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Part I
Political Dilemmas
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Chapter 1
Protests Against Prosperity:
The Recurring Chinese Dilemma
of Economic Achievement
Versus Political Discontent
China in the century from 1911 to 2011 has been replete with reforms, rebellions, and revolutions, although the various regimes that ruled China during these hundred years, from the late Qing dynasty to the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) authorities, through Mao Zedong’s political terror to the post-Mao Communist Party leaderships that virtually practice capitalism, have all emphasized the significance of national unity, social control, and political stability for their differently perceived national interests of the Central Kingdom.1 It is conventional to acknowledge that rebellions and revolutions took place against the poverty and stagnation that China had suffered since the late Qing dynasty. It is equally standard for Chinese intellectuals, in their continuous advocating to make their nation wealthy and powerful (fuqiang), to highlight the perceived linkage between China being weak and poor and the concomitant drive for modernization.2 The communist interpretation of modern Chinese history, now the official version or master narrative which to a large extent has displaced all other interpretations in the awareness of Chinese citizens, emphasizes the status of China before 1949 as a “semi-feudal, semi-colonial society” in which people suffered greatly from economic poverty, class exploitation, and political repression and in which China as a nation was easily humiliated by Western imperialist powers.3 Widely accepted at home and abroad is a standard portrayal of China during the long period from 1840, when China was defeated by the British Empire in the Opium War, to 1949, when the Communist Party took national power, or even to 1979 for those who deny that Mao effectively tackled the country’s poverty problems: a portrait in which China remained poor, stagnant, and conservative (or ideologically radical but politically and economically totalitarian in Mao’s era).4 Seldom questioned is the entrenched proposition that it was the backward economic conditions of China that nurtured continuing rebellions and revolutions.
This article challenges that conventional view and disputes the materialist, economy-determinist interpretation of Chinese revolutions. It demonstrates that China did make substantive, although unbalanced, economic and social progress in the early decades of the 20th century. Based on this rediscovery of forgotten prosperity, it re-examines the connections between economic conditions, on the one hand, and social discontents and political protests on the other. It finds that, although the suffering from material backwardness and economic stagnation often makes Chinese people rebel, political discontent also grows quickly and tremendously when the nation’s overall economy performed pretty well and Westernized social reforms effectively modernized the nation. It argues that China’s search for modernization has been constantly troubled by a tradeoff between economic prosperity and social protest. It sees Chinese economic progress over the last hundred years as occurring in three cycles of modernizing efforts, each resulting in economic successes but accompanied by a rise in social unrest. It asserts that political discontent has been fuelled not only by material backwardness as such, but also by economic growth and modernization as that has been achieved in modern Chinese history.
The three modernizing cycles, from social crisis through economic prosperity to political protest, will be the focus of this article. The first cycle that this article observes occurred in the late Qing, starting as China’s encounter with Western imperialism triggered a shakeup and led to various reform programs, but finished with the Republican Revolution that overthrew the Qing regime. The highlighted period during this process is the Empress Dowager Cixi’s “New Deal” (Xinzheng) reform, which stimulated industrial investment and commercial development in China in the first decade of the 20th century. This single-dimensional economic modernization achieved an economic boom, but failed to reduce social conflict. The latter grew until it formed the basis of the 1911 Revolution, out of which arose the Republic of China. There followed a similar cycle, with demands arising for a fundamental restructuring of political institutions to combat foreign encroachment and social backwardness, as clearly voiced during the May Fourth Movement of 1919. But these efforts were fruitless. Instead, in the Nanjing “New Deal” the consolidated authoritarian KMT regime began its campaign to build China’s economy. The decade up to the Japanese invasion witnessed what Marie-Claire Bergère calls the “golden age of the Chinese bourgeoisie,”5 featuring rapid development of national industries and commerce as well as an increase in foreign investment and international trade. However, this progress also followed the self-destructive pattern of the Cixi reforms, worsening government corruption, aggravating social tensions, and preparing the way for the communist national victory in 1949.
The cycle seemingly repeats itself again in today’s China. Economic prosperity has since the mid-1990s been arousing vast social grievances and political discontent, if not yet to the degree of fostering political revolution. Government corruption and socioeconomic inequality are again causing widespread political discontent and mass protests. The Communist Party-state now adopts the same attitudes and strategies as the Empress Dowager Cixi in the 1900s and the Chiang Kai-shek regime in the early 1930s, notably combining economic modernization with political repression for the purpose of sustaining the regime’s legitimacy. The current Chinese leadership, despite its rhetorical attachment to Marxism and Leninism that maintains a century-long prophesy of the death of capitalism, vigorously embraces capitalist globalization. But it is careful not to link market mechanisms with political democracy and with channels for ordinary people to influence the national distribution of accumulated wealth. Again, protests arise against prosperity (not only against poverty), and political discontent grows along with capital accumulation (not only with socioeconomic stagnation).
Poverty, backwardness, and stagnation have of course caused social turbulence over the last century in China; but so have economic growth and material progress as in the historical way through which they have appeared since China began to seek forms of modernization. This other side of the Chinese story — how national prosperity, economic growth, and material modernization have arou sed protests and even plunged China into social turmoil and political revolution — increasingly demands scholarly attention and explanation. The paradoxical association between the nation’s economic achievement and citizens’ political discontent is a century-long dilemma impairing modernization in China. The crux is not a developmental issue of alternative strategies of accumulating wealth but rather a political issue of balancing the accumulation of wealth with social justice. Research shows that the political preconditions and political consequences of the Chinese acquisition of national wealth and power are self-contradictory: authoritarian reforms, as in all three historical cycles, provide political preconditions for promoting economic prosperity, but authoritarian prosperity then intensifies social conflicts. The bottleneck of China’s modernization is political and institutional, rather than material and developmental.
Our analysis below begins by tracing the three cycles from reform to revolution. For the first two rounds of modernization, the article highlights the economic progress often neglected in official histories and conventional memory, and it examines the social and political aftermath of growing prosperity in particular concrete historical circumstances. For the third and latest one, the emphasis will be on the social dimensions, as the economic achievements of this round are already well-recorded. Turning next to the general political conditions of China’s economic modernization over the last century, the analysis shows how a political perspective provides a better explanation than a materialist perspective of the historical trajectories that China has travelled in the past century. The conclusion will also briefly address the theme of historical memory concerning the relationship between economic progress and its political support.
1.1From Reluctant Reform to Republican Revolution: The First Cycle in Late Qing
The defeat of China during the First Opium War by the British Empire in 1840 is conventionally regarded as a turning point for the Central Kingdom, one that inaugurated the nation’s constant pursuit of modernization.6 The Chinese, for the first time in their five-thousand-year-old civilization, were shocked by a painful self-perception that their nation had fallen far behind Western powers in material wealth, military power, and technological advancement. This shock, the standard account goes, led to a century of turbulence and revolution as the nation struggled to regain its power and wealth.7
This argument contains some truth, but it gives only part of the story. It at least ignores there was a long time span of seventy years from the Opium War to the 1911 Republican Revolution. During those seventy years several generations passed, many socioeconomic conditions changed, and, most importantly, rebellions and reforms repeatedly occurred. Violent upheavals such as the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions were not simply reactions to domestic poverty and class misery, as they took place with strong religious and nationalistic elements. Moreover, the later turbulence that directly led to the 1911 Revolution occurred under those aforementioned changing conditions; it was propelled by government-initiated reforms that aimed at promoting economic modernization. In other words, as poverty and misery did cause the crisis of China in the late Qing, it should be stressed that the initial progress in the effort to modernize China and the according improvement of the national economic performance were not remedies of social instability. Rather, such progress and improvement often aroused further political discontent which eventually generated revolutionary momentum. During this intriguing trajectory of historical development, government-initiated reforms often play a paradoxical role in both promoting economic prosperity and propelling political protest, as vividly attested by the events unfolding in the first decade of the 20th century.
The late Qing Chinese campaign of modernization began, as is widely known, with the rise of the “self-strengthening” movement after the Opium War. This movement took the form of introducing modern Western military and industrial technology to China, while rejecting spiritual and political elements of Western industrial societies.8 The modernization movement reached the domain of economic reform after intense internal debates among the Manchu and Han ruling elites, as Qing “self-strengthening” statesmen sought to expand China’s e...
