Modern China

Edwin E. Moise

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317868422
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Chinesische Geschichte

The past hundred years in China have seen almost continuous transformation and upheaval. From Confucianist monarchy to warlordism, from fanatically doctrinaire socialist tyranny to almost doctrineless social-capitalism, China has experienced political, cultural and economic disintegration, reunion, and revolution on an unprecedented scale.

Beginning with the overthrow of the Emperor in 1911, Moise guides us through a century of ever-unfolding drama with characteristic clarity and balance. Examining the effects of the communist revolution, he argues that in the early days Mao Zedong established the most effective government China had ever known, and that even during the bizarre excesses and blood-letting of the Cultural Revolution, there were still issues that were dealt with in a rational and effective manner.

Moving on to the developments since the death of Mao in 1976, in a section fully revised and updated for this new edition, Moise gives a nuanced account of the two sides of China: its spectacularly successful programme of capitalist economic development, and its continuing dictatorship. He contends that dictatorship is now much less total than it was until the mid-70s; although dissenters are still persecuted, their very existence is evidence of a significant loosening of repression. However, there is a heavy price being paid for the Chinese economic miracle. The environmental effects of this boom already stretch well beyond the borders of China.

Modern China sends us a clear message: the rapid and fundamental change that has framed the last century has not slowed or stalled but acts as a pointer to the near certainty of significant further change. To understand Chinas future we must understand its past.

Edwin E. Moise is Professor of History at Clemson University, South Carolina and a specialist in the history of China and Vietnam. His previous works include Land Reform in China and North Vietnam (1983) and Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (1996).

Chapter 1

The Chinese past

Most of the world has changed very drastically in the past 100 years, but few areas have been altered more than China. First the imperial government was brought down by internal decay and foreign pressure, and replaced by a republic. Then central authority collapsed completely, and the country was divided among provincial warlords. Incapable of organized defence, China became the prey of foreign powers whose ‘spheres of influence’ sometimes approached the status of outright colonies. Corrupt officials, marauding armies, and natural disasters periodically ravaged the peasantry.

China’s recovery began under the Guomindang, or Nationalist Party, which ruled from 1927 to 1949. It eliminated most of the foreign spheres of influence and unified significant portions of the country. The Communist Revolution of 1949 carried on with these tasks, creating the first really effective central government since the middle of the eighteenth century, and pushing economic development far enough to eliminate mass starvation if not poverty. The Communists, however, then began struggling savagely among themselves.

A large proportion of this book will be devoted to events after 1966, simply because so much happened in China after that year. China underwent greater changes just from the 1960s to the 1990s than Britain or the United States did from the 1920s to the present.

At first glance, everything in China seems new. The groups that have struggled for power in the past fifty years have been modern in their essence. Those who have ruled since the late 1970s regard modernizing China – creating a strong, wealthy, technologically sophisticated nationstate – as their main goal. We can find roots for such an attitude reaching back to about 1860, but its main development came after 1900. The group in power before 1976 had been preoccupied with Marxian class struggle; such attitudes had only become a factor in Chinese politics after about 1920.

Much of this book will be devoted to the interaction between these two trends, with the advocates of Marxian class struggle found within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), while the advocates of modernization and nationalism have been found both inside and outside the Party. For a while, in the 1940s and 1950s, the CCP seemed to have learned to reconcile the two approaches to revolution, and apply both of them simultaneously. In the 1960s, however, a savage conflict broke out between advocates of the two approaches. The advocates of radical class struggle, led by CCP Chairman Mao Zedong, seemed victorious at first. After Mao’s death in 1976, however, Deng Xiaoping led a resurgence of the group called pragmatists, moderates, or rightists – the people who thought of Communism essentially as a technique for making China a richer and stronger nation.

The groups that had opposed the Maoists during the 1970s then fought one another during the 1980s over an issue almost as characteristically modern as the previous one: whether the political domination of the Communist Party should be preserved, or whether substantial elements of Western-style democracy should be introduced. The group now called the conservatives, the defenders of Party power, triumphed in the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989, but it remains to be seen how long this triumph will endure.

Given that China has changed so much in recent decades – far more than Britain, France, or the United States – one could almost consider writing a history of modern China without reference to the past. Everyone writing a history book must decide how far back in time he or she will go in searching for the causes of later events. Some date must be the earliest date mentioned. Why not write a history of modern China in which the earliest date mentioned is 1900, or even 1921 (the year in which the CCP was founded)?

The simplest and most obvious reason why we should not do this is that not even the most drastic upheaval changes everything. Continuities with the past do exist, especially in thought and attitudes. The concern for stability and order that China’s leaders showed in 1989, when suppressing the democracy movement, was very traditional even if the nature of the order they were trying to stabilize was modern.

An equally important reason for remembering the past history of China is that the Chinese themselves remember it, and react to it. They are a historically minded people. If we wish to know why Chairman Mao and his radical followers attacked the intellectuals so savagely between 1966 and 1976, it is not enough to understand what the role and status of the intellectuals had been in 1966, or even in 1936. We must also know the role of the intellectuals in the imperial governments of past centuries, because Mao himself knew, and this knowledge helped to shape his actions.

It is sometimes said that the Chinese ‘abolished history’ during the years of the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976. This is true in the sense that there was not much historical writing done in this period, and that what little was published was mostly propagandistic hackwork. However, this did not mean that the Communist Party leaders no longer cared about the past. On the contrary, they were sure that events of the distant past could have a direct and immediate relevance to the present; the reason they clamped down on historical research was that they feared the wrong things might be said about the past.

One fairly important official of the CCP was disgraced and imprisoned partly for having written a play about a Ming Dynasty official who had died in 1587. His enemies charged that it was in fact an allegory about a 1959 power struggle in the CCP.

In 1974, the CCP declared that contemporary political issues had roots going back to ancient times. The political struggles surrounding the collapse of the Qin Dynasty, in the third century BC, were solemnly rehashed in the press. When the workers in a railway station in the city of Tianjin (Tientsin) formed a historical study group, the People’s Daily declared:

The struggle between the Confucian and Legalist schools over the past 2,000 years or so still has its influence at present and has continued to this day … The workers, peasants and soldiers can use Marxism to study and learn history. Liberate history from the confines of the historians’ lecture rooms and textbooks, and turn it into a sharp weapon in the hands of the masses.

A Chinese-American woman who visited China during this period found that her hosts, trying to decide whether she was still basically a Chinese, or had been so westernized as to be just an American with the ancestry and physical appearance of a Chinese, used knowledge of Chinese history as their touchstone. When the train on which she was riding passed a location where something important had happened more than 1,000 years before, would she know what had happened there and be excited about actually seeing the place? If so, they would consider her to be a real Chinese. This is not the behaviour of people who have abolished history, or would even consider abolishing it.

If we wish to understand modern China, therefore, we should start by learning at least a little about the origins and development of this very ancient culture.

The birth of China

The civilization we know as China originated in the area of the Yellow River, in the northern part of the country. Traditional texts list rulers going back to almost 2700 BC, but the earliest walled towns do not seem actually to have been built until the second millennium BC, and the earliest individual kings whose existence has been verified by archaeology lived probably between 1300 and 1200 BC. Their dynasty, the Shang, ruled a substantial portion of northern China. The people of the Shang used a writing system recognizably related to the characters of twentieth-century Chinese, but in other respects (such as frequent human sacrifices) they were strikingly different from later Chinese cultures.

The Shang rulers were overthrown by a group called the Zhou (Chou), who had lived on the western fringe of the Shang domain and had a similar culture. This probably occurred around 1040 BC, though estimates of the date range from 1122 BC to 1018 BC. The Zhou kings maintained fairly effective control of the area around the Yellow River for a few generations, but then gradually lost their grip. After 770 BC, real power was divided among a number of states. The typical state was a city, with some greater or lesser amount of the surrounding territory under its control. The rulers of these various states paid nominal allegiance to the Zhou kings, but the kings retained only a small territory under their actual control. The culture of Zhou China, however, was spreading even while its political structure was disintegrating. As time went on, areas along the coast and the Yangzi River, which had not been part of the Shang or the early Zhou, began adopting some cultural traits of the Yellow River states and joining their political struggles.

The period from the sixth to the third centuries BC, although characterized by interstate warfare that had many Chinese in despair, was intellectually one of the most productive eras in Chinese history. A tremendous variety of philosophers and thinkers propounded various ideas. Chinese tradition refers to ‘the Hundred Schools’, but three major groups eventually emerged, which remained central to Chinese thought down to the twentieth century: Confucians, Daoists (Taoists), and Legalists.

Confucianism

Confucius was an itinerant teacher of the fifth century BC. He travelled from one state to another, talking with his disciples and with any rulers who might be willing to listen.

Our knowledge of Confucius’ actual teachings is somewhat vague. Like Socrates, he taught face to face rather than writing books, so we are dependent on accounts by his students. Even for these we cannot be sure we have reliable texts. A considerable portion of the book known as the Analects really does come from accounts of his teachings written by his students, but other sections were inserted into the works long afterwards. While scholars today can sort much of the Analects into genuine and spurious sections, there are some passages about which doubt still exists.

Confucius was sure that his teachings provided the key to good and effective government, but no ruler was sufficiently convinced to give him a position of real power and let him show what he could do.

Confucian doctrine evolved gradually as later writers, of whom the most important was Mencius, extended and modified the original teachings. The general thrust of Confucianism was the importance of proper human relationships. Subordinates should be reverent and obedient towards their superiors, while superiors should be benevolent and just. In one sense, it was an optimistic doctrine – it claimed that human beings have a natural sense of what is good. However, Confucianism did not support the idea of progress; it suggested that people wanting to improve society should look to the past for their models, rather than trying to devise something new. Confucius advocated adherence to old customs and old rituals. Among the Confucian ideas that have particular importance for the later history of China are:

1	Confucianism treated the family as the key unit in human society, and filial piety – loyalty and reverence towards one’s parents – as the most important part of family relationships. A man’s loyalty to his parents was supposed to take precedence over everything else, including loyalty to his children, his wife, or his ruler.
2	Confucianism took a basically hierarchical view of society. One should note that of the five key human relationships in Confucian doctrine, four are relationships linking a superior to a subordinate: father to son, ruler to subject, husband to wife, and elder brother to younger brother. Only the relationship of friend to friend is between equals.
3	Confucianism argued not only that a ruler has an obligation to behave in a good and humane fashion, and provide decent living conditions for his subjects, but also that this is profitable for the ruler: the subjects will respond with loyalty and obedience. It is imperative that a ruler keep the confidence of his people. If they are poor and miserable the ruler will lose the mandate of heaven; he deserves to be overthrown, and he probably will be.
4	Power should be exercised by people who have been educated in the proper way of exercising it. Confucius himself never attained the position of power for which he yearned, but he felt that he was training his students to be officials, and eventually (many centuries later) a Confucian education became, in fact, the main pathway to power in the Chinese government.

Few rulers actually behaved in the high moral fashion that Confucian doctrine prescribed. Many Confucians, therefore, developed a low opinion of the governments with which they had to deal, although the Confucian prescription of loyalty to rulers usually kept them from engaging in active opposition.

Plate 1.1 Shang Dynasty ‘Oracle Bone’. When the Shang kings wanted knowledge about the future, they had a question inscribed on the flat-bottomed shell of a tortoise or on the shoulder bone of a cow. Heat was then applied until the shell or the bone cracked; the shape of the cracks was supposed to indicate the answer to the question. (© Sally and Richard Greenhill/SACU.)

There is an anecdote about Confucius, which, though it probably is not true, illustrates this strain in Confucianism. According to the story, the sage was once passing through a mountainous area with some of his disciples. They came upon a woman mourning by the grave of her son, who had been killed by a tiger. She told them that her husband and her husband’s father had previously suffered the same fate. When asked why she lived in a place that had so many tigers, she explained that in this place there was no oppressive government. The moral Confucius is supposed to have drawn for his disciples is that oppressive government was worse than a tiger. The unspoken implication was that governments were so universally oppressive that the only way this woman’s family had been able to escape oppression was to live in the wilderness where there was no effective government at all.

Legalism

Another school preached not moral obligations but naked self-interest. The legalists argued that human beings are fundamentally amoral, and that they cannot be moved by moral example. The only way to make them behave correctly is by a strong legal system, which enforces correct behaviour through rewards and punishments. If even minor infractions are ruthlessly punished, then nobody will dare to commit serious crimes. The philosopher Han Fei Zi (Han Fei Tzu) argued that while there might occasionally be an individual who was naturally good, and did not need to be coerced into good behaviour, ‘the intelligent ruler will not prize him. The reason is that the law of the state must not be sidetracked and government is not for one man.’ The ruler must apply coercive laws to everyone; what difference does it make that this one individual would have behaved properly without being forced to do so?

Han Fei Zi was contemptuous of the idea that the ruler should consider the opinions of his subjects. He claimed that legalist government would benefit the people, but he was sure that the people were too stupid to recognize good government even when living under it. His contemporary Li Si (Li Ssu) went further, and argued that the ruler could ignore not only the opinions but also the welfare of his subjects. The purpose of government was to serve the interests of the ruler, not the common people. ‘If a ruler will not… utilize the empire for his own pleasure, but on the contrary purposelessly tortures his body and wastes his mind in devotion to the people – then he becomes the slave of the common people instead of the domest...