Contemporary China

Kerry Brown

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350311343
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Asiatische Politik

The third edition of this concise core textbook offers students a comprehensive introduction to the politics, economy, culture and society of modern China, while grounding all of these areas in the context of China's recent history in the 19th and 20th centuries. Fully up to date, this accessible text examines the key developments that are taking place in China and that are shaping its place in the world today, from relations with Trump's United States and post-Brexit Britain, to the use of the internet to crack down on dissent and the establishment of 'Xi Jinping thought' at the 19th Party Congress. Authored by a highly-regarded expert on the topic, this is the essential guide to a country that is no longer just emerging but one which has, in many respects, already emerged as one of the leading powers of the 21st century. The book is an ideal introductory text for undergraduate and postgraduate courses on China studies and contemporary China, regardless of whether students approach the topic from a political, historical, sociological, cultural or geographical viewpoint. It can also be used on modules focussing more specifically on Chinese politics, Chinese history or Chinese society. New to this Edition:
- Fully revised and updated throughout, including discussions of Chinese-US relations in the era of Trump, the 2017 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, and descriptions of the newest high-ranking figures in Chinese politics
- New boxed features highlighting important issues and organisations, including the status of women in China, the telecoms company Huawei, and the on-going conflict over the South and East China Sea
- References to the most recent research in the field, along with new recommendations for further reading for each chapter

1 WHAT IS CHINA?

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is the world’s third-­largest ­country in land area, and has the largest number of people. It is a ­country ­dominated by the Han people, who make up more than 91 per cent of its population, but there are also 55 other officially ­recognized ­ethnic groups. The ­country is split into 22 provinces; five autonomous regions (Tibet, Xinjiang Uyghur, Ningxia Hui, Inner Mongolia and Guanxi Zhuang); four municipalities directly under the central government (the capital Beijing, ­Tianjin, Shanghai and Chongqing), and two special administrative regions (Hong Kong and Macau) (see Table 1.1). Taiwan has a special status and will be covered below. The provinces vary in size from ones such as Sichuan and Henan, with populations of around 100 ­million, to those such as Qinghai with barely five million. The PRC covers an area of 9.6 million square kilometres (3.7 million square miles), with an eastern coast bordering the South China Sea, Bohai Sea, Korea Bay and the East China Sea, and land borders with 14 countries, ­ranging from its ­longest (with Russia) to its shortest (with Afghanistan). The PRC’s ­current ­borders were approximately settled after 1949 (when there were over 20 disputes, all but two of which – with India – have subsequently been resolved), though many of them were established ­centuries before, in periods of expansion during the Qing Dynasty (see Chapter 2). The traditional area of Chinese culture in which farmers settled was around the base of the two major rivers, the Yellow River and the Yangtze. These supplied the fertile plains on which earlier dynasties established vast irrigation projects, and as early as the thirteenth century CE during the Yuan Dynasty were able to support a population of over 20 million. The contrast between this settled area, with its particular model of governance, state formation and tax payments, and the vast nomadic areas of inner Asia to the north and north-west has been one of the great ­elemental contrasts in the development of China as a culture and a nation. While the current state, the PRC, has settled parameters at least on land, the previous entities in the place now known as China have varied dramatically over the centuries, and claims to a history of 5,000 years of continuity often need to be highly qualified, especially since archaeologists in China are now dating the earliest coherent state to only 1700 BCE. In its 1982 constitution, the PRC declares that it is a ‘multi-ethnic’ country. Others have claimed it resembles an empire or a civilization rather than a traditional nation state (Jacques, 2008). That the current PRC is the successor state to entities that had complex, interlinked and sometimes divergent histories is clear, as is the fact that the PRC itself is a highly diverse terrain, in terms of populations, ethnicities and languages as a result of this varied and rich history.

Table 1.1 China’s municipalities, provinces and autonomous regions

These statistics are from the last official nationwide census of 2010. These are held once a decade, with the next due in 2020. Because they are the only set of data which is both ­comprehensive and taken across one particular time frame, they are cited here, although it is likely that there have been significant changes since they were collated.

The Geography of China

The historic complexity of China is captured in its geography. ­Fundamentally, the current PRC is divided into a number of contrasting zones. One of the most striking includes the vast mountains to the west of the country, starting from the Tibetan plateau (which accounts for about a quarter of the current extent of China) and running eastwards towards the middle regions in a huge continuous slope. Here, the world’s highest mountain range, the Himalayas, dominates the western borders, with Everest being partly claimed by the PRC. In Tibet itself, the region’s ­capital, Lhasa, is the world’s highest city, some 3,650 metres (12,000 feet) above sea level. The landscape is arid, sparsely populated and has historically been dominated mainly by nomadic peoples. In the eastern areas, around the confluence of the two great rivers, the Yangtze and the Yellow River, the population density is among the highest in the world, the climate is temperate, with long, hot summers and mild winters, and the land, when irrigated, is fertile and perfect for rice plantations. In the south-­western provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan, there are remnants of jungles, the ­climate is semi-tropical, and the fauna and wildlife – were it not for the devastating impact of dense human habitation in recent decades – rich and varied. In central China, with cold winters and dry summers, crops range from maize to wheat. In the north, winter temperatures can fall to as low as −40ºC. Inner Mongolia, a vast region that abuts the northern border with the Mongolian People’s Republic and the Russian Federation, has immense grasslands, some of which have been overgrazed in the last century since the start of intense Han settlement in the late Qing era, creating a major desertification problem. The Gobi Desert lies in the west of the ­province, along with a swathe of different grasslands where much of China’s mutton and wool are sourced. These regions only began to be settled during the twentieth century.

The PRC’s territory covers more than 5,000 kilometres (3,000 miles) from west to east, and despite the fact that the country is now largely run on one time zone settled in Beijing (with some areas in Tibet and Xinjiang using more accurate, localized time markers), it is clear there are up to five real time zones across the whole country. In terms of diet, lifestyle and culture, therefore, while many Chinese assert strongly that there is unity, in fact what strikes most visitors who spend time in the country is the diversity of the people and their lifestyles. The modern PRC embraces semi-nomadic Mongolian and Tibetan herdsmen ­practising Yellow Sect Buddhism, and family-shrine-worshipping rice farmers in the south-east, many of whom have been working their land for ­generations. It runs from the Turkic-looking, Islam-practising Uyghur group in the Xinjiang region in the north-west, to the highly assimilated Manchus from the area historically called Manchuria in the north-east, whose script and language now largely only figure on imperial monuments in Beijing, a reminder of their status as rulers during the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911). While those living in Guangzhou or Fujian may never see snow, in the Harbin area of Heilongjiang the winters are sufficiently cold to hold a three-month-long ice festival with building-sized replicas of famous monuments sculpted in ice out in the open. Diet ranges from meat-eating and bread-consuming in the north, to seafood and rice in the coastal areas. The diversity of China’s food is world renowned, with some areas (Hunan and Sichuan) famous for spicy food and the heavy use of chilli, and others (the north-east and Beijing) for meat-filled dumplings. The Guangzhou diet, with its fondness for exotic seafood and meat, ­contrasts with tofu and vegetarian dishes in areas such as Zhejiang despite their both being coastal eastboard provinces.

The Creation of Chinese Identity and History

While we can talk about the unity of the Chinese language and about the creation of a geographical entity that is now Greater China (a term which embraces the People’s Republic, Hong Kong and Macau, and Taiwan – see section on the latter below) there is the issue of whether we can find a common historic narrative in which to make sense of what China is now. Chinese history until 1911 and the collapse of the Qing is divided into dynastic periods (dynasties being the equivalent of the reigns of particular family groups, usually derived from a founding figure through bloodline succession until the collapse or overthrow of the line). The kinds of territories these dynasties presided over physically, and indeed the unity they actually had, varied widely. But some key ‘high points’ remain powerful even in today’s memory. The most striking of these are the Han Dynasty, the Tang Dynasty, the Song Dynasty, the Yuan and the Ming (see Chapter 2). There were a number of other dynasties sandwiched between these, of varying importance and cohesiveness, but these constitute the backbone of Chinese dynastic history after the unification of parts of Chinese territory under the Qin in the third century BCE.

The Han Dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE), as successor to the short-lived Qin, was almost simultaneous with the high period of Roman imperial rule in the West (Scheidel, 2009). It is now celebrated as a time in which the Chinese nation started to gain some of its cultural and social coherence, with celebrated scientific discoveries, the flowering of art and the adoption of Confucianism as a state ideology. The Han period saw the first production of systematic historical writing through figures such as the great Sima Qian, author of Record of the Grand Historian, a vast account of the biographies of key historic figures from political, cultural and religious fields, in the first century BCE.

The dynasty that eventually succeeded the Han (though with lengthy interludes under the Jin (265–420) and Sui (580–618) periods) was the great Tang, three centuries from 618, in which, from the capital of Chang’an (modern Xian) the empire enjoyed stability, was able to create rich trade links via various routes with the outside world, and experienced a number of capable rulers, perhaps the most celebrated being the sole female ruler in China’s dynastic history, Wu Zetian. This was an era of unparalleled literary creativity, with the great poets Li Bo and Du Fu producing works that remain celebrated to this day. It was also an era of true cosmopolitanism, with a China linked to the outside world and trading with it in ways which are still being discovered by ­archaeologists, some of whom have found Tang products in shipwrecks deep in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. It was as a gesture to the power and resonance of these historic linkages that the Silk Road notion was raised by Xi Jinping in 2014 – the idea of an older China which had deep trade and cultural links to the wider world around it, despite the fact that evidence of direct links pre-1000 between China and the Europe of that time are few and far between.

A period of instability from 907 to 980 saw divisions within the ­territory that had been dominated by Tang political control and division into a set of smaller, fractious kingdoms. From 980 to 1271, the Song Dynasty ran in parallel with the Liao Dynasty. As a sign of the fractures of the empire over this period, Song is divided almost equally into a period in which the capital was in modern-day Kaifeng, and then, after losses of most of its northern territories, when it was forced to relocate to modern Hangzhou. The tragic figure of the emperor Huizong best represents this era, a man remembered now as one of Chinese history’s most cultivated rulers, someone well versed in the three arts of calligraphy, painting and poetry, but who presided over a spectacular collapse of authority, ceded the throne to his son, and then watched helplessly as the empire was brought to its knees by invading Jurchen tribesmen. Huizong was to die in 1135 in captivity in northern China, a symbol for successive generations of disinterested and therefore ineffective and remote imperial rule (Ebray, 2014).

Box 1.1 Sima Qian, China’s master historian

If anyone can be said to have created the template for the narrative of Chinese history, it would be Sima Qian. Born in 139 BCE, and dying in 86 BCE, his vast Record of the Grand Historian (Shi Ji) is one of the supreme masterpieces of literary and historic culture, and it is thanks to this one work more than any other that we have such a detailed knowledge of the early period of Chinese civilization. Initially a palace attendant, and then successor to his father as court astrologer, he was also an adviser to the Emperor Wu on more broad political and strategic issues. It was in this role that he earned disapproval, speaking up for the disgraced general Li Ling who was defeated by a band of Xiongnu tribespeople. His reward for this was to choose either death or castration. Because of his belief in the importance of his mission to write the grand history he had been planning, he endured the pain and humiliation of the latter.

His history was compiled over the coming decade till his death, and is a core source to the present age of Chinese development. Like Herodotus in Greek literature, or the great historians of Rome, Sima Qian created a sense of historical continuity and a story of cultural and state mission. He covers figures as diverse as Confucius and the first emperor, painting powerful and often surprisingly modern accounts of their psychology and motivations.

The traumatic collapse of the early Song and Jin Dynasties was matched by the Mongolian conquests up to 1271 which created a dynasty in which Han were under subjugation by non-Han. This set a precedent for the coming millennium (the Qing too was to be run by Manchus, not Han). The violence of the Mongolian attacks, and the vast, unwieldy empires they created, have left a profound memory trace, with shadowy, deserted cities simply obliterated by the attacking Mongolian armies existing to this day in the western regions of China. That Genghis Khan’s grandson, Kublai Khan, and his successors were able to create a functioning centralized state, which lasted for more than a century, is largely forgotten. The acquisition of many of the marks of Chinese civilization by the new overlords was also noteworthy. The Mongolians, coming to power through a campaign which considered genocide for southern Chinese, reverted to a traditional state model, where citizens were taxed, the bureaucracy reconfigured and at least some semblance of order and artistic achievements restored. The Mongolians left their mark in this era on more than just China, reaching across central Asia as far as the Danube in Europe, where they were poised to launch attacks into the European heartland before being recalled because of leadership succession issues. The Mongolian memory trace remains in the modern English language, with the loan word ‘horde’ (Brook, 2010).

The collapse of the Yuan through disunity and internecine arguments in 1368 led to the establishment of the Ming Dynasty under a former beggar, Zhu Yuanzhang, who became the founding emperor. The Ming’s almost three centuries of stable rule saw the first tentative steps to influence not just as a land power, but also as a sea power, with the brief but extremely successful voyages of the celebrated eunuch admiral, Zheng He, in the fifteenth century. These adventures were eventually deemed to be too expensive, and were abandoned. The collapse of the Ming in 1642–1644 was the result of internal rebellion and division. The most noted emperors of this period were Yongle (1360–1424), who usurped a sitting emperor in 1...