Wang Huning's Analysis of Politics, Schooling and the Family in America

Part IV of 'An American reads America against America'

[Photo Credit: By Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Wang Huning, chief advisor to the Communist Party of China under Xi Jinping (a role he reprises from the governments of the prior two presidents), is the author of America against America, a book I’ve been reviewing for Landmarks in several parts. In the first three parts of this series, I have surveyed the book’s historical context, its analysis of American culture, economy and non-political mechanisms of technocratic control. In the present piece, I will examine Wang Huning’s treatment of our politics. For clarity’s sake: Wang Huning takes a much broader view of politics than we are accustomed to. He views American schools and American family policy as being part of our political structure, and sees the choices we make in these realms as political choices, not merely individual ones. This difference in perspective itself (that Americans treat family life as non-political, or as a matter of individual preference or taste) is a considerable part of his argumentative thrust in the latter third of the book. Yet in order to understand this argumentation, we have to accept Wang’s premise that neither the school nor even the family is politically neutral!

Up to this point, Wang’s impressions and examinations of American life took on an objective, academically neutral, even cautiously-admiring tone. There were, to be sure, a few exceptions – for example, in regard to America’s cultural penchant for sexual permissiveness, or its overweening regulatory culture. In his discussion of the United States’ political system, however, Wang Huning’s tenor becomes considerably more critical.

Wang takes the view, broadly speaking, that America’s political system is ingeniously, mechanically mapped onto its neophile cultural outlook, and its faith that technocratic solutions can be found for all of humanity’s perennial problems. In the context of Wang’s political commentary,

N.S. Lyons

is no doubt correct to read him as an impassioned advocate for a rival civilization. All the same, I would caution readers that Wang Huning does not make any aggressive policy recommendations to undermine American society. Rather, in identifying the latter’s structural weaknesses, he is offering advice to the Chinese government about how best not to fall into the same pitfalls.

II. The American Political System

To begin with, Wang Huning takes note of the peculiarities of America’s duopoly system. In his view, the two major American political parties (Republicans and Democrats) are not really ‘parties’ in the sense of the word Chinese Communists would recognize. They are loosely organized. Their membership is fluid, depending on voter registration. They don’t hold regular party meetings or events for their membership (though they do host lavish parties for their donors!). Their platforms read like kitchen-sink appeals to as broad a section of the public as they can hope to capture through votes. Indeed, Wang argues that American parties behave more like coalitions of parties than like parties tout court.

He allows that such fluidity of structure and membership can be a strength. Their lack of formal structure and party discipline allows the duopoly parties to act as ‘big tents’. Wang attributes this flexibility to American philosophical pragmatism: parties market themselves as brands which can fix particular problems in American public life. Yet the ‘profit motive’ for these political brands depends on political appointments to civil service positions like cabinet seats, deputyships, ambassadorships, committee seats and judicial positions, and the parties themselves sustain themselves on the ‘fat’ of the machinery of the American government. The electoral commission at the federal level is designed to prevent such rentier behavior, but it doesn’t succeed. The result, according to Wang, is a functional ‘one-party dictatorship’ where the dictatorship rotates with successive elections. Such is his stark characterization of the U.S. political system!

His treatment of interest groups follows along similar lines. He notes that the government relies on political pressure groups to act as a proxy for, and to inform it about, which substantial issues contribute to the ‘public interest’. As such, interest groups are accorded an immense degree of power within the government, and can form little quasi-governments of their own, with the power to allocate and organize professional and scientific knowledge, set standards and rules and even allocate public funds. Lobbyists, or to use Wang’s preferred term ‘lay advocates’ (lebianshi乐辩士), represent these interest groups to legislators and different levels of government, including local ones. They rely on their power of suasion to influence public policy in the direction they want.

Wang resists the temptation to call this kind of politics ‘dirty.’ In his view, it’s simply a logical outgrowth of America’s voluntaristic and individualistic assumptions about what constitutes Rousseau’s ‘general will.’ He nonetheless notices where the system produces distortions. Wang notes the outsized influence, for example, of AIPAC—the Israeli lobby—on American foreign policy even back in 1989, nearly two decades before John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote their famous book on the subject. But this is an outcome which follows logically from the treatment of politics as a ‘marketplace of ideas’ in which two duopolistic political ‘brands’ compete for votes—and just as with corporate branding, the Republican and Democratic parties curate their brand to the public by their association with particular sets of interest groups.

From here, Wang begins to ask the question of how democratic the American political system actually is—and if it is, what character does it have? He identifies three analytical ‘camps’ who take different approaches to this question. The first camp, the political pluralists, is associated with David Truman and Robert Dahl. The second camp, the political elitists, is associated with Ted Lowi, Ralph Miliband and Thomas Dye. And the third camp, the political participation-advocates, is associated with Alvin Toffler, John Naisbitt and Harlan Cleveland.

In general, Wang breaks down their differences as follows. The pluralists tend to explain American interest-group politics as stemming from its tradition of diversity. There is an emphasis on America as a nation of immigrants, as well as an emphasis on the legal doctrine of the separation of powers to ensure not only that no one branch of government can dominate the others, but also that no possible majority or coalition can run roughshod over everyone else. The elitists, on the other hand, point to the control of critical government functions by power elites who represent concentrations of industrial or financial capital, as the impetus for the formation of political pressure groups. Wang is careful to point out that this ‘elitism’ is merely an analytical stance, not a normative one: those who hold to it are sharply divided over whether or not this elite control over American public life is salutary or desirable. And the third group, the participation-advocates, hold the view that American public life is in the midst of a rapid and irreversible sea change. Their view is that technological advances such as mass broadcast media and the rapid development of information technology will lead to equally broad leaps that will transform American political life in the direction of direct democracy and greater civic awareness.

Wang is agnostic between the pluralists and the elitists, but he treats the Prometheanism of Toffler, Naisbitt and Cleveland with profound skepticism. He doesn’t doubt the power of technocracy or the pace of technological advance in driving political transformation, but he remarks that telecommunication advances tend toward greater centralisation in politics, just as it has in economic life. Just as big finance capital has tended to concentrate more rapidly in fewer hands with the advent of telecommunications, so too will political capital.

The election of 1988, between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, is given as the exemplar. The campaign debates were framed in terms of perceptions, and at that, perceptions of strength or weakness as defined in front of a television camera. Spectacle and conflict were framed as more important than the substance of their policy differences. Both candidates were offering prepackaged products to voters, and assembling coalitions around a relatively select set of issues that could be communicated in thirty-second sound-bites, which could be either segments of a debate or literal campaign advertisements on television. Wang notes that the campaign spending for each candidate ranged into the multiple millions of dollars in 1988, thus prohibiting any kind of challenge for a third party and creating conditions of market oligopoly. Such funds had to be raised through special dinners arranged for donors, in which money is exchanged for ‘networking’ clout—and Wang notes in passing that such an incentive structure means interest group organization at lower levels actually aids party cohesion at higher levels. It seems he at once admires and deplores this development: he describes the coordination and technical prowess of the campaigns as ‘wonderful,’ but notes that the techniques contribute, ultimately, to a ‘dysfunctional’ democracy.

Wang’s final observation in describing our political system is sobering. He holds that the cynical spectacle of electioneering actually undermines democracy far more than despotism can, and warns that common values and civic patriotism are the spiritual glue that holds America together. In the end, the procedure of elections, when it takes on such a cynical and appearances-obsessed form as the 1988 presidential election, can serve to dissolve and weaken that glue.

Even so, the structure of the American government is of particular interest to Wang Huning. In particular, he is captivated and speaks in an admiring tone of its capacity for experimentation, and he cites the federalist crucible of governmental experimentation as a distinct American strength. A lengthy chunk of the latter half of America against America is dedicated to exploring the diversity of governance systems he sees in different American locales and levels of administration. He speaks of the distinction between states with strong governors and states with weak governors; counties with executive versus administrative models; and cities in which the mayor wields more power than the city council and vice versa. For his Chinese audience, he makes the clarification that municipal government in America is at a lower administrative level than the county government. In China, the reverse is true: cities (shi 市) are at a higher administrative level than counties (xian 县).

III. Intermediate Social Scaffolding

Wang Huning also examines structures of the lower levels of government, including administrative services and bureaus on the city level, that serve the interests of social control. He explores the roles played by departments of transportation, chambers of commerce, departments of human services, public schools, libraries, museums, think tanks and even churches. I found it intriguing that Wang categorizes American religious institutions as a crypto-governance system, yet his rationale for doing so (however offensive it may be to American sensibilities, with our constitutional notion of church-state separation) is sound. We will return to this theme a bit later.

Departments of transportation have a surprisingly high degree of power. The ability to issue driver’s licenses which are applicable identification cards throughout the country, with only slightly less official power than a passport, is in fact quite remarkable. The complex database systems used by departments of transportation (DOTs) throughout the country are shared routinely with police departments and the offices of (elected!) sheriffs, and are invaluable aids to tracking, pursuing and capturing malefactors. Wang cites this as an example of ‘soft’ technocratic control. Americans would be highly suspicious of police-issued papers, but not ones issued by a department of transportation—even though all the information that the DOT collects is passed on with little fuss to police departments anyway.

Wang’s communist bona fides show, however, when he examines the structure of American workplaces and places of business. The workplaces he visits in Iowa are not democratically run, though there is often a façade of worker buy-in through stock options. Managers are allowed to make demands on lower-level employees with impunity, and are given broad discretion in hiring and firing decisions. He characterizes the management style as unforgiving and task-oriented in the extreme. The workers he observed and talked with in an Iowa factory were often physically exhausted, and didn’t know how to—or couldn’t—make their voices heard. His lack of mention of labour unions is particularly glaring.

His approach becomes very similar to that of sociologist Fei Xiaotong when he contrasts this with Chinese workplaces. He has no nationalistic illusions about Chinese businesses being any more democratic than American ones, but he notes that both the structure and the managerial style in East Asian firms are much more flexible. Relationships are considered as important as performance, creating a people-oriented rather than task-oriented atmosphere. The weakness of this system, Wang owns, is that it breeds nepotism in hiring and promotion decisions. But workers are far less stressed and can speak far more freely about work conditions in a Chinese workplace. Although he doesn’t use these exact terms, what Wang is describing is precisely Fei Xiaotong’s distinction, in his landmark sociological study From the Soil, between East Asia’s chaxu geju 差序格局 ‘differential mode of association’ and the Western tuanti geju 团体格局 ‘organizational mode of association.’

One workplace that Wang Huning visited during his stay in the United States was the headquarters of Coca-Cola in Atlanta, Georgia. There were notable works of art displayed in a gallery in the foyer, which the docent described as being company investments: they were bought by the corporation and would be resold after having appreciated in value. Several of these artworks were Coca-Cola’s own advertisements. One display in that gallery consisted of celebrities and pretty girls shown holding bottles of Coke, and another display, of US presidents doing the same. Coca-Cola’s executives understood very early and very well the importance of leveraging the power of celebrity. The success story of Coca-Cola was not one of competition in an open market! Wang Huning was told, quite proudly, that Coca-Cola invested a great deal of its money into educational institutions such as Emory University, as well as into think-tanks like the Brookings Institution. These were not charitable contributions. The cultivation of political and cultural and educational assets was key to Coca-Cola’s strategy on its way up from a small workshop bottling sugary fizzy drinks to a globe-striding commercial empire with a brand immediately recognizable anywhere on the globe.

Speaking of the Brookings Institution, this was one of several organizations which Wang Huning profiled in his section on think tanks, or as he preferred to call them, sixiang gongchang 思想工厂 ‘thought factories’. Wang understands these institutions as a merger of intelligence services, private capital and young college graduates trying to get their names in print. Despite their being organized as non-profits, they are run exactly like industrial corporations. Again Tocqueville is cited as the oracle of the ‘thought factory’: he was able to foresee that the ‘marketplace of ideas’ would see the American traditions of debate and oratory merge with its entrepreneurial spirit. Corporations come to dominate this sphere as well, oriented toward one or other of the two political brands.

Such a capitalist structure, organized in such a top-down fashion and with winners and losers being selected on political grounds, has had to adopt safety valves as a means of managing the populace. One of these safety valves is the institution of social welfare. Wang traces the use of social spending as a safety valve for social distortions or market failures produced by capitalism, back to the relief programs instituted by the Stuart dynasty in England in the 1600s, in the wake of the enclosures. But in an American context, Wang also studies how the priorities and division of labor within departments of human services serve to bolster and propagate American values. The mission statements of the human services administrations he visited were heavily focused on encouraging the integrity of the nuclear family, but also on preserving claimants’ personal privacy and decision-making autonomy.

IV. Children, Churches and Schools (Kinder, Kirche, Schule)

Another such safety valve is the institution of the American church. One would not expect a top thinker of the Communist Party of China to speak highly of the American church, yet Wang talks of it in complimentary terms. He remarks that, although not all Americans are religious, and although religion in America is highly individualistic in expression (there being a massive plethora of denominations and varieties of places of worship), the function of religion in American society serves to encourage personal generosity and charitable giving. For the benefit of his audience back home, he draws a sharp distinction between religion and superstition, which he defines as a degrading fatalistic belief in forces beyond one’s control, and also between religion and the cultus of state. He also distinguishes his admiration for American religious institutions from the instrumentalism of Plato and Rousseau. Wang realizes that religion is not merely a tool for maintaining social control, but a vehicle for encouraging self-cultivation and the propagation of humane values. He does acknowledge, nonetheless, that abuses and cultic behavior exist, and gives the Jim Jones cult as the contemporary go-to example of a xiejiao 邪教 or ‘evil religion’.

Wang Huning’s treatment of American schools and museums alternates between admiration and alarm. He characterizes American society as ‘a paradise for the children, a battleground for the youth, and a hell for the elderly.’ Wang remarks on the overwhelming amount of effort, attention and political and social capital that gets spent on education, and views it as a vehicle for reproducing our ideological structure. Education is the primary battleground between the forces of American progressivism and conservatism. It also serves as the most notable form of American ‘soft power’ abroad: universities boast of the attraction they hold for foreign exchange students, and takes pride in the many degree-holders they have all around the world. Education is also seen as the primary vehicle and prop of the American class structure (which lacks the formal heredity character of those in Europe). Universities are powerhouses of research, including social research. Schools—both high schools and universities—are training-grounds for America’s national sport: football. Wang Huning notes the degree of patriotism and civic pride that gets poured into, not only America’s pro football teams, but also our college and even high school teams, with performances of the national anthem, remembrance of veterans, and the public proclamation of military honors. Football, and its accompanying commentary in broadcast media, showcases America’s social values of honor and physical prowess as well as our outspokenness.

He is full of praise for America’s public library system. He notes that Ancient China had a remarkable depth of knowledge, but very few vehicles for the public promulgation of those ideas. Modern China, having taken its queues from the ancients, has built a library system but still treats knowledge in a bureaucratic fashion, not allowing for free dissemination. American university and public library systems serve not only as repositories of information, but also disseminate that information rapidly, and free of charge! Libraries share materials to such a degree that Wang Huning compares them to the Roman aqueduct system. He praises their openness as key to their operational success: they collect as many and as varied resources as they can, and then distribute them broadly so that Americans of all walks of life can benefit from them. He appreciates how libraries double as public computer and printer services, public job boards and employment centers, places for children’s enrichment and recreation, venues for public events of a civic character, and as social equalizers in non-metropole small towns and medium-sized cities.

America’s success story as a nation, Wang concludes, taking the institution of the local public library as his point of reference, is not just the story of New York and San Francisco. It’s the story of thousands of small towns and mid-tier cities—aided by libraries, public transit, experimentation in municipal government and local investment in manufacturing. America’s civilizational triumph was the experiment of the New England town hall and the Midwestern main street. The tight mesh of civic and business institutions on a local level was what allowed for rising standards of living throughout the country rather than just in the megalopolises on the coasts.

V. Undercurrents of Crisis

In the last part of America against America, Wang highlights the ‘undercurrents of crisis’ which undercut the bedrock of American liberalism and he then draws from this discussion some cautionary tales for his Chinese readers. Here is where I can distinctly see where Lyons is coming from when he describes Wang as a ‘dark visionary’. Wang is eager to note the weaknesses in the American model in order to steer the Chinese ship of state clear of them.

The most fundamental fault line in American society, Wang tells his readers, is the structure of the American family. His characterization of American marital habits and parenting styles is drawn from his observations of Americans’ individualistic habits. Americans are trained not to share an entire social life with a spouse, but rather to manage their social lives separately from each other, to occupy their own individual ‘fortresses’ of life in respect of each other’s privacy.

As an aside, I take a certain degree of exception to this characterization, at least as far as the older generations of Chinese are concerned. Fei Xiaotong’s observation was, and I tend to agree with him, that Chinese spouses are far better at compartmentalizing home life separately from public life. The segregation of the sexes allowed for more of a Chinese man’s social space to be devoted to male friendships, and more of a Chinese woman’s to female friendships. As a result, Fei noted, Chinese marriages tended to place a lot less psychological weight on a spouse than Western marriages do. Chinese couples, while not discounting love and sexual compatibility, particularly after the Mao era, didn’t expect to be ‘soulmates’… and thus their marriages tended to be more stable.

Where Wang’s observations tend to hold more merit, at least for me, is in his characterization of Americans’ parenting style. Americans tend to be far more ‘hands off’ with their children than Chinese parents. American children typically stop sleeping in the same room as their parents at the age of one; they are then shunted off to their own space. American children are given an allowance starting at a far earlier age than Chinese parents do. Time was when we would expect them to get jobs mowing lawns, having paper routes or babysitting by the age of thirteen. Chinese parents would be expecting their children to devote themselves to study at this time. And by the age of eighteen or twenty-one, we would expect them to move out of the house and strike out on their own; Chinese college students typically move back in with their parents after graduation. American attitudes toward dating are equally cavalier in comparison with Chinese ones. Chinese parents typically set their kids up with dates. But American parents are frowned on, thought of as ‘square’ or patriarchal or domineering, for any such attempt to ‘pry’ into their teenage kids’ private lives. Children might bring dates home to meet the parents, but only if things get ‘serious.’

Wang concludes that this dynamic leads to children leaving their parents alone in their old age. Parents are not expected to move in with their adult kids when they retire, but instead go to a retirement home and rely on social security or welfare. To the Chinese sensibility—and here Wang Huning agrees with Fei Xiaotong, the father of Chinese sociology—this state-of-affairs is intolerably cruel. This is why he calls America ‘a hell for the elderly.’ The big question facing the American technocracy is whether the individual is the fundamental unit of society, or whether the family is. American society had already made its choice: the opposite choice from that, cited by Wang, made in 1989 by Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew. Lee Kuan Yew chose to use his burgeoning technocracy to promote Confucian values and filial piety. America seems to be deciding to fashion a grand experiment in a technological society based on lust, personal fulfillment and egocentric pursuits. Wang holds it as an open question as to whether such a society can survive.

Wang sees such an individualistic choice already putting strain on the American education system: which, again, he sees as a political institution. Despite U.S. universities still being world-class engines of enlightenment, its high schools are notoriously failing and producing prodigies of ignorance. Why? Wang Huning notes several factors contributing to American secondary educational malaise. The first is the cult of celebrity. Students’ attention in the age of broadcast television—and even more in the age of large language model AI and YouTube, now TikTok and Instagram, ‘influencers’—is all on the idols of the screen. It isn’t on their own history, geography, literature or scientific achievements. The second is a degradation of morals. The failure of schools to inculcate personal virtues has long been a conservative complaint about public schools, but even teachers in liberal suburban Minneapolis can be heard complaining about students’ lack of shame about blatant academic fraud. And the third is a disconnect of schooling from practical life skills. The U.S. secondary schooling system teaches fact-regurgitation, when what students consistently demand is learning how to keep track of a credit card, how to cook, how to fix a car, how to take care of an apartment.

Wang Huning takes account of the various perspectives on why the primary and secondary schools are failing American kids. Teachers say they aren’t paid enough… and that’s true. Parents say they’re overworked, overstressed, and can’t keep track of school obligations for their kids… and that’s true, too. Administrators complain that schools are underfunded… and, guess what—that’s also true. But Wang says these are all small parts of an incomplete picture. American culture places a great deal of emphasis on chasing money, prestige and instant gratification. When kids grow up immersed in such a culture, they’re a lot less likely to want to sit still to acquire wisdom, which they can’t see the point of, and which the society doesn’t value anyway.

A culture of pervasive individualism combined with a lack of expectation of restraint leads to a plethora of other evils which Wang cites as emblematic of America’s ‘undercurrents of crisis’: single parenthood, divorce, drugs, teenage delinquency, organized crime and homelessness. The individualistic strain in American society, expecting children to make their own decisions like a mature adult at the age of eighteen, leads to decisions—like frequent divorce or bearing children out of wedlock—which come at a high social cost. Broken teens become broken parents to broken children, who repeat cycles of generational abuse. Wang notes the Reagan-era ‘war on drugs’ with a degree of skeptical approval, but (based on his observations about America’s sexual permissiveness) fears that a libertarian notion that drug use is ‘victimless’ and thus should not be seen as a crime will take hold. In 1989, that view was not mainstream. Today, it is.

Wang Huning also touches on race relations, though his observations in 1989 might seem rather tame in comparison with the vitriolic and spiteful missives penned by race (and ‘anti-racist’) theorists during the ascendancy of ‘woke’ in the mid- to late-2010s. But his points are valid. American society has a legacy of treating black people as inferior spanning the period of slavery, Jim Crow, and more recent informal forms of discrimination such as redlining, white flight and gentrification—all of which Wang mentions. Residential discrimination translates into less money for public education, which translates into fewer economic opportunities and lower cultural status for black Americans. Black Americans are thereupon regarded as a criminal element. Wang Huning predicted, as a logical outcome of the partial attempts at redressing these wrongs, that there would come an ‘anti-blackness’ backlash fueled by white resentment. Since 2019, for example, there have been more and more aggressive attempts in American schools and workplaces to enforce inclusion and equity awareness policies. In response, in 2022, the Florida legislature passed a law that banned teachers from discussing slavery in a historical context; this law was overturned as unconstitutional by the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2024.

With regard to the rights of America’s indigenous peoples, one might expect Wang, as a Chinese commentator, to stress the racial similarities of East Asians with American Indians, but Wang Huning does not make such a comparison. He dismisses the ‘Clovis First’ theory as nonsense, and states (correctly) that we’ve known since 1925 that the Indians have been here for over 20,000 years. He lambastes in particular the liberal veneer of ‘tolerance’ for the Indian that in fact masks a deep contempt; and holds that where Tocqueville said ‘Heaven did not make them civilized, they were doomed to die,’ the modern American liberal believes that ‘God did not make them rich, they are doomed to be poor.’ He draws a sharp line between the racial treatment meted out to blacks versus that to Indians. While blacks were systematically excluded from the education, jobs and infrastructure afforded to whites, those same systems were forced unwanted onto the Indians. The results of this attempt at assimilation into liberal white American society, Wang Huning says, are obvious: mass alcoholism and rampant rates of suicide and unemployment.

Given all of what comes before, it may strike the reader as odd that Wang Huning spends the closing pages of his book writing in glowing terms about the American cultural critic Allan Bloom, author of the 1987 best-seller The Closing of the American Mind. Wang Huning offers nothing but unqualified praise for Bloom’s culturally conservative thesis: that universities have become breeding grounds for moral relativism, that they have ceded the ground to a pop cultural ethos based on unthinking consumption and instant gratification, and that they are beginning to promote a relativism of values which will find no endpoint until it has leveled all values to the ground, leaving only a bleak cultural nihilism in its wake. Wang Huning fears that American culture is indeed barreling down this very track with no off-ramp.

When President Xi Jinping decries the‘historical nihilism’among China’s intelligentsia, as he has done regularly since 2013, he is thus actually quoting Allan Bloom, as filtered through Wang Huning’s commentary. (One wonders what Bloom himself would think of the leader of a Marxist-Leninist party-state citing his work this way!) Wang’s analysis here is clearly indebted to Fei Xiaotong’s sociological analysis in From the Soil, even in the places where he is militating against its conclusions. But his focus on culture in America against America is evident in many of the subsequent turns that Chinese public policy has taken over the last 30 years: from the attempts at building domestic ‘soft power’ to the international project of the Belt and Road Initiative. The propagation of a ‘China model’, with a single party-state model, state-supervised markets, and a moderate-to-conservative approach to culture, has taken shape largely under Wang’s tutelage. That Wang’s thesis is a challenge to the Washington consensus is obvious; that it ought to be considered seriously by American sociologists and students of culture ought to be clear; what is less clear is that it is a direct and hostile threat to American interests.