This assessment comes from the book New China. In the 4th decade of China’s era of “reform and opening-up”, at last the cliche of the old Maoist era — the Chinese as worker ants mouthing xenophobic anti-imperialists slogans while all dressed in blue serge boiler-suits — have given way to impressions of a country whose cities are full of skyscrapers, whose rural areas are being transformed by new forms of land ownership and a massive rise in migrant labor, and whose population is keen to engage with the outside world after years of isolation. Fullerton and Wilson’s observation that China is reaching the “hour of her destiny,” and that a significant part of the population are learning English as one way to fulfill that destiny, seems a reasonable comment on a China that is clearly very different from the one ruled a generation ago by Chairman Mao.
However, Fullerton and Wilson wrote their book a full century ago, and their reflections on what they subtitle “a story of modern travel” came at what, in retrospect, is a particularly poignant moment in China’s history: the year 1910. The China they portray was lively, even optimistic, and very much engaged with the outside world. Yet within a year, the Qing dynasty had fallen.
The second explanation, common in the early 20th century, but banished for a while after 1949, has become commonplace again today. This argument is that China has not essentially changed. Even figures such as Mao and Deng, despite their coating of communist ideology and mass mobilization politics, were essentially “emperors” reverting to type. In the countryside today, traditional superstitions, religions, and hierarchies reign supreme, just as they have done for hundreds of years. Overall, China remains a Confucian, hierarchical society with an ostensibly communist brand name on top.
The similarity in many developments in Europe and China in the period 1000 to around 1800 should not, however, conceal the fact that imperial China and early modern Europe also differed widely in their assumptions and mindsets. The development of modernity in the Western world was underpinned by a set of assertions, many of which are still powerful today, about the organization of society. Most central was the idea of “progress” as the driving force in human affairs. Philosophers such as Descartes and Hegel ascribed to modernity a rationality and teleology, an overarching narrative, that suggested that the world was moving in a particular direction — and that that direction, overall, was a positive one.
At the same time, the traditional bonds that the self had to the wider community were broken down; modern societies did not support the old feudal hierarchies of status and bondage, but rather, broke them down in favor of equality, or at any rate, a non-hierarchical model of society.
But all the same, China before the mid-19th century did not share certain key assumptions of the emerging elite of Europe in the 16th to 19th centuries. China did not, during that time, develop powerful political movements that believed in flattening hierarchies: in the Confucian world, “all men within the four seas” might be “brothers,” but “all men” were not equal. Chinese thinkers did not stress the individuated self as a positive good in contrast to the collective, although there was a clear idea of personal development to become a “gentleman” or “sage.” Nor, overall, did it make the idea of teleology of forward progress central to the way it viewed the world: rather, history was an attempt to recapture the lost golden age of the Zhou and ways of the ancients, and rather than praising innovation and dynamic change in its own right, premodern China developed highly sophisticated technology and statecraft while stressing the importance of past precedent, and of order.
Central to the assumptions of emperors and their officials were Confucian ideas about the makeup of the state. In these ideas, hierarchy was not only present but essential: the body politic was held to be a metaphorical extension of the family; just as sons should obey fathers and wives should obey husbands, so subjects should obey their rulers. The people did not have inherent rights as individuals or even as a collective body.
However, it would be wrong to think that this made Chinese governance arbitrary, irrational, or despotic. A good ruler in the Confucian world was not at liberty simply to do as he pleased. The people were in his charge, and cruel or unfair behavior towards them would result in his losing the “mandate of heaven.”
Where he never came anywhere close to advocating that the ordinary population of China should take part in the own governance, he wrote extensively about the danger of political sterility that could come from restricting both the numbers and scope for argument of those who could critique power-holders: “There is no single doctrine which is absolutely correct, and no single person who is absolutely good.”
By the early 1860s, the Taiping was effectively a separate state within Qing territory, with its capital at Nanjing, in charge of much of China’s cultural heartland.
A group of Japanese aristocrats, worried by ever-greater foreign encroachment on Japan, had overthrown the centuries-old system of the Shogun, who acted as regent for the emperor. They showed little of the ambiguity that conservatives in the Qing court had done. In quick succession, Japan replaced its culture of elite samurai warriors with a conscripted citizen army; the country was given a constitution that established it as a nation-state; and a parliamentary system was set up, although with a heavily limited male-only franchise.
By the first decade of the 20th century, Japan was a growing economic and imperial power which was even able to defeat a western power, Russia, in the war of 1904-5. These headily swift changes in a country which the Chinese had always regarded as a “little brother” gave Chinese reformers plenty of material for consideration.
When it had first been implemented, the objective, rational standards of the entrance examination had made the system far more impressive than anything the rest of the world could offer in deciding who would govern; but by the early 20th century, the system had become inflexible, and the term “eight-legged essay” had become synonymous with backwardness and conservatism to many reformers.
Local elites had been instrumental in forming New Armies from the 1860s that allowed the threat from the Taiping and other rebels to be beaten back. But this moved influence away from the central government and squarely towards to the provinces. This would be a factor when the empire finally did collapse: the ground had been set for China to divide into feuding provinces led by warlords, each with his own local army, something that would have been harder to imagine in 1800.
Chinese leaders, who are acutely conscious of history in a way that has been less true of the American and British governing classes in recent years, would also note that the seemingly moribund Qing dynasty has begun to modernize impressively fast in the early years of the 20th century. Nonetheless, it collapsed, as did most of its successor regimes in the following four decades. It is the earnest intention of the rulers of the PRC that this fate should never happen to them. To understand their fears and concerns, and to understand China in its own terms, the China of today can only be understood in its historical and global context.
But why did the Chinese think of themselves as Chinese? Broadly, shared identity came from shared rituals. For more than 2,000 years, a set of social and political assumptions, which found their origins in the ideas of Confucius, a thinker of the 6th century BC, shaped Chinese statecraft and everyday behavior. By adopting these norms, people of any grouping could become “people of the dynasty” — that is, Chinese.
Confucianism is based on the ideas of mutual obligation, maintenance of hierarchies, a belief in self-development, education, and improvement, and above all, an ordered society. It abhors violence and tends to look down on profit-making, though it is not wholly opposed to it. The ultimate ideal was to become sufficiently wise to attain the status of “sage,” but on should at least strive to become a junzi, often translated as “gentleman,” but perhaps best thought of as meaning “a person of integrity.” Confucius looked back to the Zhou dynasty, a supposed “golden age” which was long-past even during his lifetime, and which set a desirable (but perhaps unattainable) standard for the present day.
Confucius’s opinions did not emerge from thin air: he lived during the period of the Warring States, a violent era whose values appalled him, and which fueled his concern with order and stability.
However, the remarkable resilience of the Chinese system of statecraft meant that these occupiers soon adapted themselves to Chinese norms of governance, something that marked these invaders out from the Western imperialists, who did nothing of the sort. The assimilation was not total. The Qing aristocracy maintained a complex system of Manchu elite identity during their centuries of power: Manchus were organized in “banners” (groupings based on their military nomadic past), and Manchu women did not bind their feet. But overall, the rituals and assumptions of Confucian ethics and norms still pervaded society: Qing China was at core a Chinese, not a Manchu, society.
The 19th century saw a profound change in Chinese self-perception. For centuries, the empire had been termed tianxia, literally and poetically rendered as “all under heaven.” This did not mean that the premodern Chinese did not recognize that there were lands or peoples that were not their own — they certainly did — but that the empire contained all those who mattered, and its border was flexible, although not infinitely elastic.
But the arrival of Western imperialism forced China, for the first time, to think of itself as part of an international system.
Finally, it may have been the reforms themselves that doomed the dynasty. Empires often collapse when they try to reform, and unleash a forum for voices that are hostile to those in authority. It was in 1989, during the most liberal era of Communist rule, and not in 1969, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, that protesters filled Tiananmen Square demanding that the leadership step down. It was under the liberal Gorbachev, not the brutal Stalin, that the USSR finally collapsed.
The abolition of the examinations in 1905, for instance, created a huge number of angry local elites. For centuries, men would spend years learning the Confucian classics in the hope that they might pass the increasingly severe level of examinations that would let them rise to local and even national status in the bureaucracy. But now, the government abolished the raison d’etre at a stroke. From 1898 onwards, with the sudden ending of a promising series of reforms, too many of China’s elites no longe trusted the Qing to reform China successfully. The Xinzheng reforms were not too little, too late, but perhaps too much, too late.
The 37 years of the Republic founded in 1912 were dismissed by the Communists as a time of failure and broken promises, and in general, they continue to be regarded as a dark time in China’s modern history.
In 1915, while Europe was distracted by war, the Tokyo government made the notorious “21 Demands” to the warlord government of the time, demanding and obtaining exclusive political and trading rights in large parts of China.
Chiang’s opportunity to observe the Soviet advisers close-up had not impressed him. He was convinced (not without reason) that their intention was to take power in alliance with the Nationalists and then thrust the latter out of the way to seize control, Bolshevik-style, on their own. Instead, Chiang struck first. Using local thugs and soldiers, Chiang organized a lightning strike that rounded up Communist Party activists and union leaders in Shanghai, and killed thousands of them with immense brutality.
Scarcity caused inflation, to which the government responded by printing money, in part to pay for its huge military commitments: a foolish move, but alternative policies were hard to think of. Prices increased 10 times in just 2 months. By the time China was plunged into yet another war — the Civil War between the Communists and the Nationalists (1946-9) — the huge disillusionment with Nationalist rule meant that many who were not Marxists by inclination welcomed a Communist victory simply because they felt that the Nationalists had no credibility left.
The plan was fueled by a strong belief that political will combined with scientific Marxism would produce an economic miracle of which capitalism simply was not capable. Yet its goal was unquestionably one of modernization through industrial technology. The stated goal of the Leap was to overtake Britain in 15 years, and by this, it was Britain’s industrial capability, not its wheat fields or cattle, that was meant.
With its obsessive emphasis on violence as a supposedly desirable and transformative force, the Cultural Revolution was a highly modern movement. And while Mao initiated and supported it, it also had widespread support: it was a genuinely mass political movement which left many youths feeling as if they had had the best days of their lives.
Yet the new freedoms that intellectuals enjoyed gave them the appetite for more.
In retrospect, now that Tiananmen Square is more than two decades in the past, the surprising thing is what did not happen. China did not, as many feared, plunge into civil war; it did not reverse the economic reforms; it did not close itself off to the outside world.
Bo had been tipped by many (not least himself) to rise to the highest level of politics, the Standing Committee of the Politburo, and his fall and subsequent trial and conviction were seen as his punishment for attempting to bypass the existing power networks.
Since the 1990s, China has embraced economic reform with a vengeance. Its politics does not have the liberal, almost naive interest in the West that it did in the 1980s. The “New Enlightenment” wave of the 1980s, which ultimately led to Tiananmen Square, was unable to come to any understanding of the fact that China’s problems are also the problems of the world capitalist market. Finally, it was unable to recognize the futility of using the West as a yardstick in the critique of China.
However, China’s international influence has been hampered by two tendencies. In areas outside Asia, China’s preference is for remaining neutral but friendly, and to commit to few outright statements of policy: yet crises in the Middle East, the Korean peninsula, and Ukraine, and the scramble for mineral resources in Africa and energy resources around the globe may make it harder to claim a status as a world power without providing action or using influence. Meanwhile, Chinese actions in its own backyard have made some neighbouring countries wary of growing Chinese influence in the region, particularly as its defense budget soars. Although Chinese behavior in Asia veers between hard and soft tactics, it is still unclear whether Beijing has worked out a real strategy to increase its influence in the region through consensus rather than coercion.
Chinese politics since the late Qing has been dependent on nationalism, an idea that derived its legitimacy from the people as a body in their own right, and an idea that a strong state would be a rational arbiter of power. It was based on mass politics where there was a social contract between government and citizen. While the Confucian mode of governance did also embody a sort of social contract between emperor and subject, it did not think it seemly that the people should be empowered in their own right — a profoundly non-modern way of thought.
One can imagine Chiang Kaishek’s ghost wandering round China today nodding in approval, while Mao’s ghost follows behind him, moaning at the destruction of his vision.
Not every person’s natural intelligence or strength is equal. But if each person develops his mind towards service and morality so as to contribute to the mass of humanity, then he can be regarded as equal. That is real equality.
Chinese parents all indirectly rape their sons and daughters. This is the conclusions which inevitably arises under the Chinese family system of “parental authority” and the marriage system in which tehre is a “policy of parental arrangement.”
Although it stressed social equality and took delight in breaking down boundaries, the Cultural Revolution’s stress on violence and radical change swiftly made it clear that it took masculine values as its default. Women were shown in the vivid Socialist Realist posters of the era wielding rifles; men were not shown feeding babies.
It did seem possible by the mid-1930s that Chiang’s government was on the way to consolidating its power. The Communists were on the run after the Long March, and Chiang had managed to establish an uneasy truce with most of the regional militarists who had acted against him. But the outbreak of war with Japan in 1937 put paid to any hope of modernizing under a centralized, stable state. Reform required peace, stability, a reliable tax revenue stream, and access to international and domestic markets. The Nationalist government had none of these. The result was a state that turned in on itself. Corruption, black marketeering, and runaway inflation in the Nationalist zone led to a collapse of trust in the government, paving the way for the Communist victory in the Civil War.
Mao’s victory in 1949 has generally been regarded as the end of the period of war in China, as the country was finally united under a single government. Yet the organization of Maoist China was, in significant ways, “war by other means.” The Cultural Revolution saw pitched battles in the streets, and the feud with the USSR saw society and economy placed on a war footing in case of an invasion.
During the Mao’s period in power, the war against Japan was downplayed in history books: the Nationalist contribution to victory could not be mentioned, China had little interest in provoking a now pacified Japan, and therefore little public attention was paid to Japanese war crimes in China.
To understand the significance of these freedoms, one must ask what concept of freedom had previously existed in premodern China. In late imperial China, the state was widespread but relatively shallow. Local magistrates, provincial governors, and bureaucrats of various sorts kept the network of the empire running, but its active reach into the lives of ordinary Chinese was much less strong than the increasingly intrusive state of the 20th century, which reached its apogee in Mao’s China. For poor rural farmers, just as for the poor of London or Paris, there was little freedom to act, because economic deprivation limited the scope for action.
However, the freedoms of political action which are associated with the aftermath of the English, American, and French revolutions are not so easy to detect in premodern China, just as they would have been hard to find in much of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Iberian peninsula at the same time. The education and immersion into elite values that characterized scholars and officials also made them subject to the moral rules of Confucian governance, and in particular, their duty to speak out when injustice was done by those in power. Nonetheless, the Chinese system did not institutionalize protection for those who spoke out in this way and that could make open dissent a morally virtuous by personally perilous undertaking.
Even in the era of reform, the “cage” has been opened only part of the way. China still has very large numbers (probably thousands) of prisoners held essentially for political offences, such as attempting to set up a new party, joining a banned religious group, or placing dissenting views on a weblog.
Many sites, including the BBC service and sites relating to the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989, are blocked from within China. But thousands of others, relating to foreign films, university courses, news stories, celebrity gossip, and corporations are not. Many Chinese understand perfectly well the freedoms available in other parts of the world, but they choose not to embrace them — or at any rate, not to embrace them yet.
After the return of HK to Chinese rule in 1997, reunification with Taiwan moved much further up the political agenda in the rhetoric of the mainland. At the same time, movements within Taiwan itself have given fuel to the idea that the island should declare independence.
The Qing empire also contained what is now Outer Mongolia, yet there are no calls for that country to be reabsorbed into China. More crucially, Chinese rhetoric does not call attention to the fact that, since the late 19th century, Taiwan has only been part of a united Chinese state for 4 years (from 1945 to 1949).
Japan’s defeat in 1945 also saw the island handed back to Chinese (Nationalist) control, and the islanders’ view of their colonial experience became rosier in retrospect because of the harsh nature of what followed. The Nationalists treated Taiwan as if they were an occupying power, rather than liberators. As the Civil War raged on the mainland, the government clamped down yet further on dissent in Taiwan.
At the same time, the CCP became ever more concerned by the number of Taiwanese who no longer considered reunification with China desirable or even relevant, and the mainland made threatening noises about its right to invade Taiwan in the event of a declaration of independence.
Yet China has been highly successful in convincing the world of its own position on Taiwan: that Taiwan independence is unthinkable. This is in some ways odd, because Taiwan has not always been such a polarizing issue: it was not central to the territorial rhetoric of the Republican governments, or during much of Mao’s period in power. Nor is reunification necessary for China’s continued economic growth or political influence. Nor, any longer, does the mainland demand that Taiwan become like China: the terms offered for reunification since 1978 have become something like a reunification in name only, involving Taiwan maintaining its own political system and even military.
Two events made the final days before the handover in 1997 much less calm than anticipated: the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989 and the appointment of a democratic politician, Chris Patten, rather than a civil servant, as the last governor of the territory. Patten introduced much wider voting rights in HK’s highly limited elections, infuriating Beijing, who regarded the act as a breach of the spirit if not the letter of the handover agreement.
It has become conventional to condemn Mao’s China as an economic failure, which ultimately forced the reform era of the 1980s on the government. While there is real substance to this agreement, is is worth noting that there were developments during the Maoist period that provide favorable conditions for the eventual economic takeoff after 1978.
In addition, relations with the USSR began to sour from the mid-1950s, and were actively hostile by the mid-1960s. In that context, China’s leaders began to think in terms of a siege economy that could be defended in the context of a catastrophe.
Economic reform started in the countryside, with farmers given freedom to sell their crops on the free market, and individuals encouraged to set up enterprises. In the early 1980s, Deng established the SEZs in port cities on China’s southern coast. This signaled his desire to lay down the first phase of economic growth: it would start with manufacturing and light industry, and would be fueled by foreign investment which would be tempted in by highly preferential tax rates and labor laws.
The other “dragons” eventually gave up manufacturing cheap goods, as the countries became richer, wages became higher, and ultimately it became cheaper to move manufacturing to other countries (usually China, in fact).
In an attempt to move away from growth fueled by spending on infrastructure paid for by borrowing, the government has stressed consumption, trying to encourage the Chinese to spend more on consumer goods and services. Yet it is proving a hard task to encourage the Chinese to take their savings from under the mattress and spend them: after all, there have been a large number of rainy days in recent Chinese history.
China’s operation of law is still instrumental rather than principled. Though various aspects of corporate and criminal law have been revised, often with some operational success, the Party still stands above the law, making it hard to operate the “rule of law” in the classic sense.
Mao made it clear that, in the communist China that he envisaged, “Literature and art are subordinate to politics. It is therefore a particularly important task to help artists and writers to overcome their shortcomings and win them over to the front that serves the masses of workers, peasants and soldiers.
One thing remains constant, however: the CCP has no intention of allowing any rivals even to think of attaining power in China.
Being contented has none of the glamor of a good fight against misfortune. Happiness is never grand.
Can China afford to give people “the right to be unhappy,” or does it need to exile those who ask for it to its own Iceland? Are people who live in desperate poverty able to free in any meaningful sense? Are those who have TV, running water, and a car, but cannot openly discuss their views on politics being infantilized by an over-protective, sometimes vindictive state and party?