Perspectives on Modern China

Four Anniversaries

Kenneth Lieberthal, Joyce Kallgren, Roderick MacFarquhar, Frederic Wakeman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315288758
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The conveners (the editors of this book) of the September 1989 Four Anniversaries China Conference in Annapolis, asked the contributors to look back from that point in time to consider four major events in modern Chinese history in the perspective of the rapid changes that were shaping the Chinese society, economy, polity, and sense of place in the world in the 1980s, a time when China was making rapid strides toward becoming more integrated with the outside world. With contributions by distinguished scholars in the field, the four anniversaries considered are the High Qing, the May Fourth Movement, forty years of communism in China, and ten years of the Deng era.

Part One
1839: The Proscenium of Late Imperial China

FREDERIC WAKEMAN, JR.

IN HIS essay on emperorship, Alexander Woodside urges us to set aside the conventional indictment of despotism as a selfish exercise of power, and to see instead that the perdurance of the imperial institution in China reflected the monarchy's early elimination of feudal rivals. By the eve of the Opium War, there were simply none of the monarchy-limiting forces we are familiar with in European history: aristocrats, municipal oligarchies, corporations, estates, churches. The emperor's own mandarins, meanwhile, were unable to promote an independent bureaucratic conceptualization of the state.

Woodside's main theme, then, is that no one in imperial China could have imagined a "state" as being more than an extension of the personal authority at the "forbidden center" of the empire. "Altogether the Chinese monarchy in 1839 was a despotism locked in a kind of stalemate with a potentially more modern bureaucracy; but it offered very little positive political freedom to its subjects." Thanks to the examination system, moreover, the Chinese monarchy commanded greater elite support and shallower specific loyalties than equivalent European kingships. The emperor owned the empire, and hence only he could effect reform. This created a craving for the achievement of societywide justice "through the impartial leadership of one transcendental figure who ultimately controlled all resources"—a craving for ultimate leadership that could not easily be given up at the end of the ancien regime.

My own essay argues, in fact, that the monarchy's efforts after the Opium War to create a structural alternative to patrimonial leadership not only presaged, but were also linked to, twentieth-century measures to develop a modem system of state control. I believe that we can trace connections betwen the late Qing monarchy's efforts to introduce modern police forces to China, through the Guomindang government's policy of using the police as one of the two "wings" of its rule, directly to the public security system of the People's Republic of China. I argue, furthermore, that the successful construction of this structure has much to do with the current regime's staying power during and after the events of June 1989.

Madeleine Zelin's article about the Qing economy centers on the observation that it was characterized by a high level of output per unit of land thanks to labor-intensive cultivation. Increased overall output—a sixfold increase between 1400 and 1900—came about through land reclamation and the spread of traditional technologies in a "highly fragmented agrarian sector, based on small-scale farm management by tenants and owner-cultivators [that] was supported by a large, bottom-heavy, and extremely lively network of rural periodic markets and market towns."

Manufacturing in the first half of the Qing was mostly cottage industry in rural areas. The rural base of production favored a balanced growth between city and countryside, reinforcing trends toward continued population growth, falling per capital incomes, and a relatively even distribution of wealth among large numbers of economic actors. Those trends in turn led to undercapitalization of enterprises, which perpetuated capital dispersion and prevented China from moving from a highly developed commercial economy to industrial capitalism. State policies facilitated the role of small merchants in commercial networks whose long chains of credit reduced profits at each level. China was thus an empire of middling wealth resting upon a rural production system that increased family income by expanding family size. A production regime that so depended upon the family as a mechanism to pool resources encouraged entrepreneurial attitudes animating rural reform even today.

The importance of the partriarchal family to the economic system of late imperial China is, of course, matched by its centrality to what Tu Wei-ming defines as "the ethicoreligious dimension and the psychocultural dynamics of Chinese society." In his essay, Tu notes how difficult it is for Western scholars—all "children of the Enlightenment"—to sympathize with the hierarchical and authoritarian values of China's shared culture. Even many Chinese intellectuals, who became "themselves children of the Enlightenment with a vengeance" after the May Fourth era, have attacked the subjugation and repression of Chinese authoritarianism.

Tu, however, claims that it is possible to interpret the Chinese perception of the world without being "enslaved in the Enlightenment mentality," thanks in part to the challenge posed by modern East Asian industrialization to the notion that modernization must be defined as Westernization. Also, as global interdependence has increased, the "primordial ties" defining communities have correspondingly strengthened: "ethnicity, mother tongue, fatherland, gender, and religion will continue to define who we are." According to Tu, these are not just reactions to change, but "positive contributions to the meaning of life in an increasingly pluralistic universe."

The Confucian elite on the eve of the Opium War was not—as Woodside would have it—a bureaucratic stratum ideologically dependent upon a despotic emperor. Rather, Tu asserts, Confucian intellecutals "constructed their own cultural identity" by functioning as "communicative teacher[s] in society at large," and were thereby able "to maintain an independent autonomous posture toward the court."

Nonetheless, after 1839 the West overwhelmed the Chinese intelligentsia: the rules changed so radically that intellectuals found themselves "forced to play a game fundamentally unintelligible to them." Many refused to embrace the modern West and its Enlightenment ideology as an intrinsic value. Confucian humanism and the Enlightenment mentality constitute "rival and incompatible value orientations," and attempts to find a higher synthesis repeatedly failed. The ultimate tragedy for twentieth-century intellectuals, Tu concludes, is that their own Confucian humanism was simultaneously ridiculed, and they could neither "tap into their own indigenous resources nor take seriously what the West could offer."

Each of these tour essays, then, provides a different historical explanation by way of understanding aspects of contemporary China. Woodside hints at a link between the personalistic rule of Qing emperors and present-day dictatorship, intellectual dependency, and authoritarianism. My essay connects late imperial state-building with Republican and Communist systems of social control. Zelin shows how traditional Chinese modes of agriculture and commerce dispersed capital while creating entrepreneurial habits centered upon a family production regime that still operates in the Chinese countryside. And Tu suggests that the incompatibility between Confucian humanism and Enlightenment thought may explain why Chinese intellectuals feel so ambivalent about contemporary Chinese culture. Taken together, all of the essays share a common interest in decoding patterns of development that help us understand why history weighs so heavily on China today.

1
Emperors and the Chinese Political System

ALEXANDER WOODSIDE

The Debate about Emperors in Modern China

A Hobbesian fondness for the rule of a single strongman, as the antidote to conflict and disorder, may well be universal in human politics. The cult of Napoleon in nineteenth-century France, the hopes that Mussolini and Stalin once inspired in their respective countries, and perhaps even the temptations of the "imperial presidency" to very small numbers of Americans, show something of its strength. But because the unity of China was associated with the tradition of a universal monarchy for more than twenty-one centuries (221 B.C.-A.D. 1911), contemporary Chinese thinkers have been particularly sensitive to the supposed "retarding force" of such predispositions in their country.

The courageous political scientist Yan Jiaqi argued in 1980 that monarchism in China habitually meant the deification of the ruler; the periodic slaughter of meritorious ministers below the ruler, whose jealousy of such ministers was preordained; incessant struggles among court factions; and the occasional usurpations of power by eunuchs or by the ruler's relatives, including relatives of his mother or wives. As Yan saw it, all these things had survived after 1949. Mao Zedong's attacks upon rivals like Peng Dehuai and Liu Shaoqi were classic modern demonstrations of the divisive techniques of emperorship. Mao's selection of successors like Lin Biao and Wang Hongwen was entirely similar to the emperors' selection of the crown princes whom they wished to succeed them. Because high positions were held for life in post-1949 China, Chinese political struggles under Communist rule inevitably continued to assume the forms of traditional imperial court politics. The main reason for the survival of this disguised monarchism in contemporary China—the concentration of supreme power in the hands of one person and his secretive courtiers, for life—was said to be the preindustrial nature of the Chinese economy. Because of it, all Chinese revolutions, whatever their intentions, turned into peasant wars. Peasant wars led in turn to the creation of new emperors.¹

The argument that Mao was an emperor is, of course, a rhetorical one in part. Intended to be disturbing, it nevertheless minimizes awareness of the conscious popular support that Mao's policies might have enjoyed among people other than peasants. But the real curiosity of this debate about the excessive centralization of power in China lies in the fact that it has been going on for such a long time. When a lecturer at the Marxist-Leninist Institute of the Chinese Social Sciences Academy complained in 1980 about China's "pyramidal" leadership structure and the ease with which the top of the pyramid could be appropriated and occupied for long periods by the same small group of people,² he followed the footprints of the formidable seventeenth-century philosopher Huang Zongxi (1610-1695). Huang was unfamiliar with the idea of a pyramid; but his denunciation of the emperors' conversion of their empire into an "enormous private estate" that they could pass on to their descendants made the same point. Huang Zongxi had in turn been preceded by Deng Mu (1247-1306), who had criticized Chinese rulers for treating the world as if it belonged to one "fellow." Before Deng Mu there had been thinkers like Bao Jingyan (fourth century A.D.) for whom preimperial antiquity was good precisely because it lacked coercive princes.

The controversy over the nature of political leadership in China thus defies the adage that history proceeds in part by changing the subject, that one day people suddenly realize that the disputes that previously preoccupied and divided them no longer matter so much. The question of the selfishness of the exercise of power at the top of their political system has haunted some Chinese intellectuals for centuries. In our own century, the explanations for what many Chinese clearly regard as a pathological political situation have not changed very much. The last great debate about the survival of despotism in modern China, before the 1980s, occurred forty years ago in the last disillusioning years of Guomindang rule. The vastness of the country's illiterate peasantry received much attention in this debate as well. Apart from the peasants, one writer argued in an important Shanghai periodical in 1947 that democracy was elusive because of China's great size. Western democracy had originated and been renewed in small polities, like the Greek city-states or the thirteen American colonies, where high levels of communal political participation had been possible. Because of China's much bigger scale, poor communications, and low ideological tolerance for the notion of permanent decentralization or disunity, however, the only successful early exercise of a unifying political power, as demonstrated by the First Emperor of the Qin dynasty in 221 B.C., had inevitably rested upon violence and autocracy. The First Emperor's triumphant use of brute force, rather than softer options like negotiated alliances with his competitors, had created a precedent for the construction of Chinese governments from which few succeeding Chinese rulers had been able to break free.³ This "size" argument remains a staple of the discussions about the lack of democracy in China today,⁴ along with the theme that the emperorship is rooted in an unchanged peasant economy.

The first task for any analyst is to try to get the debate under better control. With respect to twentieth-century politics, it is crucial to separate phenomena that may really have change-resistant links to the old emperorship—and that legitimately belong to the "remnants of feudalism" thesis, which Chinese writers, like Soviet ones, greatly abuse—from other phenomena related to the inability of post-1911 Chinese governments to create widespread respect for new institutions quickly enough; their need to legitimize themselves at various levels of the popular consciousness; and their consequent deliberate tactical exploitation of what they imagine to be traditional values, beginning most blatantly with Yuan Shikai in 1915.

It is even more important to grasp the peculiar dynamics of the emperorship that enabled it to survive for so long. The size argument is weakened by the fact that there was little discernible democratic theory in the much smaller city-states that preceded the First Emperor's military unification of China. There was merely an enormously important tradition of political humanism that stipulated that the people were the foundation, but not the masters, of politics and ought to come first. It is true, of course, that fears of the appallingly extended savagery that might accompany Chinese disunity, which were themselves conjured up by the problems of dynastic change in such a large state, did become a growing force in their own right after the empire's genesis. It is difficult to imagine ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• PART ONE. 1839: THE PROSCENIUM OF LATE IMPERIAL CHINA
• PART TWO. MAY FOURTH ANNIVERSARY
• PART THREE. THE PRC'S FIRST FORTY YEARS
• PART FOUR. THE DENG ERA
• Index