Jack Gray - Rebellions and Revolutions: China from the 1880s to 2000

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TO MAISIE

The historian of modern China is not given much room for manuvre in his choice of themes. They impose themselves. The first is the causes of the collapse of the Chinese Empire which, founded two centuries before Christ, had survived into the modern age; the failure of what had hitherto been the most promising quarter of mankindprobably the most productive, possibly the best governed and certainly the most innovativesets a fascinating problem.

The second question raised is the prolonged failure of China to respond to the challenge posed by the coming of the West, and the question is sharpened by the unavoidable contrast with the success of Japan which, when subjected by the Western powers to precisely the same regime as they had imposed on China, moved with extraordinary rapidity to modernize and join the ranks of the industrialized powers. Related to this is the question whether the privileges of the foreign powers in China proved to be on balance a hindrance or help to her transformation; and here the fact that Japan succeeded so well, in spite of the imposition of the same privileges, throws doubt on the idea that foreign privilege was the decisive factor in preventing Chinas modernization. More important, the records of the Chinese economy in the early twentieth century, gradually made available by modern scholarship, suggest that the assertion that Chinas efforts failed miserably is not altogether true, and has persisted only as one of the nationalist and communist myths which must be eliminated before any valid assessment of modern Chinas history can be attempted.

When we move on to the rise and victory of the Chinese Communist Party we face the question whether this was really the result of a broad-based peasant revolution, or whether its cause was essentially military, and it was perhaps possible only because the Japanese invasion of China, being directed against the ports and urban centres defended by the Nationalists, left comparatively unscathed the remoter rural areas in which the Communists operated, leaving them free to build up formidable military strength through guerrilla campaigns.

The major theme presented by post-revolutionary China starts from Mao Zedongs rejection of Stalinism in the late 1950s and the gradual hammering out, through much strife and agony, of a Chinese alternative to the Soviet-style command economy, an alternative which has implications far beyond the borders of China in so far as it presents new possibilities not only for Marxist socialism but for the rest of the Third World in its struggle against poverty. Not the least interesting aspect of this alternative is that it represents the incorporation into socialism of certain traditional Chinese economic values and expectations; the socialism with Chinese characteristics advocated by Deng Xiaoping is perhaps Chinese in a sense of which Deng and his fellow reformers are not fully conscious.

The revival of these traditional values raises the further question of how far China in the course of revolution has remained Chinese. The dilemma of her first modern nationalists was that the drastic changes necessary to preserve China as a nation might destroy her as a culture and eliminate everything that gave the Chinese their identity. Yet perhaps tradition has proved to be tougher than they expected. The traditional political culture has survived the revolution very well. As with the Poles, the Hungarians and the Czechs, the nations world of historical images and references has not altogether been replaced by Marxism. The great historical figures of Confucian virtue and vice may still be more real to most Chinese than Marx and Lenin. When in 1959 Marshal Peng Dehuai was advised by his friends to cease his criticism of Mao Zedongs Great Leap Forward, he identified himself not with some figure from socialist history but with the Ming official Hai Rui, who had reprimanded the Emperor at the risk of his life. When in 1962 a group of Chinese intellectuals started a campaign against the Marxist assertion that there is no morality above class, they began at the grave of Confucius. Perhaps the most striking evidence of all comes from a recent Chinese urban opinion poll (1987) which showed that filial disobedience was still the moral defect most strongly condemned.

The final theme which presents itself to our attention is the evolution of Chinas new place in the family of nations. When, after 1949, the new regime had ruthlessly squeezed out all foreign economic interests, China found it necessary to enter into a fraternal treaty with the Soviet Union which, ironically, reasserted many of the features of the unequal treaties imposed on China in the nineteenth century. Khrushchev rescinded these arrangements, but by this time the divergence of interests and ideology between China and the Soviet Union had reached such a point that he earned no gratitude for his liberality. Thus China, having incurred the enmity of the United States of America since the Korean War, now chose to brave the hostility of the other superpower. To find a way out of this dangerous isolation, Mao Zedong chose to reach a