Third Way? No Way

By Chip Tsao | published Oct 30, 2008

I once worked part-time at a Chinese takeaway restaurant—as most Hong Kong students in the UK did in those days—and had one regular customer in particular who would come every weekend and order the same items. It was always the No. 3, which was the West Lake Beef Broth, and the No. 33, the Yang Chow Fried Rice. He had, of course, no idea where West Lake is (a place in Hangzhou) and didn’t have a clue about Yang Chow, an ancient 6th century capital in Eastern China. As a customer, he only needed to remember the numbers on the menu, which appealed to his stomach as effectively as a dog responds to the sound “sit” without knowing how the word is spelled.

The Chinese are the last people to have been exposed to political slogans. That’s why Mao succeeded with his peasant revolution. He distilled the academic theory of Marxism into a single powerful slogan—“Let’s fuck up the landlords and take their land,” and thus attracted millions of followers from the countryside. After he seized power, Mao then opted for obscure jargon instead of linguistic brevity. He branded Deng Xiaoping—then a political rival in the 1970s who advocated a limited degree of market economy—as a “revisionist-roader” and ordered the same illiterate Chinese peasant population he earlier galvanized to “criticize” this “Chinese version of Kruchnev.”
Mao used short, punchy slogans to inflame and mobilize, and obscure jargon to obfuscate and rule. What did Chinese peasants know about “revisionism”? To revise what? They had no choice but to gather under the trees and repeat the rhetoric of the editorial of the People’s Daily, which delivered the cryptic political messages of their great leader.

In his latest policy address, Donald Tsang mentioned the so-called “Third Way,” defining it as a “middle-ground” between free-market capitalism and socialism, marked by government interference. Aside from the obvious mistake—that there is no “Third Way,” which is merely a euphemistic term coined by Tony Blair to hide his reconciliation of Thatcher’s free market economy with globalization and the information revolution—Hong Kong people simply can’t understand what “Third Way” is supposed to refer to without being taught the “First Way” and “Second Way.” To fully understand the argument of Darwinism, you had better have some knowledge about the Old Testament first. But this is where the problem lies—Hong Kong people have never bothered much about Marxism and Socialism, and names like Adam Smith and Milton Friedman definitely do not sound anywhere near as meaningful as shark’s fin soup or Yang Chow Fried Rice.

At a time of financial difficulty, Hong Kong people will happily downgrade their gluttonous demands from shark’s fin soup to something much cheaper, like West Lake Beef Broth. And most people, like the peasants who took up arms and followed Mao, only want a bowl of boiled rice, but in this case they refuse to accept the jargon in any way. So I miss my old Liverpudlian customer, who always with a grin, ordered his No. 3 and No. 33. That’s the only occasion when sheer numbers made more sense.