China in the Age of Xi Jinping

Michael Dillon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000370966
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

This book presents a concise introduction to China in the Xi Jinping era. It is intended as a first book for those coming new to the subject, providing the essential information that most people need to know, without going into excessive detail. Its coverage includes the economy, society, politics, and international relations; China's history, especially the twentieth century; and Taiwan and Hong Kong, as well as the People's Republic of China. It will also be useful for more advanced students who need to understand developments in China outside their own primary disciplines.

The book provides an up-to-date and clear guide to the changes which have taken place in China in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including the recent further changes which are taking place under Xi Jinping's regime. It draws on the enormous body of empirical and theoretical research that is being carried out by economists, political scientists, and sociologists on China, but is itself written in non-technical and accessible language. It does not assume any previous knowledge of China and explanations of Chinese terms are provided throughout the book. It includes a map, a chronology, a glossary of Chinese terms, biographical notes on key figures, and a guide to further reading.

Part 1
Introduction

1
Land, people, and culture

China as a sub-continent

Although China is in many ways a country like any other – Denmark, say, or Ecuador or Nigeria – in view of its size and diversity, it is more realistic to think of it as a sub-continent. It is commonplace to speak of the countries of South Asia as the Indian sub-continent, a term which accurately reflects the size of the landmass; the geographical diversity; the variety of peoples, languages, religions and cultures; and the political differences of the states of which that region is composed. China has all of these, including the political division between the mainland and Taiwan, but it is usually treated, by Chinese and foreign observers, as a single homogeneous entity. If it is viewed as a sub-continent, as well as a nation, the geographical and cultural complexity underlying its history and the evolution of its political structures become clearer.

There is resistance, often intense resistance – by the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and by many Chinese people – to suggestions that China is, or ever has been, anything other than a single unified entity. This is invariably motivated by a sense of national pride or patriotism. From that point of view, to regard China in any other way leaves open the door to federalism or, worse still, to separatism – the possibility, however unlikely, that Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, or even one of the more prosperous southern provinces might achieve independence from the mainland: Taiwan’s de facto independence is not recognised by Beijing. Citizens of China are acutely aware of the historical legacy of division and weakness that made it possible for a disaggregated China to be colonised partially by the West in the nineteenth century and subsequently, after a period of division between warring provincial military governments in the early twentieth century, to be invaded by Japan, which occupied much of Chinese territory between 1931 and 1945. A strong, unified China, it is argued, is the only way of preventing a repetition of that period of national humiliation. There is merit in that argument, but it severely inhibits discussion of possible alternatives to the historical and contemporary configurations of China’s polity, such as regionalism and federalism.

Size

China is vast by any standards: it extends from a point 54º north latitude, on the Wusuli (Ussuri) river in the northern part of Heilongjiang province, which has a border with the Russian Far East, to 18º north, the southern point of the semi-tropical island of Hainan. It stretches for 3,000 miles across the eastern part of the Eurasian land mass from the most westerly part of Xinjiang at 74º east longitude to a point 135º east longitude, which is just to the west of the city of Khabarovsk. Westerners, especially Europeans, tend to assume that all of Russia lies to the west of China, but it is also a northern neighbour. China occupies an area of 3,657,765 square miles and has a land border of some 13,800 miles, mostly with Central Asia: it has a coastline that is over 9,000 miles long and functions as an important maritime frontier. Some of these figures may be disputed because of long-standing and unresolved boundary disputes, but they give a clear sense of the orders of magnitude involved in considering the geography of China. Because of the size and diversity of the country, it is essential that great care is taken when making generalisations about any aspect of Chinese society.

The population of China, which was 582 million when the 1953 census was carried out (the first in the entire history of China that had any degree of credibility),¹ has grown at a rate which is either impressive or alarming, according to the observer’s point of view: it stood in 2019 at approximately 1.4 billion. This makes China the most populous nation on earth, a distinction it has held for decades, although India with a total population of 1.37 billion is gradually catching up. It is instructive to compare figures for China’s population with other countries and regions. In 2019, the United Kingdom had an estimated population of almost 67 million, compared with the population of the Chinese province of Hubei, which is about 60 million; the whole of Europe, depending on how it is defined, is home to 747 million people who live on 6.5 million square miles of land shared by 44 separate nation-states; the United States has a total population of 329 million. The total land area of North America is 9.45 million square miles, and it has a combined population of over 514 million. In 2020, Taiwan had a population of 23.7 million and a declining birth rate, while in the former British colony of Hong Kong, there are only 7.5 million inhabitants.² Population size is far from being the only determinant of a nation’s character and prospects for development and stability, but it is a critical factor.

Great rivers of China

In common with all civilisations of great antiquity, China owes the earliest development of its agriculture and settlement to the great rivers that flow through its territory. The two best known, and by far the most important in the story of China’s development as a nation, are the Yellow River and the Yangzi.

The source of the Yellow River (Huanghe) is at a height of 14,000 feet in the mountains of Qinghai province close to the Kokonor: in the Mongolian language, Kokonor means Blue Lake, which is also what Qinghai means in Chinese. The Yellow River runs for over 3,000 miles through northern China and into the Gulf of Bohai to the north of the promontory of Shandong province. On its long journey to the ocean, the Yellow River describes a magnificent arc through the deserts and plains of China’s borders with Mongolia and then bends sharply into the low-lying farmland of the eastern seaboard, farmland that the might of the river has been instrumental in creating. It is called the Yellow River because of the yellow or brown silt that it carries from the mountains down to the plains. The silt contributes to a fine grained, easily worked loess soil that has enabled China’s farmers to till the land for centuries. The Chinese word huang covers a wider spectrum of colour than the English ‘yellow’ and includes light to medium browns. Similarly, the Chinese character for qing in Qinghai can be dark blue, or green or even black.

The waters of the Yellow River irrigate this loess terrain. However, the silt that has been such a boon to rural China has also destroyed it periodically: the accumulation of silt deposits builds up over time and causes the river to burst its banks, flooding the farms and villages of the North China Plain and causing great loss of life, as well as physical devastation and economic and social disruption. In one fateful year, 1851, the spectacular intensity of the flooding forced the river to change its course. Before the inundation, it flowed into the ocean south of the Shandong peninsula; after the flood it emerged to the north, at its present exit point. Not for nothing has the Yellow River been called ‘China’s sorrow’.

The river that the world calls the Yangzi (Yangtse) is known in China as the Changjiang; this simply means Long River, which it is, at a total length of 3,964 miles. It flows from its source high on the Tibetan Plateau through spectacular gorges, passes through the very centre of China and spills out into the Yellow Sea just to the north of Shanghai. Its great breadth is as significant as its great length. For centuries it was impossible to bridge the torrent along hundreds of miles of its length and, in many places, it is still necessary to use a ferry to cross from one bank to the other. The construction of the great bridge at Nanjing, which was completed in 1969 during the Cultural Revolution, was proclaimed a major triumph for Chinese engineers and for the collective spirit of the PRC.

Because of the difficulty that there has always been in crossing the Changjiang, the river was a major physical barrier; it is the natural boundary between northern and southern China, a separation that accounts in part for the pronounced cultural differences between the north and the south. The productive rice-growing areas of the south were traditionally known as Jiangnan (‘south of the river’, that is to the south of the Changjiang) and these areas have retained distinctive spoken languages and cultures which, especially in the more remote rural areas, are quite unlike those of the northern, Mandarin-speaking part of China.

The Three Gorges hydroelectric project which dams the upper reaches of the river is a colossal and controversial feat of engineering which began in 1993 and has submerged some 1,200 towns and villages, and displaced thousands of local residents. It has been criticised by environmental campaigners, and many have blamed it for the increased pollution of the river. A more detailed consideration of the Three Gorges project can be found in Chapter 20.

The Pearl River, or Zhujiang, is vital to the regional economy of south China. It is China’s third longest river and is formed from the confluence of three smaller rivers: the Xi Jiang (West River), the Bei Jiang (North River), and the Dong Jiang (East River). The river and its tributaries flow through the provinces of Hunan, Jiangxi, Guizhou, Yunnan, Guangxi, and Guangdong before draining into the South China Sea in the great Pearl River Delta.

The Pearl River Delta is home to some of the most dynamic and enterprising urban economies of contemporary China, including the pioneering Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen, where Deng Xiaoping’s reform policies were first displayed to the outside world; Zhuhai with its modern high-tech industries; and the old iron and porcelain town of Foshan. The delta has grown into one of the economic boom centres of post-Mao China and special-ises in manufacturing, notably electronics and other consumer goods for the export market. This region is increasingly known in China as the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (Yue Gang Ao Dawanqu). This is as much a political statement as a geographical description, and reflects the intention of the government of the PRC to integrate Hong Kong with the existing areas of southern China under the ‘one country, two systems’ model.

Mountains

Mountain ranges have always been the historical and natural boundaries between provinces in southern China. Mountainous terrain, which is difficult to farm and challenging to cross, has hampered communications and economic development over the centuries, although the lack of land routes has been compensated for by the abundance of natural waterways – lakes and rivers – which have played an important role in communications and commerce in the south.

The Tianshan (Mountains of Heaven) and the Pamirs mark the geographical frontiers of western China and the PRC’s borders with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, although the Tianshan range (Tengri Tagh in Uyghur and other Central Asian languages) also extends into northern Xinjiang to the north of the Taklamakan Desert. The Karakorum mountain range, part of the Himalaya chain and home to K2, the second highest peak in the world, separates China from Kashmir and Pakistan; the eastern ranges of the Himalayas are the boundary between China and India. In the northeast of China, the Great Khingan (Xing’an in Chinese) range of volcanic mountains forms the geographical boundary between the plains of Manchuria and the high plateau of Mongolia.

Geography and development

Economic and social development in China have never been uniform; there are major differences between the north and south, partly because of geographical factors. The northern climate is drier; it is difficult to guarantee regular sources of water for agriculture and there is a constant underlying threat of desertification. The south experiences rainfall in much greater abundance. This makes it possible to grow sufficient rice to feed large populations, in some areas by multiple cropping, but the drawbacks are the risk of flooding and the threat of tropical storms and typhoons which regularly assault the coastal regions of the southeast, often with devastating effect on settlements, lives and crops.

Throughout recorded history, almost all the capitals of unified Chinese states have been in the north; the paramount strategic necessity of defending agricultural China from the nomads of the steppes of Inner Asia shaped communications and settlement for centuries.

There is a striking contrast between the relatively high level of development in the eastern and southeastern coastal regions and the economic and cultural backwardness of the interior (the western regions). Although this disparity has a historical pedigree that can be traced back for hundreds of years, it was exacerbated by the creation of the treaty ports and their hinterlands under the influence of Western colonisation in the 19th century. The discrepancy in levels of development between eastern and western China has increased dramatically during the economic expansion that has taken place since 1978. One economic marker that illustrates the different level of development is Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which broadly speaking represents the total value of all goods and services produced. Per-capita figures for the GDP of individual provinces and cities illustrate the difference between the coastal (the first group) and inland western (the second group) regions of China.

GDP per capita in RMB 2019 ³

Shanghai	157,279
Jiangsu	123,607
Zhejiang	107,624
Fujian	107,139
Shaanxi	66,644
Gansu	32,994
Ningxia	54,217
Guizhou	46,433

Provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities

The major administrative sub-divisions of China are its 22 provinces and five autonomous regions (ARs) – Tibet (Xizang), Xinjiang Uyghur, Inner Mongolia (Nei Monggol), Ningxia Hui, and Guangxi Zhuang – which are provincial-level administrations that exercise a degree of autonomy (in reality only token autonomy) in deference to the large populations of non-Han Chinese people who have lived in them for centuries. Provinces and autonomous regions are further subdivided into prefectures and then counties: prefectures and counties are always based on urban administrative centres. In provinces that are not autonomous regions, but where there are concentrations of ethnic minority communities, there are also autonomous prefectures and counties.

Towns and cities may serve as provincial, prefectural, or county centres, but the largest cities – Beijing, Chongqing, Shanghai and Tianjin – are municipal administrations in their own right. In addition to the central urban areas, they have responsibility for surrounding tracts of rural land.

Languages and cultures

Chinese is the principal language of China, but it is not the only language and, more importantly, it is not even one single language. The official language of the country and its lingua franca is known today as putonghua, which translates as ‘common language’ and which purists tend to call Standard Chinese. In Taiwan, it is still known as Kuo-yu (in pinyin, Guoyu) which translates as ‘national language’, a term that was common on the mainland in the 1930s and 1940s and in recent years has reappeared in the PRC....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• Part 1 Introduction
• Part 2 Politics
• Part 3 The economy
• Part 4 Society
• Part 5 China’s periphery
• Part 6 International relations
• Part 7 Prospects: struggle between two new lines
• List of abbreviations
• Glossary of selected Chinese terms
• Biographical notes
• Index