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.
[269] Cohen,
[270] Ibid., p. 132.
[271] Meghnad Desai, ‘India and China: An Essay in Comparative Political Economy’, seminar paper, Asia Research Centre, London School of Economics, 2003, p. 5; revised version available to download from www.imf.org.
[272] Cohen,
[273] Bin Wong,
[274] Cohen,
[275] Zhao,
[276] Fairbank and Goldman,
[277] Zheng Yongnian,