The Cultural Ceiling Behind China's Economic Malaise

As 2023 drew to a close, the economic rebound China had waited for all year had not arrived. Instead, a crisis seemed to be moving closer. Explanations were everywhere, but few struck the point I cared about.

My argument in one sentence: China's economic problem comes from the way the upward drive within Chinese culture eventually converges.

Look at Chinese history. Long-lived dynasties, especially those lasting more than two hundred years, often followed a wave: growth, plateau, turmoil, decline, then another cycle.

Why? Because Chinese culture does not provide enough spiritual nourishment at the top end.

For most Chinese people, "living a life" and then "living a good life" are the central pursuit. Anyone whose life goal is economic belongs in this group, including Jack Ma. A smaller group pursues power. Conquest, unification, management and the satisfaction of control become the point of life.

Very few make an abstract pursuit such as art or science their ideal. Mainstream Chinese culture often has no place for them, or they survive through rebellion.

Now return to contemporary China. Once a large share of people reaches the "good life," the curve of desire converges. Chinese culture does not tell them what should come after food, comfort and sex. What else is worth pursuing? How should I explore? Should I explore at all?

I am not trying to answer those questions here. Their absence, and even the absence of the questions themselves, produces what I see as the biggest problem in China's economic development: weak internal momentum. Once the economy satisfies much of what traditional culture teaches people to want, they lose direction. This is not confined to China. Similar pressures exist across East Asia. Think of Japan's low-desire society and its "lost xx years."

Like it or not, the comforting smoke and warmth of everyday life in contemporary China can become a sweet poison. From the front room to the kitchen, whatever complaints people retain, heroic ambition loses to the soft pleasures of home. People cannot leave the cave because they have, to a large extent, been satisfied.

How do we break out? Remove the restraints and live freely.

If something called "Chinese culture" exists, it has to be broken and rebuilt, then broken and rebuilt again. Expecting ideas formed thousands of years ago, before calculus or even basic mechanics, to cross time unchanged and guide contemporary life is fantasy.

Look at history again and Chinese culture appears heavily organised around satisfaction, with little appetite for exploration. It is good at practical problems and weak at abstract reasoning. People study and work toward a concrete result: marriage, examination success, wealth, family glory. They do not pursue the unknown for its own sake. Stability is prized. Change is doubted or feared. People care about their relative position inside a system and lack, and I mean lack rather than entirely lack, an absolute pursuit of truth.

Many figures traditionally called Chinese "philosophers" built their theories around practical, utilitarian goals rather than pure logical inquiry. Calling much of that "philosophy" a crafty collection of pragmatic life lessons is not unfair.

Look at nearly everyone around us. Whether they lie flat or join the rat race, their actions usually aim at satisfaction, and their pain comes from failing to achieve it. We lack the desire to explore in an absolute sense. Yet those apparently pointless explorations are precisely where higher and more varied needs come from. Conventional "Chinese culture" discourages and sometimes condemns the crossing of boundaries and the refusal to follow rules. The urge to keep everything stable, trace everything back to ancestors and avoid risk sets an upper bound on the culture's spiritual range.

Modern China has produced excellent companies and industry leaders. Yet after their high-speed catch-up phase, almost all of them hit this invisible convergence curve. One reason is the same cultural weakness built around satisfaction. Once a company meets its concrete operating goals, it no longer knows what to do. It loses the drive to move into the unknown, converges and then falls, one after another. Abaiteng (阿百腾) is one example.

The old conversation between Jack Ma and Elon Musk about artificial intelligence was another. Jack Ma, at the peak of Chinese-style pragmatism, showed the limits of that outlook in a business leader.

Now widen the frame to China's economy and society. After years of talk about domestic circulation, why has China still failed to build a consumer market as strong as America's? My answer follows from everything above. A large share of Chinese people reaches a stable job, a comfortable home, good food, and sexual or reproductive satisfaction, then feels "satisfied." They have seen all worldly splendour and withdrawn into bed, dining table and school-district apartment.

That satisfaction dulls a population already short on exploratory spirit. People stop moving. When each individual unit behaves this way, the aggregate result is weak growth and recession. This is one of the deepest problems in China's economy, and the illness inside its culture.