China. Kerry BrownЧитать онлайн книгу.
before becoming President a few months later, Xi Jinping declared that ‘the Chinese nation has an unbroken history of more than 5,000 years of civilization. It has created a rich and profound culture and has made an unforgettable contribution to the progress of human civilization.’3
Every part of Ge’s ideas, and those contained in Xi’s statement, could be contested – and they frequently are. The ‘5,000-year history’ claim makes as much sense as saying Europe, with all its experience of fragmentation and complexity, has a common root going back to ancient Greece 2,500 years ago. For sure, there are unifying threads; but they are just that: threads. For long stretches, the geographical space we call China today was divided. There were multiple states and empires. As for Han ethnic continuity supplying this area of commonality, in the last 1,000 years, previous Chinese states have been under non-Han rule for over a third of this time. The last imperial dynasty, that of the Qing (1644–1912), was, as historians in recent decades have argued, one ruled by the Manchu group, extending far beyond the historical limits of previous Chinas, and connected to Inner Asia and other geographies through geographical annexation. As historian Timothy Brook argues, the modern centralized Chinese state was as much the creation of the Mongolian conquests of the thirteenth century, and their imposition of rigid rule, as something that links back to the Golden Age of the Tang and is derived from the state ideology adopted then of Confucianism and its highly hierarchical notion of order (608–912 CE).4
Despite this huge set of issues, one thing is indisputable. ‘Chinese history’ is seen as an immense source of cultural unity by politicians like Xi. Nor does this just apply to the current Communist leaders. The Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek (1887– 1975), head of the Republican government in power up to 1949 before fleeing to Taiwan, spoke in similar ways in the 1930s: ‘Through five thousand years of alternate order and confusion and the rise and fall of dynasties, our nation has acquired the virtue of modesty, a sense of honour and the ability to endure insult and shoulder hardships.’5 Every leader in the People’s Republic, from its founder Mao Zedong to Xi, has repeated sentiments similar to these. Each, however, has chosen to accept interpretations which accorded with his own priorities, recognizing how complex and varied a resource ‘Chinese history’ is.
Mao was the most radical, boldly eschewing much of the heritage of China’s historical and political imperial past by castigating it as feudal and exploitative. Despite this, he still asserted a strong sense of pride in aspects of Chinese literature and culture. Mao’s posture illustrates the ambiguity of this historical legacy – the ways in which it was a source of suffocating restraint as much as of secure identity. ‘Although China is a great nation,’ he wrote in 1939, ‘and although she is a vast country with an immense population, a long history, a rich revolutionary tradition and splendid historical heritage, her economic, political and cultural development was sluggish for a long time after the transition from a slave to a feudal society.’6 His successors, Deng Xiaoping (paramount leader from 1978 to the 1990s), Jiang Zemin (President from 1989 to 2003), Hu Jintao (2003 to 2013), and Xi Jinping (President from 2013 to the time of writing), have appealed to ‘traditional’ Chinese culture as something more positive and unifying than Mao appeared to suggest.
The rehabilitation of the past after Mao’s attack has not been easy. The path of modernity since the nineteenth century has involved fierce arguments about what relationship modern leaders need to take to this history, and what sort of resource it offers. The common point is that all eras of modern Chinese history, despite their very different political convictions and attitudes, have been driven by the desire for renewal. Chinese modern history has involved many things: the mission to industrialize, to create national unity, to struggle against colonial interference and achieve national self-determination. But, above all, it has been a history of trying to renew.
China’s Struggle to Catch Up
China’s engagement with modernity was an arduous one. It has spawned many myths, some of which are unresolved. In recent decades, there has been a lively debate about the issue of why industrialization and economic modernization took the very different trajectories they did in Europe and China. In The Great Divergence, historian Kenneth Pomeranz joins those who contest the popular idea that Europe had something unique in terms of its culture and philosophical outlook which meant it was predisposed to innovate and industrialize. ‘There is little to suggest,’ he writes, ‘that western Europe’s economy had decisive advantages before [the 1800s], either in its capital stock or economic institutions, that made industrialization highly probable there and unlikely elsewhere.’7 Rather than attributing Europe’s ultimate success in pulling ahead so dramatically in the nineteenth century to holistic explanations that range from the cultural – Max Weber’s Protestant work ethic, for instance – to the more overtly economic or political – like the rise of consumption and the prevalence of individualism and its associated governance models – Pomeranz looks at a host of interrelated, but different, more localized causes. Some of these derive from the various forms of resistance to change and transformation within Qing China. Some refer to the strengths of Europe in terms of political and social flexibility. What is indisputable is that in the nineteenth century the Qing was in seemingly irrevocable decline. In gross terms, China ranked as the world’s largest single economy up to 1820. But this claim is rendered almost meaningless by the deep structural differences between the Qing’s economy and that of, for instance, Great Britain. Nineteenth-century China did not have the same levels of urbanization, infrastructure building, and capital formation that powers like the United States, Great Britain, and Germany did. While its lack of naval assets made it incapable of reaching and impacting on Europe, Europe was more than capable of involving itself directly in China. By 1900, China was weak, exposed, and vulnerable.
These issues are illustrated by one of the key moments of encounter between the Qing court and an industrialized and modernizing Great Britain approaching its century of radical transformation. The Macartney Mission during the era of George III (r. 1760–1820) is a key moment in the histories of both China and the West. The outcome of this mission was a rejection by the ageing Qianlong emperor (r. 1735–96) of the manufactures and goods offered by the visiting dignitaries. Throughout the whole mission there were many moments of cultural miscommunication. Lord George Macartney’s refusal to show his status as a visitor from a vassal state by kowtowing to the emperor and the tortuous negotiations to achieve a way around was one of the most striking. But Macartney’s journal recording the visit presents many more examples. On 13 October 1793, he gave vent to his general frustration:
How are we to reconcile the contradictions that appear in the conduct of the Chinese government towards us? They receive us with the highest distinction, show us every external mark of favour and regard. … Yet, in less than a couple of months, they plainly discover that they wish us to be done, refuse our requests without reserve or complaisance, precipitate our departure, and dismiss us dissatisfied; yet no sooner have we taken leave of them than we find ourselves treated with more studied attentions, more marked distinction and less constraint than before. I must endeavour to unravel this mystery if I can.8
Macartney’s expression of bewilderment has been echoed ever since. In the twenty-first century, the creation of confusion with interlocutors has been one of the consistent characteristics of Chinese negotiating behaviour.
Macartney’s mission had limited success. Half a century later, the vast Manchu-run Qing empire was to pit itself against less benign aspects of the West. The first Opium War of 1839 figures in Chinese historiography to this day as inaugurating a period of China as the victim – one it is only now emerging from fully. This involved the British using advanced gunboats to force the Qing to accept the import of opium drugs they had banned because of widespread addiction within the country. Despite this attack, it was domestic challenges that proved more tumultuous in the short term, raising the question of who in the end was most responsible for the country’s woeful state: itself or outsiders. The Taiping Rebellion from 1850 to 1864 was the most extreme. Approximately 20 million died from the upheaval caused by the revolt. While it did not finish off the Qing, it contributed to the regime’s eventual collapse half a century later.