When China Rules the World

On the orders of King George III, the first British trade delegation to China left London in September 1792, bearing numerous gifts including telescopes, clocks, barometers, a spring-suspension coach and airguns. They sailed in a man-of-war equipped with sixty-six guns, accompanied by two support vessels, on a mission whose purpose was to impress and seduce the Chinese Emperor Qianlong with Britain ’s growing industrial and technological prowess. The 700-strong party, comprising diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, scientists, painters, gardeners and others, was led by Lord George Macartney, an experienced diplomat with an eye for the main chance, whether personal or national. The British government, represented by the East India Company, which organized the mission (and which acted as Britain’s de facto corporate overseas persona, ruling India until 1858), was anxious to open up the Chinese market to trade, its previous efforts having been rebuffed. The preparation was meticulous and protracted. The British mission arrived at Macao, the Portuguese enclave on the south coast of China, and then took four months to crawl northwards, as negotiations with the Emperor’s representatives dragged on, eventually reaching Beijing for the long-awaited and much-postponed audience with the Emperor.

When the meeting was finally held in September 1793, Macartney asked the Emperor for British diplomatic representation in Beijing, the ending of the system whereby foreigners were only allowed to use Canton (Guangzhou) as their point of entry and for trade, the opening up of new ports for trade, and the provision of fair and equitable tariffs. The Emperor was unmoved, his mind made up long before the mission ever arrived. Instead of informing Macartney, he sent an edict to George III, explaining that China would not increase its foreign trade because it required nothing from other countries. As Qianlong wrote:

We have never valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the slightest need of your country’s manufactures. Therefore, O King, as regards your request to send someone to remain at the capital, while it is not in harmony with the regulations of the Celestial Empire we also feel very much that it is of no advantage to your country.

To the British, possessed of the hubris of a rising power and flush with the early fruits of the Industrial Revolution — by then well under way, though unbeknown to the 81-year-old Emperor, it would appear — the Chinese reaction was incomprehensible. Duly spurned, Macartney was obliged to leave China empty-handed by the only route available to him: over land to Canton. During the course of his journey he kept a copious journal. One entry reads, ‘The Empire of China is an old, crazy, first rate man-of-war, which a fortunate succession of able and vigilant officers has contrived to keep afloat for these one hundred and fifty years past, and to overawe their neighbours merely by bulk and appearance.’ He was thoroughly bleak about the prospects for the Celestial Empire, which he saw as destined to be ‘dashed to pieces on the shore’. In Macartney’s opinion, it was futile for China to resist the British demands because it was ‘in vain to attempt arresting the progress of human knowledge’. The sense of one era closing and another beginning was apparent not only in Macartney’s over-weaning self-confidence but also in the Emperor’s blinkered failure to recognize the potential represented by Britain’s new manufactures. Meanwhile the clash of civilizations was graphically illustrated by the lengthy and tortuous argument over diplomatic protocol for the audience with the Emperor. From a full six weeks before, the Chinese had pressured Macartney with growing intensity that he should perform the kowtow, the required gesture of deference to the Emperor: a set of three genuflections, each containing three full prostrations with the head touching the ground. Macartney offered to doff his hat, go down on one knee and even kiss the Emperor’s hand, but he declined to kowtow unless a Chinese official of similar position kneeled before a portrait of George III. For the Chinese, this was out of the question: the Emperor was the ruler of ‘all under Heaven’ and therefore could not possibly be regarded as of equal status to a mere king. Even the status of the goods that the British had brought was the subject of dispute: as required by more than a millennium and a half of Chinese convention, foreigners could only visit China as inferior vassals bearing tribute. In the eyes of the Chinese, Macartney was simply a subordinate ‘conveyor of tribute’: Macartney, for his part, insisted that they were presents from the ambassador of a diplomatic equal. No compromise was reached. Two eras and two civilizations collided without a hint of mutual understanding.

The mission ended in dismal failure. Macartney’s prediction of the fate that awaited China was to be borne out more fully than the Chinese could ever have imagined, though the British — filled with the testosterone of growing power and well versed in aggressive intent — clearly had some inkling. Already at the time of Macartney’s embassy to Beijing, the East India Company had started to export opium from India to China and this was rapidly to prove a highly profitable trade. In 1829 the Chinese government banned the import of opium, much to the fury of the British. As relations deteriorated, the British launched the First Opium War (1839-42) and bombarded south China into submission. In the Treaty of Nanjing, the Chinese were forced to hand over Hong Kong, open the first five treaty ports and pay reparations. China ’s ‘century of humiliation had begun’. [190]

If Japan was the great exception, the only non-Western country to begin its industrialization in the nineteenth century, China was an example of the opposite: a country which failed to industrialize, even though it enjoyed a similar level of development to Japan in 1800. As a result, China found itself hugely outdistanced by Europe and the United States over the course of the nineteenth century, and also by Japan towards the end of it. After 1800, and especially from the middle of the century, China suffered from growing economic weakness, near implosion, debilitating division, defeat, humiliation and occupation at the hands of foreign powers, and a progressive loss of sovereignty. Disastrous though its fortunes were in the period between 1850 and 1950, however, their consequences should not be overstated. China ’s progress after 1949, and especially since 1978, suggests that the roots of its contemporary dynamism lie in its own history rather than being mainly a consequence of its turn to the West: even if it did not appear so at the time, all was far from lost in the century of humiliation. [191] Nonetheless, this period was to leave deep psychological scars. Like Japan, moreover, China ’s modernization was to take a very different path from that of the West. [192]

A PLACE IN THE SUN

China had already begun to acquire its modern shape in the centuries leading up to the birth of Christ. [193] The victory of the so-called First Emperor (Qin Shihuangdi, the Western name for China being derived from his family name, Qin) marked the end of the Warring States period (475–221 BC) — an endless series of conflicts between the numerous Chinese states of the time which resembled a much later phase of European history — and the beginning of the Qin dynasty (221–206 BC). By 206 BC the boundaries of the Qin Empire contained much of what we now regard as the heartland of modern China, stretching to Vietnam in the south and as far as the Great Wall in the north, including the densely populated region between the Yangzi and the Yellow rivers (see Map 5). Following the fall of the Qin dynasty, the country continued to expand rapidly during the Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 220), achieving its furthest extent in the period 141-87 BC (see Map 6), when the Chinese armies penetrated into southern Manchuria and the Korean Peninsula in the north-east, and south and south-west as far as northern Vietnam. [194] Over the next millennium or so, China continued to expand to the north, north-east, north-west, south and south-east. [195] The huge size that China ultimately acquired was related to the natural borders of its continental land mass, bounded by the steppe in the north, the coastline to the south and east, and the mountainous regions to its south-east. [196]

Extensive internal migration, improving communications and many centuries of unity or near unity helped to foster a relatively homogeneous culture across what was, for its time, a massive population. The Qin dynasty, short though its life may have been, constructed over 4,000 miles of imper-ial highways, as many as the Roman Empire. [197] A centralized state, and a sophisticated statecraft, took root based on the teachings of Confucius (551–479 BC), who was to exercise a huge influence over the Chinese political and moral universe for more than two millennia. Weights, measures and currency were standardized. The distinctive customs that we associate with China — including the mandate of Heaven, a family structure resting on filial piety, a language that used common signs and symbols, and a religion based on ancestral worship — were well established by the time of the Qin dynasty. During the first millennium AD, therefore, China was to acquire — given the fact that in practice it embraced many different peoples — an unusually strong sense of cultural identity. [198] One of the most striking features of Chinese history has been that, although it has been invaded from the north many times — notably by the Mongols in the thirteenth century and the Manchu in the seventeenth — all invaders, bar the Mongols, once secure in power, sought to acquire the customs and values of the Chinese and to rule according to their principles and their institutions: a testament to the prestige enjoyed by the Chinese and the respect accorded to their civilization by their northern adversaries. [199] The persistence and steady spread of the Chinese language is a further indication of the strength of the culture: the constant invasions from the north, by obliging the population to stay mobile, kept the language from becoming atomized into different dialects, at the same time making the Chinese themselves more aware of, and therefore also protective of, both their language and culture. [200] The early emergence of a Chinese identity is, perhaps more than anything else, the key to China as we know it today, for without that, China could not have remained a relatively unified country for over two millennia and would have been shorn of its most striking characteristic: its size.

Map 5. Boundary of the Qin Dynasty at its Greatest Extent, c.206 BC

Map 6. Boundary of the Han Dynasty at its Greatest Extent, 141-87 BC

Historically, relatively advanced forms of agriculture enabled societies to sustain large populations and provided propitious conditions for the development of organized states; China was a classic example of this phenomenon. It is now believed that millet and rice first appeared in northern and southern China respectively 12,000 years ago, earlier even than in Mesopotamia, where sedentary agriculture began about 8,000 years ago. Although North China has long sustained ‘dry’ agriculture by way of cereals, barley and various kinds of millet, it was the wet cultivation of rice, which developed slowly from the beginning of the first millennium and which was in full swing by its end, that was later to give a major boost to Chinese agriculture, resulting in a shift in the economic centre of gravity from the central plain to the lower Yangzi basin. New methods of wet rice cultivation were introduced, including the planting of seedlings, early ripening varieties of rice, the systematic selection of species, new tools such as a chain with paddles which made it possible to lift water from one level to another, and sophisticated forms of irrigation. These made Chinese wet rice farming one of the most advanced agricultural techniques in the world, generating extremely high yields. [201] During the Song dynasty (AD 960-1279), these advanced techniques were generalized across large tracts of the country, pushing south as the frontier was steadily extended. [202] Sustained by agrarian prosperity, the population expanded rapidly, almost doubling between 1000 and 1300. [203] Between AD 500 and 900 bricked roads were built across the middle of the Chinese empire such that the capital (known then as Chang’an, now as Xi’an) was only eight to fourteen days’ travel from any reasonably sized city. Even more significant was the spread of water transport in the form of rivers, canals and coastal shipping. These various waterway systems became part of an integral network that was to form the basis of a nationwide market that steadily took shape by 1200. As Marco Polo, a resident of Venice, Europe ’s greatest seaport, observed of the Yangzi in the late thirteenth century:

I assure you that this river runs for such a distance and through so many regions and there are so many cities on its banks that truth to tell, in the amount of shipping it carries and the total volume and value of its traffic, it exceeds all the rivers of the Christians put together and their seas into the bargain. [204]

The Chinese economy became increasingly commercialized, with paper money firmly established in both north and south China by the twelfth century. A large inter-regional trade developed in both luxuries and staples like rice. During the Song dynasty, coastal trade flourished and extended to Japan and South-East Asia. Urbanization proceeded apace, such that by the late thirteenth century Hangzhou, China’s largest city, had a population of almost 7 million, making China by far the most urbanized society in the world, its cities accounting for around 10 per cent of the population. [205] The cities were not, however, to play the same role as centres of political and personal freedom as those in Europe: autonomous urban development was constrained by China ’s centralized imperial structure, a pattern that only began to change in the twentieth century. Encouraged by the government, there was a flowering of learning and a wave of remarkable inventions during the Song dynasty, especially in the century and a half of the Northern Song (960-1126). [206] What is sometimes described as China’s Renaissance witnessed the development of a classical examination system, the birth of neo-Confucianism, the invention of gunpowder, mortars and woodblock printing, the spread of books, and major advances in mathematics, natural sciences, astronomy and geography. [207] A large spinning machine was invented that was to fall only slightly short of what might — at least theoretically — have ushered in an industrial revolution along the lines that Britain was to experience centuries later. [208] In contrast, Europe ’s Renaissance only began two centuries after the end of the Northern Song. The diffusion of books enabled by woodblock printing, the publication of large encyclopedias, the growing number of candidates who entered the examination system for the civil service, the great advances made in mathematics (particularly the development of algebra) and the emergence of a gentry-scholar class marked China out as the most literate and numerate society in the world; only Islam could compare, with Europe lagging well behind. [209] During the medieval period Europe was to borrow extensively from China ’s innovations, including paper, the compass, the wheelbarrow, the sternpost rudder, the spinning wheel and woodblock printing. [210] China was by far the most advanced civilization in East Asia, exercising a huge influence on its neighbours, many of which had long been tributary states of China, paying tribute to the emperor and acknowledging the superiority of Chinese culture.

After 1300 this efflorescence began to subside and China ’s medieval economic revolution gave way to a period of stagnation that only came to an end in 1500. The Mongol invasion marked the closure of the Song period, in many respects China ’s finest age, and led to the establishment of the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) and the incorporation of China into the Mongol Empire. It was to prove traumatic, with the Chinese finding themselves under alien rule and reduced to lowly status. There were several reasons for the economic slowdown. The dynamic by which China had expanded from its heartlands southwards had involved the addition of rich new farmlands, but this area began to fill up with migrants from the north; as a consequence there was growing pressure on resources, most notably food. [211] The spectacular advances in science, meanwhile, started to dry up. The Song dynasty had placed considerable emphasis on the importance of trade and contact with foreigners, notably Japan and South-East Asia, but also beyond to Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent and even the east coast of Africa. This process slowly went into reverse during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). [212] In 1371 the Ming dynasty forbade coastal people from sailing overseas because of the threat posed to Chinese shipping by large-scale Japanese piracy. An edict in 1390 declared: ‘At present the ignorant people of the Liang-Kuang, Chekiang and Fukien are frequently in communication with the outer barbarians, with whom they carry on a smuggling trade. This is therefore strictly prohibited.’ [213]There followed over the next three centuries a succession of restrictions banning first private and then government trade. By 1757 Canton was the only port from which legal trade could be conducted, as Lord Macartney was to complain.

The successful reconstruction of the Grand Canal linking northern China with the rich rice fields of the Yangzi in 1411 was a crucial moment, signalling a greatly reduced need for coastal shipping and, therefore, also for a navy. For almost four and a half centuries, from the consolidation of the Song Empire until the remarkable seafaring expeditions of the early Ming (1405-33), China was the greatest maritime nation in the world — using big compartmented ships (with up to four decks, four or five masts, and a dozen sails), steered by a sternpost rudder, guided by charts and compass, and able to carry 500 men. [214] The ships used by Zheng He for his great voyages to South-East Asia, the Indian Ocean and the east coast of Africa in the early fifteenth century were by far the most advanced in the world. From the moment the voyages were completed, however, China ’s maritime prowess fell into steep decline. In 1436 the construction of seagoing ships was banned and the number of smaller vessels built was reduced. The reason for this growing isolation and introspection is not entirely clear. It would appear that the failure to continue with Zheng He’s great voyages was the result of several factors: a political shift in the attitude of the Ming dynasty; the moving of the imperial capital from Nanjing to Beijing in 1421, which led to heightened sensitivities about the northern border and reduced interest in oceanic and coastal priorities; and growing concern about both the cost of the maritime voyages and the relative failure of the military expeditions against the Mongols in the north. [215] There was also an anxiety that the coastal centres, with their links to other lands, might act as an alternative source of power, the maintenance of social order and control always being a prime consideration for Chinese rulers. Perhaps also the underlying Chinese belief that their civilization was far superior to those of the barbarians (especially the nomadic cultures to its north, [216] which intensified under the Ming in an ethnic reaction to the previous Mongol rule, made such an autarchic and isolationist view seem natural.

Between 1500 and 1800, stagnation gave way to vigorous economic growth and reasonable prosperity. There was a steady increase in the food supply, due to an increase in land under cultivation — the result of migration and settlement in the western and central provinces, greater productivity (including the use of new crops like corn and peanuts) and better irrigation. [217] These developments sustained a fivefold increase in China ’s population between 1400 and 1800, whereas between 1300 and 1400 it had fallen sharply. [218] China ’s performance during this period has tended to be overshadowed by the dynamism of the earlier medieval economic revolution; unlike during the Song dynasty, this later growth was achieved with relatively little new invention. In the eighteenth century China remained the world’s largest economy, followed by India, with Europe as a secondary player. Adam Smith, who saw China as an exemplar of market-based development, observed in 1776 that ‘ China is a much richer country than any part of Europe.’ [219] It was not until 1850, indeed, that London was to displace Beijing as the world’s largest city. [220]

A model of one of Zheng He’s ships, shown in comparison to one of Christopher Columbus’s

Map 7. Zheng He’s Expeditions

As we saw in Chapter 2, Britain was able to escape the growing resource constraints at the end of the eighteenth century by deploying the resources of its colonies, together with an abundant supply of accessible domestic coal. But what exactly happened to China, which enjoyed neither? There was almost certainly enough capital available, especially given the relatively small amounts involved in the take-off of the cotton industry in Britain. Although Chinese merchants did not enjoy the same kind of independent and privileged status that they did in Britain, always being subordinate to the bureaucracy and the landowning gentry, they were widely respected and enjoyed growing wealth and considerable power. [221] There may have been rather less protection for investment in comparison with Europe, but nonetheless there were plenty of very large Chinese enterprises. China ’s markets were no less sophisticated than those of Europe and were much longer established. Mark Elvin argues that the reason for China ’s failure was what he describes as a ‘high-level equilibrium trap’. [222] China ’s shortage of resources in its densely populated heartlands became increasingly acute: there was a growing lack of wood, fuel, clothing fibres, draught animals and metals, and there was an increasing shortage of good farmland. Hectic deforestation continued throughout the nineteenth century and in some places the scarcity of wood was so serious that families burned little but dung, roots and the husks of corn. In provinces such as Henan and Shandong, where population levels were at their most dense, forest cover fell to between 2 per cent and 6 per cent of the total land area, which was between one-twelfth and one-quarter of the levels in European countries like France at the time. [223] The pressure on land and other resources was driven by the continuing growth of population in a situation of relative technological stasis. Lacking a richly endowed overseas empire, China had no exogenous means by which it could bypass the growing constraints.

With the price of labour falling, profit margins declining and static markets, there was no incentive to invest in labour-saving machinery; instead there was a premium on conserving resources and fixed capital. In such a situation there was little reason to engage in the kind of technological leap into the factory system that marked Britain ’s Industrial Revolution. In other words, it was rational for the Chinese not to invest in labour-saving machinery. As Elvin argues:

In the context of a civilization with a strong sense of economic rationality, with an appreciation of invention such that shrines were erected to historic inventors… and with notable mechanical gifts, it is probably a sufficient explanation of the retardation of technological advance. [224]

With growing markets and a rising cost of labour, on the other hand, investment in labour-saving machinery was entirely rational in the British context and was to unleash a virtuous circle of invention, application, increased labour productivity and economic growth; in contrast, China remained trapped within its old parameters. In Britain the domestic system, based on small-scale family units of production, proved to be the precursor of the factory system. In China, where such rural industrialization was at least as developed as it was in Britain, it did not. While Britain suggested a causal link between the domestic and the factory systems, this was not true in China: widespread rural industrialization did not lead to a Chinese industrial revolution. [225]

THE CHINESESTATE

The most striking difference between Europe and China was not in the timing of their respective industrializations, which in broad historical terms was similar, separated by a mere two centuries, but rather the disparity between the sizes of their polities, which has persisted for at least two millennia and whose effects have been enormous. It is this, above all, which explains why Europe is such a poor template for understanding China. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, Europe was never again to be ruled, notwithstanding the ambitions of Napoleon and Hitler, by an imperial regime with the capacity to exercise centralized control over more or less the entire continent. Political authority, instead, was devolved to many small units. Even with the creation of the modern nation-state system, and the unification of Germany and Italy, Europe remained characterized by its division into a multi-state system. In contrast, China retained the imperial state system that emerged after the intense interstate competition — the Warring States period — that ended in the third century BC, though this was to assume over time a range of different forms, including, as in the case of the Mongol Yuan and the Manchu Qing dynasties, various phases of foreign rule. [226] Apart from Outer Mongolia, China’s borders today remain roughly coterminous with those the country acquired during the period of its greatest geographical reach under the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). China ’s equilibrium state has been that of a unified agrarian empire in contrast to Europe, which for two millennia has been an agglomeration of states. [227]

From this follows a fundamental difference in contemporary Chinese and European attitudes: while the Chinese attach greater importance to unity than literally anything else, the Europeans overwhelmingly believe in the nation-state rather than European-wide sovereignty, the European Union notwithstanding. The underlying strength of the Chinese desire for unity is illustrated by the fact that, while the rise of nationalism in Europe in the nineteenth century resulted in the break-up of old empires and the creation of many new states, this has never happened, and shows no sign of happening, in China. The Chinese commitment to unity has three dimensions: the fundamental priority attached to unity by both the state and the people; the central role expected of the state in ensuring that this unity is maintained; and a powerful sense of a common Chinese identity that underpins this overarching popular commitment to unity. This unity could never be taken for granted: China has spent around half its history in varying degrees of division, which, in the light of the country’s size and diversity (far greater than that of Europe), is not surprising. As a result of its attachment to unity, China has largely escaped the intra-state wars that have scarred Europe ’s history over many centuries, though its periods of disunity and fragmentation have often carried a very heavy cost in terms of war and famine, notably from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth century, when it was chronically divided. [228] China ’s frequent experience of disunity and its baleful consequences have served to reinforce its commitment to unity, a tradition that began with Confucius — who, living during the Warring States period, was witness to the huge cost of instability and conflict, and preached the importance of harmony.

A further difference between the Chinese state and the various European states was that the former never faced competition from rival elites seeking to limit its power. By the mid tenth century, the Chinese aristocratic elites had been destroyed, with the consequence that no elite enjoyed authority independent of the state. The opposite, in fact, was the case, with the bureaucratic elite enjoying unrivalled authority and numerous privileges, and all other elites dependent for their position on the patronage of the state. [229] The key mechanism for the selection of the bureaucratic elite was the imperial examination system, which had been more or less perfected by the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) [230]. Although the nobility enjoyed an advantage in these exams, they were open to a wide cross-section of society, and were the means by which recruitment to the imperial elite was greatly broadened. Knowledge of the Confucian classics formed the core of the exams and served, for successful and unsuccessful candidates alike, to articulate and reinforce a common set of values. [231] Whereas in Europe the elites remained relatively autonomous, except at extreme moments like war, the Chinese elites were absorbed by and became effectively part of the state, often being called upon to act on its behalf. The imperial bureaucracy, under the aegis of the emperor, faced no challenge from a Church (after the seizure of Buddhist properties in the ninth century), a judiciary, a landed aristocracy, the military or an urban bourgeoisie. [232] The most important exception was the tradition of the literati, like Confucius himself, who were given licence to write critical things provided that they, in effect, removed themselves from everyday society.

The Chinese state was thus never constrained by independent power elites in the manner of Europe: it enjoyed universal and unchallenged authority. While the boundaries between the state and society in Europe were clearly delineated and constantly contested, this was not the case in China, where the frontiers remained blurred and fuzzy, as they still are today: there has been no need to define them because there were no competing social groups. Given the non-conflictual nature of state-elite relations, the boundaries between state and society were instead determined by practical issues of organization and resource constraints. In Europe, by contrast, autonomous, competing elites — nobles, clerics and burghers — fought to constrain the power of the state. Whereas the contest between state and elites in Europe was intimately bound up with both Church and class, in China the functional differentiation into scholars, peasants, merchants and tradesmen did not translate into independent bases of power or institutionalized voices.

With such a vast territory to govern, the Chinese state could not, and did not, depend solely or even mainly on physical coercion for the exercise of its rule. [233] It would have been neither feasible nor viable — the resources required being too enormous. In comparison with Japan, indeed, the military remained strikingly absent from Chinese life — at least until the early twentieth century. Instead, the power of the state has rested primarily on consent reinforced by forms of coercion. The Chinese state went to great lengths, in both the Ming and Qing periods, to inculcate in the population a sense of shared values and culture based on Confucian principles. Here was another contrast with Europe, where such matters were not considered to be the responsibility of the state and, until the late nineteenth century, were left in the hands of the Church. [234] The Chinese state saw moral instruction, amongst both the common people and the elites, as both desirable in itself and also as a means of exercising social control. For the elites, the state required that the Confucian classics be taught in schools as well as in preparation for the imperial exams. It promoted lectures for the common people on the virtues of Confucian behaviour, and imperial edicts frequently adopted a moral tone on issues such as social hierarchy and the payment of taxes. The state also sought to promote the worship of particular deities, while at the same time discouraging those which it saw as potential sources of social unrest. [235] On these matters, it was, with the exception of religious control, many centuries in advance of European states, which only began to concern themselves with such questions after the emergence of the modern nation-state and concomitant nationalism in the late nineteenth century. As the historian Bin Wong suggests: ‘From a Chinese perspective, the lack of concern for education and moral indoctrination in Europe constitutes a basic limitation on European rule, no less important than the absence of representative political institutions in China.’ [236] The same can be said of the manner in which the Chinese state, as a matter of course, engaged in surveillance of the population — by registration and other means — in order to be better able to anticipate sources of dissatisfaction and potential unrest. [237] A crucial mechanism in the exercise of social control was the clans or lineages, which were — and remain, even — far more important in China than they generally were in Europe. These were huge extended kinship groups, which traced their origins back to a common male ancestor (at the time of the 1949 Revolution there were still fewer than 500 surnames in China), [238] and were based on formal membership. They enjoyed huge authority, with the power of expulsion and the consequent threat of social ostracism. [239]

The imperial state was mindful of the importance of good governance and the need for restraint. This notion of good governance was intimately linked to the Confucian tradition, with its stress on the moral responsibility of the rulers: a continuing feature of imperial rule, for example, was a recognition that taxes needed to be kept low so that peasants would prosper, harmony would be promoted, resistance and rebellion avoided. [240] Nor was there a complete absence of accountability: imperial rule was always haunted by the possibility that the mandate of Heaven, and therefore its right to rule, might be withdrawn. During the Zhou dynasty (1100-256 BC) emperors claimed for the first time that their sanction to govern came from a broader, impersonal deity, Heaven ( tian), whose mandate ( tianming) might be conferred on any family that was morally worthy of the responsibility. This doctrine proclaimed the ruler’s accountability to a supreme moral force that guides the human community. The Chinese concept of Heaven differed from the Western concept of a universe created and controlled by a divine power. For the Chinese, Heaven was seen as superior to anything on earth but it was not regarded as the creator of the universe, nor was it visualized in concrete terms. Unlike a Western ruler’s accession through the doctrine of the divine right of kings, which rested solely on birth, the Chinese mandate of Heaven established moral criteria for holding power, which enabled the Chinese to distance themselves from their rulers and to speculate on their virtue and suitability. [241] A succession of bad harvests, or growing poverty, or a series of natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes, might bring into question in the minds of the people the right of a particular emperor to continue his rule: such a growing crisis of legitimacy could lead to and sustain huge popular uprisings, the last great example being the Taiping Uprising against the Qing dynasty in the mid nineteenth century, when tens of millions came to believe that the mandate of Heaven had been withdrawn.

The moral role that the Chinese state assumed was only one aspect of a very broad conception of how it conceived of its responsibilities. The mandate of Heaven meant that the state felt obliged to intervene in ecological and economic questions and also in ensuring the livelihood of the people. A striking example was the way the Qing during the eighteenth century managed granary reserves in order to ensure that the local laws of supply and demand worked in a reasonably acceptable fashion and produced relative price stability, a practice which dated back much earlier to the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) and even before. [242] The state also took on responsibility for what were, by the standards of the time, huge infrastructural projects, such as the maintenance of the Yellow River in order to prevent flooding, and the construction of the Grand Canal, which was completed at the beginning of the seventh century. [243] In each of these respects, the Chinese state was very different from European states in that it assumed functions that the latter were only to regard as legitimate areas of concern many centuries later. In these instances too, then, developments in China prefigured those in Europe, and confound the idea of a single Eurocentric path of development that other states are destined to follow. If anything, indeed, quite the reverse: the Chinese state acquired many of the characteristics of a modern state, not least a large-scale bureaucracy, long before, on a European time-map, it should have done. Moreover, those forces that later drove the expansion of the nation-state in Europe from the seventeenth century onwards — the exigencies of warfare, the need for revenue and the demand for political representation — were very different from the factors that shaped China’s imperial state. In contrast to Europe, where no state dominated, China enjoyed overwhelming power over its neighbours for more than a millennium, [244] while political representation was to remain an alien concept, even after the 1911 Revolution and the fall of the Qing dynasty. The dynamics of state-creation in China and Europe were profoundly different in almost every major respect. [245]

IMPLOSION AND INVASION

The problems faced by the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) began to mount in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Its first taste of what lay in wait was its defeat by Britain in the First Opium War (1839-42). Then, around the middle of the century, as economic difficulties began to grow, the Qing were shaken by a series of local revolts together with four major rebellions: a Muslim rebellion in Yunnan in the south-west (1855-73), another Muslim rebellion by those of Turkic descent in the north-west (1862-73), the Nien Rebellion in the north (1853-68), and the Taiping Uprising (1850-64). [246] Of these, the Taiping was by far the most serious. With trust in the imperial regime shaken by its defeat at the hands of the British in the Opium War, together with serious floods and famine in 1848-50, the conditions were ripe for rebellion. The Taiping Uprising started in southern China and laid waste to much of the rich lower Yangzi region before moving north and west, and threatening Beijing: it is estimated that the uprising resulted in the deaths of 20–40 million people. The historian Paul Cohen describes the Taiping’s ideology as ‘a bizarre alchemy of evangelical Christianity, primitive communism, sexual Puritanism, and Confucian utopianism’. [247] Initially it drew considerable support from various ethnic minorities in the south which had migrated from the north, especially the Hakka, and contained a strongly anti-Manchu element (the Qing dynasty being from Manchuria). [248] The outcome remained uncertain for several years, with the rebellion only finally being crushed by the raising of new armies by the Qing and the support of British and French troops. Although the ultimate ability of the Qing to triumph indicated that it was still a robust and powerful force, its moral authority had been seriously undermined and was never restored. [249]

Following the defeat of the Taiping Uprising, the problems posed by growing Western ambition and aggression began to move centre-stage in the 1870s and 1880s. [250] The First Opium War, in which the Qing unsuccessfully sought to resist British demands to allow the import of Indian-grown opium, led to the Treaty of Nanjing. [251] This was the first of the so-called unequal treaties and resulted in the imposition of reparations, the loss of Hong Kong, and the creation of four treaty ports in which the British enjoyed special concessions. The impact of the defeat, however, was limited. The Qing dynasty was not forced to rethink its attitudes in the light of its defeat: the imperial state, indeed, continued to perceive the British in rather similar terms to the way it regarded other foreigners, whether they were the peoples of the northern steppes and Central Asia, or its many tributary states in East Asia, like Korea and Vietnam. [252] The sense of Chinese superiority and self-confidence remained obdurate. [253] This state of affairs began to change with the Second Opium War (1857-60), which culminated in the ransacking and burning of the Summer Palace in Beijing by British and French troops and the resulting Treaty of Tianjin and the Beijing Conventions. These established a whole string of new treaty ports in which Western citizens were granted extra-territoriality; the right to foreign military bases was conceded; missionaries were given freedom to travel in the interior; and further reparations were imposed. As a result, China began to lose control over important aspects of its territory. [254] In 1884 the French succeeded in crushing the Chinese navy in a struggle for influence over Vietnam, which had long been part of the Chinese tributary system but was in the course of being colonized by France. The naval battle revealed the alarming disparity between the power of an advanced European industrial nation, even so far from its home base, and that of an overwhelmingly agrarian China. The Chinese flagship was sunk by torpedoes within the first minute of battle; in less than an hour all the Chinese ships had been destroyed and the way was clear for France to take control of Indochina. [255]

The decisive turning point was the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, which, like the war with the French, concerned China ’s influence over its tributary states, in this case Korea, which had for many centuries been one of the tributary states closest to China. The Chinese suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of its rapidly industrializing and increasingly aggressive neighbour and in the Treaty of Shimonoseki was forced to pay huge reparations, amounting to three times the government’s annual income. Korea effectively became a Japanese protectorate, though not formally until 1905. China lost Taiwan and part of southern Manchuria, four further treaty ports were created, and Japan won the right to build factories and other enterprises in one of the now numerous treaty ports. Japan ’s victory also proved the occasion for further demands from the Western powers and a series of new concessions from a China impotent to resist. [256] By the turn of the century, China ’s sovereignty had been severely curtailed by the growing presence of Britain, France, Japan, Germany, the United States, Belgium and Russia on Chinese territory.

The Boxer Uprising in 1900, which received the tacit support of the Empress Dowager Cixi, who held de facto power over the Qing government between 1861 and 1908, was occasioned by growing anti-Western sentiment and resulted in widespread attacks on foreign missionaries and other Westerners. Eventually a joint foreign army drawn from British, Japanese, French and American troops marched on Beijing, suppressed the uprising and then proceeded to base itself in the Forbidden City for over a year. Further concessions were extracted from the Chinese authorities, including another round of reparations. Although China was not colonized, in effect it became a semi-colony, with foreign troops free to roam its territory, the treaty ports resembling micro-colonies, missionaries enjoying licence to proselytize Western values wherever they went, [257] and foreign companies able to establish subsidiaries with barely any taxation or duties. China was humiliated and impoverished. [258] The fact, however, that it never became a colony, even though the Japanese were later to occupy Manchuria and then conquer lands much further to the south, was of great importance for China ’s ability to revive after 1949.

Major Unequal Treaties Imposed on China

Treaty of Nanjing (1842) with the United Kingdom

Treaty of the Bogue (1843) with the United Kingdom

Treaty of Wanghia (1844) with the United States

Treaty of Whampoa (1844) with France

Treaty of Aigun (1858) with Russia

Treaty of Tianjin (1858) with France, the United Kingdom, Russia and the United States

Convention of Peking (1860) with the United Kingdom, France and Russia

Treaty of Tientsin (1861) with Prussia and the German Customs Union

Chefoo Convention (1876) with the United Kingdom

Sino-Portuguese Treaty of Peking (1887) with Portugal

Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) with Japan

Li-Lobanov Treaty (1896) with Russia

Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory (1898) with the United Kingdom

Boxer Protocol (1901) with the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, Russia, France, Germany, Italy, Austro-Hungary, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands

Twenty-One Demands (1915) with Japan

China ’s impotence in the face of growing foreign intervention stimulated a movement for reform aimed at modernizing the country. Unlike in Japan, however, it failed to command anything like a consensus, its base never extending beyond a small elite, with the consequence that reform was always a hesitant and piecemeal process. It was driven by a small coterie of imperial civil servants, together with various writers and scholars, such as Kang Youwei, a well-connected man adept at showing how new ways of thinking were compatible with traditional Confucian texts. [259] The imperial government for the most part, however, neither understood nor accepted the necessity, let alone the urgency, of modernization, remaining passive or actively opposed — unlike in post-1868 Japan, where the state was the key agent of modernization. Nonetheless, there was some reform of the armed forces and various ministries, including the establishment for the first time of a diplomatic presence in major capitals like London and Paris, while the educational curriculum was revised after the turn of the century to include Western disciplines. In 1898 the reform movement reached its apogee when it finally received the formal blessing of the imperial hierarchy, but the imprimatur only lasted for a few months. [260]

One of the major problems facing the reformers was that modernization became intimately associated with the West at a time when the latter was colonizing and humiliating the country: far from being seen as patriots, they were regarded as tainted by the West or, worse, as traitors. As a result, the growing hostility amongst the Chinese towards the West was to work against the process of reform. The fact that China enjoyed such a unitary and centralized system of government also conspired to inhibit and stifle the development of alternative reforming impulses, in contrast to Japan, where authority was more dispersed. This problem was compounded by the hegemony enjoyed by Confucian thought, which made it very difficult for other ways of thinking to gain ground and influence. Until around 1900 the idea of reform was virtually always articulated within a Confucian framework — with an insistence on the distinction between Chinese ‘essence’ and Western ‘method’ (or, in the famous phrase of Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909), ‘Chinese learning for the essential principles, Western learning for the practical applications’). [261] After the turn of the century, other modes of thought began to acquire some traction, including socialist and Marxist ideas amongst sections of the intelligentsia, [262] a process that culminated in the 1911 Revolution largely being inspired by Western thinking. [263] Although Confucianism certainly declined during this period, it did not die. Nor should it be regarded as having been, or being, inherently incompatible with, or fundamentally antithetical to, change and reform. [264] However, it was in urgent need of revitalization through a process of cross-fertilization with other ways of thinking, as had happened to it in earlier periods of history with Buddhism and Taoism.

By the early years of the twentieth century, the Qing dynasty faced an intensifying crisis of authority. Constantly required to seek the approval of the occupying powers, it enjoyed only very limited sovereignty over its territory. Its economic situation, exacerbated by the enormous reparations that it was forced to pay, which required the government to depend on loans from foreign banks in order to meet its obligations, meant that it was permanently in dire financial straits. The armies that it had depended on to crush the various rebellions, notably the Taiping Uprising, behaved in an increasingly independent manner, and the regime faced gathering disaffection and disillusionment amongst growing sections of the population, with a rising tide of anti-Manchu sentiment directed against the Qing. The Qing finally fell following the 1911 Revolution, after 266 years in power, bringing down the curtain on over two millennia of dynastic government — the most enduring political system in world history. It was replaced by the republican government of Sun Yat-sen, but, far from ushering in a new and more hopeful era, Sun’s regime proved the prelude to a further Balkanization of China, in which limited sovereignty gave way to something much worse: a chronic multiple and divided sovereignty. Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang (or Nationalist) Party was in a very weak situation, with no troops at its command or effective state apparatus at its disposal. He sought to strike a deal with the country’s most powerful military overlord, Yuan Shih-kai, but the result was to render Yuan the real power in the land and to sideline Sun. After Yuan’s death in 1916, the military governors that he had installed in the provinces quarrelled and shared out China between them, with the support of various foreign powers. The years 1916-28 were the period of warlordism. Not only was the country now — de facto if not de jure — divided, but also, for the first time for many centuries, military power, together with the continuing foreign presence, became the arbiter of China ’s future. [265]

Only between 1928 and 1937, when Chiang Kai-shek, the heir to the war-lords 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. [266] 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. [267] 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. [268]

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; [269] 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 180 °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. [270] 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. [271] Despite everything, the Chinese never lost their inner sense of self-confidence — or feeling of superiority — about their own history and civilization. [272] 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.

AFTER 1949

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, [273] with the central government being obliged to share authority with both the occupying powers (i.e., multiple colonialism) [274] 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. [275] 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. [276] 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. [277] 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. [278] 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, [279] 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. [280]

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. [281] 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. [282] 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. [283]

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.

There are, thus, powerful continuities between the Communist tradition and dynastic history. The PRC is an integral part of Chinese history and can only be understood in that context. [284] The historian Wang Gungwu argues that the new Communist state was ‘a replacement for the old emperor-state’, and that ‘Mao Zedong effectively restored the idea of a charismatic founder-emperor and behaved, and he was treated very much, like an emperor with almost no limits on his power.’ [285] Suisheng Zhao makes a similar point rather differently:

A Chinese nation-state was forged under the leadership of the Communist Party and the guidance of Marxism. However, it had far more to do with Chinese nationalism, with the reassertion of China ’s former glory and future modernization, than with the universal principles of communism. [286]

As we shall see in Part II, the contours of Chinese modernity bear the imprint not just of the Communist present but, far more strongly, that of the Chinese past.

ECONOMIC TAKE-OFF

Ultimately China was undermined in the nineteenth century by its failure to industrialize at more or less the same time as the Western powers and Japan. From around 1860 there were significant examples of Chinese industrial development that were comparable with those in Japan, notably in Shanghai. [287] But, given China ’s vast size, they were too limited and too scattered. China, above all, lacked two crucial ingredients of Japan ’s modernization: a strong modernizing state and a prosperous agrarian sector that could generate the surpluses needed to fund industrialization. [288] In the second half of the nineteenth century, Chinese agriculture stagnated or even regressed as a result of the destruction wrought by civil war, insurrections, the rising price of silver, floods and famines. Worse, after the defeat by the Japanese in 1894, China was almost bankrupted by the terms of its reparation payments and then found itself defenceless in the face of yet further Western and Japanese demands. [289] The Western powers exploited China ’s vulnerability by carving out new spheres of influence and acquiring the so-called ‘leased territories’. [290] Foreign capital poured into China as the number of foreign businesses expanded rapidly, keen to exploit a situation where they could operate virtually without restraint or discrimination. [291] By 1920, Jacques Gernet writes:

the whole Chinese economy was dependent on the big foreign banks in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Qingdao, and Wuhan, and on powerful [foreign] companies… The customs, the administration of the salt tax, and the postal service were run by foreigners, who kept all the profits. Western and Japanese warships and merchant shipping were everywhere — in the ports, on the coast, and on the Yangzi River network. Apart from a few Chinese firms… the whole modern sector of industry (cloth mills, tobacco factories, railways, shipping, cement works, soap factories, flour mills and, in the towns, the distribution of gas, water and electricity, and public transport) was under the control of foreign companies. [292]

China’s plight during this period is illustrated by the fact that in 1820 its per capita GDP was $600, in 1850 it was still $600, by 1870 it had fallen to $530, in 1890 it was $540, rising very slightly to $552 in 1913 — still well below its level in 1820, almost a century earlier. By 1950 it had fallen to a mere $439, just over 73 per cent of its 1820 level, and lower than in 1850. [293] These figures reveal the disastrous performance of the Chinese economy over a period of 120 years, with foreign intervention and occupation being the single most important reason. It is hardly surprising that China now refers to the period 1850–1950 as the ‘century of humiliation’. Over eighty years after the Meiji Restoration — and well over a century and a half since the commencement of Britain ’s Industrial Revolution — China had barely begun its economic take-off.

Apart from restoring the country’s unity, the central task facing the PRC was industrialization. To this end, it engaged in a huge project of land redistribution and the creation of large communes, from which it extracted considerable agricultural surpluses in the form of peasant taxes, which it then used to invest in the construction of a heavy industry sector. Its economic policy marked a major break with past practice, eschewing the use of the market and relying instead on the state and central planning in the manner of the Soviet Union. Despite the wild vicissitudes of Mao’s rule, China achieved an impressive annual growth rate of 4.4 per cent between 1950 and 1980, [294] more than quadrupling the country’s GDP [295] and more than doubling its per capita GDP. [296] This compared favourably with India, which only managed to increase its GDP by less than three times during the same period and its per capita GDP by around 50 per cent. [297] China ’s social performance was even more impressive. It enhanced its Human Development Index (a measure of a country’s development using a range of yardsticks including per capita GDP, living standards, education and health) [298] by four and a half times (in contrast to India’s increase of three and a half times) as a result of placing a huge emphasis on education, tackling illiteracy, promoting equality (including gender) and improving healthcare. [299] This strategy also enabled China to avoid some of the problems that plagued many other Asian, African and Latin American countries, such as widespread poverty in rural areas, huge disparities of wealth between rich and poor, major discrepancies in the opportunities for men and women, large shanty towns of unemployed urban dwellers, and poor educational and health provision. [300] The price paid for these advances, in terms of the absence or loss of personal freedoms and the death and destruction which resulted from some of Mao’s policies, was great, but they undoubtedly helped to sustain popular support for the government.

The first phase of Communist government marked a huge turnaround in China ’s fortunes. During these years, the groundwork was laid for industrialization and modernization, the failure of which had haunted the previous century of Chinese history. The first phase of the PRC, from 1949 to 1978, reversed a century of growing failure, restored unity and stability to the country, and secured the kind of economic take-off that had evaded previous regimes. Despite the disastrous violations and excesses of Mao, the foundations of China ’s extraordinary transformation were laid during the Maoist era. The 1949 Revolution proved, unlike that of 1911, to be one of China ’s most important historical turning points.