Franz Michael - China Through the Ages: History of a Civilization

Past studies of China have concentrated on specific events or have related a chronological history of the dynastic periods. These works have included aspects of cultural history but have underemphasized the country's great social, political, and intellectual movements and their ultimate expression in the art and literature of the time. By focusing on such themes, Professor Michael provides a new framework for understanding the Chinese cultural tradition.

The author describes the evolving history of ideas in China, from ancient faith in powerful magic to more modern concepts of a logical moral order of the universe and mankind's place in it. He also explores the intellectual ferment following the dawn of the age of reason, the integration of Buddhism into the Confucian social order, and the social transformations accompanying the rise and fall of the centralized state. Throughout, he illustrates how the changing society's beliefs, values, and aesthetic sense were embodied in its art and literature. This portrayal of the Chinese cultural tradition not only puts Chinese history in a new perspective, it also illuminates the process through which China constructed a modern society from a non-Western foundation and serves as an essential tool for understanding modern-day China and its prospects for the future.

Franz Michael is professor emeritus at George Washington University, where he was associate director and director of the Institute for Sino-Soviet Studies from 1964 to 1972. Dr. Michael's publications include Rule by Incarnation: Tibetan Buddhism and Its Role in Society and State (Westview, 1982), The Taiping Rebellion, 3 vols. (1971), The Asian Alliance: Japan and United States Policy (with Gaston Sigur, 1972), Mao and the Perpetual Revolution (1977), and many others.

History of a Civilization

Franz Michael

First published 1986 by Westview Press, Inc.

Published 2018 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Michael, Franz H.
China through the ages.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. ChinaCivilization. I. Title.
DS721.M57 1986 951 86-11090
ISBN 13:978-0-367-01706-4(hbk)

THIS THOUGHTFUL BOOK, surveying the essentials of Chinese history from its prehistoric beginnings to the social changes of the 1980s, reflects the half-century of its author's involvement with China. The first chapter begins with a personal anecdote: The young Franz Michael, in self-imposed exile from his native Germany in the Hitler years, had become a professor at the National Chekiang University in Hangchow in the late 1930s. Along with the Chinese faculty and students, he experienced the great migration from Japanese-occupied coastal areas of wartime China to its far western interior. Along the way, pausing with that university group for some weeks in a village in Kiangsi, he shared their labor on a task of hydraulic engineering building a dike to protect homes and fields from the summer floods, one of the ancient and significant involvements of the Chinese people with their environment.

That opening anecdote is the only point at which the author inserts his own story directly into this book, as he takes up the millennia-long account of the Chinese experience in history. His final paragraph, however, again reminds us of his personal involvement. There he expresses the hope that "the great humanist tradition of the past may still provide the moral strength on which to base a freer order for a people who have suffered so much in our time." Throughout his account of that great humanist tradition his scholarly mind searches for the most meaningful elements of the Chinese experience, those aspects of history that modern readers will want to know about as they visit China, or visit museums where Chinese art is displayed, or read Chinese literary works, or think about our world.

Franz Michael has the world, and particularly our world in our time, very much in his mind as he guides us through a Chinese past that is distant from us, but nevertheless of consequence to us. The problems he brings into our view are basic human issues: How did the Chinese adapt their lives to their immense land; how did they preserve their Chinese identity through the longest of all national histories, through the high and the low points of their often troubled past; how did they express themselves and transmit their vision in thought and art; how did they work out solutions to daily-life problems within the distinctive structure of their society? Professor Michael's discerning eye for human values, combined with his social scientist's perceptions of the social process, contribute the qualities that give this book its special flavor. Above all, he disdains the unexamined assumptions of formula history, and writes his own, very personal assessment of the route by which China reached the present moment in its history. At some points his sense of Chinese history differs from my own, as is often the case when two historians compare their larger interpretive constructs. That is another way of saying Franz Michael could not write a dull book.

First and foremost, Franz Michael is a student of Chinese government, and in surveying history he is ever mindful of its meaning for the political life of China today. His view of the stark political changes of this century sets his book apart from many others. He rejects the facile labeling of the People's Republic as a new imperial dynasty, one more in the long succession of imperial regimes. The Ch'ing or Manchu dynasty that ended in 1911 provides the base from which our understanding of the present must proceed, but Mao Zedong was not a new emperor, and Chinese Communism is not, either in intrinsic or in functional terms, just an updated version of "imperial Confucianism." His sense of the past is more accurate than that of the analysts who use those labels, and his characterization of the present cuts through those mists with greater clarity. He rightly points out that the political forms adopted by the Communists could not have been generated from within, using the concepts and the institutions of the Chinese past. The political forms of Soviet Leninism imposed upon the Chinese social base are culturally incongruous with China's political past. Nonetheless, something of the old Chinese pragmatic spirit and of its traditional humane values have persisted, and they condition the way all new elements from without are received, understood, and used. The Chinese experience in today's world can only be understood by drawing deeply on our knowledge of its long past. We are often tempted to explain all human behavior in terms of parochial-minded analogies to what we know bestthe rather recent experience of our own society. That will not suffice; China, as Professor Michael states in his preface, was sui generis. That, however, makes the comparisons with our own past and present the more interesting, and if we make such comparisons well armed with sound information, they become the more revealing about the Chinese and about ourselves.