the question is how far things can actually go. For China to rejuvenate and reach high income, the country still faces a great many difficulties and challenges. Second, after 2018, there is of course Trump and China. The United States has slowly started to move, treating China and Russia once again as its principal — whether you call them threats or competitors. How big the effect will be still has to be assessed, but I think the trend will hold," Tang Shiping told QDaily.

As for where all this leads, he said: "I'm neither optimistic nor pessimistic. China's problems depend mainly on China, though that doesn't mean the external environment is unimportant. At the very beginning of reform and opening up, China did need to join the Western world, or at least be accepted by it, before reform and opening up could happen. If you joined the Soviet camp, there was no market economy, and nothing you did would work. But China's size and its basic economic vitality now give it enough capacity to withstand a fair amount of outside pressure. Whether it withstands it well probably still depends on how our own internal reforms proceed."

This article is part of QDaily's interview with Professor Tang Shiping; further topics will appear in later installments of the series.

Q = QDaily

T = Tang Shiping

1. Six basic dimensions sustain an economy's growth — why can none of them be missing?

Q: In January the National Bureau of Statistics reported that China's GDP grew 6.9% in 2017, the first acceleration in seven years. How do you read that number? Why did it happen?

T: I don't really work on short-term growth; I work on the institutional foundations of growth, so I can only answer briefly. I think it comes down to three things. First, some of China's internal reforms may be slowly taking effect. Second, the external environment improved. The American and European economies are both recovering fairly strongly, and even Japan seems to be doing well. On the whole that is good for China. Third, there may be another favorable factor: energy prices are relatively low. For a big energy importer like China, that probably helps too.

Q: I've noticed you've been thinking about long-term growth for nearly 20 years. You're writing The Institutional Foundations of Economic Growth and have proposed a new theoretical framework. In your view, where should China improve if it wants faster growth? I remember you stress six basic dimensions. Could you go through them?

T: The theory is basically finished and the empirical work is largely done, but I'm still completing my fourth English book, so the fifth, The Institutional Foundations of Economic Growth, isn't written out in full. My core theory is that the institutional foundations able to support long-term growth have six major dimensions. My framework differs from much earlier research, which works purely by induction; mine is more deductive.

My starting question is this: why does a person create wealth? Or: how does a country encourage its people, permit its people, protect its people to create wealth? Put plainly, to understand the institutional foundations of economic growth is to answer that question. My answer is that those foundations have six major dimensions, and the dimensions act on one another — they are not independent.

The first is order and stability. People need stability, and stability encourages investment. So we call it political order. Order protects basic stability: no theft, no robbery, and so on.

The second is property rights, which are obviously fundamental, because they decide whether a person can expect the returns on his own effort. This is the part we call incentive. But I am critical of Douglass North and others for over-stressing property rights. Property rights are only one dimension of the institutional foundations of growth, however important.

The third dimension is incentive in the status market — the set of institutions governing social mobility. Property rights support the incentive mechanism in the market for material goods. But people also expect to rise in what we call the status market. Take a phrase widely used in China now: pin die, "competing on your father." Pin die is a bad thing. It discourages people from competing for good positions and doing what they are good at; it puts the emphasis on inheritance. Incentives in the status market are a very important dimension.

The fourth dimension is democratic institutions. But we stress that democracy's effect on growth is indirect, works through specific channels, and is conditional — above all on the level of economic development. Growth comes in stages. For a long stretch, many countries learn from developed countries; we call that "growth by imitation." China could probably rely on imitation for quite a while — the first 20 or 30 years after reform and opening up. Whatever others do, we copy, and do it more cheaply and more efficiently, and you grow.

But past a certain point, once GDP per capita is high, there is less and less left to imitate. That is the stage we call "growth that requires innovation." Then you need to protect innovation more, and a relatively democratic system is very useful. So when people compare China and India and conclude that India's democratic system holds back growth, that isn't a rigorous scientific argument. Many factors interact with the political system to make India's growth slower than China's. China may do many other things better than India, and so may grow more.

The fifth dimension is raising people's capabilities through redistribution. The aim of good redistribution is simple: to give people on low incomes, or born poor, a real chance to compete for good jobs and get a good education. On this point China did quite well in the early years of reform and opening up, or even further back with land reform. But there are plenty of problems now; the social classes have hardened.

The last dimension is equality of opportunity — whether you appoint people by connections or by merit. Lowering the college entrance exam thresholds for some ethnic minority regions, for instance, is a way of promoting equal opportunity. To rise in the material market and the status market, you first need a chance to enter the market at all, and institutional guarantees that the chance is the same for everyone.

2. Have we overstated "stability"? Is violence in modernization unavoidable?

Q: You just said order and stability matter a lot. Many establishment figures argue that if controls were loosened China would fall into chaos, so maintaining stability is crucial. What do you think?

T: Even people who support pouring huge resources into maintaining stability know that it is expensive. A good institutional system — and as I said, these six dimensions are a system — cannot stress one dimension and neglect another, or stress one and ignore all the rest. That is an unscientific way to argue. I keep saying the six dimensions form a system. At different stages different combinations of them can produce growth. But past a certain point, all six probably have to be in decent shape for growth to continue.

So on the stability dimension, the best system is one that does not keep stability at too high a cost. If the cost is too high, money that should go to education, infrastructure, and better health care goes to maintaining stability instead. Keeping order mainly through the machinery of violence is very expensive. A good system keeps stability cheaply, which is plainly good for growth.

I therefore believe at least some degree of democratization would do China's future a great deal of good. Done well, it should not produce large-scale political disorder. Many people either misunderstand democracy or simply don't want it, and so they insist that democracy must bring unrest. It doesn't. In fact, plenty of democratizations have happened without civil disorder.

Q: Your work on how the modern world was formed bears this out, with cases from many countries.

T: Yes. I often use an analogy: modernization is an island. So far only about 30 countries have swum ashore. More than 100 others are still swimming toward it. And some are not merely stranded mid-ocean clinging to a rock; some may already have drowned. On the whole the road to modernization is a winding one. Most countries' experience has been winding. A few have been lucky — Britain, as we usually say, was relatively lucky.

Looking at the process as a whole, modernization does not have to come through violence. But very often it has come with a great deal of violence. The reason violence seems to be what moves modernization along is that the fight over who controls the path of modernization produces violence. China's 1911 Revolution, and later the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists, both grew out of disagreements about how China should modernize — not out of any need for violence in modernization itself.

Another thing I want to stress: violence arises in modernization so often because politicians and political groups fail to build a democratic, or peaceful, system for transferring power. So they settle matters by force instead. People who believe modernization must involve violence have the causation backwards, or at least have it wrong.

3. What role does the middle class play in modernization?

Q: Chinese society is also in transition. The traditional theory holds that over the long run economic development lays the foundation for a modern democratic system, because development produces a middle class, which becomes more conscious of its rights and pushes the transition along. Applied to China, that theory doesn't seem to fit. Do you have any observations about China's middle class?

T: I think the Lipset-style theory, or middle-class theory, assumes far too readily that the transition will be "natural," that it will simply ripen on its own. That is certainly a problem. Of course, China today has come a long way from the Cultural Revolution or the Anti-Rightist Campaign. We call it liberalization — a degree of loosening. It just hasn't arrived at a reasonably complete enlightened polity.

As to whether the theory fits China, that mainly depends on China's own development. China has really only been doing economic development for the past 40 years. We can say the 30 years before that laid certain foundations, but overall China's economic development is still quite incomplete, and a large part of the population has not entered anything you could call middle-class life.

Q: What do you think will be the key forces driving China's modernization transition?

T: The driving forces are the usual ones. One is the leadership. Is the Chinese Communist Party itself willing to push democratization? That obviously matters a great deal, because democratization from the top down tends to be gentler. Another force is the middle class, the intellectual elite, and the people who control large economic and financial resources. And one more force matters. Here we still have to agree with some of what Marx and Engels argued: the working class, and even the peasants, are important forces too.

So I don't think China's democratization can be settled in advance by any a priori method. But I suspect that many people in intellectual circles, and I would say the broad public as well, hope for a relatively gentle change rather than a violently unsettled one.

4. Why the government cannot stop at technological innovation — the real test is institutional innovation

Q: You said different stages of development need different institutional foundations, and that what China needs now is innovation-driven growth. Everyone knows Schumpeter's creative destruction. But in your view that kind of creative destruction never took hold in China; there was only imitation. In future, good growth can only come from disruptive innovation. What does the government need to do — protect innovation, for instance?

T: First, to be clear: the innovation-driven growth I mean is broader than Schumpeter's. In economics, innovation usually means technological innovation. But I think institutional innovation matters as much as technology. Both kinds are necessary. So innovation, as I use the word, covers both institutions and technology.

What innovation needs most is an environment that protects it. China is now reasonably good at protecting technological innovation. Do technological innovation and you are usually protected, though also restricted. We recently applied for a patent, for example, and were turned down — not over any technical problem, but a political one. News like that leaves me not knowing whether to laugh or cry, because we work in social science, which is not quite like making some electronic gadget.

But the more critical constraint, and one China will feel more and more, is the constraint on institutional innovation. How easy it is to start a company, as we often say, is an important measure. On things like that you can plainly see that under some of our existing institutional arrangements certain innovations are not encouraged, or are at least difficult — institutional innovations above all.

It is usually easier for the government to drive institutional innovation. But the government does not always have good enough information. More important, if only the government is allowed to drive it, innovation from the bottom up becomes very hard. Hayek and Karl Popper both made the point that no one can know all the information. So depending entirely on top-down institutional innovation is a problem.

We have to acknowledge that top-down institutional innovation, or top-level design, is certainly important. But we cannot stress top-level design alone. We must also let people and organizations at the bottom do some innovating. Their innovations may solve real problems better, and at lower cost.

5. Industrial policy needs a strong society, not just a strong government — why top-level design alone isn't enough

Q: You said in an earlier interview: "To discuss industrial policy without discussing institutions is to dodge political reality, because without good institutions good policy is almost impossible. And to discuss institutions without considering industrial policy is to ignore history, because almost every country's economic development has required industrial policy; the question is whether the industrial policy is good or bad. Likewise, some people like to argue about whether the government or society should be strong. In fact we need both a strong government and a strong society. The question is where the government should intervene, where it should not, and how much. These are all concrete questions." Could you say more about both sides of this, with examples you think matter for the public interest?

T: Scholarship on industrial policy is still not sufficient, and we are trying to push the research forward. Broadly, I think judging an industrial policy takes at least three basic dimensions.

The first is time. How long does an industrial policy take to work? A lot of people forget this. Some industrial policies genuinely need five or ten years before you can tell whether they succeeded.

The second is how you measure success. We generally use total factor productivity, or market share, or competitiveness. I think that is an important approach.

The third is cost. If the return is smaller than the outlay, it is of course a failure.

But even after measuring along those three dimensions, there is still a problem from an econometric standpoint: how can you be sure that an industry's success or failure has anything to do with the industrial policy? There are many technical issues here, and our current research is working on them.

From our results so far, some of China's industrial policies should be counted as successful, but a considerable share may not have had much effect. We are still looking into why, and the research isn't finished, so I don't dare say too much.

We should acknowledge that in particular times and places industrial policy is certainly useful. But I don't think everything should be packed into industrial policy either. Good industrial policy is not a planned economy. I also think a good many Chinese industries lean too heavily on state-owned enterprises, which may not be especially efficient.

Discussing industrial policy also means you must discuss the institutional system and the improvement of macroeconomic policy. All three affect growth. Yet many people today discuss industrial policy and drop institutional reform, or discuss institutional reform and assume industrial policy is out of the question. That seems one-sided to me. An argument should not end with one camp rejecting everything correct or useful in the other.

6. Are globalization and liberal institutions going into reverse?

Q: In recent years many people feel the whole world — China, the United States, Europe — is turning more extreme and more closed. Liberal democracy has run into trouble in many Western countries, and globalization is reversing. How does it look to you, and why has it come to this?

T: First, we Chinese have a saying: the road is a winding one. Often we read history superficially and picture modernization as a straight broad highway. It is not. There have been many defeats. As I said, many countries may already have been defeated — drowned, gone, or sunk — and some may still be struggling to keep swimming. So I don't find this kind of backsliding especially surprising. By "not surprising" I mean that we, as people who observe the world, should not be surprised.

That doesn't mean we — the public, politicians, companies alike — should not face these problems squarely. They have to be faced. There has already been a great deal of superficial discussion of them, and I may not have much new to add.

The first point, and the one most often made, especially about developed countries, is a paradox: a high-welfare society plus globalization, and in particular the shift of low-end production to developing countries, has caused "re-impoverishment" inside the developed world. Many people lost their jobs, or cannot find suitable ones, because their work went to people on lower wages. They fall back into — or rather, sink back into — the poverty they had already climbed out of. That is bound to produce a great deal of anger.

We have to acknowledge it. For developed countries in particular this is a clear challenge, and one that may last a while. Its root is that in the good times they built a very strong welfare state. Once people have received higher benefits they are certainly unwilling to see them cut. And "re-impoverishment" is more frightening still. This is something developed countries have to confront.

Second, the new inequality within developed countries is partly related to globalization, but not entirely caused by it. To a considerable degree it comes from national tax policy, financial policy, and the like, all of which make it easier for people with money to make more. Say two people start out, one with $10,000 and one with $50,000. Ten years later the first has an income of $20,000 and the second has an income of $500,000. The gap keeps widening. This is the problem Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century describes.

The third reason, I think, really does have to do with the Western world's overconfident insistence, or slightly proud belief, that it can change the world. Changing the world has never been that easy. Their interventions abroad, for instance, produced a great many refugees and civilian deaths. Those refugees poured into Europe and pushed Europe toward what people call conservatism. Those are the three fairly obvious reasons. We have criticized this neo-imperialist approach in many places.

7. When we are confident and proud, how do we stay clear-eyed about what the world thinks of us?

T: About developing countries I'm less sure. It may hold for China's data, but whether it holds for other developing countries I don't really know. What I would say is that young Chinese, some of them, are becoming increasingly nationalist. I think there are roughly three reasons.

The first is China's growing national strength. Many of the young Chinese who can now travel abroad come from the coast, or from relatively high-income places. They don't really know the hard and winding road China once walked, so it is easy for them to feel China is already a very rich country. And when outsiders say something bad about China — criticizing the economy, or even certain political flaws — they get very angry. That is easy to understand. When a person feels good about himself, he does not take criticism easily.

The second reason is that some criticism from abroad genuinely is not well meant. It may really come from resenting a stronger China. We have to admit that too.

The third reason may be that Chinese media and foreign media have come to depend on each other. We usually pay attention to only two kinds of news about others: that China is wonderful, or that China is terrible. In the age of the phone, most people will not read a long study carefully, or even a long piece of in-depth reporting. What they read is short — you read the headline and you're done. So a good part of what things appear to be may not reflect how they actually are; it is the result of media amplification.

8. Why no assessment of Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening up can be too high

Q: 2018 is the 40th anniversary of reform and opening up. Looking back over those 40 years, what strikes you most? I remember you have written a lot on this, for instance "China Is a Not Especially Successful 'Developmental State'".

T: That piece did not say China is unsuccessful; it said China is not the most successful. Put it this way: we have spent 40 years and still have not reached OECD levels. South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan took 30 or 40 years to enter the ranks of OECD countries and regions. We still have a long way to go.

I certainly hold reform and opening up in the highest regard. I have said many times that in the last century all of East Asia produced only three world-class leaders: Deng Xiaoping, Lee Kuan Yew, and Shigeru Yoshida. What Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening up meant for China cannot be overstated.

But we now need to revisit and truly understand what reform and opening up was. We must be clear that Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening up was, at bottom, a return to Adam Smith. Unfortunately Adam Smith published his book in 1776, and Deng Xiaoping could only bring a market economy to China in 1978. Still, the return was necessary. Today far too many people, far too often, want to blaze an entirely unique path to modernization. I think that is a problem. I said modernization is an island; we can see all around us a crowd who have drowned and a crowd who are finished. What does that tell us? It tells us that many routes lead nowhere — for instance, any route without a market economy.

So should we still learn from other people's experience? Of course. Truly good reform and opening up means sparing yourself the mistakes, taking the lessons from other people's failures and other people's experience, so that our society's march toward modernization costs less and returns more. That is good for the country and good for the people.

Q: But some people think no lessons are being learned at all — that there is neither reform nor opening up — and find that worrying.

T: I wouldn't go so far as to say there is neither. Reform is still under way, and opening up continues in some areas. But the questions we really need to ask are these. First, is the direction right? Second, is the progress enough? Third, do these policies have some continuity, some stability?

What worries China most right now, and worries its people, foreign investors, and Chinese entrepreneurs alike, is whether that continuity will hold. The government can make promises, but are the promises credible? If the law can be changed today and changed again tomorrow, that certainly affects a lot of investors.

Q: Is there anything about society today you would warn about, or that worries you?

T: One of the most frightening possibilities is that China's wealthy lose confidence in the whole system. The government can of course use all sorts of controls to limit the outflow of wealth. But that still does not solve the incentive problem for investors, because wealth that is not invested merely collects interest; it does not work as capital. Wealth is not the same thing as capital.

So what worries me is that China's wealthy will stop believing this system can deliver returns for them. To fix that, the government has to make its commitments credible, and the direction of reform has to be right.

(Further reporting to come.)

The person featured in this report:

Tang Shiping: professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University. His books include The Social Evolution of International Politics and A General Theory of Institutional Change.

He says: "China is only one member of the 'developmental state' club, and not even its most successful member. Talking about a 'China model' at the drop of a hat is a frightening kind of pride."

Cover image: a still from the film Bridge of Spies, from Douban