When China Rules the World (17 page)

Only between 1928 and 1937, when Chiang Kai-shek, the heir to the warlords and leader of the Nationalist Party, a position he inherited from Sun Yat-sen, became China’s leader and effective dictator, was China relatively united. But even Chiang Kai-shek’s power was circumscribed by a combination of the Japanese occupation of the north-east, the presence of other foreign powers and his lack of support in rural areas, together with the opposition of the Communist armies in the south (until he drove them out in the early 1930s), followed by their Long March around China in 1934-5 when they tried to evade the Nationalist offensive against them.
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The country was to face a further trauma in 1937 with the Japanese drive southwards from their stronghold in the north-east and their seizure of the fertile eastern provinces of China, where most industry was located. The brutality of Japan’s colonization, symbolized by the Nanjing Massacre in December 1937, when Japanese troops killed many tens of thousands of Chinese civilians and soldiers (and possibly as many as 300,000), was to leave a lasting impression on the Chinese and has continued to haunt Sino-Japanese relations to this day.
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Chiang was now to pay dearly for his earlier preoccupation with the defeat of the Communists and his failure to offer any serious resistance to the Japanese occupation of the north-east. After 1937, it was the Communists that were seen as the patriots, the standard-bearers of the fight against the Japanese and for China’s independence. In the 1949 Revolution, the Communist Party led by Mao Zedong finally took power. Unlike the 1911 Revolution-which in practice proved to be one of history’s commas, the prelude to almost four decades of divided authority and foreign occupation - 1949 proved to be the decisive turning point.

From this most bitter period, one is left with two crucial questions: why did China, though chronically divided, never break up; and why - despite everything - did the impact of Western and Japanese occupation prove relatively limited, at least in the long run?

In the period 1911-49, the possibility of China dividing was very real: on three occasions between 1911 and 1916 provinces actually declared independence from the central government. This, however, was done in response to particular actions by central government rather than as a matter of principle. In practice there were no alternative identities strong enough to provide a viable basis for the formation of breakaway states. There were two exceptions to this: the ultimately successful pressure for an independent Outer Mongolia between 1933 and 1941, and the de facto independence enjoyed by parts of Tibet between 1913 and 1933. But in the vast heartlands of China no such movement for separatism or independence ever acquired any serious strength. The Han Chinese identity, bolstered by new forms of anti-Manchu expression from the late nineteenth century, was simply too strong and too exclusive, while provincial identities remained ill-formed and never acquired any nationalist aspirations. Furthermore, as China entered the Western-dominated modern nation-state system, it was to experience the binding effects of modern nationalism: the centuries-old sense of cultural identity and cohesion, born of a unique kind of agrarian civilization, was reinforced by a profound feeling of grievance engendered by foreign occupation.
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Finally, why were the effects of foreign occupation relatively limited when elsewhere - Africa and the Middle East most obviously - they were to prove so enduring? China’s vastness made colonizing the whole of it, or even the majority of it, a huge task which Britain and the United States saw no advantage in, although Japan and some of the other European nations favoured such an approach;
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as a consequence, most of the country remained under Chinese sovereignty. Apart from Manchuria, it was largely the many treaty ports that experienced sustained foreign occupation and these were, in effect, small enclaves (albeit, by far the most advanced parts of the country) surrounded by China’s huge rural hinterland. This is not to detract from or underestimate the extent to which the country was undermined and dismembered by foreign occupation, but it fell far short of the kind of colonization experienced in Africa, for example. The fact that prior to 1800 China was an advanced agrarian economy, with widespread rural industrialization, considerable commercialization and sophisticated markets, meant that once foreign occupation came to an end, China could draw on this culture, knowledge and tradition for its industrialization. Furthermore, China enjoyed the world’s oldest and most sophisticated state and statecraft, a huge resource that post-1949 China was able to utilize with great effect. This was in striking contrast to post-colonial Africa and the Middle East, where modern states had to be created more or less from scratch. Finally, the powerful sense of Chinese identity helped China resist many of the most negative cultural and psychological effects of Western and Japanese colonialism.
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The Chinese remained bitterly hostile towards the presence of the Western powers and the Japanese, and felt deeply humiliated by the concessions they were forced to make; this was quite different from India, for example, which learnt to accommodate the presence of the British.
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Despite everything, the Chinese never lost their inner sense of self-confidence - or feeling of superiority - about their own history and civilization.
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This notwithstanding, the scale of China’s suffering and dislocation in the century of humiliation has had a profound and long-term effect on Chinese consciousness, which remains to this day.

By 1949 China had suffered from an increasingly attenuated sovereignty for over a century. After 1911 it had experienced not only limited sovereignty but also, in effect, multiple sovereignty,
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with the central government being obliged to share authority with both the occupying powers (i.e., multiple colonialism)
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and various domestic rivals. Most countries would have found such a situation unacceptable, but for China, with its imposingly long history of independence, and with a tradition of a unitary state system dating back over two millennia, this state of affairs was intolerable, gnawing away at the country’s sense of pride. The Communists were confronted with three interrelated tasks: the return of the country’s sovereignty, the reunification of China and the restoration of unitary government. Although the Communists had played the key role in the resistance against the Japanese, it was the Japanese surrender at the end of the Second World War that forced their departure from China.
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In 1949, with the defeat of the Nationalists by the Communists in the Civil War, the country was finally reunified (with the exception of the ‘lost territories’, namely, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao). The key to the support enjoyed by the Communist regime after 1949 - and, indeed, even until this day - lies, above all else, in the fact that it restored the independence and unity of China.
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It was Mao’s greatest single achievement.

After the ravages of the previous forty years, the disintegration of the imperial state and the failure of the Nationalists, the Communists had to deal with the daunting task of establishing a new ruling system. China, ever since the rise of the West, had been faced with a range of strategic choices concerning its modernization: it could reform the traditional imperial institutions, which was attempted unsuccessfully prior to 1911; it could imitate the Western model, an experiment which failed badly between 1911 and 1949; or it could develop new institutions, drawing on foreign examples where appropriate as well as on the past.
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The last, in effect, became the Communist project, with inspiration being sought in part from the Soviet Union, although Maoism was largely a home-grown product rather than a foreign import.
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The Communists had already acquired some initial experience of governance in the areas over which they had enjoyed limited authority during the late twenties and early thirties,
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then in the expanding territory they controlled during the resistance against the Japanese occupation after 1937, and finally in the regions they governed during the Civil War between 1945 and 1949. One of the key problems that faced both the late imperial state and the Nationalists, under Sun Yat-sen and then Chiang Kai-shek, was a loss of control over government revenues. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) - as the new regime was known - quickly reasserted central control over revenues and disbursements. Although the actual expenditure of revenues was to remain in local hands, as it had been since the eighteenth century, central government once again determined how they should be used; there was, in this respect, a strong continuity with the late imperial state.
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The backbone of the new ruling system was the Communist Party. In many respects, it proved a highly effective mechanism for governing, certainly in comparison with the late imperial state and the Nationalists. The key figure was Mao Zedong. Notwithstanding his colossal abuses of power, which resulted in the deaths of millions, as the architect of the revolution and the founder of an independent and unified China, he played the central role in sustaining the popularity and legitimacy of the new regime, and he remains, even today, a venerated figure in the eyes of many Chinese, even more than Deng Xiaoping, who presided over the reform period from 1978. Prior to 1949, the Communist Party’s main base of support lay amongst the peasantry, who constituted the overwhelming majority of the population, rather than in the cities, where the Nationalists were strong. This was very different from the Bolsheviks in the USSR, whose support was concentrated in the cities and was very weak in the countryside.
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The underlying strength and resilience of the new regime was demonstrated by the ability of the Communist Party to renew itself after the death of Mao.
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Despite the calamities of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, both of which Mao had been responsible for, the Communist Party succeeded in restoring its legitimacy amongst the people and then embarking on a very different kind of economic policy, which led to a sustained period of extremely rapid economic growth and a remarkable transformation in China’s situation and prospects.

Judgements about the post-1949 era have - both in China and the West, albeit in differing ways - placed overwhelming emphasis on the extent to which it represented a new departure, a rupture in the continuity and tradition of China. The reasons for this are not difficult to understand. The Chinese Communists - like the communist tradition more widely - sought to underline the extent to which they represented an utterly new kind of regime marking a complete break with the past. That, after all, is what revolutions are supposed to be about, especially socialist revolutions. The Communist Party directed its venom against many Chinese traditions, from the long-standing oppression of women to Confucian notions of hierarchy, and carried out a sweeping land reform in the name of class struggle. Meanwhile the West, with the exception of a brief period during the Second World War, has, more or less ever since the 1917 October Revolution, regarded Communist regimes as the devil incarnate. As a result, too little attempt has been made to understand them in their historical and cultural context, to appreciate the continuities with previous history and not just the discontinuities. In sum, for a variety of reasons, there has been a tendency to overlook the powerful lines of continuity between post-1949 China and the dynastic period. As Bin Wong points out, while the overt differences between Confucian and Communist ideology are clear - hierarchy versus equality, conservatism versus radicalism, harmony versus conflict - there are also important similarities between the two traditions. As in the Maoist period, for example, the Confucian tradition also emphasized the need to reduce inequality, limit the size of landholdings and redistribute land. Similarly, as we discussed earlier, the state’s responsibility for moulding the outlook of the people is an old Chinese tradition, which the Communists have simply perpetuated in a distinctive form. The same can be said of the state’s role in economic and social security, which the Communists continued during the Maoist period in the form of the ‘iron rice bowl’, with state enterprises required to provide employees with housing, education and health, as well as lifelong employment.
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There are political parallels, too. Both the Confucian and Communist modes of rule involved an implicit contract between the people and the state: if the state failed to meet its obligations then the peasants had, according to Mencius (551-479 BC; the foremost disciple of Confucius), a right to rebel. In the imperial era this took the form of the mandate of Heaven; in the Communist era it was expressed, in the name of class struggle, in the right of the proletariat to resist and defeat the bourgeoisie, which during the Maoist era was the pretext for the many top-down mass mobilizations that eventually culminated in Mao’s own assault on the Communist state in the enormously destructive Cultural Revolution. The relationship between state and subject in both traditions was authoritarian and hierarchical, and very different from the Western tradition with its narrative of political rights and formal representative institutions. There are other examples of continuity. Confronted with the problem of the gulf between the cities and the countryside, both acknowledged the need to rule them differently. While the Confucian tradition recruited a governing elite consisting of the highly educated and literate by means of the imperial examination system, the Communists, faced with the same task, used the Party as their means of recruitment to the state. Finally, in the Communist as in the Confucian tradition, elites were seen as an appendage of the state rather than as independent groups with their own forms of organization and power. The absence of a civil society and an autonomous public realm in Communist China is not a new phenomenon: China has never had either.