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.
[283] Bin Wong,
[284] Ibid., pp. 70, 194-7, 205.
[285] Wang Gungwu, ‘Rationalizing China’s Place in Asia ’, in Reid and Zheng,
[286] Zhao,