The handover of 1997 came and went. The British retreated; Hong Kong returned to Chinese control. But Chinese nationalism, inflamed again in 1999 by NATO’s accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and by other real and imagined slights from the West, remains a potent force. One of the entrances to the parklands of the Summer Palace still displays a sign saying: ‘Do not forget the national shame, rebuild the Chinese nation.’
For the early generations of Chinese leaders, this was of course easier said than done. The idea of restoring China’s old glory motivated the masses as well as its elite, and the best way, it seemed to a wide range of thinkers from Yan Fu and Liang Qichao to Mao Zedong, was to replace the old dynastic state and its politically passive subjects with a centralized nation-state. But in order to mobilize active and efficient citizens in the service of a nation-state China needed new and common institutions: schools, the law, and military service. And, after several abortive experiments, it was eventually the ideology of communism that helped create the necessary political community for the creation of a modern nation-state.
In many ways, the humiliations at the Paris Peace Conference, and the subsequent May Fourth Movement which exalted Western thought and violently repudiated Confucianism, enshrined Marxism-Leninism as the main ideological outlook of Chinese thinkers and revolutionaries. The Russian Revolution, Lenin’s voluntary renunciation of Russia’s territories and special privileges in China, and a resurgent communist movement in Europe all helped convince Chinese activists of the validity and inevitable triumph of communism.
Lenin’s influential theory of imperialism called for liberation movements in countries oppressed by imperialist forces, so Marxism-Leninism could seem to complement the fierce nationalism of the May Fourth generation. Lenin’s idea of a vanguard of dedicated revolutionaries appealed not only to men like Chen Duxiu or Mao but also Sun Yat-sen, who reorganized his Nationalist Party, the Guomindang, along Leninist lines, and set up, with Soviet assistance, the famous Whampoa Military Academy where many of China’s leaders were trained. Shortly before he died in 1924, Sun stressed the need for revolutionary glue in China:
Why are Chinese like a sheet of loose sand? What makes them like a sheet of loose sand? It is because there is too much individual freedom. Because Chinese have too much freedom, therefore China needs a revolution … Because we are like a sheet of loose sand, foreign imperialism has invaded, we have been oppressed by the commercial warfare of the great powers, and we have been unable to resist. If we are to resist foreign oppression in the future, we must overcome individual freedom and join together as a firm unit, just as one adds water and cement to loose gravel to produce something as solid as a rock.72
The problem in China, Sun recognized, was one of mobilizing the Chinese masses into a revolutionary movement. He even allied himself with the Communists to achieve this. By 1924, Sun had also become aware that his political programme must meet the economic challenge of China – the agrarian crisis in particular. But he died too early, and his successor, Chiang Kai-shek, though a self-styled military tactician, had little interest in land reform. Allied with landlords, urban financiers and businessmen, he failed to keep up Sun’s radical initiative, which passed to Mao Zedong and the Communists.
‘Whoever wins the support of the peasants,’ Mao said, ‘will win China; whoever solves the land question will win the peasants.’73 And so it happened. Mao’s stress on rural mobilization was initially opposed by doctrinaire Marxists within his own party. Eventually, however, through a series of agrarian revolutions – land redistribution, local government by peasants – the Communists under Mao welded Chinese peasants into a revolutionary army, and made their victory in 1949 possible.
Analytically, a theory suffused with the assumptions of Western history proved disastrous for China. Here Liang Qichao’s critique of the earliest socialist ideas of class struggle in China was to prove prescient. China, he had argued, did not have the particular social and economic conflicts that made socialism so necessary in the West. Sticking to textbook Marxism, however, the Communists misleadingly characterized the Chinese past as ‘feudal’: a built-in bias towards urban industrial growth and against agrarian life led to a condescending attitude towards the mass of Chinese peasants; ‘poor and blank’, as Mao called them. And the search for class enemies led to campaigns of mass killings in the 1930s and 1940s in the remote country areas into which the Communists had been forced by their rivals, the Nationalists and the Japanese.
Organizationally, however, communism worked much better than the warmed-over Confucianism of the Nationalists. Eventually it helped Mao build up a mass base for the CCP in the countryside. Unlike his rivals, Mao himself provided a compelling narrative of China to the Chinese masses. As he wrote in his 1940 essay, ‘On New Democracy’:
Since the invasion of foreign capitalism and the gradual growth of capitalist elements in Chinese society, that is, during the hundred years from the Opium War until the Sino-Japanese War, the country has changed by degrees into a colonial, semi-colonial, and semi-feudal society. China today is colonial in the enemy-occupied areas and basically semi-colonial in the non-occupied areas, and it is predominantly feudal in both … It is precisely against these predominant political, economic, and cultural forms that our revolution is directed.74
The Japanese invasion helped Mao’s cause as much as the corruption and brutality of the Nationalists; the Communists tapped directly into the anti-imperialism of the Chinese masses, and appeared the natural leaders of the Chinese resistance even when their actual military contribution to Japan’s defeat was minor. Class struggle was another of their preferred catalysts for the reorganization of Chinese society. They pursued, often brutally, land reform and other class-based social and economic policies, even as they fought a civil war with the Nationalists after 1945. Moreover, the same organizational skills helped the CCP to rebuild a political and administrative system remarkably quickly after their victory in 1949 (which forced the Nationalists to retreat to Taiwan), and to lead their young nation-state into a major war with the United States in Korea in 1951.
Together with Soviet and Korean communist forces, China fought the United States to a stalemate in Korea by 1953 at the cost of nearly half a million Chinese dead. For the fledgling People’s Republic of China it was a bloody initiation into the Cold War, and its century-long suspicion of Western powers was confirmed when the United States successfully isolated China, arming Nationalist Taiwan and giving the small island China’s seat at the United Nations.
Yet Marxism-Leninism continued to reveal its intellectual inability to deal with Chinese realities. The view (deriving from the May Fourth radicals) that the Chinese were irrevocably tainted by their backward past and needed urgent guidance from a vanguard was never going to encourage political democratization in China. The problem of concentrating excessive power in the apparently wise ‘vanguard’ became more and more apparent as China embarked on rapid economic growth.
Wanting China to catch up with the West as quickly as possible, Mao Zedong set fantasy targets: he asked his compatriots in the mid-1950s, for instance, to match Britain’s industrial production in fifteen years. The blunders resulted in a series of catastrophes which brought China to its knees. Food shortages followed by famine killed more than 30 million people between 1959 and 1961. Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which aimed, initially at least, to start the Chinese revolution afresh in the 1960s degenerated into civil war.
It was the death of Mao in 1976 that enabled a fresh beginning on principles that, though presented as purely pragmatic, seemed to owe less to orthodox communism than to Mencius’s economic ideals of public ownership combined with free trade. In retrospect, communism in China seems more and more to have been an effective ideology for mobilizing and unifying the Chinese masses. Chinese activists in the early twentieth century tried and failed to create a unified nation-state that could launch China’s search for wealth and power in the modern world. It was the
Communists who succeeded in creating a broad-based participatory nationalism that included peasants as well as urban workers. They created a new army, giving a new sense of purpose and energy to demoralized peasants, and went on to build a powerful state bureaucracy that combined party and administrative officials to reach down into every urban neighbourhood and village.
This is partly why, though communism led to a calamitous misinterpretation of Chinese realities and has lost its intellectual appeal, the Chinese Communist Party seems in little danger of going the way of its East European and Russian counterparts. It no longer insists on doctrinal orthodoxy – indeed it has tried to replace communism with Confucian notions of the ‘harmonious society’ – but it remains unchallenged in its role as the sole guarantor of China’s stability, security and growing prosperity.
Partly out of noble intentions, and partly out of vanity, malice and ineptitude, Mao unleashed one disaster after another on his people. But his heirs still rule the country, and millions continue to invest their faith, despite successive tragedies and disasters, in what they see as the good intentions and wisdom of their remote rulers in Beijing.
Founding the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Mao Zedong had said, ‘The Chinese have always been a great, courageous and industrious nation; it is only in modern times that they have fallen behind. And that was due entirely to oppression and exploitation by foreign imperialism and domestic reactionary governments.’ Mao went on to declare that ‘the Chinese people, comprising one quarter of humanity, have now stood up’.
The words now have a prophetic resonance, confirming that the old vision of wealth and power dreamt of by Yan Fu as well as Liang Qichao is a reality. ‘We will have not only a powerful army but also a powerful air force and a powerful navy,’ Mao promised in 1949. ‘Ours will,’ he warned, ‘no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation.’ In less than six decades, history seems to have fulfilled Mao’s hopes.
There still exists a great and restless Chinese mass in the countryside, cruelly shut out from the new urban prosperity to which their labour and taxes have contributed so much. Social unrest, environmental decay, corruption and other ills feed on China’s new affluence. Yet China, the biggest exporter and the largest holder of foreign-exchange reserves in the world, increasingly drives the global economy, boosting GDP rates across the world with its hunger for resources and markets. Western Europe and America have no option but to pay court to it; the small commodity-producing countries of Africa and Latin America form the new periphery to China’s metropole; its formerly hostile neighbours – Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Mongolia – now cower in its shadow, seeking favourable trade deals.
The CCP’s hold on state power remains unchallenged; it keeps key industries under its control; it promotes the rhetoric of egalitarianism and maintains a remarkable ideological cohesiveness on foreign policy, ensuring that China presents a united face to the world. China doesn’t seem close to embracing liberal democracy; rather, its one-party state seems to have ensured the political stability that Samuel Huntington regarded as imperative for Third World societies undergoing modernization.
As previous pages have shown, the idea of individual rights was never deeply rooted in even the most liberal strains of modern Chinese thought, which always had a collectivist orientation. Democracy was seen as essential to the modern nation-state that China had to become in order to survive. ‘The strength of a nation’, Liang Qichao wrote, ‘stems ultimately from democracy.’ But democracy for Liang was ‘simply public-mindedness’, as opposed to the selfishness of monarchism.75
In this formulation of democracy, individual rights enshrined by Western liberal ideologies were always subordinate to the imperatives of national solidarity and a strong state, especially in the context of the permanent external threats China faced in the first half of the twentieth century. The cults of the state and a loyal citizenry that were manifest even in Liang Qichao’s writings were to be elaborated at length by the Communists, notwithstanding Marxist predictions about the ‘withering away of the state’.
During his debates with his radical rivals, Liang Qichao asserted that Western-style liberalism might weaken the state by promoting individual and group interests. What China may well need, he said, is state socialism which controls the economy and works to diminish inequality, while making the country a serious combatant in the jungle of international competition. ‘The economic policy I advocate’, he wrote, ‘is primarily to encourage and protect capitalists so that they can do their best to engage in external competition. To this policy all other considerations are subordinate.’ Liang’s inadvertent prophecy is confirmed by contemporary China, which the West increasingly accuses of being mercantilist in its economic policies, and where an all-powerful state is quick to suppress, often brutally, freedom of expression and other civil rights if they seem to be undermining the all-important national tasks of high economic growth and political stability.
THE RISE OF THE ‘REST’
Praising European energy and initiative in 1855, de Tocqueville added, ‘European races are often the greatest rogues, but at least they are rogues to whom God gave the will and the power and whom he seems to have destined for some time to be at the head of mankind. Nothing on the entire globe will resist their influence.’76 This turned out to be true in more ways than de Tocqueville could predict.
White men, conscious of their burden, changed the world for ever, subjecting its great diversity to their own singular outlook and in the process reducing potentially rich encounters with other peoples and countries to monologues about the unassailable superiority of modern Western politics, economy and culture. Successfully exporting its ideas to the remotest corners of the world, the West also destroyed native self-confidence, causing a political, economic and social desolation that can perhaps never be relieved by modernity alone.
In the end, Western efforts to modernize supposedly backward Asians, however sincere or altruistic, incited more resentment than admiration or gratitude. Expelled from their old social and political orders and denied dignity in a West-dominated world, aggrieved natives always wanted to beat the West at its own game. This is the point that the Chinese intellectual in André Malraux’s prophetic novel The Temptation of the West (1926) makes when he says, ‘Europe thinks she has conquered all these young men who now wear her garments. But they hate her. They are waiting for what the common people call her “secrets”.’77 Many of these secrets are now in Asian hands.
Television and the internet, and in particular the growth of virtual communities, have helped stoke an unprecedented intensity of political emotion around the world. It is no exaggeration to say that millions, probably hundreds of millions of people in societies who have grown up with a history of subjection to Europe and America – the Chinese software engineer and the Turkish tycoon, as well as the unemployed Egyptian graduate – derive profound gratification from the prospect of humiliating their former masters and overlords, who appear uncompromisingly wedded to their right to dictate events around the world. The images from Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, the deep Western financial crisis, and the brutal but inept military actions in Afghanistan and Pakistan all sustain a powerful sense of Western hypocrisy, failure and retrenchment.
This loss of the West’s moral prestige and the assertiveness of the East may appear a recent phenomenon. But, as this book has shown, the less uneven global order coming into being was outlined as early as the nineteenth century by Asian intellectuals who rejected the West’s racial and imperial hierarchies and its right to define the rules of international politics. The historical resentments and frustrations of non-Western societies, whose periodic eruptions come as a shock to many Europeans and Americans, have long been central to Asia’s political life in which memories of past religious and political grandeur despoiled by European imperialists still have not faded.
These different national subjectivities now combine to remake the modern world; it is impossible to ignore th
em. Assumptions of Western supremacy remain entrenched even among intelligent people; indeed, they routinely dictate the writing of newspaper editorials as well as the making of foreign and economic policy in the United States and Europe. However, for many others, the Western nations long ago squandered much of their moral authority – as early as the First World War – even though they retained their power to dictate the course of history. But even this power, rarely admired and mostly feared, leaked away steadily throughout the Cold War’s many cynical hot wars. Nor was it boosted by the downfall of the West’s communist rival. Blighted by the calamitous ‘war on terror’, it has been profoundly discredited by the collapse of the ‘Washington Consensus’, the West’s vaunted model of unregulated financial capitalism.
Globalization, it is clear, does not lead to a flat world marked by increasing integration, standardization and cosmopolitan openness, despite the wishful thinking of some commentators. Rather, it reinforces tribalist affiliations, sharpens old antipathies, and incites new ones while unleashing a cacophony of competing claims. This can be seen most clearly today within Europe and the United States, the originators of globalization. Inequality and unemployment grow as highly mobile corporations continually move around the world in search of cheap labour and high profits, evading taxation and therefore draining much-needed investment in welfare systems for ageing populations. Economic setbacks, the prospect of long-term decline and a sense of political impotence stoke a great rage and paranoia among their populations, directed largely at non-white immigrants, particularly Muslims.
From the Ruins of Empire Page 34
