ABSTRACT
When I was a PhD student at UCLA in the late 1980s, an assignment was to critique the Radical Planning paradigm in John Friedmann’s book Planning in the Public Domain: From Knowledge to Action. To Friedmann, an alternative mode of planning is needed to resolve the ineffectiveness of planning as societal guidance, related to the then unfolding crisis of industrial capitalism in the West. His idea of radical planning is to change ‘existing relations of power, whether exercised by the state or global corporations’ (Friedmann 2011, p.61). Radical planning is to engender ‘social transformation’ through the mediation of transformative theory and radical practice (2011, p.11). The ultimate aim of radical planning is ‘the structural transformation of industrial capitalism toward the self-production of life, the recovery of political community and the achievement of collective self-reliance in the context of common global concerns’ (2011, p.81). Although I no longer have a copy of my assignment, based on the notes I penned in the book I think I raised the following questions on Friedmann’s thesis: Is industrial capitalism in crisis? Is mainstream planning (state-led societal guidance) in crisis? How to reconcile public interest with human nature especially when not everyone is kindhearted and selfless? In the course of restructuring the household as an economy and a political community, how can we differentiate love from control, care from domination? If politics is brought to the household as a daily agenda – how will our lives be affected? Shouldn’t our home be a place of refuge from harsh reality? What if some people simply do not want to be involved in politics? How can we know that people living with ‘the selfproduction of life’ will lead a happier life? Is capitalism so bad that it has to be discontinued? Could it be perfected? In retrospect, my responses reflected very much my cultural roots as a
Chinese influenced on a daily basis by unspoken Confucian values as well as my upbringing in a colonial capitalist city praised by many as a model of a free market economy. This probably explains why, while I was fascinated by the goal of radical planning to have a ‘new orientation of livelihood: of
practical, self-managing, self-renewing societies, in which people care first for each other, in a living world’ (Williams 1983, p.267 cited in Friedmann 1987, p.342), I had doubts about ‘how to get there’. In what follows, I first discuss why insurgent citizenship and radical plan-
ning are rather alien concepts in the Chinese Confucian culture. I then argue that this deep-rooted culture, among others, helps explain why even with the 1911 Xinhai Revolution that ended the dynastic rule in China and the very many social movements in Hong Kong including the most recent 2014 ‘Umbrella Movement’,1 the discourse seldom touches on the need to transform fundamental social relationships. Nevertheless, traditional Confucian culture carries a vision of the ‘Grand Union’ or the ‘Great Harmony’ that is surprisingly similar to the vision of radical planning – the building of a good society for human flourishing. However, it seems that Chinese intellectuals take a more intricate pathway towards this ideal. My essay concludes by advocating radical planning the Chinese way.
