Orville Schell and John De Lury: Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century. New York: Random House, 2013.
Wisely “emphasizing the perspectives of the Chinese themselves,” the authors trace the actions of a succession of Chinese regimes as they undertook “the abiding quest for fuqiang, ‘wealth and power.'” Rather optimistically, they tell us that the recent success of these effects have “made Chinese society finally more ready than ever for the possibility of a more open and democratic future,” even while admitting that the adage fuguo qiangbing means “enrich the state and strengthen its military power,” a sentiment deriving not from Confucianism but from the hard-headed doctrines of Chinese Legalism—hardly a prolegomena for democratization. Indeed, “what “Liberté, egalité, fraternité meant to the French revolutionaries and to the making of the modern West, ‘wealth, strength, and honor’ have meant to the forging of modern China…. Reformers have been interested in democratic governance at various stages of China’s tortuous path, not so much because it might enshrine sacred, unalienable political liberties but because it might make their nation more dynamic and strong.” Chinese ruler have experimented with democratization but also with “communism, fascism, and authoritarianism” in search of “a formula that worked.”
The 1842 Treaty of Nanjing ended the Opium War, stipulating that China no longer controlled its political and military policies. The Chinese Communist Party regime describes this treaty as a major cause of Chinese poverty and weakness, which the Party inherited after seizing power slightly more than a century later. There must have been prior causes enabling the Western powers to defeat China in the first place, however, and these were identified by Wei Yuan, a classically trained scholar/official whose generation had superintended the catastrophe. Wei called for the Chinese to understand the modern science which provided the intellectual framework within which Western navies had “wreaked havoc along Chinese coasts and up her riverways, into the heart of the empire.”
Only half a century earlier, the Qing Dynasty was at its apex. When England’s George III sent an embassy requesting a trade treaty, the emperor dismissed the overture, indicating that China had “no great need for England’s goods or inventions, and, in any event, it was not accustomed to establish ‘equal’ relations with anyone”; after all, “We possess all things,” he explained, and therefore “have no use for your country’s manufactures.” The authors consider the Emperor’s judgment to have been “a perfectly rational assessment of the balance of power between China and the West at that moment.” The head of the British contingent nonetheless suspected that that moment was fleeting; he compared the Chinese empire to “an old, crazy, first-rate Man-of-War,” imposing in its day but rotting underneath. Once she wrecks, “she can never be rebuilt on the old foundation.” There were already rebellions in the distant provinces, a telling sign of centralized authority on the wane.
By Wei’s time, the Englishman’s prediction had materialized. Wei was well prepared to notice. His teacher was the pretended Confucian thinker Liu Fenglu, who had “inducted his bright acolyte into an esoteric school of Confucianism that claimed to unlock secret teachings of the Sage through unorthodox readings of classical texts.” Liu claimed that Confucius didn’t really consider the course of events to be cyclical, with imperial dynasties rising and falling; rather, things “progressed in a linear, teleological fashion, from an ancient era of Chaos toward a utopian future called datong, ‘Grand Harmony.'” To hasten the arrival of this consummation, Confucius supposedly taught “a secret set of pragmatic, realpolitik methods to keep the world orderly until the era of Grand Harmony arrived.” To anyone familiar with Chinese thought, this is obviously a Legalist subversion of Confucianism, an attempt to put a Confucian mask on Legalist doctrine. It is a rhetorical strategy employed by the rulers of China to this day.
For his part, Wei advanced the Legalist cause by publishing An Anthology of Statecraft Writings from the Present Dynasty in 1826. The term for ‘statecraft’ is jingshi, “ordering the world”; Chinese Legalists posing as Confucians deployed it to indicate their departure from traditional Confucians “who were more interested in ethical self-cultivation, metaphysical philosophy or classicist scholasticism.” As the authors remark, “Wei’s statecraft reform agenda turned out to be based less on the moral values preached by Confucians than on the precepts of the Sage’s ancient rivals,” bringing “these very un-Confucian ideas back into the mainstream of nineteenth-century reform thinking,” even while insisting (quite correctly) that Confucius and his followers did have a political teaching. Indeed, Confucians and Legalists alike would have endorsed the attempt to prevent the British imperialists from selling Indian opium to the Chinese—a policy intended to pacify the nation, weaken resistance to foreign encroachments, and to deplete China financially—even as the Chinese Communists are doing today in the United States, in collaboration with Mexican drug cartels, and for the same purposes. The British policy succeeded; they won the Opium War and obtained Hong Kong as a prize of empire along with access to four coastal cities for purposes of trade. Wei concluded that the Chinese had better learn a lot more about Western technology, geopolitics, and the synergy between the two.
In his next book, Records of the Conquest, he “argued that Chinese needed to feel a more acute sense of humiliation over their current fallen status,” the better to spur them to fighting back. “Humiliation stimulates effort; when the country is humiliated, its spirit will be aroused.” Subsequent Chinese political and intellectual figures have taken this teaching very much to heart, repeating the lessons of China’s ‘Century of Humiliation’ at the hands of the West, with the United States now replacing Great Britain as the prime humiliator. Subsequent Wei productions included a proto-Mahanian analysis of maritime power and a discussion of how that power now linked the major continents in a way unseen in previous centuries. No Chinese had understood this before; no Chinese had felt the need to try. As Wei wrote of the British, for them “soldiers and trade are mutually dependent. By overpowering [their rivals], they have become the most powerful of the island barbarians.” Wei didn’t advocate a counter-imperialism—only a sufficiency of “barbarian techniques” for Chinese self-defense. He admired the United States for having adapted exactly that stance, beginning with the Washington administration, and also for having established a democratic civil society, a system that “may truly be called public.” Having seen the impotence of the Chinese monarchic and bureaucratic regime, he advocated not a republican regime, however, but a strong, more centralized modern state—effectively an oligarchy—on a democratic social basis.
The Qinq Dynasty tottered on, nearly overthrown by the Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s and again humiliated in the Second Opium War of 1856-60, which resulted in the destruction of its royal garden and summer palaces. This new humiliation strengthened the desire for revenge among China’s elites, and it remains a useful foil for Communist Party propaganda to this day. Wei’s successor in the next generation of Chinese scholar/officials was Feng Guifen, who took Wei’s call for zixiu ziqiang or “self-improvement and self-strengthening” into the second half of the nineteenth century, “articulating core principles for what was China’s first indigenous plan for modernization.” Given the fact that China is far bigger than any of the Western countries, Feng asked, “Why is it that they are small and strong, yet we are big and weak?” The answer could be found in Western superiority in education, economic development, political legitimacy, and intellectual inquiry. “Chinese would have to swallow their pride and become more like their adversary in these fundamental areas.” Learn from the West but accept no aid from them, particularly the military aid which entailed the presence of foreign troops on Chinese soil. Hire a small cadre of Western military specialists to train Chinese, who would then replace their tutors. Again following Wei, Feng advocated the use of national humiliation as a goad toward the recovery of national honor. He pointed to Japan, which had already begun to build modern ships, as proof that Asian nations could indeed strengthen themselves by learning from the barbarians.
Also like Wei, Feng expressed a measured appreciation for American democracy if not for American republicanism. Considering the recent election of Abraham Lincoln, “The president rules the nation,” he imagined, and his “political power is transmitted not to [his] son but to the wise.” “Thereby” (Feng continued) “the nation became wealthy and powerful, gradually surpassing in national strength even Russia, England and France. Who dares say that there is no man [of greatness] among the barbarians?” With Tocqueville, he admired American “village democracy.” He stopped short of republicanism for the nation as a whole, preferring what the authors call a regime of “participatory authoritarianism” whereby the authority of the emperor would win popular consent by means of providing the people with social welfare and education, as seen in northern Europe. Above all, and again like Wei, he praised Western modernity: “If a system is no good, even though it is from antiquity, we should reject it; if a system is good, then we should follow it, even if it originates from uncivilized peoples.” For their part, Confucians dismissed all of this as typical Legalist scheming. Nonetheless, in 1898 the emperor read Feng’s essays and had them “distributed to his entire senior bureaucracy, who were ordered to suggest which parts of his proposals should be implemented.” The effort proved too little, too late.
This brings the authors to the career of Feng’s younger contemporary, the Empress Dowager Cixi, whom they rescue from slanders fabricated by a British sinologist named Edmund Backhouse, whose tales of orgies at the imperial palace were, as the joke goes, much exaggerated. Cixi’s real failing was her inability to modernize China so as to compete successfully not so much with the West as with Japan and semi-Western Russia.
She ruled China from 1861, when her husband the emperor Xianfeng died at the age of thirty, leaving her as regent, until her death in 1908, having survived her son and a nephew she placed on the throne after the young man’s death. Although she supported provincial reforms, she failed “to broaden and intensify these scattered and localized reform efforts into a comprehensive, empire-wide initiative.” She adopted the Liu-Wei-Feng “discourse of humiliation and self-strengthening” while doing less than enough to get results, as many of the modernizers, less than impressed with her abilities, rightly and disappointedly anticipated. In 1884 she went to war with the French over control of Indochina and lost. In 1894 she went to war with the Japanese (“the dwarf people,” as Chinese had long called them) over control of Korea and Taiwan and lost. Unlike China, Japan had effectually adopted the Chinese neo-Legalists’ notions about state-building wedded to token democratization under the slogan, “Rich country, strong army.”
When the “sickly” but “audacious” nephew, the emperor Guangxu, having read Feng’s principal book, attempted to reform the Chinese state, the Dowager initially said nothing but soon sided with the resistant bureaucracy. She had Guangxu arrested. At the same time, somewhat improbably, a consortium of martial arts groups in northern China developed a resentment of Chinese Christian converts amongst them, of the foreign missionaries who had worked with them, and of the foreign emissaries who supported and protected both. The rebellion of the “Boxers,” as Westerners called them, risked provoking another foreign intervention in China while at the same time threatening the monarchy itself, if it moved to shield the foreigners. “Cixi fatefully decided to back the Boxers” in what the authors call “a moment of delusional revanchism.” When the Boxers laid siege to the foreign embassies in Beijing, and eight-nation military force broke the siege and forced Cixi to flee her capital.
Surviving, she eventually charmed her way back into the good graces of the foreigners, who had no capacity or desire actually to rule such a vast empire. She then proceeded to offend and enrage the Confucian bureaucrats and aspiring bureaucrats by abolishing the civil service examination system, intending to replace traditional learning with what one indignant traditionalist called “barbarian learning.” The traditionalists had the advantage of coming for the most part from the majority of ethnic Han Chinese, whereas the ruling dynasty were Manchus. Modernization could be pilloried as a scheme to enrich the Manchus and to subordinate the Han.
Such unrest in the end did not redound to the benefit of Confucianism, however. The new generation of Chinese included the writer Liang Qichao, whom the authors call “the most influential thinker of early twentieth-century China.” Liang was “the first public figure to argue that China’s revival would require the wholesale destruction of the cultural tradition that he had come to view as holding back his country’s progress, and the creation of a whole new sense of national self in its place,” a sense epitomized in the title of his journal, New Citizen. He called for an open break from Confucianism and the imperial regime; himself taught by a ‘Confucian’ Legalist in the Liu line, Liang pursued a career in journalism, always staying a step ahead of local authorities, always influencing the increasingly powerful engine of public opinion in a society that was democratizing underneath a regime still dependent upon the aristocratic and semi-feudal institutions which had set the tone for the Chinese way of life for so long. Liang argued that China’s “cultural core would have to be altered” by the introduction of “Western studies”—meaning, most assuredly, not the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and the Christian theologians but John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. Spencer’s doctrines in particular meshed well with Legalist notions.
With the downfall of the hapless reform emperor Guangxu, Liang soon found himself exiled. He was welcomed to Japan by the modernizers there, as were a number of Chinese reformers and future revolutionists, including Chiang Kai-Shek. “The source of the backwardness of the Chinese,” Liang “now argued forcefully, was his country’s lack of guojia sixiang or ‘national consciousness,’ and their congenital inability to imagine themselves as active participants, as guomin, ‘citizens,’ of a modern nation-state.” Unless this changed, the Spencerian survival of the fittest would extinguish China altogether. “That the strong always rule the weak is in truth the first great universal rule of nature,” he wrote, for “in the world there is only power—there is no other force,” and surely no real moral force. “Liberty” and “democracy,” yes, but strength first. No unalienable natural rights need apply, since nature is amoral. Hence his radicalism. His “new citizens” must completely destroy “the baggage of China’s traditional value system” or, as Liang himself wrote, “overturn things from their foundations and create a new world.” Although he would later distance himself from this policy, “the young future founders of Chinese communism, Chen Duxiu and Mao Zedong,” did not. Indeed, Mao “would adopt with a vengeance the motto ‘Destruction before construction’ during the Cultural Revolution” of the 1960s.
After visiting the United States in 1903 (he met, among others, Theodore Roosevelt and J.P. Morgan), Liang “reluctantly concluded that the Chinese people were, at least for the present, incapable of democracy,” fit only “for despotism.” “Freedom, constitutionalism, and republicanism,” he wrote, “would be like hempen clothes in winter or furs in summer; it is not that they are not beautiful, they are just not suitable for us.” Still insisting on rapid modernization, “I returned from America to dream of Russia,” where Stolypin was undertaking what turned out to be a noble but failed attempt to inculcate civic education under the command of enlightened despotism. Or, looking at English history, he wrote that a Chinese “Cromwell alive today [would] carry out harsh rule, and with iron and fire to forge and temper our countrymen for twenty, thirty, even fifty years. After that we can give them the books of Rousseau and tell them about the deeds of Washington.” Like so many political writers, he came increasingly to suppose that there was no hope for his country “unless I return to take the reins of government.” With the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in January 1912, Liang imagined that he saw his chance, but he proved ineffective in politics, accepting a series of governmental appointments in the fragile republic. He left for Europe, only to become disenchanted with Europeans as well, after they immolated themselves in the Great War, surviving with just enough strength to favor Japan over China in the Treaty of Versailles. Indeed, the war had caused Europeans to become disenchanted with themselves, with the modern project by which they had conquered the world. “The European people have had a big dream about the omnipotence of science. Now they are talking about its bankruptcy” in the wake of the war’s “selfishness, slaughter, corruption, and shamelessness.” Could China learn from the West’s mistakes?
Evidently not, at least not with the meager moral and intellectual resources at hand. Hoping to find a Confucian middle ground between “Marxists and anarchists on the Left, nationalists and authoritarians on the right,” Liang “invited like-minded big thinkers from around the world—John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, and Rabindranath Tagore—to China to spread their enlightened humanistic and liberal teachings,” while editing a new journal, Emancipation and Reconstruction, in which he “offered up a cocktail of Keynesian economics, Deweyan democracy, and globalized Confucian humanism.” That wouldn’t work, either. He died in 1929.
Rather more formidable was Liang’s contemporary, Sun Yat Sen. Having been educated in Hawaii, he understood the American regime specifically, and the West generally, better than “anyone else of his time” in China. “No Chinese leader since has come to close to matching the ease with which he was able to navigate the world outside China.” Upon his return, he settled in cosmopolitan Hong Kong, becoming a surgeon, before returning to Hawaii in 1894 to found the Revive China Society, dedicated to fomenting armed uprising in Canton, then moving again to Japan in the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War. Although many other reformers found him “too detached from China’s reality, even un-Chinese,” Sun by that very token understood Chinese inferiority to ‘the moderns’ without sentimentality. And when the republican revolution did occur he was invited to return to China, becoming its provisional president. Seeing that he had no domestic political base, feeling his lack of governing experience, and rejecting the figurehead status his sponsors had in mind for him, he resigned after only forty-five days in office. This turned out to be fortuitous as well as prudent, since he could not be said to have failed and opened the chance for him to build up an independent political base, the Guomindang or Nationalist Party, which he founded in 1912.
In doing so, he reckoned on Confucianism to serve as what the authors call “an essential field of cultural gravity for Han Chinese as they sought to rejuvenate their country,” holding, with the Confucianists, that “the structural relationship between Chinese citizens and the state begins with the family, extends to the clan, and only afterward the nation.” That is, Sun intended to sunder Confucianism from the blunders of the Manchu Qin Dynasty, as seen in his book, Three People’s Principles, published in the early 1920s. The first of these principles was nationalism, by which he meant ethnicity rather than nation-statism, an ethnicity to counter the threat of racial extinction posed by the dominance of ‘whites.’ Such ethnic nationalism could serve as an agent of civil-social cohesion, unifying China against economic concessions made to Western imperialists in the previous century.
He supplemented ethnic nationalism with his second principle, the “rights of the people.” The authors are careful to explain that Sun’s “conception of rights was not of the kind of natural or God-given rights that Enlightenment thinkers viewed as the birthright of all human beings” but rather instruments of Chinese “wealth and power.” “Like so many other Chinese reformers and even revolutionaries”—one might add, in view of the future CCP, especially revolutionaries—when “push came to shove, Sun came down on the side of order, not the rights of the people” in the Western sense. And so, in Sun’s words, “the individual should not have too much liberty, but the nation should have complete liberty”; “we must each sacrifice our personal freedom…if we want to restore China’s liberty,” with nationalism as the cement uniting the “sheet of loose sand” which the four hundred million Chinese then comprised.
Minsbeng zhuyi, the “livelihood of the people,” constituted Sun’s third “people’s principle.” He opposed Marxism, with its doctrine of class warfare, dreaming instead of social equality brought about by taxation and purchase of property by the government, which would then redistribute lands to peasants and give the people generally a chance to invest in economic development.
In politics he wanted first, Liang-like, to dismantle existing political structures, then to establish “a period of ‘political tutelage,’ when a provisional government would be promulgated” while “a strong ‘transitional’ government would rule.” This would be followed by “the implementation of full ‘constitutional government,’ which would happen only ‘after the attainment of political stability throughout the country.'” Likening the officials of the transitional government to chauffeurs who would do the driving even as the passengers expected to be delivered to the destination of their own choosing, Sun modeled his nationalist party not on any existing Western republican party but on Lenin’s Communist Party, whose supposed efficiency, so-called ‘democratic centralism,’ and anti-imperialism he admired. Needless to say, Lenin played on this, interesting Sun in exploring a Soviet-backed “United Front” between his Nationalists and Mao’s newly-formed Chinese Communist Party, against the Western imperialists and China’s regional warlords. Sensibly enough, Sun insisted, nonetheless, that “if there was going to be a United Front, he was going to be boss,” and that there would be no “Communistic order” in China. The thing did get off the ground in January 1923; “even Mao Zedong and Chen Duxiu incongruously became active members of the Nationalist Party through this marriage of convenience,” with Mao sighing, “the great cause of revolution is no easy matter.” The Front brought Soviet economic and military aid to Sun, and among those who received military training in Moscow was Chiang Kai-Shek. Sun died in 1925, never ceasing to “openly admire what Lenin had accomplished in Russia”—in his eyes, overthrowing an ossified monarchy and forging a modern state.
“A studious and excitable man,” Chen Duxiu was schooled in the Chinese classics but detested the examination system, joined the Communist Party, but became increasingly nationalistic in reaction to Japanese imperialism. Unlike Sun, and like Marx, he rejected the traditional family, complaining that Chinese “care about their family and do not care about their nation,” making it difficult for China to defend itself against foreign encroachment. The collapse of the Qing Dynasty and the subsequent decline of the Chinese republic into “warlordism and dictatorship” impelled him to place his hopes on the next generation of “newly educated youths who, if they could be inspired by enlightened mentors into the right kind of nationalist pride, might yet rise to the challenge of awakening their country to all that threatened it.” As Liang had done, he founded a journal to further this project; New Youth attracted a wide audience because it featured the kind of iconoclastic debate not seen before in China. It also featured fiction written by Lu Xun, “a true master of modern Chinese prose and short fiction, whose first contribution, ‘Diary of a Madman,’ caused an intellectual sensation and became an instant literary classic,” working the angle of the man who sees things as they are and is therefore regarded as mad by everyone around him. Despising Confucianism as “the ethics of a feudal age,” he wrote an essay claiming that the world must choose one of two roads: “the road of light which leads to democracy, science and atheism; and the other, the road of darkness leading to despotism, superstition and divine authority.” He urged the Chinese to follow “Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy.” He therefore rejected Sun’s strategy of state-building first, democracy second, arguing that democracy can only be learned by doing. As was characteristic of all these thinkers, however, he advocated liberal democracy primarily as a tool for releasing national energy; “if there were other pathways that could do the same thing more efficiently, fine—which is why, by the end of 1919, he became interested in Marxism-Leninism, with profound historical consequences.”
Liberal democracy hadn’t failed the West but the democracies themselves had failed China, transferring Germany’s rights and concessions in Shandong Province to Japan instead of returning them to his country, first by a secret treaty and then formally at the Paris Peace Conference, despite President Wilson’s anti-imperialist principles enunciated in the Fourteen Points. “For Chinese patriots, these Japanese demands were the final indignity, a guarantee that their country would never cease to be cannibalized by foreign powers.” At this, Chen turned to Marxism, which could now be presented in China “as a fairer form of ‘democracy'” than anything on offer by the liberal democracies of the West. More, Marxism’s self-proclaimed status as ‘scientific socialism’ equally appealed to Chen. Finally, the character of the Chinese themselves, he by now concluded, was too stupid and narrow-minded, too irresponsible for self-government. Like Russia, China needed a vanguard of Leninist professional revolutionaries to get its people organized—a sort of transfer of authority from a Confucian elite to a Communist elite.” Chen’s disillusionment with liberal democracy, shared by Mao, “represented an enormous sea change among Chinese intellectuals,” who (somewhat paradoxically) sought in Marxism-Leninism a means of restoring national greatness. This denial of Marxist-Leninist internationalism eventually got him in trouble with Joseph Stalin, who removed him from his post as the CCP’s first general secretary in 1927, then expelled him from the party two years later, guilty of “rightist opportunism.” Understandably, Chen began to prefer the tolerant ways of liberal democracy, again. He lived to see the beginning of the Second World War but was spared from witnessing the triumph of the Communists in the years after it.
His younger contemporary, Chiang Kai-Shek, was not so lucky, although much more politically successful. Classically educated but no intellectual, he studied in Japan in 1905, intent on learning the techniques of modernization in an Asian society; as an ally of Sun during the Nationalist Party’s outreach to Lenin, he studied military and party organization in Moscow in 1923. “By the time of Sun’s death in 1925, the ambitious Chiang had come to view his life as inseparably intertwined with the destiny of his country,” setting his party and the nation on a successful military expedition to northern China against the warlords. With this “stunning and unexpected triumph,” he consolidated Nationalist rule under the slogan “Abolish the unequal treaties.” By 1928, he chaired the Political Council for a new administration controlled by the Nationalists. Until this time, “few had had much confidence in China’s future.”
A year earlier, Chiang had turned on the Communists, ending the National Front alliance with a massacre of Communist labor leaders. He was confident he could “reunify the country without the Communists”; had it not been for Japanese imperial ambitions, he might have been correct. But the Japanese military was considerably more formidable than the Chinese warlords. Chiang’s forces failed to seize the territories granted to Japan at Versailles. Worse, in 1931 Japan seized Manchuria, making it into a Japanese puppet state, partly because Chiang had decided that fighting the Communists in central China was more important. This undercut his own ideological legitimacy as a nationalist, and by 1937 Japan threated Beijing and Shanghai, then massacred and raped tens of thousands of Chinese in Nanjing, Chiang’s capital city. During the Second World War, Japanese forces moved around China with impunity. Chiang was caught between Mao’s Communists and the imperial powers of the West and of Japan; even his necessary military alliance with the United States and Great Britain during the war left his nationalist credentials tarnished. In his 1943 book, China’s Destiny, he excoriates “the poison of foreign economic oppression” and the “dangerous and maliciously ruthless intrigues and methods of the imperialists.” For their part, the Americans became frustrated with Chiang’s refusal to commit his Nationalist forces fully to the war against Japan.
Through it all, Chiang remained loyal to Sun’s program of state-building first, democracy later. He propounded a doctrine called the “New Culture”—in fact an amalgam of Confucian and Christian principles, “an effort too many educated Chinese dismissed as retrograde and simple-minded,” and one with little appeal among the peasants. His tightly organized political party, drawing upon Lenin’s Bolsheviks and even, briefly in the 1930s, fascism and Nazism, proved a stronger means of maintaining such national unity as could be mustered against the Communist faction. The authors caution against over-reading this latter flirtation: “Chiang’s fascist tendencies were far more muted than those of his European counterparts,” in some measure because “his authoritarianism was closer to that of traditional Chinese secret societies than mass-based political organization.”
Unfortunately for Chiang and for China, Mao proved “the master” of “mass political organization,” defeating the Nationalists and driving them onto Taiwan in 1949. There, after many years of what Chiang’s mentor, Sun, had called “political tutelage,” Taiwan eventually liberalized its regime under the rule of his son, Ching-kuo, proving “that Chinese were not somehow congenitally incapable of sustaining democratic governance, and thus enabled Chinese everywhere to imagine for the first time how, with further political maturation, perhaps even mainlanders could someday look forward to living in a more open political system.”
Chairman Mao had other ideas, mostly Stalinist. He had loathed the Confucian texts since childhood, admiring the Legalists, who “emphasized the law as a way for the state to control its people, including government officials, through strict punishment, and thereby maintain order and increase their collective wealth and well-being,” with no pesky protections of the “people’s rights against the state.” He concurred with the early twentieth-century trend (exemplified in the United States by Theodore Roosevelt but powerful throughout Europe, as well) which countered the relative ease of modern life, with its urbanization and gadgets, with what TR called “the strenuous life” of vigorous physical exercise and military training. Mao’s first contribution to Chen Duxiu’s New Life magazine was an article promoting physical fitness. As he turned toward Marxism a bit later on, he retained an admiration for strength of will that lay uneasily with Marxist determinism. After a stint as a librarian at Peking University, he returned to his home province of Hunan. There, he observed not an urban proletariat but a dispossessed peasantry, “who had been largely written off by urban intellectuals as an ignorant and inert segment of society, of little use to proletarian Marxist revolution or individualist liberal reform.” “Mao was almost alone” in seeing revolutionary possibilities and organizational potential in the countryside; in this, he again parted from Marxism but not from Lenin, who had seen much the same thing in Russia. Indeed, by 1927 he found that the peasants were “far more cocked, loaded, and ready to revolt than intellectuals or urban workers,” having already rebelled against the local landlords, “seizing lands rented to them at usurious rates.” Accordingly, “Mao’s simple solution to the problem of making Marxism work in an overwhelmingly agricultural society was to turn China’s greatest weakness, its rural poor”—some eighty percent of the population—into “its ultimate strength.”
Peasant rebellion would require what Mao called “a brief reign of terror in every rural area” to repress the “counterrevolutionaries” and “overthrow the authority of the gentry.” Unlike Confucians, who regarded disorder as a sign of decadence, and unlike modern ‘state-builders’ who seek relief from the natural war of all against all, Mao considered violent collisions “as creative and regenerative motor forces of progress” or, in his words, “the locomotive of history.” “His writing became ever more replete with upbeat allusions to storms, upheavals, tornados, tempests, tides, and waves”—naturalistic metaphors for Marxian historical dialectic. As late as the 1966 “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (as he styled it), he announced that there was “no need to be afraid of tidal waves,” since “human society has been evolved out of tidal waves.” Departing from Marx and Lenin, who, with Hegel, posited a future ‘end of History’ in which all dialectic would cease, departing equally from the similar Legalist expectation of “The Great Harmony,” Mao regarded revolution as a permanent condition among human societies and indeed throughout the cosmos, writing, “the suppression of the the old by the new is a general, eternal and inviolable law of the universe.” Even after securing tyrannical power over China he would repeatedly refresh the dialectic, murdering millions in such bloodbaths as the “Rectification Campaign” of 1942, “The Great Leap Forward” of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the aforementioned “Cultural Revolution.” He especially detested anything suggesting ‘idealism’ or the separation of theory from practice, anything “detached from the revolutionary reality he most cared about,” anything that might ossify the dialectical process. No trace of Confucian sagacity or its institutional embodiment, imperial bureaucracy, must survive, as it did in the Soviet Union, after Stalin died.
To achieve this, Mao killed millions but preferred to ‘re-educate.’ “Those accused of ‘erroneous thinking’ were first to be given an invitation by the party to ‘reform’ themselves through a process that came to be known as ‘criticism and self-criticism,'” to be followed if necessary by “public criticism” by right-minded Party members, “shaming, persecution, prison, or worse.” Thus “wayward comrades were artfully made complicit in the process of their own ideological remolding.” Similarly, writers and artists must understand that nothing they do can be “independent of politics,” as literature and art should rather become, in Mao’s words, “a powerful weapon for uniting and educating the people and for crushing and destroying the enemy” and, complementarily, a cog serving “a constructive part of the whole revolutionary machine.” “There was really no way to reconstruct the kind of ‘new man,’ ‘new culture,’ and ‘new China’ that Mao had been conjuring up in his revolutionary imagination since his youth, short of first being willing to erase the past that lay so stubbornly rooted within each and every Chinese.” As he put it, “a clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it. The newest and most beautiful picture can be painted on it.” At this, the authors pause to express their astonishment that Mao could bring himself “to describe a people possessed of so many millennia of history and so steeped in a traditional culture as ‘blank.'” They go on to acknowledge that the permanent revolution was designed to serve as the great eraser. “This man Hitler was even more ferocious” than we have been, Mao confided to his inner circle. “The more ferocious the better, don’t you think? The more people you kill, the more revolutionary you are.”
Bizarrely, the authors end their account of Mao with praise for his “agility and innovation,” which I suppose is one way of putting it. It is at any rate understandable that the Chinese themselves looked for less dialectical drama, in the wake of the Great Helmsman’s demise in 1976. The task of consolidation fell to Deng Xiaoping, who returned China to the quest for wealth and power, away from exhausting permanent revolution. True, “Deng would prove almost as ruthless as Mao in silencing his critics, most notably the outspoken democracy advocate Wei Jing-sheng.” He preferred to put cultural politics aside in order “to foment a new kind of frenzy—for making money.” His best-known slogan was “Yellow or white, a cat that catches mice is a good cat.” Although left exposed to Red Guard persecution during the Cultural Revolution, “his loyalty to the Communist Part and Leninism’s founding principles never wavered,” and he proved “a master in the arts of political organization…putting the right people in the right places, keeping machinery running, making appropriate corrections at key times, and enforcing party loyalty.” That is, he was exactly the kind of bureaucratic operator Mao despised but the Communist Party, and even Mao himself, needed, especially when the old man needed someone “to counterbalance the influence of his wife’s power-hungry leftist faction” in the years immediately following the Cultural Revolution. He fully endorsed Mao’s overtures to the United States during the second term of the Nixon administration, seeking, as he said “to make use of capital from foreign countries and of their advanced technology and experience in business management.” Readers of Lenin will recall his New Economic Policy of the 1920s, which sought to do just that.
“By 1975, Deng was running much of the People’s Republic,” combining modest economic liberalization with “Leninist ruthlessness in the face of resistance.” Given his organizational skills, he had no trouble in taking formal control, a year later. “Let us advance courageously to change the backward condition of our country and turn it into a modern and powerful socialist state” by “learn[ing] to manage the economy by economic means.” Economic means in the hands of Deng did not closely resemble the ideas of Adam Smith, however. The means of production and of distribution, along with the levers of political power, would remain in the firm grip of the Communist Party. Calling upon the Chinese to “emancipate their minds,” he took care to provide a firm framework within which that emancipation took place: “adherence to socialism, people’s democratic dictatorship, party leadership, and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought,” and most assuredly “not bourgeois, individualist democracy.” What Deng meant by “political reform” was really “administrative reform”; “the party’s political monopoly over government appointment should remain sacrosanct.” As he told a visiting European socialist, “the greatest advantage of the socialist system is that when the central leadership makes a decision, it is promptly implemented without interference from any other quarters.”
The formula worked for nearly a decade, but by the mid-1980s inflation and corruption had begun to eat away at socialism. Civil-social clamor for democratization surged, culminating in the murderous crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The crisis had threatened the Party’s cohesion. And so, Deng, having implemented a version of Lenin’s N.E.P., initiated what amounted to a (mildly) Stalinist correction of the ‘excesses’ his reforms had engendered. The crisis passed and in 1997, like Mao, Deng died peacefully abed.
His successors, President Jian Zemin and Premier Zhu Ronji, followed the Dengian line. Zhu saw that “if the party would help the people create wealth, the people would let the party keep power,” without much of that nasty democratization talk. The N.E.P. would be extended indefinitely, provided that such economic liberalization as occurred took place on Party terms. “The days of the Chinese Communist Party seeking legitimacy through class revolution and ideological purity had now morphed into something quite new and pragmatic. Legitimacy was to be derived almost entirely from delivering on the promise of prosperity.” ‘Democratic centralism’ was to be supplemented by ‘economic centralism.’ “Zhu’s genius was that he managed to centralize without strangling the economy.” To do this (as the authors do not quite see) Zhu shifted Mao’s idea of permanent revolution into the Chinese economy by implementing policies of “continuous reform,” centering on the fiscal and financial systems on the one hand, the state sector of the economy on the other. Respecting the latter, he addressed the state-owned enterprises, getting rid of small and medium-sized firms but preserving the big ones. At the same time, and crucially, he insisted that the Party members who ran the surviving SOEs be competent, not merely loyal to the Party.
“At the time, Western onlookers”—ever intent on seeing what they wanted to see in enemy regimes—were pleased to “celebrate such reforms as evidence of China’s inevitable economic liberalization,” which they understood as privatization. The characteristically clueless ex-president, George H. W. Bush, politely asked, “How is the privatization program in China coming along?” to which Zhu replied in astonishment, “Mr. Bush, China isn’t privatizing. We’re creating a shareholding system,” streamlining the SOEs but most decidedly not eliminating state ownership of the means of production. “The majority of shares must remain under state control.” Further, the ever-growing calls for ‘globalization’ didn’t impress the Chinese rulers, despite their pleasure in being admitted into the World Trade Organization. He continued to think in Leninist terms, those of allowing foreign capitalists to make the rope with which Communists eventually will hang them. And as for democracy, the political dimension of globalization as conceived in the West, Zhu “flatly rejected…the relevance of liberal democracy to China, saying that the problem was not just that the Chinese people were unready for democracy,” as Sun and his line of statesman had asserted, “but rather that democracy had never been, and would never be, suitable for China.” In his words, “We absolutely will not copy the Western model as we reform our political system,” admitting a variety of political parties or establishing a bicameral legislature.
Writer, political activist, “loner and iconoclast” Liu Xiaobo hoped for a better regime than that. He died in state custody a few years after this book was published, having been awarded a Nobel Prize while in jail. The authors allow that “although the ideals of thinkers like Liu Xiaobo have not been the main motor force of Chinese history to date, it is impossible to know how they might ultimately come to play themselves out in the future.” Liu himself knew the score, writing that “China’s so-called intelligentsia is, for the most part, the dictator’s conspirator and accomplice”; as for the people, “the Chinese love to look up to the famous, thereby saving themselves the trouble of thinking”—a weakness not limited to China. The Chinese national ethic, he continued, “is disconnected from civic values,” rather more “a primitive jungle ethic of master and slave” whereby the people “act like slaves” in front of the strong, “like masters” “in front of the weak.” As a result, “the spirit of the entire people” has been poisoned by the likes of Mao, with his fomenting of class hatred. As for the later system of crony capitalism, it has enriched the Communist Party oligarchs, leading to “a robber baron’s paradise, a free-for-all,” turning Chinese intellectuals “into a pack of complacent cynics” who have collaborated with Party hacks to a fake Confucianism, “a sales pitch that combines tall tales about the ancients with insights that are about as sophisticated as the lyrics of pop songs.” The ‘Chinese miracle’ is “the miracle of systematic corruption; the ‘miracle’ of an unjust society; the ‘miracle’ of moral decline; and the ‘miracle’ of a squandered future.” The only real miracle would be recovery from it all.
Such talk attracted the unfavorable attention of the Party, which kept Liu in jail for many of the last twenty years of his life. Inexplicably, the authors insist that China’s “search” for “wealth and power” “may well converge” with republicanism. They are happy with Mao’s “demolition job on China’s ‘old society,” which “finally free[d] Chinese from their traditional moorings”—a “brutal interim” which “was perhaps the essential, but paradoxical, precursor to China’s subsequent boom” and “the antecedent to the Chinese people being able to free themselves at last from their past and catapult themselves into their present single-minded and unrestrained pursuit of wealth and power.” The authors ask, cogently, “Toward what end?” They recur to the standard claim that as the Chinese become more affluent they will want “a more open and law-abiding society,” and that even the leaders, supposedly “yearning” for “international respect,” will move “toward a more consultative, if not democratic, form of government.”
It is hard to resist considering these sentiments the rubbish of political pietism.
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