In 2016, US Vice President JD Vance published a best-selling memoir entitled “Hillbilly Elegy”. Curiously, he explained on the Fox News network recently that China’s pivotal influence on American consumption was due to the US borrowing “money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture” (YouTube link here). Let’s consider the sort of individuals in question.
European understanding
The distinguished Italian philosopher, medievalist, novelist and commentator, Umberto Eco was also a prolific, widely translated, political and social observer. Eco’s greatest virtue, according to the Times Literary Supplement, “might be said to lie in his ability to clarify the exact nature of our present perplexities” adding that he was, “lucid, logical and always firmly on the side of civilization.”
Vance’s calculated resort to denigrating, peasant imagery brings to mind a reflective essay written by Eco in 1977, which examined the furore that surrounded the release of Michelangelo Antonioni’s then new documentary film, “Chung Kuo” (China). Eco acutely observed how, as that debate intensified, “willing [Italian] ministers, prefects, police superintendents and old school diplomats [were enlisted] for whom it is important for the Chinese to remain yellow, treacherous, inscrutable and pig-tailed.”
The peasant and the hillbilly
Here are two widely-used, resonating dictionary definitions: a peasant is, a “poor smallholder or agricultural labourer of low social status; while a hillbilly is an “unsophisticated country person.”
Mr Vance, in his positively-reviewed memoir, endorsed the supportive aspects of his hillbilly pedigree while he was deeply critical of what he saw as its capacity to foster social disintegration. His Fox News, peasant reference was, however, far more binary: negatively aimed without any upside qualifications.
The Washington hillbillies
So, if China’s global success can largely be explained as a case of tricky peasants lending funds to others (especially in the US) to buy their wares, it is surely now reasonable to submit, based on recent events, that Hillbillies currently appear to have taken over the White House.
Consider some of the latest evidence advanced by mainstream Western media outlets:
- The Economist, April 12: “The age of chaos. Trump’s incoherent trade policy will do lasting damage. …. Such is the short-sightedness of Mr Trump’s reckless agenda. In a mere ten days the president has ended the old certainties that underpinned the world economy, replacing them with extraordinary levels of volatility and confusion (see [paywalled] link here).
- The Telegraph, April 11: “Trump’s chaos risks exposing the world to a $1 trillion parasite. … To believe that the worst of the Trump tariff shock is now over is to believe in the miraculous. But I wouldn’t be so foolish as to predict that there is inevitably worse to come. With Trump, it is impossible to know“. (See this link.)
- MSNBC, April 11: “Trump’s tariff tantrum showed why he is wrong about global trade. … After Trump imposed a 10% worldwide baseline tariff and a whopping 145% cumulative tariff on imports from China, the stock market sank, other countries retaliated, our trade partners began looking for leadership elsewhere and Trump was forced to back down, while claiming this was the plan all along”. (Link here.)
- The Hill, April 9: “The world is shocked by Trump’s tariff tantrums – it shouldn’t be. … Trump promised to govern by vengeance. …. What we are witnessing is the end result of a presidency where values are fluid and transactional, expertise is irrelevant and our national credibility is an afterthought”. (See this link.)
Selecting a government
Next, it is useful to reflect on how governments are chosen.
The Communist Party of China (CPC) has ruled the PRC since 1949. China plainly does not have a Western democratic system. But it does have a merit and performance-based governing tradition, which has its roots in Confucian statecraft thinking.
Competitive exams to recruit scholar-officials to run the Song Dynasty empire date back over 1,000 years. And they were founded on principles established over 2,000 years ago during the Han Dynasty (link). Moreover, according to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, by the 4th century BC, China was divided into four ranked (in this order) classes:
The scholar elite;
The landowners and farmers,
The craftsman and artisans; and
The merchants (or businessmen) and tradesmen (link).
Note how “warriors” do not appear on the list above (as they certainly would on any such list from Ancient Greece or the Roman Empire). Polish scholars, writing in 2008, explained that:
“The Western tradition glorified war and conquest and warriors constituted their ruling elite, whereas the Confucian tradition that shaped Chinese civilization detested violence and raised scholar-officials to the rank of the ruling elite” (link).
China’s key leaders at all levels are drawn from the CPC, which has over 100 million adult members. As it happens, this is equivalent to around 40% of the adult US population. Rising through the ranks is fraught with political challenges but the process remains fundamentally shaped by the traditions outlined above and success still greatly depends on education and intense relevant experience.
Washington also has certain filtering traditions but these are measurably more flexible than those which apply in Beijing. This flexibility can be positive – but it has also left the door open to fast-tracking the appointment of Elon Musk, a massive political donor, to the highest governance level in America (link), along with a number of other questionable appointments, including multiple, fervent war hawks and a primary architect of the tariff tsunami who heavily referenced a confected version of himself in his scholarly writing (link).
Consider your verdict
Does all this thoroughly confirm that Hillbillies have now occupied the White House? Weigh the evidence and decide for yourself. But the record already shows that adolescent, wild-words, voodoo economics (link) war-mongering bravado and reckless gate keeping are all especially permissible in Washington today. This has consequences.
Self education
It also seems plain that the governing elite in Beijing understands far more about the US than their equivalents in Washington understand about China – and how far it has advanced in so many respects. To confirm that this is so, the White House could do worse than watch some of the widely-viewed, recent youthful presentations from China by Darren Watkins, an American online personality and opinion leader, also known as, “IShowSpeed.”
One clip from a Fox programme in Los Angeles confirms that China already has not one but two Donald Trumps (link). These are remarkable, word-perfect, bilingual comedians, if truth be told, each claiming the other is a Donald Trump pretender. Fortunately, neither has any access to any levers of power.