About china and the modern west history (2025)

CHINAA N E W H I S T O RY

Second Enlarged Edition

John King Fairbankand

Merle Goldman

THE BELKNAP PRESS OF

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England • 2006

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fairbank, John King, 1907–1991China : a new history / John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman.—2nd. enl. ed.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-674-01828-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)1. China—History. I. Goldman, Merle. II. Title.

DS 735.F27 2005951—dc22 2005053695

For Wilma, Laura,

and Holly Fairbank

Contents

Preface to the Enlarged Edition xv

Preface to the Original Edition xvii

Introduction: Approaches to Understanding China’s History 1The Variety of Historical Perspectives 1Geography: The Contrast of North and South 4Humankind in Nature 14The Village: Family and Lineage 17Inner Asia and China: The Steppe and the Sown 23

part oneRise and Decline of the Imperial Autocracy 27

1. Origins: The Discoveries of Archaeology 29Paleolithic China 29Neolithic China 31Excavation of Shang and Xia 33The Rise of Central Authority 37Western Zhou 39Implications of the New Archaeological Record 40

2. The First Unification: Imperial Confucianism 46The Utility of Dynasties 46Princes and Philosophers 49The Confucian Code 51Daoism 53Unification by Qin 54Consolidation and Expansion under the Han 57Imperial Confucianism 62Correlative Cosmology 64Emperor and Scholars 66

3. Reunification in the Buddhist Age 72Disunion 72The Buddhist Teaching 73Sui–Tang Reunification 76Buddhism and the State 79Decline of the Tang Dynasty 81Social Change: The Tang–Song Transition 83

4. China’s Greatest Age: Northern and Southern Song 88Efflorescence of Material Growth 88Education and the Examination System 93The Creation of Neo-Confucianism 96Formation of Gentry Society 101

5. The Paradox of Song China and Inner Asia 108The Symbiosis of Wen and Wu 108The Rise of Non-Chinese Rule over China 112China in the Mongol Empire 119Interpreting the Song Era 126

6. Government in the Ming Dynasty 128Legacies of the Hongwu Emperor 128Fiscal Problems 132China Turns Inward 137Factional Politics 140

7. The Qing Success Story 143The Manchu Conquest 143Institutional Adaptation 146

viii Contents

The Jesuit Interlude 151Growth of Qing Control in Inner Asia 152The Attempted Integration of Polity and Culture 154

part twoLate Imperial China, 1600–1911 163

8. The Paradox of Growth without Development 167The Rise in Population 167Diminishing Returns of Farm Labor 170The Subjection of Women 173Domestic Trade and Commercial Organization 176Merchant–Official Symbiosis 179Limitations of the Law 183

9. Frontier Unrest and the Opening of China 187The Weakness of State Leadership 187The White Lotus Rebellion, 1796–1804 189Maritime China: Origins of the Overseas Chinese 191European Trading Companies and the Canton Trade 195Rebellion on the Turkestan Frontier, 1826–1835 197Opium and the Struggle for a New Order at Guangzhou,1834–1842 198Inauguration of the Treaty Century after 1842 201

10. Rebellion and Restoration 206The Great Taiping Rebellion, 1851–1864 206Civil War 209The Qing Restoration of the 1860s 212Suppression of Other Rebellions 214

11. Early Modernization and the Decline of Qing Power 217Self-Strengthening and Its Failure 217The Christian–Confucian Struggle 221The Reform Movement 224The Boxer Rising, 1898–1901 230Demoralization 232

Contents ix

12. The Republican Revolution, 1901–1916 235A New Domestic Balance of Power 235Suppressing Rebellion by Militarization 236Elite Activism in the Public Sphere 238The Japanese Influence 240The Qing Reform Effort 241Constitutionalism and Self-Government 244Insoluble Systemic Problems 247The Revolution of 1911 and Yuan Shikai’s Dictatorship 250

part threeThe Republic of China, 1912–1949 255

13. The Quest for a Chinese Civil Society 257The Limits of Chinese Liberalism 257The Limits of Christian Reformism 260The Tardy Rise of a Political Press 262Academic Development 263The New Culture Movement 266The May Fourth Movement 267Rise of the Chinese Bourgeoisie 269Origins of the Chinese Communist Party 275

14. The Nationalist Revolution and the Nanjing Government 279Sun Yatsen and the United Front 279The Accession to Power of Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kaishek) 283The Nature of the Nanjing Government 286Systemic Weaknesses 289

15. The Second Coming of the Chinese Communist Party 294Problems of Life on the Land 294Rural Reconstruction 299The Rise of Mao Zedong 301The Long March, 1934–1935 305The Role of Zhou Enlai 307The Second United Front 310

x Contents

16. China’s War of Resistance, 1937–1945 312Nationalist Difficulties 312Mao’s Sinification of Marxism 316Mao Zedong Thought 321The Rectification Campaign of 1942–1944 323American Support of Coalition Government 326

17. The Civil War and the Nationalists on Taiwan 331Why the Nationalists Failed 331Nationalist Attack and Communist Counterattack 334Taiwan as a Japanese Colony 337Taiwan as the Republic of China 339

part fourThe People’s Republic of China 343

18. Establishing Control of State and Countryside 345Creating the New State, 1949–1953 345Collectivizing Agriculture 352Collective Agriculture in Practice 354Beginning Industrialization 357Education and the Intellectuals 359The Anti-Rightist Campaign, 1957–1958 365

19. The Great Leap Forward, 1958–1960 368Background Factors 368The Disaster of 1959–1960 372Revival: Seizing Control of Industrial Labor 374Party Rectification and Education 376The Sino–Soviet Split 378The Great Leap Forward as a Social Movement 380

20. The Cultural Revolution, 1966–1976 383Underpinnings 383Mao’s Aims and Resources 385Role of the People’s Liberation Army 387How the Cultural Revolution Unfolded 389

Contents xi

The Red Guards 392The Seizure of Power 393Foreign Affairs 395Decentralization and the Third Front 397The Succession Struggle 400The Cultural Revolution in Retrospect 401Aftermath 404

21. The Post-Mao Reform Era 406by Merle Goldman

Epilogue: China at the Start of the Twenty-first Century 457by Merle Goldman

Note on Romanization and Citation 472

Suggested Reading 473

Publisher’s Note 429

Illustration Credits 531

Author Index 535

General Index 545

Illustrations follow pages 104, 200, and 328

xii Contents

Maps

1. Land Forms of China 6–72. Population Distribution in 1980 8–93. Geographical Features 104. Provinces 125. Macroregions 136. The Three Dynasties: Xia, Shang, and Zhou 367. The Qin and Other Warring States 508. Commanderies and Kingdoms of the Han Empire, 206 bc 589. Tang Empire at Its Greatest Extent (Eighth Century) 80

10. Population Distribution in the Han Dynasty, ad 2 9011. Population Distribution in the Tang Dynasty, ad 742 9012. Population Distribution in the Song Dynasty, ca. 1100 9113. The Northern Song and Liao (Qidan) Empires, ca. 1000 11414. The Southern Song and Jin (Ruzhen) Empires in 1142 11615. Mongol Conquests and the Yuan Empire in 1279 12016. The Grand Canal System of the Sui, Song, and Yuan Dynasties 12517. The Ming Empire at Its Greatest Extent 13118. The Voyages of Zheng He 13619. Rise of the Manchus 14420. Foreign Encroachments 20221. Nineteenth-Century Rebellions 21522. The Long March 30623. The Japanese Invasion of China 31524. The People’s Republic of China 346–347

xiii

Tables

1. Major periods in Imperial China 242. China’s prehistory 313. Divisions of the Mongol empire under Chinggis Khan’s successors 1194. Events in China, 1796–1901 1885. Major turning points, 1901–1916 2426. Rural administrative units and average characteristics,

1974 and 1986 355

xiv

Preface to the Enlarged Edition

John King Fairbank devoted his life to writing and teaching on China, acountry whose history and society absorbed him throughout his adultyears. This book is a fitting conclusion to his career.

Fairbank, who was affectionately referred to as JKF by his colleaguesand students, began as a scholar of British history. But he was drawn tothe study of China by the publication of its diplomatic archives in 1932,when he was in China doing research for his dissertation. That disserta-tion emerged as the pioneering monograph Trade and Diplomacy on theChina Coast, which launched the study of Qing dynasty documents andChina’s interaction with the West. In 1936 Fairbank joined the HarvardUniversity History Department, where he introduced the history of mod-ern China to its curriculum. His lectures, given with wry wit and humor-ous slides, presented history as a story. For the next five decades he con-tinued to teach at Harvard, to work for the United States government inWashington, D.C., and in China during World War II, and to write, co-author, and edit over three dozen books plus hundreds of articles, re-views, commentaries, and congressional testimonies. Fairbank was thedean of modern Chinese studies not only in the United States but in mostof the world—a teacher, mentor, administrator, public educator, and his-torian.

I first met JKF in 1953 when I entered Harvard’s East Asian RegionalStudies master’s program. He subsequently became my Ph.D. thesis advi-sor and invited me to become a Research Associate of Harvard’s EastAsian Research Center (later renamed the Fairbank Center for East AsianResearch), where I have been ever since. He was an inspiring and de-

manding graduate advisor. As with the scores of other future historiansof China whom he trained, he relentlessly guided, cajoled, and pushedme through the Ph.D. process and then the publication of my first book.Even after I began teaching at Boston University and had my ownstudents, he remained a constant, dominating presence. Sometimes hewould call before 7:00 in the morning, usually on weekends, to tell mehow much he liked a piece I had written and to suggest ways it couldhave been “even better.”

At the time Fairbank completed this book, the post-Mao reform pe-riod had been under way for little more than a decade and could not yetbe analyzed in historical context. My contribution, Chapter 21 and theEpilogue, deals with the reform period in more detail, providing greaterperspective than the first edition could. My views also diverge somewhatfrom those of Fairbank. Another of JKF’s notable qualities was his will-ingness to take on and encourage students who were interested in topicsand approaches different from his own.

Whereas Fairbank emphasized demographic and institutional factorsand stressed China’s uniqueness, I tend to be more interested in intellec-tual and political history and to see more overlap between Confucianand Western views. Whereas he saw the post-Mao era as a continuationof China’s repressive, backward recent history, I view it as more open tochange. His darker view was due in part to the fact that this book wascompleted in the aftermath of the violent crackdown in TiananmenSquare on June 4, 1989. In his preface, he notes that while in most as-pects Chinese civilization before the nineteenth century was far more ad-vanced than that in the West, in modern times, China had fallen far be-hind. Even its revolution, he asserted elsewhere, has been the longest,most difficult, and bloodiest in modern history. He often despairedwhether China would ever be able to catch up with the developed world.

This question remains unanswered today. Fairbank often pointed outthat China has the extraordinary problem of having to feed, house, andprovide a livelihood for the largest population in the world, 1.2 billionand growing. But as my epilogue points out, despite many difficulties,China in the post-Mao era appears to be finding its way to deal with itsproblems and has acquired the potential to revive its greatness of old.Whether or not China succeeds in becoming a great power, it will have amajor impact on the rest of the world in the years to come.

Merle GoldmanDecember 1997

xvi Preface to the Enlarged Edition

Preface to the Original Edition

Since the 1970s, as part of the modernization defining the current phaseof the great Chinese revolution, China has been emerging as a more di-verse and dynamic place. “One China, One Culture” may still be the pa-triotic slogan of 1,250,000,000 people in China, echoing the old Confu-cian governing elite’s persistent ideal of political unity. But the Chineseexperience of invasion, rebellion, civil war, and reform since the 1930shas shattered the ancient sanction for central autocracy and local acqui-escence. Education and economic modernization among the great massof the Chinese people are creating new opportunities, new careers andlifestyles. Fresh ideas and political institutions cannot lag far behind.

Along with this transformation in Chinese life has come a dynamicgrowth in China studies the world over. During the last twenty years anoutpouring of skilled monographs has begun to modernize our view ofChina’s history and institutions. This new view has rendered obsolete theold sinologue’s all-about-China approach to the country as a single en-tity inhabited by “the Chinese.” Archaeologists excavating thousands ofsites, historians researching in the great new archives, social scientists in-vestigating localities have all begun to break up the unitary One-Chinamonolith.

China: A New History takes account of much of this recent work.Yet the perpetual seesaw between fresh evidence and interpretation givesany new history a fuzzy outline, bounded by many unresolved ques-tions. The path of historical wisdom is to find out what issues are still indispute, to identify major current questions, rather than to try to resolvethem all here and now. Our libraries are littered with the pronounce-

xvii

ments of writers who knew all about China but could not see how muchthey did not know. The expansion of our knowledge has expanded thecircumference of our ignorance.

The plan of this book is as follows: After noting several lines of ap-proach to the Chinese scene, we look first at the newest chapter in thestory, China’s prehistory. Since 192o archaeology has broken throughthe ancient crust of Chinese myth and legend, confirming much of it.Scientific excavation has found Peking Man, traced the growth of Neo-lithic China, and exhumed the Bronze Age capitals of the once-legend-ary Shang and Xia dynasties. We start with a firm picture of the extraor-dinary continuity of a largely self-contained civilization.

Next, we trace the growth of the imperial autocracy, of the elite, andof the state and society they governed. New studies of the major peri-ods—Han, Tang, Song, Ming, and Qing—allow us to appreciate the so-phistication of China’s achievements. Never have so few ruled for solong over so many. Yet this success in autocracy and elitism left a prob-lem. The imperial mixture—the ruler’s ritual leadership, the elite’s self-indoctrination in moral principles, the bureaucracy’s clever self-regulat-ing mechanisms among the people, and the violent punishments held inreserve—all created a self-sufficient and self-perpetuating civilization.But it did not form a nation-state with a government motivated to leadthe way in modernization.

China’s history when surveyed over the last two thousand years con-tains a great paradox that bothers all Chinese patriots today. In compar-ison with Europe, the China of the eleventh and twelfth centuries was aforerunner, far ahead in most aspects of civilization, whereas in the nine-teenth and twentieth centuries China lagged far behind. When FrancisBacon remarked around 1620 that the world was being made over byprinting, gunpowder, and the magnet, he did not refer to the fact thatthey all three had appeared first in China. Nowadays, however, it isgenerally conceded that the China of ad 1200 was on the whole moreadvanced than Europe. So why and how did China fall behind? Amongthe world’s major peoples, why have the Chinese become latecomers onthe way to modernity? If living conditions and the amenities of life inChina and Europe were generally comparable as recently as the eigh-teenth century, how did China so spectacularly fail to follow the Euro-pean lead in industrialization? To so large a question there is no single,monocausal answer. In Part Two we pursue this intriguing questionfrom several angles.

In Part Three, we look at the rise to power of the Chinese Commu-

xviii Preface to the Original Edition

nist Party under Mao Zedong and, in Part Four, at its amazing vicissi-tudes since 1949. Once the modern revolution in Chinese thought gotunder way in the 189os, it became evident that no foreign model couldfit the Chinese situation, that many models would be used but nonewould be adequate, and that the creative Chinese people would have towork out their salvation in their own way. Having had a unique past,they would have their own unique future.

This conclusion, unsettling to many, has now coincided with a fur-ther worldwide realization that the species Homo sapiens sapiens (as ithas reassuringly designated itself) is itself endangered. The twentiethcentury has already seen more man-made suffering, death, and assaulton the environment than all previous centuries combined. Perhaps theChinese have finally joined the great outside world just in time to partici-pate in its collapse. A few observers, less pessimistic, believe that in theend only a survival capacity like that exhibited by the Chinese forthree millennia can save us.

By taking a fresh, newly informed look at China’s long history, at itsmultichanneled reforms, rebellions, and revolutions and its record of ad-mirable successes and grievous failures in the modern century, we mayfind the long-term trends and contemporary conditions that will shapeChina’s future and affect our own.

JKFSeptember 12, 1991

Preface to the Original Edition xix

Introduction: Approaches toUnderstanding China’s History

The Variety of Historical Perspectives

The fact that Chinese history is best known in China, just as Westernhistory is best known in America and Europe, creates discordant per-spectives between China and the outside world. For example, Chineseknow that Manchu tribal leaders christened their new state Qing(“Pure”) in 1636, the year that Americans (at least those around Boston)remember as the founding of Harvard, the New World’s first college.After 2 million or so Manchus took power over 120 million or so Chi-nese, the Qing dynasty governed the Chinese people for 267 years whiletheir numbers rose to about 400 million. At its midpoint in the 1770s,the Qing dynasty, governing the Chinese empire from Beijing, completedits conquest of Mongolia, Central Asia, and Tibet, while a few millionAmerican rebels in their thirteen colonies declared their independence ofBritain.

Now that the United States is top nation in succession to eighteenth-century France and nineteenth-century Britain, historical perspective ismore necessary than ever. In China the United States’ democratic marketeconomy faces the last communist dictatorship, yet behind Chinese com-munism lies the world’s longest tradition of successful autocracy. It isnow trying to achieve economic modernization without the representa-tive political democracy that Americans view as their special gift to theworld’s salvation. U.S. citizens who feel inclined to bash China’s dicta-torship may usefully recall their nation’s own difficulties in the exerciseof freedom and power, which call into question the appropriateness ofthe American model for China’s modern transformation. The United

States has, for example, had trouble recently with its national leadership.One president was assassinated for reasons not yet known which we pre-fer not to ask about. Another president resigned to avoid impeachmentfor lying. A more recent president from Hollywood lived a fantasy life,lying to himself and the public to make us feel good, while creating anunderclass beneath our democracy and ending the Cold War with the So-viet Union. Meanwhile, in far-off China, Chairman Mao Zedong killedmillions and millions of Chinese while calling it a class struggle for revo-lution. His successor in 1989 was so stuck in China’s autocratic traditionthat, when confronted with unarmed petitioners for democracy, he madethe mistake of sending in tanks to shoot down hundreds of them onprimetime television.

Today the old men in Beijing do not want China flooded with thecommercial world’s pop culture. Academic Americans welcome 40,000bright students from China and want them free to think about modernproblems. In America these include the drug and gun industries andshooting in the streets. The Chinese have to reduce their birthrate toavoid drowning in a population of more than a billion. Female infanti-cide is one way, birth control and abortion are others. Many Americansmeanwhile want to save every fetus as a sacred human being, never mindits mother or its future.

Among all these bizarre and poignant ironies, one unanswered ques-tion haunts all Chinese patriots today. The Chinese Han empire hadbeen contemporary with and bigger than the Roman Empire. Indeed,China was once the superior civilization of the world, not only the equalof Rome but far ahead of medieval Europe. Albert Feuerwerker, an eco-nomic historian disciplined against hyperbole, tells us that from 1000 to1500 ad “no comparison of agricultural productivity, industrial skill,commercial complexity, urban wealth, or standard of living (not to men-tion bureaucratic sophistication and cultural achievement) would placeEurope on a par with the Chinese empire” (in Ropp 1990). So why didChina fall behind in modern times? How could it be ignominiously con-temned by Western and even Japanese imperialists in the late nineteenthcentury?

The answer lies partly in China and partly in the West. From thetime of the Industrial Revolution that began about 1750 in England,science and technology have been radically transforming the modernworld. Since 1978 “modernization” has been China’s national goal. Thehigh drama of a great people making a modern comeback is particularly

2 introduction

moving in this case because of the Chinese people’s residual convictionof their innate superiority. The twentieth century has generally acknowl-edged the superlative quality of Shang bronzes, Song paintings, andother aspects of China’s heritage. And since 1950 Joseph Needham andhis collaborators in the fourteen and more volumes of Science and Civili-sation in China have described the impressive array of early Chinese dis-coveries and inventions, far more than the well-known paper, printing,gunpowder, and compass. Nathan Sivin suggests that premodern sciencein China and Europe superficially resembled each other more than eitherone resembled modern science. Although Europe had inherited ways ofthought that made it more ready for scientific thinking when the timecame, in neither case was there much linkage between science and tech-nology, between the theoretical scholar and the practical artisan. The dy-namic combination of S&T is a modern creation.

Sivin also points out how, for example, the remarkable efficiency ofthe Chinese abacus as a calculator was limited to a dozen or so digits in alinear array and so was useless for advanced algebra. He suggests thatthe relative lack of Chinese mathematical innovations from the mid-1300s to the 1600s may have been the price paid for the convenience ofthe abacus. Here we have an example of how China’s early precocity ininvention could later hold her back. Indeed, I shall argue that the verysuperiority achieved by Song China would become by 1800 a source ofher backwardness, as though all great achievements carry the seeds oftheir ossification.

China’s precocity, it is now recognized, was not limited to the artsand technology. By almost any definition, an autocratic state appeared inancient China, with institutions of bureaucratic administration, record-keeping, selection of officials by merit on the basis of examinations, andcentral control over the economy, society, literature, and thought. ThisChinese autocracy presaged the rise of the modern absolutist state in sev-enteenth-century Europe. Our repertoire of social science concepts de-rived from the pluralistic Western experience seems still inadequate toencompass this early Chinese achievement.

If we wish to understand the social and human factors in China’s fall-ing behind the West in the modern period, we must look more closely ather prehistory, her rice economy, family system, Inner Asian invaders,classical thought, and many other features of her high civilization to seehow they all may have played a part. Let us therefore identify certainmajor approaches to understanding China.

Approaches to Understanding China’s History 3

Geography: The Contrast of North and South

One’s approach to China’s diversity is first of all visual. To the travelerwho flies through the vast gray cloud banks, mists, and sunshine of con-tinental China, two pictures will stand out as typical, one of NorthChina and one of the South (see Map 1). On the dry North China plainto the south of Beijing, where Chinese civilization had its first flowering,one sees in summer an endless expanse of green fields over which arescattered clusters of darker green, the trees of earth-walled villages. It isvery like the view of the Middle West in the United States a few decadesago, where farmsteads and their clumps of trees were dispersed atroughly half-mile intervals. But where the American corn belt had afarm, on the North China plain there is an entire village. Where oneAmerican farmer’s family lived with its barns and sheds among its fieldsin Iowa or Illinois at a half-mile distance from its neighbors roundabout,in China an entire community of several hundred persons lives in its tree-studded village, at a half-mile distance from neighbor villages. TheAmerican people, in spite of their farming background, have no appreci-ation of the population density that subtly conditions every act andthought of a Chinese farmer.

In South China the typical picture is quite different, and like nothingto which Americans are accustomed. There during much of the year therice fields are flooded and present a water surface to the airborne ob-server. The green terrain is hilly, and the flat crescent-shaped rice terracesmarch up each hill almost to the top and on the other side descend againfrom near the crest, terrace upon terrace in endless succession, each em-bankment conforming to the lay of the land like the contour lines of a ge-ographer’s chart. Indeed, the curving pattern of the rice terraces seenfrom above is a visual index to the slope of the valleys in which they arebuilt—narrow concave strips of paddy field touch the hilltops, the lowerterraces grow broader and longer and bulge out as they descend to thevalley floor. Gray stone footpaths are built on many of the embank-ments, forming intricate patterns. When the sun is out, one sees it fromthe air reflected brilliantly in the water of the rice fields. The sun seems tobe shining up through the fields from below, so that the whole ornatenetwork of the embankments and paths and hilltops appears to rush be-neath one as though on a great rolling screen, a black lacework movingacross the bright silver of shining water.

No one can fly over the rugged green hills of the South without won-dering where the billion and more people of China live and what they

4 introduction

eat—such vast reaches of mountain and valley seem largely uncultivableand sparsely settled. One’s picture of a big empty landscape is mirroredstatistically in the estimate that six sevenths of the population have tolive on the one third of the land that is cultivable (see Map 2). Theinhabited part of China is roughly half as large as the inhabited part ofthe United States, yet it supports five times as many people. This is madepossible only by crowding some 2,000 human beings onto each squaremile of cultivated earth in the valleys and floodplains. The United Stateshas some 570,000 square miles under cultivation and could greatly in-crease this area; China has perhaps 450,000 square miles of cultivatedland (less than one half acre of food-producing soil per person), withlittle prospect of increasing this area by more than a small fraction, evenif it is used more intensively. In short, China must feed about 23 percentof the world’s population from about 7 percent of the world’s arableland.

The dry wheat-millet area of North China and the moist rice-grow-ing areas of the South divide along a line roughly halfway between theYellow (Huang) River and the Yangzi River on the thirty-third parallel(see Map 3). Rainfall, soil, temperature, and human usage create strikingcontrasts between these two economic regions.

China’s rainfall patterns are created by the terrain. The Asian landmass changes temperature more readily than does the Western PacificOcean and its currents, and the cold dry air that is chilled over the conti-nent in the wintertime tends to flow southeastward to the sea, with mini-mum precipitation. Conversely, the summer monsoon of moisture-ladenair from the South China Sea is drawn inward and northward over theland mass by the rising of the heated air above it, and precipitation oc-curs mainly during the summer. The southerly wind of summer crossesthe hills of South China first, and they receive a heavy, relatively depend-able rainfall. North China, being farther from the South China Sea, re-ceives less rainfall overall, and the amount of precipitation over the dec-ades has varied as much as 30 percent from one year to the next. Theaverage annual rainfall of the North China plain is about 20 to 25inches, like that of the great American dustbowl, barely sufficient tomaintain cultivation at the best of times. This high variability of rainfallfrom year to year constantly threatens to produce drought and famine.

North China’s severe continental winters, not unlike those of theAmerican Middle West, limit the growing season to about half the year.In southernmost China, crops are grown the year around, and rice isdouble-cropped and even triple-cropped. This explains why most of the

Approaches to Understanding China’s History 5

3. Geographical Features

Chinese people live in the more fecund rice country of the South. Riceculture, with its greater inputs of water and labor, until recent timesyielded more than twice as much food as wheat-growing.

In both the North and South, natural resources are supplemented byunremitting human endeavor, of which the night-soil (human-excre-ment) industry is but one of the more spectacular forms. Without return-ing human waste to the land, or using equivalent chemical fertilizers, noregion of China could produce enough food crops to sustain its presentpopulation. Each urban center sustains its surrounding truck gardens inthis way; from the air Chinese cities can be seen surrounded by a belt ofdense green crops that fade at the periphery.

Early travelers compared China with Europe in the variety of its lan-guages and the size of its different provinces (see Map 4). For example,three regions along the course of the Yangzi River—Sichuan province tothe west, the twin provinces of Hubei to the north and Hunan to thesouth, and the lower Yangzi delta—are each of them comparable to Ger-many in area and each bigger in population. Major provinces of Chinahave distinctive dialects, cuisines, and sociocultural traditions that cantrigger endless dinner conversations. But provinces are essentially politi-cal subdivisions of government. One new approach has been to divideChina for analytic purposes by regions of economic geography.

In the last quarter-century, G. William Skinner’s work on marketingand urbanization has led him to divide China into macroregions, eachcentering around a river drainage basin (see Map 5). Each region has apopulous and productive core area on a waterway and a less populousand less productive periphery area in mountainous or arid terrain. Acore area is naturally more powerful in human affairs, while a peripherybecomes adjusted to its subordinate or marginal role. For example, de-forestation, cultivation, and soil erosion in a periphery will tend to senduseful alluvium down into a core, heightening their difference in fertility.

The precise limits and interrelationships of these analytically definedmacroregions will be refined and improved upon. They are useful to his-torians because they reflect economic reality more accurately than thepolitical provinces. In fact, provincial boundaries may be set not to en-hance the power of economic factors but rather to counter them. Thus,the fecund Yangzi delta is divided among the provinces of Zhejiang,Jiangsu, and Anhui so that the preeminent economic strength of the re-gion will not be under a single provincial government that might takeover the state.

Macroregions center on waterways as transport routes for trade. In

Approaches to Understanding China’s History 11

12 introduction

4. Provinces

Approaches to Understanding China’s History 13

5. Macroregions

modern times the great cities—Guangzhou, Shanghai, Wuhan, evenTianjin—have grown up where sea trade met the waterborne commerceof the interior. Yet until recently China’s foreign trade seldom lived up tothe great expectations of the foreign merchants. Stretching so far fromnorth to south, from the latitude of Canada to that of Cuba, China re-mains a subcontinent largely sufficient unto herself. Too easily we forgetthat Shanghai, at the mouth of the Yangzi River, is in the temperate lati-tude of New Orleans and Suez, while Guangzhou, on the West River, isin the latitude of Havana and Calcutta, well into the tropics.

In spite of the immensity and variety of the Chinese scene, this sub-continent has remained a single political unit, where Europe has not, forit is held together by a way of life and a system of government muchmore deeply rooted than our own, and stretching further back uninter-ruptedly into the past.

Humankind in Nature

No matter what elements of civilization—peoples or cultural traits—ac-cumulated in China, they all became integrated in a distinctly Chineseway of life, nourished, conditioned, and limited by the good earth andthe use of it. To cite but one example, from Neolithic times (12,000 yearsago) to the present the people of North China have made pit dwellings orcave homes in the fine, yellow, windborne loess soil that covers about100,000 square miles of Northwest China to a depth of 150 feet or more(see Map 3). Loess has a quality of vertical cleavage useful for this pur-pose. Many hundreds of thousands of people still live in caves cut intothe sides of loess cliffs; these homes are cool in summer, warm in winter,and dangerous only in earthquakes.

Where forest land occurred, the Chinese, like other early peoples andrecent American pioneers, achieved its deforestation. The consequenterosion through the centuries changed the face of the country, and ero-sion today is still a major problem. The waterborne loess deposits of theYellow River have built up a broad floodplain between Shanxi provinceand the sea, and the process still goes on. Nothing so vividly conveys asense of man’s impotence in the face of nature as to watch the swirlingcoffee-colored flood of the Yellow River flowing majestically within itsgreat earthen dikes across, and 20 feet above, the crowded plain 200miles from the sea; and to realize that this vast yellow torrent is steadilydepositing its silt and in this way building its bed higher above the sur-

14 introduction

rounding countryside until the time when human negligence or act ofGod will allow it again to burst from the dikes and inundate the plain.

Deforestation, erosion, and floods have constantly been met by hu-man efforts at water control. The planting of trees and damming of trib-utaries in the watershed of the Yellow River is a recent effort of the Peo-ple’s Republic. In previous periods China’s rulers confronted in everyflood season the debouching of the river upon the North China plain infull force. In prehistoric times, however, flooding of the plain was less ofa problem than the reclamation of it from its primitive swamp and fenconditions; water-control techniques were developed for drainage pur-poses as well as for flood prevention and irrigation. Thus many genera-tions of labor have been spent upon the land to make it what it is today,protected by dikes, crossed by canals and roads worn into the earth, irri-gated by streams and wells, divided by paths and occasional remnants ofgrave land in their groves of trees, and all of it handed down from gener-ation to generation.

This land that modern China has inherited is used almost entirely toproduce food for human consumption. China proper (as distinct fromInner Asia; see below) cannot afford to raise cattle for food. Of the landthat can be used at all, nine tenths is cultivated for crops, and only about2 percent is pasture for animals. By comparison, in the United Statesonly four tenths of the used land is put into crops, and almost half of it isput into pasture.

The social implications of intensive agriculture can be seen moststrikingly in the rice economy, which is the backbone of Chinese lifeeverywhere in the Yangzi valley and the South. Rice plants are ordinarilygrown for their first month in seedbeds, while subsidiary crops areraised and harvested in the dry fields. The fields are then irrigated, fertil-ized, and plowed (here the water buffalo may supplement man’s hoeing)in preparation for the transplanting of the rice seedlings. This trans-planting is still done in large part by human hands, the rows of plantersbending from the waist as they move backward step by step through theankle-high muddy water of each terrace. This goes on in the paddy fieldsof a whole subcontinent—certainly the greatest expenditure of muscularenergy in the world. When the rice has been weeded and is mature, thefield is drained and the crop is harvested, again often by hand. Given anunlimited supply of water and of human hands, there is probably noway by which a greater yield could be gained from a given plot of land.In this situation land is economically more valuable than labor, or to put

Approaches to Understanding China’s History 15

it another way, good muscles are more plentiful than good earth. Lack-ing both land and capital for large-scale agricultural methods, the Chi-nese farmer has focused on intensive, high-yield hand-gardening ratherthan extensive mechanized agriculture.

The heavy application of manpower and fertilizer to small plots ofland has also had its social repercussions, for it sets up a vicious inter-dependence between dense population and intensive use of the soilwhereby each makes the other possible. A dense population providesboth the incentive for intensive land use and the means. Once estab-lished, this economy acquired inertial momentum—it kept on going. Theback-breaking labor of many hands became the accepted norm, and in-ventive efforts at labor saving remained the exception. Early moderniz-ers of China, in their attempts to introduce the machine, constantly ranup against the vested interest of Chinese manpower, since in the shortrun the machine appeared to be in competition with human hands andbacks. Thus railways were attacked as depriving carters and porters oftheir jobs, and there was no premium upon labor-saving invention.

This unfavorable population-land balance had other implications aswell. Pressure from rising population drove many Chinese farmers in theLate Imperial era to switch from grain production to the growing ofcommercial crops (such as cotton in the Yangzi delta). This offered agreater return per unit of land but not per individual workday. It was asurvival strategy—Philip Huang (1990, 1991) calls it “involution”—inwhich substantial commercialization could take place without leadingeither to modern capitalist development or to the freeing of the Chinesefarmer from a life of bare subsistence.

The ecology of the Chinese—their adaptation to the physical envi-ronment—has influenced their culture in many ways. Life on the greatriver floodplains has always been a hard life. “Heaven nourishes and de-stroys” is an ancient saying. On the broad stretches of the plain the pa-tient Chinese farmers were at the mercy of the weather, dependent uponHeaven’s gift of sun and rain. They were forced to accept natural calam-ity in the form of drought, flood, pestilence, and famine. This is in strik-ing contrast to the lot of Europeans, who lived in a land of variegated to-pography. People in the West, either on the Mediterranean or on theEuropean continent, were never far from a water supply and could usu-ally supplement agriculture by hunting or fishing, provided they exer-cised initiative. From ancient times, seaborne commerce has played animmediate part in Western economies. Exploration and invention in the

16 introduction

service of commerce became part of a Western struggle to overcomenature.

This different relation of human beings to nature in the West andEast has been one of the salient contrasts between the two civilizations.Man has been at the center of the Western stage. The rest of nature hasserved as either neutral background or as an adversary. Thus Western re-ligion is anthropomorphic, and early Western painting anthropocentric.To see how great this gulf is, we have only to compare Christianity withthe relative impersonality of Buddhism, or compare a Song landscape, itstiny human figures dwarfed by crags and rivers, with an Italian primi-tive, in which nature is an afterthought.

Living so closely involved with family members and neighbors hasaccustomed the Chinese people to a collective life in which the groupnormally dominates the individual. In this respect the Chinese experi-ence until recently hardly differed from that of other farming peopleslong settled on the land. It is the modern individualist, be he seafarer, pi-oneer, or city entrepreneur, who is the exception. A room of one’s own,more readily available in the New World than in the crowded East, hassymbolized a higher standard of living. Thus, one generalization in thelore about China is the absorption of the individual not only in the worldof nature but also in the social collectivity.

Today the balance between the collectivity of Chinese society and itsbeautiful natural surroundings is being destroyed by modernization.Chemicals and industrial effluents pollute the water, while use of un-washed soft coal for energy pollutes the air. Growth of a predominantlyyoung population with an increasing life expectancy cannot be throttleddown for decades to come. Meanwhile, deforestation and erosion cou-pled with the building of roads, housing, and installations are destroyingthe arable land. The world’s biggest and most populous country is head-ing for an ecological nightmare that will require a great collective effortto overcome.

The Village: Family and Lineage

To understand China today, one basic approach is that of anthropology,which looks at the village and family environment from which modernChina has just begun to emerge. Even now the Chinese people are stillmostly farmers tilling the soil, living mainly in villages, in houses ofbrown sun-dried brick, bamboo, or whitewashed wattle, or sometimes

Approaches to Understanding China’s History 17

stone, with earth or stone floors, and often paper, not glass, in the win-dows. Frequently half their meager material income goes for food. TheChinese still lack the luxury of space. Farmers’ dwellings have usuallyabout four small room sections for every three persons. Sometimes fam-ily members of both sexes and two or three generations all sleep on thesame brick bed, which in North China may be heated by flues from thenearby stove. There is little meat in the diet. Manpower still takes theplace of the machine for most purposes.

To Americans and Europeans with their higher material standard ofliving, the amazing thing about the Chinese farming people has beentheir ability to maintain a highly civilized life under these poor condi-tions. The answer lies in their social institutions, which have carried theindividuals of each family through the phases and vicissitudes of humanexistence according to deeply ingrained patterns of behavior. These insti-tutions and behavior patterns are among the oldest and most persistentsocial phenomena in the world. China has been a stronghold of the fam-ily system and has derived both strength and inertia from it.

Until very recently the Chinese family has been a microcosm, thestate in miniature. The family, not the individual, was the social unit andthe responsible element in the political life of its locality. The filial pietyand obedience inculcated in family life were the training ground for loy-alty to the ruler and obedience to the constituted authority in the state.

This function of the family to raise filial sons who would becomeloyal subjects can be seen by a glance at the pattern of authority withinthe traditional family group. The father was a supreme autocrat, withcontrol over the use of all family property and income and a decisivevoice in arranging the marriages of the children. The mixed love, fear,and awe of children for their father was strengthened by the great respectpaid to age. An old man’s loss of vigor was more than offset by hisgrowth in wisdom. As long as he lived in possession of his faculties, thepatriarch had every sanction to enable him to dominate the family scene.According to the law, he could sell his children into slavery or even exe-cute them for improper conduct. In fact, Chinese parents were by customas well as by nature particularly loving toward small children, and theywere also bound by a reciprocal code of responsibility for their childrenas family members. But law and custom provided little check on paternaltyranny if a father chose to exercise it.

The domination of age over youth within the old-style family wasmatched by the domination of male over female. Even today, Chinesebaby girls seem more likely than baby boys to suffer infanticide. A girl’s

18 introduction

marriage was arranged and not for love. The trembling bride left herown family behind and became at once a daughter-in-law under the con-trol of her husband’s mother. She might see secondary wives or concu-bines brought into the household, particularly if she did not bear a maleheir. She could be repudiated by her husband for various reasons. If hedied, she could not easily remarry. All this reflected the fact that awoman had no economic independence. Her labor was absorbed inhousehold tasks and brought her no income. Farm women were almostuniversally illiterate. They had few or no property rights.

The inferior social status of women was merely one manifestation ofthe hierarchic nature of China’s entire social code and cosmology. An-cient China had viewed the world as the product of two interacting com-plementary elements, yin and yang. Yin was the attribute of all things fe-male, dark, weak, and passive. Yang was the attribute of all things male,bright, strong, and active. While male and female were both necessaryand complementary, one was by nature passive toward the other. Build-ing on such ideological foundations, an endless succession of Chinesemale moralists worked out the behavior pattern of obedience and passiv-ity that was expected of women. These patterns subordinated girls toboys from infancy and kept the wife subordinate to her husband and themother to her grown son. Forceful women, whom China has neverlacked, usually controlled their families by indirection, not by fiat.

Status within the family was codified in the famous “three bonds”emphasized by the Confucian philosophers: the bond of loyalty on thepart of subject to ruler (minister to prince), of filial obedience on the partof son to father (children to parents), and of chastity on the part of wivesbut not of husbands. To an egalitarian Westerner the most striking thingabout this doctrine is that two of the three relationships were within thefamily, and all were between superior and subordinate. The relationshipof mother and son, which in Western life often allows matriarchal domi-nation, was not stressed in theory, though it was naturally important infact.

When a father saw the beginning of individuality and independencein his son, he might fear that selfish personal indulgence would disruptthe family. Strong bonds of intimacy between mother and son or son andwife threatened the vertical lines of loyalty and respect that maintainedthe family and the father’s authority. In Jonathan Ocko’s summary (inKwang-Ching Liu, 1990), wives were “ineluctably destabilizing ele-ments,” promising descendants, yet always threatening the bond of obe-dience between parents and sons.

Approaches to Understanding China’s History 19

In addition to this common bond of loyalty to family, the old Chinawas knit together by the common experience of a highly educated localelite, who were committed from childhood to studying and following theclassical texts and teachings. Motherly nurture and fatherly disciplinecombined to concentrate the young scholar’s effort on self-control andon the suppression of sexual and frivolous impulses. Instead, as JonSaari’s (1990) study of upper-class childhood in the late nineteenth cen-tury reiterates, the training of youth was in obedience above all. Once aboy entered his adolescent years, open affection from parents gave wayto intensive training aimed at proper character formation.

The traditional family system was highly successful at preparing theChinese to accept similar patterns of status in other institutions, includ-ing the official hierarchy of the government. The German sociologistMax Weber characterized China as a “familistic state.” One advantageof a system of status is that a man knows automatically where he standsin his family or society. He can have security in the knowledge that if hedoes his prescribed part, he may expect reciprocal action from others inthe system.

Within the extended family, every child from birth was involved in ahighly ordered system of kinship relations with elder brothers, sisters,maternal elder brothers’ wives, and other kinds of aunts, uncles, cousins,grandparents, and in-laws too numerous for a Westerner to keep trackof. These relationships were not only more clearly named and differenti-ated than in the West but also carried with them more compelling rightsand duties dependent upon status. Family members expected to be calledby the correct term indicating their relationship to the person addressingthem.

In South China the pioneer anthropologist Maurice Freedman(1971) found family lineages to be the major social institutions—eachone a community of families claiming descent from a founding ancestor,holding ancestral estates, and joining in periodic rituals at graves and inancestral halls. Buttressed by genealogies, lineage members might sharecommon interests both economic and political in the local society. InNorth China, however, anthropologists have found lineages organizedon different bases. Chinese kinship organization varies by region. Familypractices of property-holding, marriage dowries, burial or cremation,and the like also have had a complex history that is just beginning to bemapped out.

The Chinese kinship system in both the North and South is patrilin-eal, the family headship passing in the male line from father to eldest

20 introduction

son. Thus the men stay in the family, while the women marry into otherfamily households, in neither case following the life pattern that Westernindividuals take as a matter of course. Until recently a Chinese boy andgirl did not choose each other as life mates, nor are they likely even todayto set up an independent household together after marriage. Instead,they usually enter the husband’s father’s household and assume responsi-bilities for its maintenance, subordinating married life to family life in away that many Westerners would consider insupportable.

While the family headship passes intact from father to eldest son, thefamily property does not. Early in their history the Chinese abandonedprimogeniture, by which the eldest son inherits all the father’s propertywhile the younger sons seek their fortunes elsewhere. The enormous sig-nificance of this institutional change can be seen by comparing Chinawith a country like England or Japan, where younger sons who have notshared their father’s estate have provided the personnel for government,business, and overseas empire and where a local nobility might grow upto challenge the central power. In China, the equal division of landamong the sons of the family allowed the eldest son to retain only certainceremonial duties, to acknowledge his position, and sometimes an extrashare of property. The consequent parcelization of the land tended toweaken the continuity of family land-holding, forestall the growth oflanded power among officials, and keep peasant families on the marginof subsistence. The prime duty of each married couple was to produce ason to maintain the family line, yet the birth of more than one son mightmean impoverishment.

Contrary to a common myth, a large family with several children hasnot been the norm among Chinese peasants. The scarcity of land, as wellas disease and famine, set a limit to the number of people likely to sur-vive in each family unit. The large joint family of several married sonswith many children all within one compound, which has often been re-garded as typical of China, appears to have been the ideal exception, aluxury that only the well-to-do could afford. The average peasant familywas limited to four, five, or six persons in total. Division of the landamong the sons constantly checked the accumulation of property andsavings, and the typical family had little opportunity to rise on the socialscale. Peasants were bound to the soil not by law and custom so much asby their own numbers.

The farming village, which even today forms the bedrock of Chinesesociety, is still built out of family units that are permanently settled fromone generation to the next and depend upon the use of certain land-

Approaches to Understanding China’s History 21

holdings. Each family household is both a social and an economic unit.Its members derive their sustenance from working its fields and their so-cial status from membership in it. The life cycle of the individual in afarming village is still inextricably interwoven with the seasonal cycle ofintensive agriculture upon the land. The life and death of villagers followa rhythm that interpenetrates the growing and harvesting of the crops.

Yet Chinese peasant life has not normally been confined to a singlevillage but rather to a whole group of villages that form a market area.This pattern can be seen from the air—the cellular structure of marketcommunities, each centered on a market town surrounded by its ring ofsatellite villages. The prerevolutionary Chinese countryside was a honey-comb of these relatively self-sufficient areas. From the market town,footpaths (or sometimes waterways) radiated out to a first ring of aboutsix villages and continued on to a second ring of, say, twelve villages.Each of these eighteen or so villages had perhaps 75 households, andeach family household averaged five persons—parents, perhaps two chil-dren, and a grandparent. No village was more than about two and a halfmiles from the market town, within an easy day’s round trip with a car-rying-pole, barrow, or donkey (or a sampan on a waterway). Together,the village farmers and the market-town shopkeepers, artisans, land-owners, temple priests, and others formed a community of roughly1,500 households or 7,500 people. The town market functioned periodi-cally—say, every first, fourth, and seventh day in a ten-day cycle—sothat itinerant merchants could visit it regularly while visiting a centralmarket and the adjoining town markets five miles away in similar cy-cles—say, every second, fifth, and eighth day or every third, sixth, andninth day. In this pulsation of the market cycle, one person from everyhousehold might go to the market town on every third day, perhaps tosell a bit of local produce or buy a product from elsewhere, but in anycase to meet friends in the tea shop, at the temple, or on the way. In tenyears a farmer would have gone to market a thousand times.

Thus while the villages were not self-sufficient, the large market com-munity was both an economic unit and a social universe. Marriageswere commonly arranged through matchmakers at the market town.There, festivals were celebrated, a secret society might have its lodgemeetings, and the peasant community would meet representatives of theruling class—tax gatherers and rent collectors. Yet here again recent re-search has already modified the stereotype. Prasenjit Duara (1988) hasnoted how villagers participated in several networks—of kinship rela-tions, secret societies, religious cults, militia groups, or the security sys-

22 introduction

tem of mutual responsibility—that were not necessarily coextensive withthe market network.

Inner Asia and China: The Steppe and the Sown

The contrasts between North and South China are superficial comparedwith those between the pastoral nomadism of the plateaus of Inner Asiaand the settled villages based on the intensive agriculture of China. InnerAsia denotes the originally non-Chinese regions abutting China in awide arc running from Manchuria through Mongolia and Turkestan toTibet. At various times of strength and conquest the Chinese empire hasincluded Inner Asia, as indeed the People’s Republic does today. Such In-ner Asians as Mongols, Tibetans, and Manchus are counted among the55 ethnic minorities that help to make up the People’s Republic ofChina.*

The contrast between Inner Asia and China proper is a striking onein nearly every respect. On the steppe, population is thinly scattered; to-day there are only a few million Mongols and hardly more than thatnumber of Tibetans in the arid plateau regions that more than equal thearea occupied by over a billion Chinese who trace their ancestry to theHan dynasty (see Table 1). The thinness of population in Inner Asia initself makes the life of the steppe nomads vastly different from thecrowded life of the Han Chinese.

“Nomadism” of course does not mean aimless wandering over thegrasslands but the seasonal migration of camps and flocks from oneknown place to another, perhaps to the hills in winter and the lowlandsin summer, as climate and rainfall dictate, in search of pasture. Full no-mads of this sort, dependent upon their horses and sheep, may haveemerged from seminomadic societies on the edge of the grasslands thatoriginally combined settled agriculture with hunting and warfare. Bothacquired metallurgy in bronze and then iron.

Just as intensive agriculture molded the Chinese, so the sheep andhorse economy of Inner Asia conditioned the nomad. The sophisticatedtechnology of rice culture in South China’s paddy fields had its counter-part in the care with which sheep, goats, camels, horses, and cattle musteach be properly adjusted to the ground cover, terrain, and climate in

Approaches to Understanding China’s History 23

*Early Western explorers spoke of the deserts and mountains west of China and north ofIndia as “Central Asia.” Thus Inner Asia—inner from China—includes Central Asia.

the grasslands. From his flocks, the nomad secured food, sheepskins forclothing, shelter in the form of felt for his yurt, and fuel in the form ofsheep dung. Cultivation of the soil being unreliable, he depended uponthe management of his animals for a livelihood and upon his horses formobility, which could save him from the aridity of the steppe. He there-fore had to be constantly resourceful and ready for new ventures. Cus-tom did not tie him to the land, but he remained dependent upon a cer-tain minimum of trade with settled regions. He was often freer than theChinese farmer and at the same time poorer than the Chinese landlord,since he could not accumulate immobile wealth from generation to gen-eration. He was also a trained hunter and horseman, and so a potentialwarrior.

Succession to tribal leadership had to be settled not by simple inher-itance as in a dynasty but more flexibly by tanistry—the election of anheir apparent for his (presumed) preeminent ability to carry on the lead-ership. Such a man might be found patrilineally among the chieftain’ssons or laterally among the chieftain’s brothers. Such an ambiguous sys-tem could justify any choice that the tribal leaders might make. Theywould accept an able leader, and so a charismatic chieftain like Chinggis(Genghis) Khan in the thirteenth century might quickly organize a tribalconfederation of great military strength based on the firepower ofmounted archers. Until recently the nomadic and seminomadic peoples

24 introduction

Table 1. Major periods in Imperial China

Eastern Zhou 771–256 bcWarring States 403–221 bcQin 221–206 bcEarlier Han 206 bc–ad 8Later Han 25–220Period of North-South disunion 220–589Northern Wei 386–535Sui 589–618Tang 618–907Northern Song with Liao empire

(Qidan) on north border960–1125

Southern Song with Jin empire(Ruzhen) in North China

1127–1279

Yuan (Mongols) 1279–1368Ming 1368–1644Qing (Manchus) 1644–1912

to the north and west of China were a continuing factor in Chinese mili-tary and political life.

Here lies one source of China’s “culturalism”—that is, the devotionof the Chinese people to their way of life, an across-the-board sentimentas strong as the political nationalism of recent centuries in Europe.Where European nationalism arose through the example of and contactwith other nation-states, Chinese culturalism arose from the differencein culture between China and the Inner Asian “barbarians.” Because theInner Asian invaders became more powerful as warriors, the Chinesefound their refuge in social institutions and feelings of cultural and aes-thetic superiority—something that alien conquest could not take away.

We must therefore realize that Chinese history has embraced both theChinese people and the Inner Asian non-Chinese who have repeatedlyinvaded the Chinese state and society and become integral componentsof them. In short, we must broaden our sights: the Inner Asian peopleshave been a critical part of the history of the Chinese people. Even todaythe Chinese state assigns to the “autonomous regions” of the minoritynationalities more land area than to the Han Chinese majority.

Approaches to Understanding China’s History 25

P A R T O N E

Rise and Decline of theImperial Autocracy

Si n c e h i s to r i a n s , like journalists, have constantly to gen-eralize about complex situations, they easily accede to the needof ruling figures to stand forth as principal actors in the record.Short referents help—witness TR, FDR, IKE, JFK, and even Bushamong American presidents. Such preeminence may be institution-alized, as when all communications from an embassy have to goout over the ambassador’s name. How infinitely more prominent,then, was an emperor of China, whose individual reign title datedall records—as though our calendar read not 1991 and 1992 butBush 3 and Bush 4. Is it even worth mentioning that an emperorwas an autocrat? What else could he have been?

But autocracy is a matter of degree and takes various forms. Itmay be defined at one extreme as the capacity of a ruler to imposehis will upon his state and society. This borders on despotism ortyranny. At a minimum autocracy is above the law, a law untoitself, making specific laws but not controlled by them.

In operational terms, however, an autocrat like the emperor ofChina had to contend with procedural rules as well as moral ad-monitions and his own interests and reputation. He needed staffcooperation and competent information and advice. For example,procedural rules might require that he could act only when a mat-ter was formally presented to him, or only when others had pre-pared his choices to decide upon. His staff outnumbered him andslept in shifts. Personal freedom for such an autocrat might be hardto find, especially in an age that exalted imperial rites and cere-monies. He was burdened by many duties and manipulated by the

system—by his courtiers during the day and by his harem at night.What a crowded life!

However, the aspects of Chinese autocracy that will be de-scribed in the following chapters are not those of the palace tread-mill but rather certain other features that seem to have stood out inthe Chinese case. First, one notes the pervasiveness of the imperialauthority. The Chinese emperor seems to have had the final word inevery aspect of life. Second, we see the resulting politicization of allthese aspects, from dress to manners, books to paintings. One’s ev-ery act might have political significance. Third is the emperor’scareful refusal to allow any rival authority to arise, nor any untax-able income, that might challenge the imperial monopoly of power.In short, China’s imperial institution at times was capable of strongleadership, and this fact seems to have contributed to China’s earlyachievements. We cannot say the emperor did it all—far from it!—yet we may see the vigor of the imperial institution as a rough indexto the strength of China’s social cohesion and unity. But as timewent on, how long could this quality of strong leadership survivethe growth of the body politic?

28 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

1Origins: The Discoveries

of Archaeology

Paleolithic China

One of the early forms of Western cultural imperialism toward Chinawas the belief of some pundits and archaeologists that Chinese civiliza-tion had no prehistory of its own, that it arose suddenly from the diffu-sion of West Asian cultural traits like wheat, pottery, writing, or thehorse-drawn chariot as a “civilization by osmosis,” bit by bit comingacross Central Asia from the West. Such assumptions out of ignorancehave long since been overturned. The early stress on diffusion of culturaltraits has given way to a realization that there were probably substantialcontacts among primitive men over the eons.

In China, the study of prehistory through excavation is one of thenewest developments. Part of China’s modernization today lies in thesteady advance of archaeology since the 1920s. Modernization effortsunder both the Nationalist and the Communist governments, as the lat-est phase of China’s modern revolution, have been matched by scientificdiscovery of China’s prehistory. The story continues to unfold. Its impor-tance lies in the cultural continuity that it discloses. Distinctive featuresof Chinese life today, such as autocratic government, come down di-rectly from prehistoric times.

China has two north-south chains of mountains: one along thecoast, running discontinuously from the northeast (formerly calledManchuria) through Shandong province and the southeast coast toHong Kong and Hainan Island. The other chain is inland on the easternedge of the Central Asian plateau, running from Shanxi province souththrough Sichuan to the southwest China upland. East of it in the northstretches the North China plain. Among the limestone hills on the edge

of the plain twenty-seven miles southwest of Beijing near today’s villageof Zhoukoudian there are a number of caves. One particularly largecavern was originally the size of a football field (500 by 150 feet and inone area 120 feet from floor to ceiling). Beginning about 400,000 bp(before the present) this cave, which had a small entrance on the north-east, was inhabited by primitive people continuously for about 200,000years until the interior was completely filled up with layers of their de-bris.

What a find for archaeologists! In 1921 a single tooth from the sitewas identified as belonging to a primitive species of human. The firstskull was found in 1929. Careful excavation from 1921 to 1937 andsince 1959 has exhumed about 100,000 stone tools, over 100 teeth, 14skulls, and many other bones representing more than 40 individuals ofHomo erectus, the same species of early humans as the ones found inJava (1891), Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

They were little people. Peking Man stood about 5 feet, 2 inches tall,Peking Woman about 4 feet 9. They had very thick skull bones andreceding chins, but their cranial capacity of 850–1300 cc may be com-pared with Java Man’s 775–900 cc and the 1350 cc of early Homosapiens. They were hunter-fisher-gatherers and used fire to illuminatetheir cave and to cook their meat, 70 percent of which consisted of deer,although bones of the leopard, bear, saber-toothed tiger, hyena, ele-phant, rhinoceros, camel, water buffalo, boar, and horse were alsofound. There were no burials or complete skeletons in the cave, but someskulls were bashed in, which suggests that Peking Man was a small-timecannibal or at least a head-hunter who savored brains. All in all, saysK. C. Chang (1986), the Peking Man fossils were “paleoanthropology’sgreatest catch.”

Other discoveries followed. After 1949 the widespread constructionof roads, railways, dams, and foundations unearthed hundreds of newarchaeological sites. Another skull of Homo erectus was found in 1964in Shaanxi province, though it seemed more primitive than Peking Man.Chipped stone tools and human fossils from between 400,000 and200,000 years bp (during the Lower or Early Paleolithic period; seeTable 2) at a dozen or more sites show Homo erectus to have beenwidely dispersed in China, mainly in the provinces of the western moun-tain chain. A cranium was found in 1980–81 in Anhui province, anda partial skeleton was found in 1984 in Liaoning. Other finds are con-tinuing.

At several sites excavated in the 1970s remains were found of early

30 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

Homo sapiens, dating between roughly 200,000 and 50,000 years bp(the Middle Paleolithic period). By roughly 50,000 to 12,000 years bp(the Upper or Late Paleolithic period), Homo sapiens sapiens (the latermodel) was widely dispersed in half a dozen or more local culturesthroughout China. They were usually situated at points where moun-tains descended into plains and hunting could be combined with fishingand gathering. Judging by the stone tools left behind, these cultural re-gions had common features but also distinctive local characteristics evenat this early time. Sites included the middle Yellow River valley, the Or-dos region, the loess plateau of Shaanxi province, and the western edgeof the North China plain—for example, the Upper Cave at Zhoukou-dian seems to have served at this late time as a burial place. Seven skullswere found there, all battered. Archaeologists like K. C. Chang haveconcluded that Old Stone Age man in China was not a mere chipper ofrocks; basic ideas of kinship, authority, religion, and art that can still befound in China today were already developing in these early cultures.

Neolithic China

The Neolithic Age that began in China about 12,000 years ago wasmarked by the spread of settled agricultural communities. At that time

Origins: The Discoveries of Archaeology 31

Table 2. China’s prehistory

1,000,000–200,000 bp400,000–200,000

Lower (Early) PaleolithicHomo erectus (Peking Man)

200,000–50,000 bp Middle PaleolithicEarly Homo sapiens

50,000–12,000 bp Upper (Late) PaleolithicHomo sapiens sapiens

12,000–2000 bc8000–50005000–30003000–2200

NeolithicBeginning of agricultureYangshao Painted PotteryLongshan Black Pottery

2200–500 bc Bronze Age

2200–1750 bc1750–1040 bc1100–256 bc

XiaShangZhou

600–500 bc Beginning of Iron Age

All dates are approximate except 256 bc. bp = before the present

the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers had not yet deposited all the alluvial soilthat today forms the plains between the western and eastern mountainchains. Today’s North China plain between Shanxi* and Shandong wasmainly lakes and marshes—Shandong was almost an island off thecoast. Today’s provinces of Hebei and Henan were still fens not easilyhabitable. Meanwhile, the central China section of the Yangzi was anenormous lake. Today’s provinces of Hubei and Hunan were not yet cul-tivable, even for rice. The mountains were well forested, and animalswere plentiful. Domestication of animals like the dog and pig was a mi-nor problem compared with the domestication of crops. The hardy pe-rennial plants that hunter-fisher-gatherer communities might have grad-ually begun to use for food had to be substituted by annual seed cropsthat could be regularly planted and harvested—in short, cultivated. Atthis time the fairly warm and moist climate of Paleolithic China had notyet shifted to the more arid and colder climate of the present day. Neo-lithic agriculture could start most easily in marginal areas where uplandforest gave way to cultivable grassland and where an abundance ofplants and animals could sustain human life with or without successfulfarming.

Discoveries at thousands of Neolithic sites show a beginning of set-tled agriculture below the southern bend of the Yellow River, on a bor-der between wooded highlands and swampy lowlands. For example, thevillagers of Banpo (now in the city of Xi’an) about 4000 bc lived on mil-let supplemented by hunting and fishing. They used hemp for fabrics.Dwellings were grouped in clusters that suggest kinship units. Arrow-heads indicate hunting with bows. The villagers raised pigs and dogs astheir principal domesticated animals and stored their grain in potteryjars decorated with fish, animal, and plant designs as well as symbolsthat were evidently clan or lineage markers. But this “Painted Pottery”(called Yangshao) culture of North China was paralleled by contempo-rary cultures found at sites on the southeast coast and Taiwan and in thelower Yangzi valley, where rice culture had already begun.

Overlying the Painted Pottery has been found a thinner, lustrousBlack Pottery (called Longshan) more widely distributed throughoutNorth China, the Yangzi valley, and even the southeast coast, indicating

32 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

*Names of provinces commonly use shan mountains, xi west, dong east, he river, betnorth, nan south, and hu lake. Shanxi is “west of the mountains.” Hunan is “south of thelake.”

a great expansion of Neolithic agriculture with many regional subcul-tures. Thus, it seems that Neolithic China developed in several centersfrom Paleolithic origins.

Another achievement of Neolithic China was silk production. Theexacting procedures of sericulture have been practiced in the Chinesefarm economy throughout history. How to nourish silkworms on vastquantities of mulberry leaves, how to help them go through periods ofquiescent moulting and then spin their cocoons, and finally how to un-wind the cocoons to produce raw silk thread are all parts of a painstak-ing craft. The worms eat about 100 pounds of mulberry leaves to pro-duce about 15 pounds of cocoons from which comes one pound of rawsilk. This household industry began in North China in Neolithic timesand remained a Chinese monopoly until silkworms were smuggled to theWest in the sixth century ad.

Excavation of Shang and Xia

As of 1920 among the legendary Three Dynasties of ancient China—Xia, Shang, and Zhou—only the Zhou (Chou) was known directly fromits own written records. The Shang dynasty’s 30 kings and seven succes-sive capitals were listed in chronicles compiled during the Zhou orshortly after. Many centuries later antiquarians of the Song era becameinterested in the bronze ritual vessels inherited from the Shang, somewith inscriptions. But not until 1899 did scholars note that Chinesepharmacists were selling “dragon bones” inscribed with archaic charac-ters. By the late 1920s private buyers had traced these “oracle bones” toa site near Anyang north of the Yellow River in Henan province. In 1928archaeologists of the National Government’s Academia Sinica began sci-entific excavations of the last Shang capital at Anyang that continued un-til Japan attacked China in 1937. After 1950 an earlier Shang capitalwas found near present-day Zhengzhou.

In these Shang capital cities were royal palaces and upper-class resi-dences of post-and-beam construction on stamped-earth platforms, builtin the basic architectural style we admire today in Beijing’s ForbiddenCity. At Anyang were found the stamped-earth foundations, as hard ascement, of 53 buildings, with many stone-pillar bases. Subterranean pithouses nearby evidently were used as storage and service quarters. Thearistocracy had the services of artisans who specialized in a highly de-veloped bronze metallurgy, pottery, and many other crafts. The Shang

Origins: The Discoveries of Archaeology 33

bronzes, never surpassed in craftsmanship, are still one of humankind’sgreat artistic achievements. The Shang king was served by diviners whohandled the writing system and took the auspices by scapulimancy (ap-plying a hot point to create cracks in animal shoulder blades, interpret-ing these cracks as the advice of the ancestors, and inscribing the resultson the bones). This produced the famous “oracle bones” that first led toexcavation at Anyang. Some 100,000 such bones have been collected.Questions and answers inscribed on the bones reveal that the Shang aris-tocracy lived a superior life, fighting in horse chariots, hunting for sport,performing rites and ceremonies, while served by scribes and artisansand supported by the agriculture of the surrounding village peasants,who lived in semisubterranean dwelling pits. Shang society was alreadyhighly stratified.

In the warmer and moister climate of the time, water buffalo werethe principal domestic animals, and large herds of cattle must have beenmaintained to supply the bones for scapulimancy and the animals usedby the hundreds in ritual sacrifices. Reverence for ancestors was ex-pressed by rulers in the form of a fully ritualized religious observance.Royal tomb chambers deep in the earth were supplied with precious ob-jects and many animal and human sacrifices. K. C. Chang concludes thatthese burials indicate most vividly a stratified society in which membersof a lower class were sometimes the victims of ritual sacrifice. TheAnyang excavations seem to have revealed only the royal core of a muchlarger capital area. Many Shang sites have also been found elsewhere inNorth China and Sichuan.

The power of the Shang king was also attested in the use of vast bod-ies of manpower for public works. The Shang capital at Zhengzhou hada roughly rectangular wall 4 miles around and as high as 27 feet, built ofstamped earth. Pounding thin layers of earth within a movable woodenframe made a product as hard as cement. This building technique, whichwas found first in Longshan sites, has been used throughout China’s his-tory. Three thousand years later the walls of the capitals of the Ming dy-nasty (ad 1368–1644) at Nanjing and Beijing were also built of stampedearth. They were some 40 feet high and respectively 23 and 21 milesaround, bigger and faced with brick but still built by massed labor. Inother parts of the ancient world massed manpower was used to buildmany wonders, such as the Egyptian pyramids, but in China this customhas persisted to the present day.

In 1959 excavations at Erlitou (in the city of Yanshi not far fromLuoyang and just south of the Yellow River) uncovered another site with

34 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

large palaces that seems likely to have been a capital of the Xia dynasty.The Erlitou culture was widespread in the region of northwest Henanand southern Shanxi. It was a direct successor to the Longshan BlackPottery culture and preceded the early Shang, with radiocarbon dates ofca. 2100 to 1800 bc. With this all-but-final identification, the Xia andShang components of the legendary Three Dynasties have taken tangibleform. What do they tell us about China’s origins?

First, there seems to have been a rather smooth transition from theinnumerable Neolithic villages of the Longshan culture to the BronzeAge capital cities of the Three Dynasties, all of which we can view as suc-cessive phases of a single cultural development. Looking at the tools andweapons, the pots and bronze vessels, the domestication of crops andanimals, the architectural layout of settlements and burials, and the evi-dent practices of religion and government, we can see a high degree ofcultural homogeneity and continuity. One dynasty succeeded anotherthrough warfare, but there is no evidence of violent intrusion by an out-side culture. Moreover, Xia, Shang, and Zhou centered in three differentareas and seem to have co-existed (see Map 6). The Shang and Zhou“succession” consisted of becoming the dominant center of ancientNorth China.

Second, these ancient capitals testify to the power of a kingship basedon sedentary, land-locked agriculture, not on mobile, waterborne tradewith other areas. To be sure, cowry shells found at Anyang must havecome from the seacoast; and the Neolithic East Asians were seafarerswhen opportunity arose. We know this from the fact that a Neolithic sitein northern Taiwan dated 4000–2500 bc (and a later Neolithic SouthTaiwan site dated 2500 to 400 bc) were uncovered on an island that to-day is 100 miles off the coast of Fujian province. As there was no landbridge from the mainland, and as the sea, though more shallow, did notvary sufficiently in depth to make crossing much easier than it would betoday, we have to conclude that the Neolithic peoples living on the seadeveloped a nautical technology parallel with the Neolithic capacity foragriculture. So why did a robust sea trade not grow up in China compa-rable to that in the Middle East and Mediterranean? The difference layin an accident of geography: few other early communities in East Asiacould be reached from China by coasting or by sea trade. Chinese ship-ping developed on the Yangzi, between Shandong and South Manchuriaand along the coast, but no great sea trade could grow up in the absenceof accessible foreign countries.

Origins: The Discoveries of Archaeology 35

36 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

6. The Three Dynasties: Xia, Shang, and Zhou

The Rise of Central Authority

The deposits of Yangshao and then Longshan types of pottery in half adozen or more areas on the North China plain and along the YellowRiver and Lower Yangzi show the differentiation of local cultures. Ascontact grew among these Neolithic farming villages, networks of kin-ship and allied relationships created an opportunity for broader govern-ment from a central capital. Judging by what came later, it seems thatfamily lineages, derived from large tribal clans, each set up their separatewalled towns. The Shang oracle bones name about a thousand towns al-together. One lineage headed by a patriarch would establish relations bymarriage with other lineages in other walled towns. Branch lineagescould also be set up by migration to new town sites; and complex rela-tions of subordination and superordination would ensue.

Toward the end of the third millennium bc the making of bronzefrom copper and tin deposits widely mined in North China coincidedwith the rise during the Xia and Shang dynasties of the first central gov-ernment over a broad area. Bronze metallurgy was probably a naturalfurther step in a technology that had developed techniques for shapingand firing Yangshao and Longshan pottery and then producing smallcopper objects such as knives. Whether the techniques of bronze metal-lurgy were indigenous or imported (or both), the central fact of bronzeproduction was that only a strong authority could ensure the mining ofore. Judging by nineteenth-century examples, premodern mining re-quired laborers, on hands and knees, to drag their heavy ore-sleds outthrough cramped and unventilated tunnels—work fit for slaves or pris-oners. When it came to bronze casting by the piece-mold process, hun-dreds of skilled artisans would be needed to prepare and handle themolten metal. Making ritual vessels of bronze thus had several implica-tions—first, that a royal authority was vitally concerned with rituals asan aspect of its power; and, second, that it was able to assign manpowerto the onerous tasks of mining ores and refining metals.

We know that in both Xia and Shang the ruling family made use ofelaborate and dramatic rituals to confirm their power to govern, espe-cially the rituals of shamanism by which a priest (or shaman), often theruler himself, would communicate with the spirits of the ancestors to se-cure their help and guidance. In this function the shaman would behelped by certain animals considered to have a totemic relation to theancestors. On the Shang bronze ritual vessels these were represented byanimal designs, especially by the bilateral animal masks (taotie, echoed

Origins: The Discoveries of Archaeology 37

much later, for example, in Amerindian totem poles). By practicing a re-ligious cult of the ancestors, local rulers legitimized their authority. Somebecame lords over groups of towns, and group vied with group as well asregion with region, until a single ruling dynasty could emerge in a dis-tinct area.

Once under way, the expanding authority of the state would encom-pass settlements still at a Neolithic stage of pre–Bronze Age culture.Bronze weapons would help, and in their conquests we know that thelate Shang after about 1200 bc used the two-horse war chariot that hadempowered conquerors in West Asia from about 1500 bc. No doubt itsconcept had come across Central Asia. The spears and arrows of footsoldiers accompanied the chariot. Three men manned it—a driver in thecenter, flanked by a swordsman (or halberdier) and a bowman. Bronzefittings made the chariot motile. Men from each cluster of families in alineage seem to have formed a military unit. Thousands of soldiers arementioned as having taken thousands of prisoners, hundreds of whommight be sacrificed. The king claimed that his primacy rested on his per-sonal merit, but there is no doubt that military power helped him.

In addition to warfare, the Xia and Shang expanded their domain bybuilding new towns. Towns were not unplanned growths caused bytrade or by migration of individual families but were planned and cre-ated by local rulers. Typically a king might decree the building of a townin a new region where farmland was to be opened up, and a town popu-lace would be selected and dispatched to do the job. In the Classic of Po-etry (Shijing) is a description of a town-founding in terms not inappro-priate for a barn-raising by American pioneers:

. . . left and rightHe drew the boundaries of big plots and littleHe opened up the ground, he counted the acresFrom west to east . . .Then he summoned his Master of WorkThen he summoned his Master of LandsAnd made them build houses.Dead straight was the plumb lineThe planks were lashed to hold the earth;They made the Hall of Ancestors very venerableThey tilted in the earth with a rattlingThey pounded it with a dull thud . . .They raised the outer gateThe outer gate soared high.

38 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

They raised the inner gateThe inner gate was very strong.They raised the great earth-moundWhence excursions of war might start . . .

On balance, warfare and trade seem to have been no more importantas factors in expansion than the overall superiority of the king’s ritualand liturgical functions in his intercession with the ancestors and otherforces of nature. Perhaps like the early Carolingian kings of France, theking’s extensive travels suggest, as David Keightley observes, that he washead of a patrimonial state that was not yet fully bureaucratic, a statethat was still more theocratic than secular in its institutional activity.

Western Zhou

With the conquest of the Shang dynasty by the Zhou, the Chinese statefinally emerges. Here again, the new archaeological evidence such as in-scriptions on bronzes and newly excavated Zhou oracle bones fit to-gether with the literary record of ancient places, people, and events longknown from the classics and earliest histories.

In its origins, the small Zhou tribe interacted with nomads on thenorth and with proto-Tibetan Qiang people on the west. They earlylearned how to tolerate and work with peoples of different cultures. Af-ter they finally settled in the Wei River valley, the Zhou rulers becamevassals of the Shang until they became strong enough to conquer Shangin warfare in about 1040 bc. Each side mobilized from seven to eighthundred villages or petty “states.” The victorious Zhou built a new cap-ital at Xi’an (Chang’an). They transported many Shang elite families tomanage the work of building and made use of Shang skills in ritual andgovernment. Other Shang families were transported to populate and de-velop the west. Cho-yun Hsu and Katheryn Linduff (1988) concludethat the former Shang elite and the Zhou ruling class coalesced.

After conquering the eastern plain, the Zhou’s power expanded bydefeating nomads on the northwest and by campaigns southward intothe Han and Yangzi River areas and southeast along the Huai River.Zhou rule was established by setting up what has been called a “feudal”network, enfeoffing (fengjian) sons of the Zhou rulers to preside overfifty or more vassal states. The Zhou investiture ceremony was an elab-orate delegation of authority of a contractual nature. Along with sym-bolic ritual gifts the Zhou king bestowed upon a vassal lord the people

Origins: The Discoveries of Archaeology 39

of a certain area. The people, so bestowed, however, were more impor-tant than the land, and whole communities composed of descendants ofa lineage might be moved to another area and be superimposed upon thelocal people to create another vassal state.

While the Zhou thus continued, like the Shang, to use kinship as amain element of political organization, they created a new basis of legiti-macy by espousing the theory of Heaven’s mandate. Where Shang rulershad venerated and sought the guidance of their own ancestors, the Zhouclaimed their sanction to rule came from a broader, impersonal deity,Heaven (tian), whose mandate (tianming) might be conferred on anyfamily that was morally worthy of the responsibility. This doctrine as-serted the ruler’s accountability to a supreme moral force that guides thehuman community. Unlike a Western ruler’s accession through the doc-trine of the divine right of kings, which rested on birth alone, the Chi-nese theory of Heaven’s mandate set up moral criteria for holdingpower.

Expansion of the Zhou central power involved a degree of accultur-ation of those who submitted, not least in the spread of the Chinesewriting system and the rituals and administration that it served. Themainstream culture was that of the Central Plain (zhongyuan), the coreregion of Shang–Zhou predominance. In peripheral areas were manynon-Chinese whose different cultural status was marked by the fact thattheir names were not Chinese but were recorded in transliteration. Theyincluded both seminomads of the north, northeast, and northwest andtribal peoples of South China. By degrees, intermarriage, acculturation,and a beginning of bureaucratic government created the successor statesthat followed the Shang–Zhou dominance. These states inherited vari-ous cultural mixes and emerged as distinct political entities during theWarring States period, which began about 400 bc.

Implications of the New Archaeological Record

The cultural homogeneity of ancient China as revealed by the archaeo-logical record contrasts remarkably with the multiplicity and diversityof peoples, states, and cultures in the ancient Middle East. Beginningabout 3000 bc, Egyptians, Sumerians, Semites, Akkadians, Amorites(ruled by Hammurabi of Babylon), Assyrians, Phoenicians, Hittites,Medes, Persians, and others jostled one another in a bewildering flux ofMiddle Eastern warfare and politics. The record is one of pluralism with

40 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

a vengeance. Irrigation helped agriculture in several centers—the Nile,the Tigris–Euphrates, and the Indus valleys. Trade flourished along withseafaring. Languages, writing systems, and religions proliferated. Thecontrast with ancient China could not have been greater.

Second, Middle Eastern technology predates Chinese in several re-spects. Painted pottery, the use of bronze, and the horse chariot appearearlier in the Middle East than in China, as does the subsequent use ofiron, and this priority naturally suggests that these cultural elementswere transmitted to China. But the precise connections between ancientChina and the Middle East are still obscure and in dispute. We do knowthat some things failed to be transmitted from the Middle East. For ex-ample, despite precedents in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, the YellowRiver did not at first lend itself to irrigation networks on the NorthChina plain. The Chinese of Xia and Shang did not use metal agricul-tural tools nor draft animals and plows. The horse chariot functioned inthe late Shang as an aristocratic vehicle as well as the main war machine,but its use in the Shang is not thus far accompanied by evidence of a bar-barian horse-chariot invasion from the northwest and the steppe, asWestern historians posited until recently from the example of earlyhorse-chariot invasions in the Middle East.

Obscurity also clouds the influences coming into China from thesouth. For example, bronze metallurgy seems to have begun in Thailandbefore 3000 bc. Its relation to bronze in China is uncertain. On thewhole, the Middle Eastern evidence of early and extensive communica-tion between separate prehistoric cultures has made “diffusion” or thelack of it a dying issue. Each major culture was a local achievement, butcultures were hardly isolated. We can conclude that important influencesfrom West Asia reached China as though “by osmosis,” to be sure, butnever in proportions so cataclysmic as to shatter China’s cultural homo-geneity.

This conclusion counters the early suggestion of pioneer archaeolo-gists, mainly Western, that ancient China was given an absolutely essen-tial impetus toward civilization by Middle Eastern contact filtered acrossCentral Asia. The new evidence also militates against a more recent con-cept that ancient Chinese civilization grew from a single nuclear area inNorth China and that the Xia-Shang development was unique—“thecradle of the East,” in P. T. Ho’s phrase. To be sure, the combination ofZhou era chronicles about Xia, Shang, and Zhou and post-1920 exca-vations gives the Three Dynasties center stage in China’s ancient history.

Origins: The Discoveries of Archaeology 41

But excavation in East Asia as a whole, though just beginning, has al-ready revealed separate though related pottery cultures south of theYangzi, on China’s southeast coast, and in northern Vietnam.

One source of Xia–Shang strength was the social order imposed bykinship and the ranking of lineages through their hierarchical segmenta-tion, that is, branch lineages remaining subordinate to their parent lin-eages. Every individual had a status in his family group, and lineages hadrelationships of superiority and inferiority among themselves, all theway up to the dynastic power-holders. The ruler’s top position restedalso on his final authority both in the shamanistic religion of ancestorreverence that used bronze ritual vessels and in the warfare that featuredchariots and bronze weapons. Royal burials involved human sacrifice ina society already highly stratified.

On the other hand, in the absence of significant seafaring, trade andtechnological innovation seem to have been quite secondary in thegrowth of central political authority. This finding of the archaeologistsis not easy for Western historians to grasp, so deeply engrained in West-ern, especially Mediterranean, history is the evidence that early citiesemerged on trade routes and empires grew by their command of com-merce, especially on the sea. Ancient China’s lack of sea trade left themerchants less important and disesteemed ideologically, and this made iteasier for the Qin and Han rulers when they came to power to assertcontrol over the merchants who had arisen in their societies.

Finally, the ruler’s primacy rested on his monopoly of leadership notonly in ritual and warfare but also in oracle-bone writing and the histor-ical learning it recorded. The Shang writing system already evincedsubject-verb-object syntax and methods of character formation bysimple pictographs, abstract descriptive pictographs, and phono-pictographs that would remain basic in Chinese thereafter. Chinese char-acters began as pictures or symbols. The ancient character meanta tree, two trees meant a forest, and three , a dense growth. Thesymbols are certainly easier than “one, two, three.” indi-cates an enclosure or “to surround,” while a smaller square is the signfor the mouth and by extension means a hole, a pass, a harbor, and thelike.

In its early growth the Chinese written language could not expandon a purely pictographic basis (like the joining of two trees to make aforest, noted above). A phonetic aspect had to be adopted. As a result,most Chinese characters are combinations of other simple characters.

42 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

One part of the combination usually indicates the root meaning, whilethe other part indicates something about the sound.

For example, take the character for east , which in the Beijingdialect has the sound “dong” (pronounced “doong,” as in Mao Ze-dong’s name). Since a Chinese character is read aloud as a single syllableand since spoken Chinese is also rather short of sounds (there are onlyabout four hundred different syllables in the whole language), it hasbeen plagued with homophones, words that sound like other words, like“soul” and “sole” or “all” and “awl” in English. It happened that thespoken word meaning “freeze” had the sound “dong.” So did a spokenword meaning a roof beam. When the Chinese went to write down thecharacter for freeze, they took the character for east and put beside itthe symbol of ice , which makes the character (“dong,” to freeze).To write down the word sounding “dong” which meant roof beam, theywrote the character east and put before it the symbol for wood mak-ing (“dong,” a roof beam).

These are simple examples. Indeed, any part of the Chinese languageis simple in itself. It becomes difficult because there is so much of it to beremembered, so many meanings and allusions. When the lexicographersof later times wanted to arrange thousands of Chinese characters in adictionary, for instance, the best they could do in the absence of an al-phabet was to work out a list of 214 classifiers or “radicals,” one ofwhich was sure to be in each character in the language. These 214classifiers, for dictionary purposes, correspond to the 26 letters of our al-phabet, but are more ambiguous and less efficient. Shang writing was al-ready using “radicals” like wood, mouth, heart, hand, that indicatedcategories of meaning. From the start the governmental power of theChinese writing system was at the ruler’s disposal. Writing seems to haveemerged more in the service of lineage organization and governmentthan in the service of trade.

When we group together the shaman-priests, warriors, scribes, headsof lineages, and superintendents over artisans, we can see the rudimentsof the ruling elite that developed. The emerging art of government madeuse of ritual and art, warfare, writing, and family connections, all ofwhich contributed to the concept of culture. A next step was the asser-tion of central cultural superiority over the surrounding peoples by des-ignating as “barbarians” (in the Greek cultural sense of βαρβαροι)those peoples who did not yet acknowledge the central government’ssupremacy. Such peoples were given generic names in the classics and

Origins: The Discoveries of Archaeology 43

histories: Yi, barbarians on the east, Man on the south, Rong on thewest, and Di on the north. (When Westerners arrived by sea, they wereofficially designated until the late nineteenth century as Yi.) This customof sharply distinguishing “inside” (net) and “outside” (wai) went alongwith calling China the “Central Country” (zhongguo), which began byruling the “Central Plain” (zhongyuan) in North China. So strong is thisnomenclature in the classics that were composed under the Zhou Dy-nasty that historians East and West have generally depicted ancientChina of the Three Dynasties as a “culture island” surrounded by a seaof “barbarians” lacking in the civilized qualities of Chinese culture.

The new archaeological record suggests that things were not so sim-ple. The Western Zhou, having intermingled with non-Chinese-speakingpeoples on China’s north and west peripheries, were adept at toleratingcultural differences while asserting the civilizing superiority of the cul-ture of the Central Plain. Rather than outright military conquest, theprocess was often one of steady assimilation based on the efficacy of theChinese way of life and government. The political unit was defined cul-turally more than territorially.

When we read that “barbarians” have been ever-present on thefringes of China’s long history, we can realize that they were a basic cate-gory in the political system from the very beginning. We must not over-look the ancient Chinese assumption of a symbiosis between culture(wenhua) and temporal power. Subservience to the dynastic state re-quired acceptance of its rituals and cosmology that gave it Heaven’smandate to rule over mankind. Nonacceptance of this politicized cultureleft one outside of Zhongguo. Yet if one’s language was Chinese, accep-tance was already partway assured by the very terms imbedded in theclassics and in the spoken tongue itself. An identifiably similar way of lifewas widespread throughout late Neolithic China. The task of state-building during the Three Dynasties of the Bronze Age was to gain everwider submission to or acceptance of the central dynastic ruling house. Itfunctioned as the capstone of the social structure, the high priesthood ofthe ancestor cult, the arbiter of punishments, and the leader in publicworks, war, and literature. Among these omnicompetent functions K. C.Chang stresses the ruler’s “exclusive access to heaven and heavenly spir-its.” The result was that the ruler engineered a unity of culture that wasthe basis for political unity in a single universal state. China of coursewas not alone in idealizing this kind of unity, which was sought in manyof the ancient empires. But China’s geographic isolation made the ideal

44 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

originally more feasible, and as time went on it became more readily sup-portable in the state and society.

Overstated though these considerations may be, they represent agreat fact emerging from Chinese archaeology—that by the beginning ofthe era of written history, the Chinese people had already achieved a de-gree of cultural homogeneity and isolated continuity hard to match else-where in the world. They had begun to create a society dominated bystate power. To it all other activities—agricultural, technological, com-mercial, military, literary, religious, artistic—would make their contribu-tions as subordinate parts of the whole. Yet it would be an error for ustoday, so long accustomed to the modern sentiment of nationalism, toimagine ancient China as an embryonic nation-state. We would do betterto apply the idea of culturalism and see ancient China as a completecivilization comparable to Western Christendom, within which nation-states like France and England became political subunits that sharedtheir common European culture. Again, because we are so aware of theall-encompassing power of the totalitarian states of the twentieth cen-tury, we would do well to avoid an anachronistic leap to judgment thatthe Shang and Zhou kings’ prerogatives led inevitably to a sort of totali-tarianism. We might better follow Etienne Balazs (1964), who called it agovernment by “officialism.” As summarized by Stuart Schram (1987),“The state was the central power in Chinese society from the start, andexemplary behavior, rites, morality and indoctrinations have alwaysbeen considered in China as means of government.” We need only addthat in addition to these liturgical functions the ruler monopolized theuse of military violence.

Origins: The Discoveries of Archaeology 45

2The First Unification:

Imperial Confucianism

The Utility of Dynasties

Until this century dynastic families have provided most of the rulers overthe human race. Kinship formed an in-group network to support thepower-holder (or a rival) as well as a principle by which to settle (or dis-pute) the explosive question of the succession to power. Yet among Euro-pean dynasties such as the Capetian kings of France (987–1328), theNorman and Plantagenet kings of England (1066–1485), the Hapsburgs(1273–1919), or the Romanovs (1613–1917), none ruled as large a stateas China or maintained such a monopoly of central power. As institu-tions of government, the major Chinese dynasties are in a class by them-selves. Neither Japan, India, nor Persia produced regimes comparable inscope and power. The Liu clan of Earlier Han provided 13 emperors andin Later Han 14 emperors, the Li clan of the Tang dynasty 23 emperors,the Zhu clan of the Ming dynasty 17 emperors, and the Aisin Gioro lin-eage of the Manchus 9 emperors (see Table 1).

By comparison, European dynasties were provincial potentateswithin the oikoumene of Christendom, ruling regional kingdoms. AsJacques Gernet points out, at the end of the seventeenth century the firstmodern state, the Kingdom of France, was just getting organized whileChina had long been a “great centralized empire governed by a uniformadministrative system.” Again, emperors have been quite different enti-ties, East and West. Modern Europe, for example, at one time had em-perors of France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and the BritishEmpire plus the Pope at Rome all making history simultaneously. Chinaideally, and most of the time in fact, had only one emperor on earth, likeone sun in the sky.

Our first requirement, then, if we are to understand China, is to try toavoid imposing a European scale of judgment. For instance, Europeanmusic and fine arts, technology, philosophy, and religion might come inall or part from outside the country one lived in. No European rulersgoverned self-sufficient lands or held the final word on law and justice,moral thought, religion, art, the military, and public works that wasclaimed by and for China’s Sons of Heaven.

Periodizing Chinese history by dynasties makes more sense than theWestern periodizing by centuries. China’s dynasties, after all, were politi-cal ventures like American presidential administrations, full of humanstruggle, idealism, and knavery—a lot more concrete and intelligiblethan European centuries, few of which fit neatly over the movements andtrends grouped under them. The sequence of dynasties was due to the in-veterate Chinese impulse during a dynastic interregnum toward politicalreunification. Unity was so strong an ideal because it promised stability,peace, and prosperity. Yet unity seemed precariously dependent on his-torical rhythms. The waxing and waning of regimes, like that of peopleand families, called for constant attention.

Students have been impressed by the parallel sequences in ancientChina and in the Graeco–Roman world: an age of philosophers andwarring states, an age of unification and empire, and an age of disinte-gration and collapse of central power. Thus Confucius and his discipleswere roughly contemporary with Plato and Aristotle; Alexander theGreat preceded the First Emperor of the Qin (221 bc) by only a century;and the imperial systems of Rome and Han flourished contemporane-ously. Similarly, the barbarians on the northern frontier grew more dan-gerous as each of these empires declined, and the economic and politicaldisintegration within the “universal state,” in Toynbee’s phrase, wasmarked by the spread of foreign religions to which the distressed peopleturned for solace. The entrance of the northern nomads into China andthe spread of Buddhism in the period from the third to the sixth centuriesad were actually contemporary with the inroads of the Goths and Van-dals and the spread of Christianity in the West, the triumph, as Gibbonput it, of “barbarism and religion.”

Within Chinese history, the most interesting parallel sequence ofphases centers about the Han (206 bc–ad 220) and the Tang (618–907). Preceding each of these imperial eras was a time of intellectualferment marked, respectively, by the philosophers of the late Zhou andby the flourishing of Daoism and Buddhism prior to the Tang. Eachphase of imperial greatness was inaugurated by a short-lived powerful

The First Unification: Imperial Confucianism 47

dynasty which unified the state, the Qin (221–206 bc) and the Sui (ad589–618). Both the Han and the Tang, once established as a new unity,achieved an expansion of Chinese political power in neighboring re-gions, especially Central Asia, and a corresponding growth of foreigncontact.

In the phenomena recorded so assiduously in the dynastic historiesthere is naturally a certain recurrence of data, since the chroniclers ineach case were recording the life history of a ruling family that came topower, had its heyday, and shuffled from the scene. Toward the close ofeach regime, for example, natural calamities, earthquakes, floods, com-ets, eclipses, and other heavenly portents become more numerous in therecord, evidence that the improper conduct of the ruler was losing himthe Mandate of Heaven.

Autosuggestion, indeed, on the plane of public morale and socialpsychology, played its part in the dynastic cycle. For so great was the dy-nasty’s dependence on its moral prestige that its loss of “face” in certaininstances might set in motion a process whereby the ideology, as it were,turned against the regime and hastened its downfall. Once the literatiwho set the tone of ruling-class opinion became convinced that a dy-nasty had lost its moral claim to the throne, little could save it. This is afactor in Chinese politics today.

Time after time dynastic decline went hand in hand with the increas-ing inefficiency of the ruling house. The family in power accumulatedover the generations a heavy load of dead wood, fastened upon it by thefamily system. This was most flagrantly visible in the peculations andprofligacy of the emperor’s maternal relatives, who became entrenchedin the imperial household.

An economic interpretation has been used even more extensively toexplain the dynastic cycle. This approach concentrates particularly uponthe land tax. In each dynasty the progressive withdrawal of land fromtaxation to benefit the ruling class led to a dangerous reduction of impe-rial revenues. At the beginning of a dynasty the land and the populationwere usually estimated and recorded in a rough sort of census. New taxregisters were used as a basis for revenue collection. As time went onthere ensued a struggle between the interests of the imperial governmentand of the great families who lived under it. Gradually the ruling classwere able to increase their land-holdings and to remove them from taxa-tion by expedients such as the destruction of tax registers, official con-nivance, or legal falsification. The big lineages could then take undertheir wing small farmers as clients who paid less to the big household

48 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

than they would have to the state. This created a vicious spiral in which agreater burden was placed upon the still-taxable land of the peasantry, ata time when the demands of the government for revenue were probablyincreasing. In this way a progressively smaller proportion of the landwas expected to pay a progressively larger amount of revenue. Peasantdisorders would eventually result.

In some cases the final collapse of a dynasty came through peasantrebellion under fervent religious leadership. Since no dynasty toleratedan organized opposition, its opponents had recourse to secret cults orsocieties.

Princes and Philosophers

The imperial institution that came to dominate Chinese society gainedits sophistication and durability through long experience. In 771 bc theZhou house moved its capital from the Wei valley near Xi’an eastwardto Luoyang, thus inaugurating the Eastern Zhou. Already Zhou powerwas being gradually diminished by the growth of many aristocratic fam-ily-states out of its central control. By the so-called Spring-and-Autumnperiod (722–481 bc) there were about 170 such states, each centered inits walled capital. These states formed alliances and leagues and engagedin a diplomatic—military free-for-all, some absorbing others. By the eraof Warring States (403–221 bc) only seven major states remained inthe competition, most of them on the populous North China plain (seeMap 7).

Already visible were two components of the eventual Chinese impe-rial government—military rulers and scholar-teachers. Both were con-cerned with the performance of ritual and ceremonies to keep humansociety in proper accord with the cosmic order of which it was a part.Our understanding of the ruler’s role has been recently advanced byMark Edward Lewis’ (1990) study of sanctioned violence as a key toancient China’s state power and social order. He finds that the ruler’sauthority in each state was based on “ritually directed violence in theform of sacrifices, warfare and hunting.” Since hunting as violenceagainst animals was practice for war against men, the two major stateservices were actually sacrifices and warfare. Both involved the ritual-ized taking of life, and this defined the realm of political power. In theZhou period as in the Shang, veneration of the ancestors through sacri-fices, both animal and human, made use of the highest achievements ofart—the bronze ritual vessels—and maintained the ruler’s legitimacy by

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50 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

7. The Qin and Other Warring States

his liturgical activities. Hunting provided sacrificial animals, warfaresacrificial prisoners. Warfare was itself a religious service, replete withrituals of divination, prayers, and oaths preceding combat and ending inpresentation of formal reports, booty, and prisoners at the ancestral al-tars. Participation in service to the ancestors and other deities throughhunting, warfare, and sacrifices defined one’s membership in the rulingclass, who shared a common ancestry. Its hallmark was the privilege ofeating meat.

Along with this military—liturgical basis for state power and socialorder, the Warring States also fostered, rather paradoxically, an age ofphilosophers who sought theoretical bases for those same things. Dur-ing this time of rivalry and warfare, there was a widespread yearningfor peace and order. Many people idealized a golden age of earliertimes when according to legend all China had lived peacefully under oneruler. Violence inspired the late Zhou philosophers, who acted as whatwe now call consultants, advising rulers on how to get back to thegolden age.

Confucius (551–479 bc) and his major disciple, Mencius (372–289bc), were members of a considerable group of seminal thinkers in thisera. Among the so-called “hundred schools” (meaning a great many),there were half a dozen major schools of thought whose writings sur-vived. They were contemporaries of the great teachers in India (the Bud-dha, ca. 500 bc) and Greece (Plato, 429–347 bc, Aristotle, 384–321 bc,et al.) in what some have called the “axial age,” when basic ways ofthought were established in these early civilizations. The philosophers ofthe various schools of thought in China did not quell the disorder, andConfucianism would become an important philosophy only later, underthe Han. Yet the Warring States context of sanctioned violence, with itskillings and its ceremonies, helps us understand how the Confucianteaching arose and why it was eventually embraced.

The Confucian Code

Confucianism’s rationale for organizing society began with the cosmicorder and its hierarchy of superior-inferior relationships. Parents weresuperior to children, men to women, rulers to subjects. Each persontherefore had a role to perform, “a conventionally fixed set of social ex-pectations to which individual behavior should conform,” as ThomasMetzger (in Cohen and Goldman, 1990) puts it. These expectations de-

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fined by authority guided the individual’s conduct along lines of properceremonial behavior. Confucius had said (rather succinctly), “jun junchen chen fu fu zi zi,” which in its context meant “Let the ruler rule as heshould and the minister be a minister as he should. Let the father act as afather should and the son act as a son should.” If everyone performed hisrole, the social order would be sustained. Being thus known to others bytheir observable conduct, the elite were dependent upon the opinion andmoral judgment of the collectivity around them. To be disesteemed bythe group meant a disastrous loss of face and self-esteem, for which oneremedy was suicide.

A major Confucian principle was that man was perfectible. In the eraof Warring States, Chinese thinkers of the major schools had turnedagainst the principle of hereditary privilege, invoked by the rulers ofmany family-states, and stressed the natural equality of men at birth.Mencius’ claim that men are by nature good and have an innate moralsense won general acceptance. They can be led in the right path througheducation, especially through their own efforts at self-cultivation, butalso through the emulation of models. The individual, in his own effortto do the right thing, can be influenced by the example of the sages andsuperior men who have succeeded in putting right conduct ahead of allother considerations. This ancient Chinese stress on the moral educabil-ity of man has persisted down to the present and still inspires the gov-ernment to do the moral educating.

The Confucian code also stressed the idea of “proper behavior ac-cording to status” (li). The Confucian gentleman (“the superior man,”“the noble man”) was guided by li, the precepts of which were written inthe ancient records that became the classics. Although this code did notoriginally apply to the common people, whose conduct was to be regu-lated by rewards and punishments (stressed by the Legalist school),rather than by moral principles, it was absolutely essential for govern-ment among the elite. This was the rationale of Confucius’ emphasis onright conduct on the part of the ruler—an emphasis so different fromanything in the West. The main point of this theory of government bygood example was the idea of the virtue that was attached to right con-duct. To conduct oneself according to the rules of propriety or li in itselfgave one a moral status or prestige. This moral prestige in turn gave oneinfluence over the people. “The people are like grass, the ruler like thewind”; as the wind blew, so the grass was inclined. Right conduct gavethe ruler power. Confucius said: “When a prince’s personal conduct iscorrect, his government is effective without the issuing of orders. If his

52 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

personal conduct is not correct, he may issue orders but they will not befollowed.”

As a code of personal conduct, Confucianism tried to make each in-dividual a moral being, ready to act on ideal grounds, to uphold virtueagainst human error, even including evil rulers. There were many Confu-cian scholars of moral grandeur, uncompromising foes of tyranny. Buttheir reforming zeal—the dynamics of their creed—aimed to reaffirmand conserve the traditional polity, not to change its fundamental prem-ises.

Western observers, looking only at the texts of the Confucian clas-sics, were early impressed with their agnostic this-worldliness. As a phi-losophy of life, we have generally associated with Confucianism thequiet virtues of patience, pacifism, and compromise; the golden mean;reverence for the ancestors, the aged, and the learned; and, above all, amellow humanism—taking man, not God, as the center of the universe.

All this need not be denied. But if we take this Confucian view of lifein its social and political context, we will see that its esteem for age overyouth, for the past over the present, for established authority over inno-vation has in fact provided one of the great historic answers to the prob-lem of social stability. It has been the most successful of all systems ofconservatism.

Daoism

It is aptly said that the Chinese scholar was a Confucian when in officeand a Daoist when out of office. Daoism, which flourished among thecommon people, was the school most opposite to the elitist prescriptionsof Confucianism. Dao means “the path,” “the way.” It expressed thecommon people’s naturalistic cosmology and belief in the unseen spiritsof nature, much of which was shared by the scholar-elite. Daoism was anenormous reservoir of popular lore. It also provided an escape fromConfucianism, profiting by each revulsion of scholars against the over-nice ritualism of the classics. It was a refuge from the world of affairs.

Traditionally Daoism stemmed from Laozi (lit., “The Old Master”),who was claimed by his followers to have been an elder contemporary ofConfucius. The school of thought ascribed to him became a repositoryfor a variety of beliefs and practices that Confucianism had refused, in-cluding early popular animism, alchemy, ancient magic, the search forthe elixir of immortality and the Isles of the Blest, early Chinese medi-cine, and mysticism generally, both native and imported from India.

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In general the Daoist philosophical writers who followed the brilliantliterary example of Zhuangzi (369–286 bc?) raised their doubting ques-tions from what we might now call a relativistic point of view. It wasZhuangzi who delighted succeeding generations by writing that he haddreamed that he was a butterfly playing in the sunshine and after heawoke he could not be sure whether he was still Zhuangzi who haddreamed that he was a butterfly, or actually a butterfly dreaming that itwas the philosopher Zhuangzi. Applying the idea of the unity of oppo-sites, the early Daoists argued that human moral ideas are the reflectionof human depravity, that the idea of filial piety springs from the fact ofimpiety, that the Confucian statement of the rules of propriety is really areflection of the world’s moral disorder. Following this line of thought,the typical Daoist took refuge in a philosophy of passivity expressed inthe term wuwei, meaning “action by inaction” or “effortlessness.” Thistook the form of laissez-faire, of following one’s unrationalized inner na-ture and accepting without struggle the experience of life. This wasplainly the philosophy of those who condemned government meddlingand moral crusading and who sought to be resigned to the burdens oflife, since they could not be avoided.

Unification by Qin

As interstate rivalries intensified, the ingredients of a new order began toemerge that would contribute to the unification of the Warring States.Among these ingredients was the use of infantry armies in hilly terrainon the northern and southern frontiers, areas which were difficult forchariots to maneuver in. Another ingredient was the use of iron for toolsas well as weapons, leading to greater agricultural production, moretrade, and larger armies. Finally, non-Chinese tribes of Inner Asia beganto use the horse in cavalry warfare, obliging the Chinese to do the same.

Much growth occurred in all the seven most persistent WarringStates—for example, the state of Qi on the eastern edge of the NorthChina plain in what is now Shandong province (Map 7). Able rulers hadbegun to build there a centralized administration with uniform taxes,law codes, a salt monopoly, and central army. Other states were compa-rable.

However, the most powerful growth occurred in the state of Qin.Though less renowned for culture, it was strategically well situated onthe west where the Zhou had earlier risen to power. The Qin king

54 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

(wang), who was to create for himself the title of First Emperor (Shihuangdi), had the advantage of reforms that for a whole generation hadalready been instituted by the ruler’s Legalist adviser, Shang Yang (LordShang, d. 338 bc). The Legalist school, so called for its reliance on hardand fast rules (fa, not “law” in the modern sense), advocated rewardsand punishments as the “two handles” by which to keep the people inorder. Lord Shang was quite cynical (or realistic?) about it: “To clubtogether and keep your mouth shut is to be good; to be alienated fromand spy on each other is to be a scoundrel. If you glorify the good, errorswill be hidden; if you put scoundrels in charge, crime will be punished.”The ruler’s aim was to preserve his power, never mind benefiting thepeople. There was no harmony of interests assumed between ruler andpeople.

Lord Shang’s reforms had strengthened Qin power. The ruler’s prob-lem was the common one of how the center could dominate local lin-eages. For this purpose the Qin fostered bureaucracy. The state was di-vided into 31 counties, each administered by a centrally appointedmagistrate who reported to the capital in writing. Next, a score of hon-orary ranks with exemption from labor service or taxes and (at certainlevels) conferment of income from certain lands and people were used tocreate a new elite separate from the old aristocracy and dependent uponthe ruler.

Meanwhile, the common people were permitted to buy and sell land,which stimulated farm enterprise, and criminal laws were promulgatedso that severe punishments as well as rewards would be known to every-one and equally applicable to all persons. Legalist doctrines of govern-ment aimed at enforcing laws to support agriculture and strengthen thestate over the family. For example, group responsibility was decreed notonly within each family but among units of five or ten families, so that allwithin each unit were collectively to answer for any individual’s wrong-doing. Under this system one’s best protection was to inform on all male-factors without delay. Group ties and loyalties were thus undermined infavor of obedience to the state.

State control of the people enhanced Qin’s military power. The stateexalted its administrators and its farmers (who were potential soldiers)and downgraded merchants and artisans. Against other states Qin’s de-fensible position on the west in the area of today’s Shanxi and Shaanxiprovinces and also in Sichuan, its first conquest, was strengthened eco-nomically by building canals and irrigation networks. In warfare, the

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horse chariots of antiquity had now been supplanted by cavalry andmassed infantry armed with bronze or iron weapons and especially thecrossbow.

Once Qin’s armies had defeated the other states in 221 bc, the FirstEmperor divided his new empire into 36 commanderies (jun), each sub-divided into a number of counties (xian). (Junxian has been shorthandfor centralized bureaucratic rule ever since, as opposed to fengjian mean-ing decentralized or “feudal.”) Each commandery was headed by a civilgovernor and a military commander, with an imperial inspector to watchthe governor. County magistrates were centrally appointed, salaried, andsubject to recall. Local aristocratic families were moved en masse to thecapital, nongovernment arms were melted down, and some city wallswere destroyed.

Writing was standardized and unified under two forms, the so-calledsmall seal (actually rather complex-looking) script, used for inscriptionson stone and formal engravings, and a more cursive and simple clericalscript used for everyday business. The latter won out when it was writ-ten by a brush on bamboo slips or strips of silk and then on paper(which was developed gradually during the first century ad). Weights,measures, and currency were also standardized. Imperial highways werebuilt totaling over 4,000 miles, as many as in the Roman Empire. Onewas a “straight road” through the arid Ordos region to reach the fron-tier facing the nomads of the steppe. To the south, waterways and canalswere cut to allow water transport for 1,200 miles from the Yangzi toGuangzhou (Canton).

If all this sounds overstated, and it does, our doubts must confrontfacts such as the 7,500 life-sized ceramic soldiers found in 1974 and stillbeing excavated at the First Emperor’s tomb near Xi’an. Here again ar-chaeology is revealing more about ancient China than we had ever imag-ined. As late as the 1930s art historians were still saying that China hadno sculpture in the round before the advent of Buddhism in the first cen-tury. How little we knew!

Recent scholarship casts doubt on the question of whether the FirstEmperor, who disliked hearing the complaints of scholars, actually had460 of them buried alive. Derk Bodde (in CHOC 1) suggests the ideacomes from a mistranslation; the scholars were merely murdered. Qin’sLegalist-minded control of history by the burning of books was also farfrom complete, although the archives of conquered states were de-stroyed and the records of Qin alone were preserved.

56 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

Walls were built by Qin and other Warring States and later by somedynasties, but the hoary legend that Qin built the Great Wall of Chinahas long since been exploded. The vast wall system visible today wasmainly built by the Chinese Ming dynasty in the sixteenth century. In afresh interpretation, Arthur Waldron (1990) has recently demonstratedhow the Ming wall building, though of little military value for keepingout the non-Chinese nomads to the north, resulted from the officials’ in-ability to decide on any better course, either to attack or to trade. Earlierrulers going back to the Qin had dealt with the nomads through trade,diplomacy, or warfare, not by fortifications alone.

Under the Qin, the First Emperor’s ruthless exactions of men andtaxes year after year exhausted the people and the state’s other resources.After 37 years as ruler of the Qin state, he suddenly died at age 49 in 210bc. His empire quickly disintegrated. Aside from unity of the knownworld, the First Emperor had sought mainly an elixir of immortality forhimself. His five royal journeys to sacred mountains had been part of hissearch. His regime’s ideology was quite inadequate to rule by. His suc-cessors, the emperors of the Earlier and Later Han dynasties (206 bc–ad220) continued to extend Qin’s methods of bureaucratic control, but didit more gradually and combined it with a comprehensive moral cosmol-ogy that focused on the emperor.

Consolidation and Expansion under the Han

The Han dynasty began its administration of the Chinese empire in 206bc by setting up 14 commanderies to govern the western half of the em-pire, while permitting 10 aristocratic kingdoms to rule the more popu-lous eastern half (see Map 8). The Han emperors put their sons to rulethe kingdoms and gradually reduced their territories and the size of theircourts. By 108 bc there were 84 commanderies and 18 kingdoms,smaller and more easily controlled. Meanwhile, the Han emperors con-ferred hundreds of marquisates, consisting of certain taxes from the landand the populace of a designated area, on relatives and men of merit whowould (it was hoped) collect the taxes and be local aristocratic support-ers of the throne.

The bureaucracy created by the Qin and Han buttressed the powerof the state in many ways. One was the government post, which sentcommunications on the highways. Another was the institution of re-gional inspectors, who traveled through their designated areas and re-

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58 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

8. Commanderies and Kingdoms of the Han Empire, 206 bc

ported on local administration annually to the imperial secretariat at thecapital city of Chang’an. The main problem was how to check thereemergence of aristocratic local families with their own resources offood and fighting men.

At the capital arose a similar problem for the Han ruler: how toavoid domination of the court by the family of an empress. When a Hanemperor died, power resided in his widow, the empress dowager, to ap-point her husband’s successor from the Liu clan (the clan of the Han em-perors). She might appoint a minor of the Liu clan as emperor, and astrong-man regent of her own clan to rule for him. Half a dozen familiesof empresses played this game. An emperor, however, could rely withinthe palace on the staff of eunuchs, whose castration fitted them to lookafter the women selected for the emperor’s harem. There, by having sev-eral sons, the emperor hoped to find one worth selecting as his successor.Eunuchs, being entirely dependent on a young emperor as his servantsand companions, might be his only reliable supporters against an em-press’s family. The palace was a center of intrigue.

Outside the palace, in order to control residents of the Earlier Hancapital (Chang’an), the emperor divided the city into 160 wards, eachwithin its own walls and gate and superintended by a select group of res-idents not unlike a street committee of today. The Han state also tried todominate economic life. All urban trading was in the government mar-kets, where officials set commodity prices and collected commercialtaxes that went directly into the court treasury. The registered shop mer-chants in the cities were actively discriminated against: they were not al-lowed to own land, become officials, or enjoy a fine lifestyle (no silkclothing or riding on horseback!). By contrast, the unregistered mer-chants, who patronized the private inns on the post roads while tradingto other cities and foreign countries, grew rich. They developed connec-tions with officials, became big landowners, hoarded goods, speculated,and made great profits exporting gold and silks across the oases of theSilk Road to West Asia and Rome. In short, the evil of commerce tendedto suborn the officials. A “merchant–official complex” might have ac-quired some power in the government had not Confucian values sostrongly disesteemed the profit motive. In deference to the Confucianideology, official pronouncements for the next 2,000 years would gener-ally denigrate merchants, while officials in practice would profit from li-censing, taxing, and sharing private deals with them. The merchants’ de-pendence on official approval or cooperation would seldom stimulaterisk-taking entrepreneurship.

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The government also operated monopolies of manufactured goodswhenever feasible, beginning with salt (a daily necessity for a grain diet)and iron (in demand for farming tools as well as weapons). In 117 bcthe state set up 48 foundries with thousands of workers. The generalidea of the salt monopoly was that licensed saltmakers would sell theirproduct to the government or to licensed salt merchants, and govern-ment revenue would accumulate at each stage of production, transport,and sale. After much experimenting with minting copper coins by mer-chants and local authorities, the minting of “cash”—a copper coin witha square hole in its center—also became a central government monop-oly. In the first century bc, for a population that was approaching 60million, the Han minted in the average year about 220,000 strings ofcash (each of 1,000 coins). This does not signify a highly developedmoney economy.

During the four centuries of Han rule, vast changes occurred inChina—not only an increase of population but a growth of the landedestates of local magnates, who gained control of the lands of impover-ished peasants when they could not pay their debts and then let them usethe land as tenants. The government land tax was light, about one tenthto one thirtieth of the crop, whereas rent from sharecroppers to theirlandlords might be half to two thirds of the crop. Peasant labor service,or corvée, due the state for one month a year was increasingly commutedinto cash payments. Peasants continued to pay a poll (or capitation) tax.As the Han government by degrees lost vigor, it gave up some of its mo-nopolies and control of markets, while local aristocratic landed and mer-chant families grew stronger.

During these four centuries an upper class emerged as the dominantsocial group, tied by kinship to officialdom but locally independent andrepresented by men educated to be gentlemen. Its literate, artistic, andsumptuous lifestyle is dramatically evident in three tombs, dating from186 bc to ca. 168, discovered at Mawangdui near Changsha in 1974.The well-preserved body of the Princess Dai in the innermost of a nest offour waterproof coffins was accompanied by 1,000 objects, includingpaintings, texts written on bamboo and silk, and variegated silks that theprincess’s Roman counterpart could hardly have matched for beauty andcraftsmanship. Other Chinese luxury items included lacquerware, pot-tery, bronzes, and steel for weapons, produced by forging together twotypes of iron with different contents of carbon. Iron metallurgy mayhave begun later in China than in the Middle East but, once introduced,it developed rapidly.

60 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

Han economic growth in North China stimulated foreign trade andmilitary expansion. Under the most energetic of the Han rulers, the Mar-tial Emperor (Han Wudi, reg. 140–87 bc), Chinese armies penetratedinto southern Manchuria and Korea to the northeast and into south andsouthwest China and northern Vietnam. In these areas commanderiescould be established over farming peoples. Only on the north and north-west was there an unstable frontier.

Han foreign policy began with the need for stable relations with thefar-flung tribal confederation of the Xiongnu—Turkish nomads whosemounted archers habitually raided North China for loot and supplies.During times when the Han were strong, they developed their own horsepastures and mounted archers, while usually enlisting the aid of nomadallies or mercenaries as well. One device was to subsidize the SouthernXiongnu as a client state to help fend off the warlike Northern Xiongnu.The alternative—punitive expeditions into the steppe—was costly andperilous; within a few weeks, lack of food supplies would oblige retreat,leaving the Xiongnu horde still intact and at large. When militarilyweak, which was much of the time, Han emperors used a policy of“peace and kinship” (heqin)—entertaining the nomad chieftain, givinghim Han princesses in marriage, and making lavish gifts, especially ofsilks. Nomad warriors learned that if they performed a ritual at Chang’-an in which they accepted Han suzerainty, they could profit substantiallywhile having a good time. Ying-shih Yü notes that this appeasement pol-icy was a forerunner of the unequal treaties of Song and late Qing times,which acknowledged China’s military weakness.

Besides fighting or buying off the barbarians, Han rulers also learnedhow to use diplomacy to enlist some barbarians in fighting others. In thesearch for allies against the Xiongnu, the Han sent envoys across the SilkRoad through the oases of Central Asia on the southern flank of thesteppe nomads. Other tribal peoples like the Qiang (proto-Tibetans)menaced the trade route to the west; and in periods of strength, as underWudi, the Han set up a Protectorate General of the Western Regions. Attheir high point, Chinese armies crossed the Pamirs into the center ofAsia, where Alexander’s Greek forces had penetrated more than twocenturies earlier.

The Chinese techniques of barbarian-taming, we must realize, werenot successful in the end. Thomas J. Barfield (1989), looking at the InnerAsian side, reminds us how Chinese rulers had to pay the powerful no-mads either with gifts in response to their presenting tribute or withoutright subsidies or involuntary loot when nomads raided. The fact

The First Unification: Imperial Confucianism 61

was that goods from China were essential to nomad life. When Chinawas unified, Barfield suggests, the steppe tribes were more likely to ac-cept the overlordship of the nomad rulers who handled the China con-nection. China’s strength made them more powerful.

Imperial Confucianism

The Han rulers’ daily regimen of ceremonies and rites required the guid-ance of learned men at court. Han Wudi in particular fostered learningas one channel (in addition to recommendation) for recruitment of of-ficials. He saw education as a way to strengthen his new upper classagainst the older aristocratic families, and he accepted Confucianism asthe ideology in which the state’s officials should be trained. To the des-potic statecraft of Qin Legalism the Han added a monumental structureof ideas of largely Confucian origin that provided an all-encompassingstate philosophy. This Legalist-Confucian amalgam we call ImperialConfucianism, to distinguish it both from the original teaching of Con-fucius, Mencius, et al. and from the secular and personal Confucian phi-losophy that arose during Song times and has since then guided so manylives in the East Asian countries of the old Chinese culture area—China,Korea, Vietnam, and Japan.

The essential point about the Legalist-Confucian amalgam was thatLegalism was liked by rulers and Confucianism by bureaucrats. A rulercould use the material inducements of rewards and punishments (whichwere so material you could feel them) to keep the common people in or-der. But his administrators needed something more than benefits or in-timidation to inspire their best efforts. The Confucians believed that theruler’s ceremonial observances and exemplary conduct gave him a cer-tain virtue (de)—or, as A. C. Graham (1989) says, potency—that drewothers to accept, support, or even venerate his rule. If his exercise ofmoral and cultured civility (wen) became ineffective, the ruler could al-ways fall back on punishment and even military force (wu). The ruler’suse of violence remained his prerogative toward both his people and hisofficials. But he could not rule by force alone and so needed the Con-fucianists’ help in showing his constant moral concern for benevolentand proper conduct. Under Confucian guidance the emperor day by dayperformed rituals and ceremonies that were his special function as Son ofHeaven. (Today’s White House foto-ops and sound-bites would haveseemed quite natural to him.)

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The limitations of the Confucians’ status had been plain from thestart. Confucius had aimed to train an elite who would become superiormen, able both to secure the people’s respect and guide the ruler’s con-duct. Confucius was neither out to become a ruler himself nor to educatethe masses directly. His priorities put proper ritual first, humaneness sec-ond, and learning only third. By his example he showed the way for hisown kind, who would later be the scholar-officials of the imperial era.China’s social structure, in short, was already in place and the philoso-pher’s task in his Chinese form of prophecy was not to arouse the massesbut only to guide the rulers. As W. T. de Bary (1991) points out, the Con-fucians did not try to establish “any power base of their own . . . theyfaced the state, and whoever controlled it in the imperial court, as indi-vidual scholars . . . this institutional weakness, highly dependent condi-tion, and extreme insecurity . . . marked the Confucians as ju [ru] (‘soft-ies’) in the politics of imperial China.” They had to find patrons whocould protect them. It was not easy to have an independent voice sepa-rate from the imperial establishment.

The Han retained the Mandate of Heaven by an imperial cult ofritual observances, beginning with the Liu family ancestors but espe-cially devoted to Heaven. Its attendant cosmology tied together all thephenomena of human experience and set the stage on which Confu-cianism by degrees came to play a central political role as an officialteaching.

Early China’s cosmology (her theory of the universe as an orderedwhole) shows striking points of difference with Western thought. Forexample, the early Chinese had no creation myth and no creator-lawgiver out of this world, no first cause, not even a Big Bang. As JosephNeedham says, they assumed “a philosophy of organism, an orderedharmony of wills without an ordainer.” This view contrasts with the in-veterate tendency elsewhere in the world to assume a supernatural deity.Westerners looking at China have continually imposed their own pre-conceptions on the Chinese scene, not least because the Chinese, thoughthey generally regarded Heaven as the supreme cosmic power, saw it asimmanent in nature, not as transcendent. Without wading further intothis deep water, let us note simply that Han thought as recorded in classi-cal writings built upon the concept of mankind as part of nature andupon the special relationship between the ruler and his ancestors, con-cepts that were already important in Shang thought over a millenniumearlier.

The First Unification: Imperial Confucianism 63

Correlative Cosmology

Han Chinese saw correspondences or mutual influences betweenHeaven, earth, and man—that is, between celestial phenomena, theworld of nature on earth, and human society—from which they derivednotions of their proper place in the universe. This “correlative cosmol-ogy,” or what John B. Henderson (1984) calls “correspondences be-tween microcosmic man and macrocosmic nature,” can be seen, for ex-ample, in a Han work dated about 139 bc, the Huainanzi. This workexplained that “the head’s roundness resembles heaven and the feet’ssquareness resembles earth. Heaven has four seasons, five phases, ninesections, and 366 days. Man likewise has four limbs, five viscera, nineorifices, and 366 joints. Heaven has wind and rain, cold and heat. Manlikewise has taking and giving, joy and anger . . . Thus the eyes and earsare the sun and moon; and the blood and pneuma are the wind andrain.”

Once one begins to see close correspondences—numerological, an-atomical, psychological, and moral—between Homo sapiens and therest of nature, this is a game any number of philosophers can play. Eventoday the Chinese have a custom of assigning numbers to importantevents, like the May Fourth Movement of 1919—(in Chinese, 5–4).This strong numerological habit of thought found its fullest expressionin the doctrine of the five phases. Numerologies using three, four, nine,and other numbers were all surpassed by the five phases or processes.Also known as the five elements, these were water, fire, wood, metal, andearth. Once started on this approach, Han cosmologists noted the fiveplanets (all that were then visible), five seasons, five directions, fivecolors, five musical tones, five sage emperors, five viscera, five orifices,five animals, five grains, five mountains, five punishments, and the like.This system of fives could be used to explain change, since each phase isfollowed by a succeeding phase—wood producing fire, fire producingearth, earth producing metal, metal producing water, and water produc-ing wood. Alternatively, the phases could be put in different sequences,such as wood conquered by metal, metal reduced by fire, fire extin-guished by water, water blocked by earth, and earth manipulated bywood.

Application of this structure of correspondences was not automaticbut arguable and gave great substance for philosophical discussion.There was a considerable problem, for example, in trying to mesh the

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five phases with the four seasons and other fours, like the quarters of thecompass. Correlative thinkers in medieval Europe faced a similar prob-lem when they had to relate, for instance, the nine muses to the eight ce-lestial spheres. It was about like squaring the circle.

Chinese thinkers were ingenious in developing the vocabulary forcorrelative thinking through such devices as yin and yang or the ten ce-lestial stems and twelve earthly branches (gan and zhi) which producedthe sexagenary or 60-unit cycle for counting time. (Each of the 60 unitscould be represented by two characters respectively drawn from the setof 10 and the set of 12.) A considerable lore grew up about cycles of 60,but the broadest Chinese device was that of the 64 hexagrams in theClassic of Changes or Yijing. These were sets of six parallel lines eitherbroken or unbroken. Each of the 64 resulting figures was given its spe-cific connotations, which could be used in fortunetelling.

Correlative thought is not news to social anthropologists studyingany early society. It was by no means unique to China. But it gainedunusual currency in China and dominated thinking for an unusuallylong time, no doubt because of the centripetally organized Chinese stateand society. The emperor was so much at the center of everything thatthe ideas of correlative thinking and particularly of the phenomenalismof his close interaction with nature could become an established doc-trine.

Natural phenomena do not become less mysterious simply becausewe get used to them. Today we accept the idea of gravity by which wefind all bodies influence other bodies at a distance. The early Han postu-lated the existence of a pervasive pneuma or ether (qi) through which hu-man and natural processes interacted. Correlative cosmology can becalled wrong only because it was not scientifically provable. The idea ofresonance (ganying), as when one pitch-pipe or one lute string induces aresponse from another, also inhered in the virtue of reciprocity (onegood act must be balanced by a response). Another resonance was whenthe good example set by the conduct of the ruler moved the beholder todo likewise.

This early Han reasoning by correspondence helped Chinese observ-ers of natural activities to move in the direction of scientific thought, asNathan Sivin (1987) has pointed out, particularly in the realm of Chi-nese medicine. For example, certain puncture points in the human bodywere found to control nervous sensitivity in other parts of the body,although acupuncture anesthesia has developed only in this century.

The First Unification: Imperial Confucianism 65

Alchemists, who were the principal pioneers in Chinese science, madegreat use of correlative thinking. Indeed, its influence may be seen in al-most every field of Chinese mental activity.

In the Western world correlative cosmology played a considerablerole in Hellenistic thought contemporary with the early Han. Its influ-ence among syncretic thinkers of the Renaissance would be even greater.Yet the arbitrary nature of some correspondences and the all-inclusive-ness of some systems in the course of time produced skepticism. LeadingSong scholars doubted the resonance between natural events and impe-rial conduct. Since correlative thinking made so much use of imaginationand speculation, it could not stand up as a comprehensive explanatorydevice, especially in astronomy, where theories of correspondence couldnot handle the complex and extremely various phenomena of the heav-enly bodies.

All this cosmological lore could be focused particularly on the cor-respondence between the ritual observances of the ruler and the cycle ofthe seasons or other celestial phenomena. As a proliferation from theearly activity of the shamans who inscribed the oracle bones in theShang period, the prescriptions for the emperor’s ritual observances be-came very detailed. First of all, one kept careful note of heavenly events.Chinese celestial observations were remarkably precise, for example intables showing the times and locations of the rising and setting of themajor planets between 246 and 177 bc. Equally careful attention waspaid to the ritual observances of the emperor, for reciprocal relationswere seen between his conduct and natural events. Basic here was theconcept of resonance noted above. This idea of mutual influence wasparticularly applicable to the relationship between the ruler and theheavens. Because mankind played a part in the cosmic process, humanerror could throw it out of order. Misgovernment on the part of the rulermight produce natural catastrophe; and so a meteor, an eclipse, an earth-quake, or a flood could all be regarded as nature’s commentary on theruler’s performance.

Emperor and Scholars

Here plainly was a tool which the Confucian adviser could use to affectthe emperor’s behavior. By means of correlative cosmology, portentscould be interpreted for the ruler, as had been done by the magical sha-mans at Anyang. Because the classics were felt to offer insights into theart of government and hidden meanings that only erudite scholars could

66 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

bring out, the scholars at court like Dong Zhongshu (c. 175–105 bc)found a great opportunity to become savants on how the ruler should fitinto the cosmos and in turn was affected by it. Benjamin Schwartz(1985) remarks how Dong’s “cosmological Confucianism confirms thecosmic status of the universal king” but then adds “in the case of HanWu-ti [Wudi], Tung [Dong] also seems to have conceived of it as aweapon of inhibition and constraint.” In other words, as Derk Bodde(1991) notes, portents could sometimes be falsely alleged to have oc-curred, faked for political purposes.

The Confucianists won out over the other schools of Warring Statesphilosophy because they claimed to be, and became, indispensable advis-ers to the emperor. In its broad historical context this meant, as Arthur F.Wright phrased it, that “the literate elite . . . had entered into an alliancewith monarchy. The monarch provided the symbols and the sinews ofpower: throne, police, army, the organs of social control. The literatiprovided the knowledge of precedent and statecraft that could legitimizepower and make the state work. Both the monarch and the literati werecommitted to a two-class society based on agriculture.”

The Han emperors stressed the worship of Heaven as their major riteand also maintained hundreds of shrines to deceased emperors, but theirhigh officials at court became most concerned with the precedents set byformer rulers as recorded in the classics. Han Confucianism came into itsown when the imperial academy was founded in 124 bc. There were spe-cialists on the five classics: the Yijing or Classic of Changes (for divina-tion), the Shujing or Classic of Documents (or History), the Shi-jing orClassic of Songs (Odes, ancient folk poems), the Chunqiu or Spring andAutumn Annals (chronicles of Confucius’ own state of Lu in Shandong,with their commentaries), and the Liji or Record of Ceremonies andProper Conduct. The Han emperors, who had already asked for talentedmen to be recommended for examination and appointment, now addedclassical training to the criteria for official selection, plus written exami-nations in the Confucian classics. By the mid-second century ad, 30,000students were reported at the academy, presumably listed as scholars,not resident all at once.

The Confucian code of personal conduct also came from examplesin the classics as elucidated by scholars. Though this personal codewould be most fully developed in Song Neo-Confucianism, certain basicthemes emerged among pre-Han philosophers of various schools. Mostfundamental was the stress on hierarchy so evident in prehistoric times,which assumed that order can be achieved only when people are orga-

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nized in gradations of inferiority and superiority. This hierarchic princi-ple in turn was the basis for a stress on duties rather than rights, on theevident assumption that if everyone did his duty everyone would getwhat he deserved. Thus, the filial son obedient to his parent would baskin the parent’s approval. With all duties performed, society would be inorder to everyone’s benefit.

The most important of all duties was loyalty. In the form of filial pi-ety it ensured parental control within the family. Within the state loyaltyensured the support of officials for the emperor and his dynasty. Sodeeply was this idea ingrained in official thinking that at times of dynas-tic overthrow servitors of the old dynasty might choose death ratherthan serve the new one.

The strength of this loyalty may account for a curious anomaly thathaunts the imperial annals. Only one thing unaccounted for keeps crop-ping up in the biographies of eminent Confucian officials—some are be-headed. The fact that officials in the later dynasties are publicly beatenmay be an unfortunate incidence of greater despotism. But beheading?Surely this is an important event not only for the victim but as a symbolof the values of the state. How can the emperor behead his ministerswith a minimum of legal procedure, as an imperial right exercised sincetime immemorial?

Eventually the ritual would be less bloody: as recently as 1858 theemperor sent a silken bowstring to the grandee who had negotiated thefirst treaties with Britain, France, and the United States because he lostface in front of the foreigners. The grandee was permitted to kill himself,with the help of his servants.

Here certainly is a Legalist aspect of imperial Confucianism. Benja-min Schwartz (1985) reminds us that in Legalist texts the ruler is “ad-monished to use the full severity of the law against the unfilial and theunfraternal so that penal sanctions are introduced into the very heart ofthe family network where the bonds of family morality should reign su-preme . . . The virtue of the rulers was manifested as much in their righ-teous punishments as in the power of their moral influence.”

Several assumptions seem implicit here. First is the emperor’s role asa source of spontaneous, irrational, or unpredictable acts, as opposed tothe routinized, predictable action (or inaction) of bureaucrats. The of-ficials sought order. The emperor could shake them up with disorder.Second, the emperor was considered to have an arbitrary and unbridledpower of life and death. The victim had no rights, partly because a doc-trine of rights was not part of Chinese political theory. Third and most

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striking is the almost universal acceptance of the emperor’s decision toexecute an official. There is no court of appeal. Others may be outraged,but they have no recourse except various forms of protest or even grouprebellion. This situation no doubt was an inheritance from the rituallysanctioned violence that Mark Lewis has documented from the era ofWarring States, when killing of beasts in hunting and men in warfarewas the ruler’s professional specialty, even after human sacrifice wasgiven up.

This leads one to wonder whether Western and modern Chinesescholars have not underestimated the transcendental role of the emperorin the Chinese belief system. Truly the Son of Heaven is the equivalentof what we would call God on earth, the one person who in Westernparlance might be termed a god incarnate. The imperial temples wereplaces of emperor worship. Perhaps we can understand the emperor’scapacity to kill his officials only by appreciating his role as the centraldivinity of the Chinese state and society. The Confucianist had no fearof retribution in an afterlife because he lived in a day-to-day environ-ment in which the imperial power might reward and also extinguishhim. Where the West Asian or European, focused upon a faith in anafterlife, might fear going to Hell, the Confucianist, concerned with thehere and now, could live in fear of the imperial wrath. God was on histhrone within the palace at the capital. The aspiring official made hisevery move with this in mind. If an official was beheaded, it was simplyto be accepted as what today our insurance agents would call an “actof God.”

This line of thought raises a major question, the relationship be-tween wen and wu. Wen means basically the written word and so byextension its influence in thought, morality, persuasion, and culture. Letus call it in the most general terms “the civil order.” Wu connotes theuse of violence and so stands for the military order in general. TheConfucian-trained scholar class went to great lengths to exalt wen anddisparage wu. Yet I wonder if wu (including the founding of dynasties,extermination of rebels and evildoers, and punishing of officials) shouldnot be considered the stronger and wen the weaker element in the wen—wu combination. For example, was the virtue of loyalty (an aspect ofwen) as powerful as the practice of intimidation (an aspect of wu)?Often it seemed that when he wanted to control a situation, the emper-or’s principal tactic was intimidation. Take for example the case of Chi-na’s greatest historian Sima Qian. As Edwin Reischauer (Reischauer andFairbank, 1960) says, he had “inherited a post as court astrologer and

The First Unification: Imperial Confucianism 69

had access to the resources of the imperial library . . . he claimed to besimply completing the historical work which his father, Sima Tan, hadcommenced, but this may have been partly a pious excuse for what wasin reality a most presumptuous undertaking—the continuation and am-plification of what was supposed to be Confucius’ greatest accomplish-ment, that is, the arrangement of the record of the past in proper form.Sima Qian was obviously a man of great daring as well as prodigiouslearning. In 99 bc he came to the defense of a prominent Chinese generalwho had been forced to surrender to the Xiongnu and Wu Di repaid himfor his audacity by having him castrated.”

As a punishment, losing one’s testicles was the next thing to losingone’s head because it potentially cut off the male offspring who in thesecular religion of the Chinese elite would conduct the family rituals ofveneration of ancestors that would comfort their spirits. In the periodfrom 99 bc to his death about 85 bc Sima Qian was presumably com-pleting his great work of organizing Chinese history. Should we believethat he was not intimidated by his castration?

Whether this intimidation had any effect on the Records of the His-torian (Shiji) we can only imagine. Sima Qian’s basic annals of Wudi’sreign stop short after the introductory paragraph. Sima did not pursuethe origins of imperial legitimacy—what sanctioned the emperor’s ca-pacity to execute or castrate his subjects. Perhaps there is something herethat deserves critical reexamination.

As Thomas Metzger (1973) has pointed out, the emperor naturally“played on the whole range of available sanctions—coercive, remunera-tive and normative”—combining them to suit circumstances. “His use ofterroristic violence was usually accompanied by outbursts of moral in-dignation aimed at achieving normative justification in the minds of theelite.”

Along with the emperor’s power over the scholar-official’s life wenthis power over his books and education—the system of learning and itstransmission. Nearly every dynasty sponsored the collecting of books;the Qin First Emperor’s destructive concern for books and scholars hadbeen only more vehement than that of other rulers. R. Kent Guy (1987)has concluded that if “the arts of ruling and writing developed togetherin ancient China, then a sense of the basic unity of the two acts may wellhave underlain both the Confucian and the Legalist views of scholarshipand government.”

A similar conclusion may be reached concerning education. Perhapsit is an overtranslation to call the imperial academy or Taixue (inaugu-

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rated in 124 bc and continued into the Southern Song) the “NationalUniversity,” or to call the Guozijian (from Song to Qing) the “Director-ate of Education.” Focused on the classics, these institutions mightequally well be called indoctrination centers. The fact remains that impe-rial power, books, and scholars were all seen as integrally related aspectsof government.

The First Unification: Imperial Confucianism 71

3Reunification in the

Buddhist Age

Disunion

As China’s unity under the Han disintegrated, the Buddhist faith, whichhad been imported from India in the middle of the first century ad,gained adherents while state Confucianism went into a decline. Barba-rism and religion accompanied the breakup of the Han empire as it didthe Roman. But different results ensued in China than in Europe.

The basic mechanism of the Han dynasty’s decline was the usual one:the rise of local or regional power to eclipse that of the central dynasty.Weakness at the center came from many causes: the succession of inef-fectual Han emperors, their domination by the empress’s family, usurpa-tion of power by eunuchs, and many other factional rivalries at thecourt. Favoritism and corruption resulted in the appointment of inade-quate personnel, rapacious exploitation of the people, disregard of theinterests of merchants’ and magnates’ families, and a weakening of thedynasty’s military capacity. Such weaknesses at the center interactedwith the growth of local and regional power in the hands of aristocraticfamilies possessing landed estates and walled cities as well as industrieswithin them. The final disaster came in 220 from a revolt of formerly no-mad aristocratic families in North China and their retainers, who hadsettled inside the Wall yet kept their skills and propensities for warfare.

At the time of this rebellion, two processes were at work that wouldlead to over three centuries of disunion between North and SouthChina—first, the continual incursion of nomadic peoples into NorthChina and, second (partly as a result of this), migration of Han Chineseto the warmer and more fertile areas of the Yangzi valley further south.This laid the basis for a dual development of small regional dynasties

north and south. After the era known as the Three Kingdoms, from 220to 265 ad, and a temporary reunification of the country between 280and 304, there ensued in the centuries from 317 to 589 a successionknown as the Six Dynasties in South China along and below the Yangziand in North China a welter of competition among a total of SixteenKingdoms first and last.

The principal invaders in the north were no longer the TurkicXiongnu, whose confederation had broken up, but a nomadic proto-Mongol people known as the Xianbei, who set up states in Gansu on thewest and Hebei and Shandong on the east. Instead of a barbarization ofthe local Chinese culture, these less-civilized invaders quickly took onthe trappings of Chinese aristocratic families, intermarried with the localHan people, and set up courts in the Chinese style. The most outstandingwere the Toba Turks, who set up their Northern Wei dynasty (386—535) first at Datong in northern Shanxi and later (after they had con-quered and reunified North China) at their second capital, Luoyang, justsouth of the Yellow River, which had been the capital of Later Han. Notleast of the achievements of Northern Wei was their devotion to Bud-dhism and the great stone carvings they produced near their two capi-tals.

Buddhism spread rapidly not only in the north but also among theSix Dynasties of the south. In the great age of Buddhism in China fromthe fifth to the ninth centuries, Confucianism was largely left in eclipseand the Buddhist teachings as well as Buddhist art had a profound effectupon Chinese culture, both north and south.

The Buddhist Teaching

The Buddha, who lived probably during the sixth century bc in Nepal,began life as an aristocrat. After renouncing his palace and its haremand luxuries, he achieved through meditation an illumination in whichhe realized the great principle of the wheel of the law or the wheel of theBuddha. This may be defined as a theory of the “dependent origination”of life: that everything is conditioned by something else in a closed se-quence, so that in effect the misery of life is dependent upon certainconditions, and by eliminating these conditions it is possible to eliminatethe misery itself. Thus desire—which ultimately leads to misery—origi-nates in dependence upon sensation, which in turn originates in depen-dence upon contact and the six senses, and so on. The Buddhist objec-tive therefore becomes to cut the chain of conditions that bind one into

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this sequence of passions, desires, and attachments. From this premisethat misery is conditioned and that the conditions can be destroyed, theearly Buddhists developed many theories.

One central idea of peculiar interest today is that of the dharmas.This is actually a theory of elements or atoms, according to which an en-tity does not exist in itself but is made up of all its parts. The old Bud-dhist monks believed that man himself is composed merely of thesemany parts or dharmas; he has no personality, soul, or self. The dharmasare of several types. Some relate to form and substance, others to sensa-tion, and others to mental activity. Taken together, they make a neat ex-planation of experience and form a basis for the denial of the existenceof self. This is just what the Buddhist sought, as a way of escaping life’smisery. Since all the elements of experience could be analyzed to be dis-parate, unconnected, and atomic, both in space and in time, it was heldthat a proper realization of this truth could lead to elimination of the il-lusion of the self and a release from the wheel of the law. This sort of es-cape or enlightenment, as you prefer, has been sought by mystics theworld over and was eagerly pursued in medieval China.

Early Buddhism was institutionalized in a monastic order that maybe compared and contrasted with the monasticism of Christianity at alater date. By these early Buddhist monks the sutras (traditional sermonsand teachings of the Buddha) were finally written down.

By the time of its expansion from North India to the Far East theBuddhist school of the Mahayana (the “greater vehicle”) had wroughtprofound changes in the ancient doctrines and made them more likely toappeal to the masses of the population. One of these developments wasthe idea of salvation, which became possible through the intercession ofthe bodhisattvas (or “enlightened ones”) who had attained the enlight-enment of the Buddha but continued their existence in this world in or-der to rescue others. The most famous of these deities has been the Chi-nese Goddess of Mercy or Guanyin, an abstraction of the principle ofcompassion. Another is the Buddha of Endless Light, Amitabha (in Chi-nese, Emituofo or O-mi-to-fo). Salvation of others through the efforts ofthese enlightened ones was made possible on the theory that merit couldbe transferred. Along with this notion went the concept of charity, whichsupplemented the original Buddhist faith and has made it in China andJapan a more positive social force.

The Mahayana school also developed a positive doctrine of nirvana,the state which it was the object of Buddhist effort to attain but which

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the Buddha himself had regarded as so completely indescribable that hehad said nothing about it.

The Buddhist teachings were set forth in the great Buddhist canon ortripitaka. Translation of sutras from this canon became the chief work ofthe first Buddhist monks in China. They and their followers faced enor-mously complex linguistic as well as intellectual problems—how totranslate from Sanskrit, which was polysyllabic, highly inflected, andalphabetic like English and other Indo-European languages, into themonosyllabic, uninflected, ideographic script of China; how to convey,in that rather terse and concrete medium, the highly imaginative andmetaphysical abstractions of Indian mysticism.

In attempting to transfer or “translate” their new and alien ideas intoterms meaningful for their Chinese audience, the early Buddhist mission-aries ran into the problem that has faced all purveyors of foreign ideas inChina ever since: how to select certain Chinese terms, written charactersalready invested with established meanings, and invest them with newsignificance without letting the foreign ideas be subtly modified, in factsinified, in the process. For example, the Chinese character dao (“theway”), already so much used in Daoism and Confucianism, might beused variously for the Indian dharma or for yoga or for the idea of en-lightenment, while wuwei, the “nonaction” of Daoism, was used for nir-vana. The result was at least ambiguity, if not some watering down ofthe original idea.

Abstract ideas from abroad when expressed in Chinese characterscould hardly avoid a degree of sinification. In addition, exotic and so-cially disruptive values were resisted. As Arthur Wright (1959) remarks,“The relatively high position which Buddhism gave to women andmothers was changed in these early translations. For example ‘Husbandsupports wife’ became ‘The husband controls his wife,’ and ‘The wifecomforts the husband’ became ‘The wife reveres her husband.’ ”

Non-Chinese invaders of North China, in the fourth century and af-ter, accepted Buddhism partly because, like themselves, it came fromoutside the old order that they were taking over. Buddhist priests couldbe allies in fostering docility among the masses. For the Chinese upperclass who had fled to the south, Buddhism also offered an explanationand solace, intellectually sophisticated and aesthetically satisfying, forthe collapse of their old society. Emperors and commoners alike soughtreligious salvation in an age of social disruption. Great works of art,statues, and rock-cut temples have come down from this period. Fruitful

Reunification in the Buddhist Age 75

comparisons and contrasts can be made between the roles of clergy andmonasticism, the growth of sects, and relations of church and state, dur-ing this age of Buddhist faith in China and its later Christian counterpartin medieval Europe. Buddhist monasteries, for example, served as hos-tels for travelers, havens of refuge, and sources of charity. They also be-came great landowners and assumed quasi-official positions in the ad-ministration.

The early period of borrowing and domestication was followed byone of acceptance and independent growth. Chinese native Buddhismwas influenced by Daoism, and influenced it in return, to an extent stillbeing debated. New sects arose in China, catering to Chinese needs. Bestknown to us today through its influence on Oriental art was the schoolwhich sought enlightenment through practices of meditation (called inChinese Chan, or in the Japanese pronunciation, Zen). Perhaps enoughhas been said to indicate the very complex interaction among such ele-ments as Indian Buddhism, the barbarian invaders, native Daoism, andthe eventual growth, flowering, and decay of Chinese Buddhism.

Sui-Tang Reunification

During the period of disunion the lack of central orthodoxy allowed thesouthern Six Dynasties, most of which set their capital at Nanjing, andthe northern Sixteen Kingdoms to differentiate and innovate. Buddhismand Daoism inspired artists, philosophers, and writers. Many of the dy-nastic histories concern the transient small dynasties of this era.

The three centuries of the Sui-Tang dynasties (589–907) finally re-established the Chinese ideal of unity that had developed under the Han.North China had been devastated by the nomad invasions, whereasSouth China along the Yangzi had prospered in relative peace. The 60million people estimated for the Han dynasty in the year ad 2 (mainlyin North China; see Map 10) had been reduced in number, but the mi-gration of Han families to the south had begun to shift China’s center ofgravity (see Maps 11 and 12.). In modern times South China would havetwo thirds of the Chinese population. Yet in the sixth to tenth centuriesthe great bulk of China’s people lived still on the easily unified NorthChina plain, where a score of prefectures, each with 100,000 house-holds (say, 500,000 people) were found. As Mark Elvin (Blunden andElvin, 1983) has pointed out, the Roman Empire had “conspicuouslylacked a comparable consolidated dominant region.” North China’s cen-trality and heavy population was a factor for unity. Whoever got control

76 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

over it could rather easily subjugate the other areas, including SouthChina.

The Sui and Tang dynastic founders had intermarried with nomadictribal families who became sinicized. They were now the aristocraticfamilies of Northwest China, located particularly in present-day Shanxiprovince and the ancient capital region running from the Wei valleyalong the south of the Yellow River to the North China plain. As underthe Zhou and Qin, this northwest area derived military vigor from thenomadic peoples. From the herdsmen of the grasslands the Chinese ac-quired horses for cavalry warfare, trousers for riding astride, saddles andlater stirrups, plus the breast harness and eventually the horse collar,which would be imitated in the West. The relations of these clans withCentral Asia in trade and diplomacy were close and influential long be-fore the Sui-Tang reunification within China.

The Sui founder was of a part-nomad Yang family with estates situ-ated midway between the two ancient capitals of the Zhou and Han,Chang’an and Luoyang. The Tang dynastic founder was likewise a scionof a Li family of Turkic military origins and aristocratic status. Thesemilitary aristocrats had intermarried both with Chinese and with eachother’s families so that they formed a large and homogeneous group ofleaders, equal to the onerous tasks of conquest and administration. Thenomad rulers of North China adopted Chinese ways, including lan-guage, dress, and methods of government so sedulously that their hybridstates seemed in the historical record to be properly Chinese.

The last of the Sixteen Kingdoms had already unified North Chinawhen the Sui founder took power in 581. He quickly produced a newlegal code in 500 articles, brought order into local government, and con-tinued several institutions begun by earlier kingdoms. These includedthe “equal field” system that was supposed annually to allot severalacres of cultivable land to each adult male. He also continued the systemof collective responsibility among groups of households, the territoriallyadministered militia, and the military agricultural colonies on the fron-tier. The unified bureaucracy brought in tax revenues; price-regulatinggranaries bought grain in times of glut and sold it cheaply in times ofshortage. Meanwhile, Buddhist monasteries became great landowners ofincreasing influence. The emperor’s devout patronage created (in ArthurWright’s phrase), an “imperial Buddhism.”

The Sui conquest of the south along the Yangzi was not very destruc-tive, and the second emperor, Sui Yangdi, was able to mobilize the em-pire’s resources for great projects. One was the extension of the Grand

Reunification in the Buddhist Age 77

Canal from Hangzhou north across the Yangzi to Yangzhou and thennorthwest to the region of Luoyang (see Map 16). By 609 it was ex-tended from this far inland point in a northeasterly direction to the re-gion of Tianjin and Beijing. By making use of local streams and lakes,barge transport could bring the food and commodities of the lowerYangzi up through North China to strengthen the northern frontier aswell as feed the capital area. Large granaries were built (one could hold33 million bushels).

This outburst of inordinate energy under an emperor with visions ofgrandeur has inspired comparisons between the short-lived reigns of SuiYangdi and Qin Shihuang, each of whom overreached himself. Yangdi’sattempt to conquer Korea exhausted his resources, and defeat there con-tributed to widespread rebellion and his loss of the Mandate.

The Tang founders were more prudent. They inherited the Suiachievements, including the enormous 5-by-6-mile capital Chang’an andthe secondary capital Luoyang. Where the Han administrative depart-ments had handled palace and dynastic family affairs cheek by jowl withcountrywide matters, the Sui and Tang set up six ministries—personneladministration, finance, rites, army, justice, and public works—whichwould form the main echelons of China’s government down to 1900.Other agencies included the censorate that scrutinized and reported onofficial and even imperial conduct and an early version of the examina-tion system.

Under the second emperor the Tang armies spread outward in all di-rections, defeating the Koreans, expanding south into northern Vietnam,and most of all pushing their control into Central Asia until Chinese pre-fectures were actually functioning west of the Pamirs (see Map 9). ThisTang expansion through the oasis trading cities of the Silk Road openedthe way for increased contact with West Asia. The Tang capital atChang’an became a great international metropolis, a focal point of theEurasian world. Between 600 and 900 no Western capital could competein size and grandeur.

Tang military prowess was matched by achievements in the fine artsand literature. Tang poetry became the model for later periods. The cre-ative vigor of the Tang let it be a more open society, welcoming foreign-ers in its urban life from Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, as well as fromPersia and West Asia. Buddhism had added an extra dimension to theTang heritage from the Han. Younger states arising in East Asia modeledtheir institutions on the Tang.

78 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

Buddhism and the State

A comparison of Buddhism’s role in China with that of Christianity inEurope shows one striking difference on the political plane. After the re-vival of central power by the Tang, under Buddhist influence Confucian-ism was gradually reinvigorated to support strong government. Even-tually the imperial bureaucracy would bring the Buddhist church underfirm control.

Buddhism’s adaptation to Chinese ways is evident, for example, ineducation. As Eric Zürcher (1959) points out, the Buddhist Way wassimilar to Confucianism in emphasizing moral behavior. The Buddhistnovice had to learn countless rules of conduct and maintain a constantstruggle against sin, desire, and attachment. He had to observe the fiverules, abstaining from killing, stealing, illicit sex, lying, and intoxication.The sangha—or community of monks and nuns, novices, and lay believ-ers—had to observe a great number of vows. Along with this went theperformance of good works and charity (a development that lies in thebackground of the Confucian “community compacts,” xiangyue, of theSong and later, as we shall see).

During the Buddhist age in China from ca. 500 to 850 Buddhism didnot diminish the power of the state as the sole source of political and so-cial order. High culture was still dominated by the secular elite of the lite-rati. This meant that the Buddhist community of believers was keptstrictly within limits. Not until the sixth century did the sangha becomewhat Zürcher calls a “secondary elite.” Monks were recruited from fam-ilies of high official status. This was anomalous because the members ofthe sangha as a corporate entity had severed their ties with the outsidesociety. Toward the government it claimed to be autonomous, free ofgovernment control and taxes, and it even included women. Sooner orlater this autonomy would make Buddhism a threat to the state.

Under the Tang the tendency was to bureaucratize Buddhismthrough administrative control, bestowal of titles, sale of ordination cer-tificates, compilation of a Buddhist canon, and a system of clerical ex-aminations to select talent. Monks had to undergo an arduous programof training and study before ordination. The clerical examinations forthe Buddhist as for the Confucian classical scholar were under the Min-istry of Rites. Education in Buddhist monasteries included study of theConfucian classics. Indeed, the Buddhist monasteries that preparedmonks for the Confucian examination system seem like forerunners

Reunification in the Buddhist Age 79

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of the academies of the Song period. Thus Buddhism, until the crack-down of 845, was consistently circumscribed in its educational efforts bythe prior domination of Confucian teaching. However, Buddhism wouldhave its indirect influence later in the amalgam known as Neo-Confu-cianism.

So little had Buddhism disrupted political tradition that the Tanggovernment had relatively little difficulty in reducing the economicpower of the Buddhist monasteries. The several persecutions of Bud-dhists, especially in the ninth century, were in part a struggle to keepland out of the hands of the church and more easily amenable to taxa-tion. But no struggle between church and state developed in medievalChina comparable to that in the West. The church—whether Buddhist orDaoist—was quite unable to achieve independence from the state. Itspriesthoods and temples remained loosely decentralized, dependent onmodest local support but without organized lay congregations or anynationwide administration, and passive in matters of politics.

Led by the example of Buddhism, the Daoist church, as distinct fromthe philosophers or alchemists, reached the masses with an imposingpantheon and many sects but failed to build up a worldly organization.Daoist monasteries and temples remained disconnected units, catering topopular beliefs. By its nature Daoism could not become a vigorous orga-nized force in Chinese politics: it expressed an alternative to Confucian-ism in the realm of personal belief but left the field of practical action tothe Confucians.

On the other hand, Daoists contributed to China’s technologythrough the long-developed practices of alchemy, both in pursuit of thephysiological goal of immortality and the more immediate bonanza ofmaking gold. In their physiological and chemical experiments, they con-cocted elixirs and also searched for herbs, building up the great Chinesepharmacopoeia on which the world is still drawing. The alchemists con-tributed to the technology of porcelain, dyes, alloys, and eventually toother Chinese inventions like the compass and gunpowder. Many oftheir achievements, as Joseph Needham remarks, were “proto-sciencerather than pseudo-science.”

Decline of the Tang Dynasty

The third Tang emperor was unfortunately a weakling, though his Em-press Wu made up for it by wielding autocratic power for half a century

Reunification in the Buddhist Age 81

(ca. 654–705), first through him, second through his young successors,and finally for a time as empress of a newly declared dynasty. China’sonly woman ruler, the Empress Wu was a remarkably skilled and ablepolitician, but her murderous and illicit methods of maintaining powergave her a bad repute among male bureaucrats. It also fostered overstaff-ing and many kinds of corruption. In 657 the Tang government wasusing only 13,500 officials to rule a population of probably 50 million.By drawing a local militia (fubing) from self-sufficient farms and requir-ing them to perform labor service in each locality, the governmentreduced expenses. The administration still aimed to see independent,free-holding farmers, and so under the equal-field (juntian) system itreallocated land periodically according to population registers. Butwhereas the second emperor had ruled in a hands-on fashion with hiscouncilors day by day, the manipulations of the Empress Wu made theimperial power more remote, conspiratorial, and despotic. She broke thepower of the aristocratic clans of the northwest and gave more oppor-tunity for the North China plain to be represented in the government.Examination graduates began to be a small elite within officialdom. Herrecord is still being debated.

Under the Emperor Xuanzong (who reigned from 713 to 755) theTang reached its height of prosperity and grandeur, but weaknesses accu-mulated. First came military overexpansion, ruinously expensive. Tangforces were engaged on the frontiers in southwest China and also be-came overextended west of the Pamirs. There they were defeated byArab forces in 751 near Samarkand. Meanwhile, the fubing militia hadbeen made gradually into a professional fighting force grouped in ninecommands, mainly on the frontiers under generals with wide powers torepel attack. Powerful generals got into court politics. As the OuterCourt under the Six Ministries became more routinized and cumber-some, the high officials who led it as chancellors—actual surrogates forthe emperor, ruling in his name—became increasingly involved in bitterfactionalism, while the emperor used eunuchs to support his controlfrom the Inner Court. Then in his old age Xuanzong fell for a beautifulconcubine, Yang Guifei, and let the central power deteriorate. Sheadopted as her son her favorite general, An Lushan, who rebelled andseized the capitals in 755. From 755 to 763 a frightfully destructiverebellion raged across the land. When the emperor fled his capital andhis troops demanded Yang’s execution, his imperial love story came to atragic (and often recounted) end. Tang rule was nominally restored after

82 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

eight years, but over the next century and a half Tang power never fullyrevived.

The defeat of the An Lushan rebellion had the effect of setting up re-gional military commands that later became the basis for a new provin-cial layer of administration. While control of outer regions evaporated,the Tang regime within China had to cede power to the military. Nolonger was it able to govern from the center with uniform laws and insti-tutions. The elite bureaucracy was unable to maintain countrywide pro-cedures. Localism and particularism supervened, and the nominal unityof the Chinese state became a hollow facade.

Social Change: The Tang–Song Transition

Of the several movements for change during the late Tang dynasty, themost long-term was the decline of the aristocratic families that had dom-inated government. Later Han had seen a clear-cut though not statutorysocial distinction between elite families (shi) and commoners (shu] plusmean people (jianmin). In its original meaning the term shi had desig-nated “servitors,” meaning the literate elite who served the state. Fromthe Han to the end of the Tang, the “aristocratic” status of the greatclans coincided with clan members’ holding high office in government.The families of the elite were listed in official social registers. Marriagebetween them and commoners was frowned upon. During the post-Hanperiod of disunion this elite provided roughly three quarters of govern-ment officials. During early Tang the proportion was more than half andlater three fifths. Although the aristocratic clans of the northwest weremainly non-Chinese in origin, they were a major source of officials forthe central government. As David Johnson (1977) says, “Unlike Englandor France, where a man could rise to a position of high social statusthrough a career in law, medicine, commerce, the church or the military,in China there was only one significant occupational hierarchy: the civilservice.”

The lack of primogeniture in China meant that equal division ofproperty among males was the common practice when the head of afamily died. The imperial code of laws required partible inheritance andso prevented the rise of a landed nobility such as occurred in Europe. Ifa member of the family did not become an official for two or three gen-erations, the family would sooner or later disintegrate. Each generationwas potentially insecure and had to prove itself in official life. Family

Reunification in the Buddhist Age 83

status was hereditary, but if a family that joined the elite through havingmembers in high office was unable to produce additional members, itsstatus would decline. However, a cushion was provided in that the Tangmaintained various status groups outside the ranked bureaucracy fromwhich one could re-enter official service.

Appointments to office were made by recommendation, first by theprefect, who was expected to rank all members of the elite within his ju-risdiction according to a scale that eventually would consist of nineranks, each one divided into upper and lower. Official appraisals of eachprospective candidate for appointment were accumulated in dossiers.Through this system the elite perpetuated itself. Although the examina-tion system got started in Sui–Tang times, it did not dominate the pro-cess whereby officials were recruited. Recruitment was a social ratherthan a legal process because in the social scene personal connections(guanxi) formed the fluid matrix in which candidates for office were ad-vanced and family status was maintained. For example, the NorthernWei established its own list of major clans and made them equivalent tothe Chinese list, so that families of nomad background could now moveinto Chinese life at the top level. Officially sponsored lists of the greatclans’ genealogies were produced between ad 385 and 713, evidentlybased on the recommendation lists submitted by the prefects. These es-tablished genealogies formed the basis for arranging marriages.

The Tang founders had felt this system obstructed the mobility of tal-ent and turned against it. In this way the newly arisen Sino-barbarianfamilies of the northwest, who now were taking power, struck a blow atthe great Chinese families on the northeast of the North China plain.The Tang founders also denounced the large gifts that were being de-manded by the old established families when their daughters were mar-ried. In 659 a revision of the national genealogy was 200 chapters longand contained 2,287 families from 235 clans. One aim of the revisionwas evidently to put the northeastern families in their place.

By the eighth century it appears that the holding of office had becomethe main criterion of family status, and the pedigrees of the great clanswere less important. Everything now depended upon the official rank ofthe person listed, not on his family origins. Legally, officials were nolonger regarded as a special elite. Though sons of officials were given aminor rank in the Tang legal code, there was no longer an upper-classstatus recognized in the code that gave special claims for appointment tooffice. The imperial institution had won out over the social interests ofthe great clans.

84 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

As Denis Twitchett (in CHOC 3) suggests, the Tang thus began thetransition from rule by aristocratic families, in which the imperial housewas merely primus inter pares, to rule of China by a trained bureaucracyselected by merit partly through the examinations. Decline of the aris-tocratic families left the central power more able to dominate local re-gions. The emperor would become a sacrosanct ruler set apart in hispalace, remote from companions of the battlefield and dependent uponcounselors who emerged from the new bureaucracy.

The aristocratic clans’ loss of their dominance in government duringthe late Tang was accompanied by another great change—the govern-ment’s retreat from its hands-on domination of China’s economic life.The collapse of the equal-field system of land allotment in the country-side, and of official markets and price-setting in the cities, showed thatthe economy was outgrowing state control. Property began to accumu-late in the hands of local magnates. In order to shore up the state’spower, the tax system was rationalized by setting annual quotas to becollected on land, not persons, in summer and autumn. It was knownfrom 780 as the two-tax system, that is, the combination of land tax andhousehold tax. Tax quotas were set by consultation and provided thecentral government with some prospective security, although the newsystem acknowledged the government’s inability any longer to controlprivate wealth and free trade in land.

After the 755–763 rebellion, the government superintendence oftrade also began to break down. Tang policy had been to keep trade reg-ulated so that officially supervised markets with stable prices would as-sist peasant production but not permit the ignoble human propensity forprofit-seeking. Tax revenues from trade were not considered importantexcept when fiscal crises arose, although they always did in times of mili-tary need or dynastic decline. China’s network of market communities(as described in the Introduction) would soon emerge under the Songand be too prolific for state control.

Finally, China had been militarized by the An Lushan rebellion, evenwhile the Tang outposts in Central Asia had been overrun and much ofthe northwest was occupied by a Tibetan people, the Tanguts. WithinChina, the new provinces at first totaled some 30 units, mostly undermilitary governors whose garrisons gave them power over local govern-ment. In contrast, the central government had almost no forces of itsown and was several times in danger of takeover by Tangut invaders.The emperor’s power after 763 rested precariously on four regions—themetropolitan province, the northwest frontier zone, the lower Yangzi,

Reunification in the Buddhist Age 85

and the zone along the Grand Canal, which was the capital’s lifeline.Several North China provinces remained out of central control and sotook perhaps a quarter of the empire’s population out of the revenue sys-tem, leaving the lower Yangzi and Huai valley region to be the dynasty’schief source of revenue.

A few Tang emperors after the rebellion succeeded in retrenchmentand centralization of power, but the great age of the Tang had passed.The Inner Court was now plagued by the emperor’s reliance on eunuchpower while the Outer Court was wracked by intense factionalism.

In general, the rise of the Tang civil service contributed to a renewalof Confucianism, another aspect of the Tang–Song transition, researchedmost recently by David McMullen (1988). A continued development ofclassical scholarship had been fostered under the Tang by a school sys-tem, the examinations, the cult of Confucius, and state ritual as well asby historiography and secular literature. This growth of the scholar-eliteduring the Tang prepared the ground for the intellectual flowering of theNorthern Song.

In 845 the Tang emperor decreed a broad, systematic repression ofBuddhist monasteries, with their enormous tax-exempt land-holdingsand resplendent city temples housing thousands of inmates. As many asa quarter of a million priests and nuns were forced back into lay life.Thereafter the government controlled Buddhist growth by its issuance ofall ordination certificates to monks. The splendor of the Tang and ofChinese Buddhism declined together.

The power relations in North China at this time suggest that theactual interregnum in central power lasted all the way from the rebellionof 755 to 979. The military governors surviving from the Tang and theirsuccessors set up centralized, personally led military regimes that be-came the model for government during the interregnum and earlyNorthern Song.

In its final half century the Tang was an object-lesson in anarchy.Officials, both civil and military, became so cynically corrupt and villagepeasants so ruthlessly oppressed that the abominable became common-place. Loyalty disappeared. Banditry took over. Gangs swelled intoarmed mobs, plundering all in their path as they roamed from provinceto province. Emperors, their eunuchs, and officials lost control and weredespised. For six years (878–884) the major bandit Huang Chao led hishorde up and down the face of China, from Shandong to Fuzhou andGuangzhou, then to Luoyang and Chang’an, which was destroyed. By907, the official end of the Tang dynasty, Turkic and other non-Chinese

86 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

peoples occupied much of North China and warlordism flourished else-where.

Out of the debris emerged regional states known in North China asthe Five Dynasties and in Central and South China as the Ten Kingdoms.The situation of general warlordism would be resolved only by the even-tual domination of an imperial army at the new capital of the incomingSong dynasty in 960.

Reunification in the Buddhist Age 87

4China’s Greatest Age:

Northern and Southern Song

Efflorescence of Material Growth

A curious anomaly haunts the three centuries of the Song in China. Onthe one hand it was a great creative age that put China ahead of the restof the world in technological invention, material production, politicalphilosophy, government, and elite culture. Printed books, paintings, andthe civil service examination system, for example, all attest to China’spreeminence. On the other hand, during just this time of Chinese efflo-rescence, tribal invaders from Inner Asia gradually got military andadministrative control over the Chinese state and people. Were SongChina’s cultural achievements related to the eventual non-Chinese domi-nation? It is a vital question, though not a simple one.

In 960 the commander of the palace guard under the last of the FiveDynasties in North China was acclaimed by his troops as a new emperor.Thus catapulted into power, Zhao Kuangyin founded the Song dynasty.He and his successor, prudent and capable, pensioned off the generals,replaced the military governors with civil officials, concentrated the besttroops in their palace army, built up the bureaucracy from examinationgraduates, and centralized the revenues. It was an exemplary job of con-trolling the military and establishing a new civil power. The century anda half of the Northern Song (960–1126) would be one of China’s mostcreative periods, in some ways like the Renaissance that would begin inEurope two centuries later.

To appraise the strategic place of the Song in Chinese history, wemust take several major approaches. The first is on the plane of materialgrowth—in population and urbanization and in production, technol-ogy, and trade, both domestic and foreign.

China’s population had reached about 60 million in mid-Han(around ad 2) and, after a probable decline in the era of disunion, seemsto have approached 50 to 60 million again at the height of the Tang inthe early 700s. It grew to perhaps 100 million in early Song and stood atabout 120 million at the end of the twelfth century: say 45 million in thearea north of the Huai River and 75 million along the Yangzi and south-ward (see Maps 10, 11, and 12.).

Population growth brought the rise of city life, which became mostspectacular in the capital. As the political and administrative center ofNorthern Song, Kaifeng held a great concentration of officials as well asthe service personnel, troops, and hangers-on attracted by the court. Itwas only four fifths the size of the Tang capital, Chang’an, but thrice thatof ancient Rome. In 1021 the population was about 500,000 within thewalls. Including the nine suburbs, it totaled roughly a million. By 1100the registered households totaled 1,050,000 persons. Adding the armymade about 1.4 million.

Such an urban concentration could be fed because Kaifeng was nearthe junction of the early Grand Canal and the Yellow River, at the headof barge transport from the Lower Yangzi grain basket. China’s domes-tic and interregional trade was facilitated by cheap transportation on theGrand Canal, the Yangzi, its tributaries and lakes, and other river andcanal systems. These waterways stretched for something like 30,000miles and created the world’s most populous trading area (see Map 16).Foreign trade would be at all times an offshoot of this great commercewithin China.

Industry grew up at Kaifeng first of all to meet the needs of govern-ment. For example, North China then had large deposits of coal andiron, which water transport made cheaply accessible to the capital. Theexhaustion of forest cover by about ad 1000 obliged iron smelters to usecoal instead of charcoal in coke-burning blast furnaces. Moreover, usingthe cast iron thus produced, Song ironworkers developed a decarboniza-tion method for steelmaking. By 1078 North China was producing an-nually more than 114,000 tons of pig iron (700 years later Englandwould produce only half that amount).

From this the art of war gained coats of mail and steel weapons.Meanwhile a proto-artillery in the form of the catapult (trebuchet) wasused in siege warfare, and gunpowder was used first in fire-lances, gre-nades, and bombards. Ancient sieges had been chancy because a be-sieged city, with its stored supplies, often could outlast the besiegers for-aging in the barren countryside. The new Song weapons now could

China’s Greatest Age: Northern and Southern Song 89

10. Population Distribution in the Han Dynasty, ad 2

11. Population Distribution in the Tang Dynasty, ad 742

China’s Greatest Age: Northern and Southern Song 91

12. Population Distribution in the Song Dynasty, ca. 1100

batter walls and gates, explode gunpowder mines, and light fires withinthe walls.

Unfortunately for the Northern Song dynasty, this war technologywas soon taken over by the Ruzhen invaders, who set up their Jin dy-nasty in North China after seizing Kaifeng in 1126. A new Song capitalwas established in the south at Hangzhou.

At its height in the early 1200s this great capital of the SouthernSong stretched alongside the Qiantang River estuary for more thantwenty miles, from the southern suburb of about 400,000 peoplethrough the imperial walled city of half a million and the northern sub-urb of say 200,000. Hangzhou had some Venetian features, as MarcoPolo noted. Clear water from the large West Lake flowed through thecity in a score or more of canals, which carried refuse on out east to thetidewater in the river estuary. The city embraced some seven squaremiles within its walls, bisected by the broad Imperial Way that ran fromsouth to north. Before the Mongol conquest of 1279, Hangzhou had apopulation of more than a million (some estimates reach 2.5 million),making it the world’s biggest city. Marco Polo’s Venice had perhaps50,000; we can understand why he was impressed by urban life inChina.

During the Southern Song, foreign trade bulked large in Chinesegovernment revenues for almost the only time before the nineteenth cen-tury. The demand for luxuries at Hangzhou and especially for spicesimported via the Spice Route that ran from the East Indies to China, aswell as to Europe, figured in the rapid growth of Song foreign trade. Thedemand was so high that the famous Chinese exports of silks and por-celains and also copper cash were not enough to balance the imports.The Islamic diaspora that had reached Spain and profoundly influencedEurope had similarly, by Song times, prompted a great increase of seatrade at the Chinese ports of Guangzhou (Canton), Quanzhou (Zayton),Xiamen (Amoy), Fuzhou, and Hangzhou. Chinese shipping went downthe coast of East Asia to the Indies and across to India and even to eastAfrica, but the Southern Song foreign trade was still largely in Arabhands. Its taxation enabled the Southern Song to rely more on salt andtrade taxes than on the traditional staff of imperial life, the land tax.One effect of this increase of commerce was to revive the use, inaugu-rated in the Tang, of paper money, beginning with government remit-tance notes to transfer funds, promissory notes, and other paper of lim-ited negotiability, and finally arriving at a countrywide issuance of paper

92 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

currency by the government. Like coal, this use of paper money was an-other thing that amazed Marco Polo.

Chinese nautical technology led the world during this period. China’sbig compartmented ships (with as many as four decks, four or six masts,and a dozen sails), which were guided by a stern post rudder and the useof charts and the compass, could carry 500 men. This technology was farahead of West Asia and Europe, where Mediterranean galleys were stillusing muscle power and an inefficient steering oar.

These facets of the spectacular achievements of the Song are onlyexamples. Any modern-minded expansionist looking back on all thisgrowth and creativity can imagine how Song China, left to itself, couldhave taken over the maritime world and reversed history by invadingand colonizing Europe from Asia. Seemingly the only thing lacking wasmotivation and incentives. This of course is a far-out fantasy, but it posesagain the question of what impeded the further development of China’s“medieval economic revolution,” as Mark Elvin (1973) calls it. It is easyto point to barbarian invaders and blame the Mongol conquest for tor-pedoing the Song ship of state as it sailed so promisingly toward moderntimes. This has the attractiveness of any monocausal devil theory, but, aswe shall see presently, the causes were various.

In the sections that follow we will see how the examination systembecame a major source of civil service bureaucrats, how the decreasinglikelihood of actually getting a position in the civil service encouragedthe scholar class (shi) to turn toward primary involvement in local affairsas leaders of the gentry, and how Neo-Confucian philosophy aided thisshift in focus.

Education and the Examination System

The technological key to the growth of education under the Song was theprinted book. As Tsien Tsuen-hsuin has recounted in his magistral vol-ume on paper and printing, the first component of China’s success in in-venting the printed book was paper. Its development dated from the sec-ond or first centuries bc, but it was used in block printing only in lateTang. Northern Song was the first society with printed books. Europelagged behind. Paper was cheaper when made of plant fibers in Chinathan when made of rags in Europe, just as wood-block printing wassimpler, cheaper, and better suited for Chinese characters than movable

China’s Greatest Age: Northern and Southern Song 93

type. Printed matter was the life-blood of the expanding Song educatedelite.

Printed books gave a great impetus to the education carried on inBuddhist monasteries as well as within families. The government had atfirst tried to control all printing, which was widespread. But by the1020s it was encouraging the establishment of schools by awarding landendowments as well as books. The aim was to have a government schoolin every prefecture. The schools enrolled candidates, conducted Confu-cian rituals, and offered lectures. John W. Chaffee (1985) tells us that bythe early 1100s the state school system had 1.5 million acres of land thatcould provide a living for some 200,000 students.

The examination system became an enormous and intricate institu-tion central to upper-class life. During a thousand years from the Tang to1905 it played many roles connected with thought, society, administra-tion, and politics.

The first two Song emperors built up the examination system as ameans for staffing their bureaucracy. The yin privilege by which higherofficials could nominate their offspring as candidates for appointmentstill operated to make the official class partly self-perpetuating. Butwhere the mid-Tang had got about 15 percent of its officials from exami-nations, the Song now got about 30 percent. Song examiners tried to se-lect men ready to uphold the new civil order, who would be “loyal to theidea of civil government,” says Peter Bol (1992). The examiners had totake precautions against cheating and so used devices such as searchingcandidates on entrance, putting numbers instead of names on their pa-pers, and recopying papers to prevent readers from recognizing the writ-ers’ calligraphy. In 989 quotas of how many could pass were set up foreach examination, so that certain geographical regions productive ofhigh scholarship could not get too many winners in the competition.

Pioneer researchers some decades ago concluded that the Song ex-aminations offered a career open to talent, letting in new men on theirmerits, but closer scrutiny now suggests that big families neverthelesscontinued to get their candidates into officialdom in disproportionatenumbers, partly by virtue of superior home training, partly by influencethrough recommendations and connections. Chaffee found that duringthe three centuries of the Song the examinations became less and lessimportant for gaining office and yet, paradoxically, more and more menbecame examination candidates. This reflected the fact that “the estab-lishment” of official families increasingly found special ways to get de-

94 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

grees for their sons—for instance, by the yin privilege of recommenda-tion, by passing various special or restricted examinations outside theregular competition, and, most amazingly, by simply taking the exami-nations and failing them time after time! (One is reminded of the reportcard that gives a backward child at least a grade of “A for Effort.”) As aresult, holders of regular degrees constituted in 1046 about 57 percent ofthe civil service; in 1119, 45 percent; in 1191, 31 percent; and in 1213,27 percent. This declining rate of success was shown in the legislated(that is, decreed) pass-fail ratios as the number of candidates grew: 5 outof 10 were allowed to pass in 1023, 2 out of 10 in 1045, 1 out of 10 in1093, 1 out of 100 in 1156, and 1 out of 200 in 1275. As more com-peted, fewer passed.

Thus, becoming classically educated and taking the examinationshad become a certification of social status, whether or not one passedand whether or not one became an official. An exemplary communitystudy by Robert Hymes (1986) traces how growth of the scholar classfar outstripped the growth of state posts, leaving most examination de-gree-holders unable to enter the professional elite of the civil service.Among the 200,000 registered students, about half were candidates forexamination in competition for about 500 degrees that would let thementer the civil service of, say, 20,000 officials. Thus, the road to officewas blocked for most students. In this situation the growth of rural mar-ket communities with their need for local leadership attracted scholarsto their home localities. An elite family’s status in Southern Song beganto depend less on office-holding by a family member and more on thefamily’s wealth, power, and prestige in the local scene.

Hymes finds that the 73 families in his community’s elite on the aver-age maintained their elite status for about 140 years. He also finds“dense networks of connections”—familial, scholarly, and personal—joining official and commoner. Holding office in the civil service had be-come only one factor—and not a necessary one—in establishing elite sta-tus. In other words, the elite had broadened out to include local mag-nates, family heads, and informal public servants as well as ex-officials.The prerequisite for all was a classical education that qualified one cul-turally as a member of the class of shi—literati or “gentlemen.” Suchmen, by their Confucian training, felt a sense of responsibility to keepthe world materially and morally in order. They were guided by the creedof Neo-Confucianism, a philosophy of life that grew out of the debatesof scholar-officials in the Northern Song.

China’s Greatest Age: Northern and Southern Song 95

The Creation of Neo-Confucianism

Confucianism asserted standards of perfect, unselfish conduct, and sincebacksliders were as common in China as elsewhere, Confucianists peri-odically called for reform. Indeed, most dynastic founders came intopower to remedy evils. Once the examination system had taken hold andthe Song bureaucrats shared a training in the classics, reformers natu-rally arose among them. As we look at this recurrent aspect of Confu-cianism, two features may be noted: reform-advocating officials nor-mally hoped that the emperor would grant them power to make theirreforms. They assumed that the imperial autocracy was the origin of allpolitical power. They might strengthen it or use it but never sought to gobehind it and consider any other forms of authority in state and society.Second, would-be reformers regarded the great mass of the commonpeople as passive recipients of the benevolent despotism they sought toguide. They assumed merchants were perniciously addicted to greed andmilitary men to violence. The reformer’s job was to keep them in theirplace and secure a wise application of the unified central power repre-sented by the emperor. Viewed this way, reform was a high calling, ameans of preserving the imperial order and benefiting (while controlling)the mass of the people.

One early exemplar of the Confucianist reformer was Fan Zhong-yan, whose dedication was indicated in his maxim, “Before the rest ofthe world starts worrying, the scholar worries; after the rest of the worldrejoices, he rejoices.” As summarized by James T. C. Liu (in Fairbank1957), Fan when prime minister of Northern Song pushed reforms in thebureaucracy against favoritism, in the examinations for practicality ofsubject matter, in land-holding to give local officials a chance to rely onincome instead of squeeze, in defense to strengthen local militia, and thelike. His call for a broader school system got some result, and Fan is alsoknown as the founder of an exemplary “charitable estate” of land de-voted to supporting the education of his own lineage members.

The most famous and controversial Song reformer was Wang Anshi.Though his reforms have been variously regarded, the most recent anal-ysis sees him as a totalitarian-minded man ahead of his time. As a clas-sicist, he regarded China’s ancient sages down to Confucius as modelsof perfection whose intentions at least could still be followed. Wang’sNew Policies aimed to establish a “perfect, self-contained, and self-perpetuating system,” as Peter Bol (1992) phrases it. Backed by the em-peror from 1068, Wang bypassed the bureaucracy by getting his own

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people in office to pursue reforms to attack corruption and inequalitiesof wealth through vigorous state intervention in the economy. In effect,he tried to knock out the private sector, as we would now call it, bystrictly limiting land-holding and private wealth, and by organizing thepopulace into mutual-responsibility groups for the purpose of control-ling it. He would not tolerate opposition, which he considered immoral;in a properly unified state and society all men would have the same val-ues, all people would function at their level in the hierarchy, and nonewould have independent means to support others and so possibly sup-port dissent. There would be no loans from landlords to tenants; all peo-ple would depend entirely on the government. Meanwhile, the mutual-responsibility system would create community ties and would weakenthe power of the family.

Since Wang’s radical program attacked the basis of local familywealth that in turn produced examination candidates as well as localmanagers and merchants, Wang’s reforms after some years of experi-ment and turmoil were shot down. The alternative approach that gainedthe day was typified by Wang’s contemporary, the historian Sima Guang.Sima thought that imperial policy should not be guided by the perfecttheoretical models of antiquity but by the study of history. He thereforecompiled a most influential summary called A Comprehensive Mirrorfor Aid in Government, which chronicled dynastic rule from 403 bc toad 959. Sima tried to choose events that showed how the policies ofvarious kinds had worked out. This pragmatic approach urged the em-peror to study his predecessors and not rock the boat by seeking perfec-tion. The established order should be repaired, to be sure, but not trans-formed by a blueprint. Landlords and tenants were a natural result ofthe difference in human abilities. The key function of the ruler was theselection of talent, which was to be found among the Confucian-trainedliterati.

This conservative approach of keeping the imperial Confucian sys-tem going by always trying to remedy its defects and avoid its evils had along-term effect on Chinese government. Wang had aimed to transformthe state into an integrated social–political order led by political author-ity. It would make no distinction between government and society or be-tween the political and the moral. Sima, on the other hand, saw the stateas needing to be run by the literati as a separate social elite who camemainly from families with a tradition of official service and acquiredtheir learning for that purpose.

Neo-Confucianism, as the Jesuits later named it, took shape in the

China’s Greatest Age: Northern and Southern Song 97

Southern Song after the Ruzhen’s humiliating overthrow of the NorthernSong. The five main thinkers of the school had written during the earlierSong but were acclaimed only later when their various contributionswere synthesized by the impressive scholar-organizer Zhu Xi (1130–1200). His teaching was not just another version of the state cosmologybut provided a broad philosophical view of the universe and the individ-ual’s place in it. Like other Song writers, he decried the value of Sui-TangConfucianism and instead looked back to the Confucian classics of thelate Zhou and Han. From the ancient classics that had now grown tonumber thirteen in some 120 massive volumes, he selected the FourBooks as containing the essence of Confucianism. These were Confu-cius’ Analects (Lunyu); the book of Confucius’ principal successor, thephilosopher Mencius (ca. 372–289 bc); plus the Doctrine of the Mean(Zhongyong) and the Great Learning (Daxue), both of which formedparts of a certain classic.

Zhu Xi’s cosmology asserted a dualism, that the great immutableprinciples of form (li) give shape to the material stuff (qi) that, whenshaped by li, creates existent reality. Behind this duality, however, is theDao, the Way, the vast energizing force that pervades the universe and allthings in it. Only through disciplined self-cultivation could a man getsome understanding of the Way and in pursuit of it form his character.Song Neo-Confucianists believed that the true Way for the moral im-provement of the individual and the world had been set forth by Confu-cius and Mencius but had not been transmitted thereafter. Their aim fif-teen hundred years later was therefore to “repossess the Way.”

In effect Zhu Xi found a means of smuggling a needed element ofBuddhist transcendentalism into Confucianism. This new philosophy,both eminently rational and humane, was promoted by its adherents as achallenge to the court and the literati to be less selfish and live up to theirConfucian ideals. Through the writing and teaching of this critical-minded minority, Neo-Confucianism became the living faith of China’selite down to the twentieth century, one of the world’s most widespreadand influential systems of ethics.

In recent decades, after the collapse of the traditional society inwhich Neo-Confucianism was the principal faith among the elite, schol-ars of Chinese thought have again “repossessed the Way” through ap-preciation of Zhu Xi’s teachings. For example, a three-day “Workshopon Confucian Humanism” was held at the American Academy of Artsand Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1989. Confucian human-

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ism, needless to say, now includes the modern idea of human rights, al-though Neo-Confucianism was originally more concerned with the edu-cated elite, not the masses.

In the textual studies of Neo-Confucian writings conducted by W. T.de Bary and others, what stands out first of all is the relative autonomyof the scholar, who is called upon to exercise his own conscience and per-ceptiveness in his classical studies. One’s learning is “for the sake of one-self . . . to find the Way in oneself.” To study for oneself instead of forothers (one’s examiners) is not selfish but achieves self-cultivation. Theself-discipline of the scholar who “subdues himself” by arduous self-control is in the end for the public good.

Second, the primary aim is rational, moral learning, which is consid-ered far more important than art and literature. It supports the FiveRelationships (son to father, and so on) and so maintains the social or-der, avoiding polarization between individual and society. Instead ofradical individualism, de Bary (1983) suggests this may be called “Con-fucian personalism.” It is most fulfilled when one is “in communion withothers.”

To reach the populace, Zhu Xi used the vernacular and also advo-cated using the periodic local residents’ meeting known as the Commu-nity Compact (xiangyue). Although it came into general use only in theMing dynasty after 1368, this institution originated in a prototype estab-lished in 1077 by the Lü family. It consisted of a monthly assemblywhere food was eaten and a record of proceedings kept. One or twoheads were elected, and quite detailed regulations regarding behaviorwere adopted. Zhu Xi produced an amended version of the Lü family’sregulations that was even more detailed. It stressed hierarchy, for exam-ple by establishing five age-grades with rules for the conduct of all mem-bers of different categories. The aim was obviously to tell educated elitefamilies how to behave. Zhu assumed that the ordinary dress and majorrituals would be those of the elite. Seating by seniority would not applyto the non-elite, if they ventured to be present. Zhu Xi’s amendmentsalso contained detailed instructions on the way to greet a fellow compactmember, when to make calls on fellow compact members, how to invitethem to banquets, and how to conduct banquets—what to wear, whatname cards to use, and so on. What an organization man!

Through discussion in these Community Compact meetings, gooddeeds could be praised, errors corrected, and rites and customs pre-served. Zhu saw this institution as fusing together private and public

China’s Greatest Age: Northern and Southern Song 99

interests and as mediating between state and family. More than 700years later the content would differ but the methods of criticism and self-criticism would resurface under the People’s Republic. Both were exer-cises in applied morality.

For the scholar-elite, Zhu Xi promoted academies. He had contactwith about 24 such unofficial institutions and taught 20 students in hisown. The object of this teaching was the individual, who must learn howto achieve his own grasp of morality and bear responsibility for hismoral self-cultivation in his effort to become a sage. Zhu hoped thatproper government, finally, would rest upon “universal self-disciplinebeginning with the ruler’s self-rectification.” This could be aided byscholars’ lectures to him (as part of court ritual) as well as by the subse-quent judgments of the court historians. In discussing moral questions,minister and emperor should talk as equals.

Zhu Xi was a great editor of texts and writer of commentaries, buthis main contribution was to raise the flag of Confucian moral righ-teousness and nail it to the mast. As Denis Twitchett (in CHOC 3) re-marks, the Song era saw “the gradual change of China into an ideolog-ical society with a strong sense of orthodoxy.” James T. C. Liu (1988)calls the Neo-Confucians “moral transcendentalists,” although in time,he says, “neotraditionalism permeated the culture so completely that itlost the power to transform.” The historical role of Zhu Xi and Neo-Confucianism is still in dispute: seven centuries of writings facilitateargument. One way in which Neo-Confucianism may have retardedChina’s modern growth was by its disesteem of trade. The attitude wasthat merchants did not produce things but only moved them around insearch of profit, which was an ignoble motive.

We can better understand why there is continuing controversy overthe meaning of translated Chinese texts if we look at the classical schol-ars’ way of writing. As Joseph Needham has pointed out, they saw theworld as a flux of concrete phenomena worth careful observation andchronological listing, but they did not make much use of analytic catego-ries. Logical system building was not their forte. “Even in the case ofsuch a giant as Chu Hsi [Zhu Xi]” says Derk Bodde (1991), “we have toderive his system from a bewildering assortment of recorded sayings,commentaries on the classics, letters to friends and other scattered docu-ments. There is no single summa written by the master himself” (unlikehis European contemporary Thomas Aquinas).

Writers of classical Chinese were by training compilers more than

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composers. Having memorized vast sequences of the classics and histo-ries, they constructed their own works by extensive cut-and-paste repli-cation of phrases and passages from those sources. This unacknowl-edged quotation today would be called plagiarism, but the Chinesewriters from early times saw themselves as preservers of the record morethan its creators.

Translation problems arose from the absence in Chinese grammar ofparticularities such as: singular and plural numbers; past, present, or fu-ture tenses; gender and case inflections showing relationships; as well asa means of showing the derivation of some words from others (except asmight be indicated by radical and phonetic parts of characters). On theother hand, a reader can be guided to meaning by the rhythm, cadence,and balance of successive groups of characters, as I found during twenty-five years of teaching the translation of Qing official documents.

Another problem with classical Chinese was that there was little wayto generalize or express abstractions—for example, to express the ideaof being or existence as a nontemporal and nonactive abstraction. Therewas little use of theoretical hypotheses or conditions contrary to fact,nor of inductive and deductive logical reasoning. All this made it difficultto take novel foreign ideas into the writing system. In the end, this mayhave made it hard to develop the theoretical aspects of science. The best-known term problem in English translation was the phrase gewu (ke-wu). Used by Zhu Xi and translated as “the investigation of things,” itseemed to some modern scholars to call for scientific study of nature, butthe term meant in fact, as Kwang-Ching Liu explains (1990), “acquisi-tion of moral knowledge through the careful study of the classics and thescrutiny of the principles behind history and daily life.”

The sources of imprecision just noted plus the constant growth of themodern philosophers’ conceptual repertoire make Neo-Confucianismstill a fertile field for new insights and interests.

Formation of Gentry Society

As China grew larger during the Song, a social structure became estab-lished that lasted in its general outline until the twentieth century.Upper-class families dominated Chinese life so much that sociologistshave called China a gentry state, and even ordinary people may speakof the “scholar-gentry” as a class. But do not let yourself be remindedof the landed gentry, roast beef, and fox hunts of merry England, for

China’s Greatest Age: Northern and Southern Song 101

“gentry” in the case of China is a technical term with two principalmeanings and an inner ambiguity. It requires special handling. The char-acterization that follows is derived mainly from the Qing era (1644–1912), which has been the most fully studied. In its institutional arrange-ments, China’s gentry society underwent a long and varied evolution,and its immense diversity is now being brought out by studies of localelites. But in order to appreciate diversity one must first acquire a generalimage, a China-wide model, as pioneer researchers tried to do.

Non-Marxists generally agree, first of all, that the gentry were not amere feudal landlord class, because Chinese society was not organized inany system that can be called feudalism, except possibly before 221 bc.While “feudal” may still be a useful swear word, it has little value as aWestern term applied to China. For instance, an essential characteristicof feudalism, as the word has been used with reference to medieval Eu-rope and Japan, has been the inalienability of the land. The medieval serfwas bound to the land and could not himself either leave it or dispose ofit, whereas the Chinese peasant, both in law and in fact, has been free, ifhe had the means, to purchase land. In fact, it was the buying and sellingof land in small and so not-too-costly plots that probably contributed tothe extreme parcelization of cultivable land, with its many small strips offields. At any rate, not calling the Chinese farmer’s situation in life “feu-dal” by no means signifies that it was less miserable. But if the word is toretain a valid meaning for European and other institutions to which itwas originally applied, it cannot be very meaningful in a general Chinesecontext.

The Chinese gentry, as their institutions developed from the Songperiod down to the Qing, can be understood only in a dual economicand political sense as connected both with land-holding and withdegree-holding. A narrower definition would assign gentry status tothose individuals who held degrees gained normally by passing exami-nations, or sometimes by recommendation or purchase. This narrowdefinition has the merit of being concrete and even quantifiable—thegentry in this sense were scholarly degree-holders, as officially listed, andnot dependent for their status on economic resources, particularly land-owning, which is so hard to quantify from the historical record. More-over, the million or so men who held the first-level degree under theQing must be seen, as P. T. Ho suggests, as “lower gentry,” barely re-moved from commoner status, whereas the small elite who after furtheryears of effort went on up through the three rigorous week-long exami-

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nation rounds at the provincial capital and at Beijing formed an “uppergentry” of great influence.

Gentry society was based on familism, which was dominated by themen within it. Women were inferior creatures, relatively expendable,who were usually married into other families. The gentry’s aim was topreserve the family’s elite status by training sons to become scholars anddegree-holders. Under Neo-Confucianism the training of a youngscholar from childhood was strong on discipline and perhaps shorter onaffection. Self-control and unselfish hard mental work tended to crowdout frivolity, sexuality, muscular development, and even spontaneity.Testimony collected by Jon Saari from late Qing scholars paints a rathergrim picture of education in gentry families.

The gentry as individuals served as public functionaries, playing po-litical and administrative roles. Yet they were also enmeshed in familyrelations, on which they could rely for material sustenance. This politi-cal–economic dualism has led many writers to define the term gentrymore broadly, as a group of families rather than of individual degree-holders only. Both the narrow and the broad definitions must be kept inmind.

The gentry families came to live chiefly in the walled towns, not inthe smaller villages. They constituted a stratum of landowning familiesthat intervened between the earth-bound masses of the peasantry, on theone hand, and the officials and merchants who formed a fluid matrix ofoverall administrative and commercial activity, on the other. They werethe local elite, who carried on certain functions connected with thefarming populace below and certain others connected with the officialsabove. In the agricultural community, the gentry included the big land-owners, whose high-walled compounds enclosing many courtyards, re-plete with servants and hoarded supplies and proof against bandits,dominated the old market towns. This was the type of “big house” cele-brated in both Chinese and Western novels of China. As a local rulingclass, the gentry managed the system of customary and legal rights to theuse of land. These ordinarily were so diverse and complicated that de-cided managerial ability was required to keep them straight. The differ-ent ownerships of subsoil and topsoil, the varied tenant relationships,loans, mortgages, customary payments, and obligations on both sidesformed such a complex within the community that many farmers couldhardly say whether they were themselves mainly small landowners ormainly tenants.

China’s Greatest Age: Northern and Southern Song 103

For the officials of the old China the gentry families were one me-dium through whom tax collections were effected. By this same token,they were, for the peasantry, intermediaries who could palliate officialoppression while carrying it out. The local official dealt with flood andfamine, incipient rebellion, a multitude of minor criminal cases, andprojects for public works all through the help of the gentry community.It was the buffer between populace and officialdom.

If a poor man could pass the examinations, he could become a mem-ber of the gentry in the narrow sense used above, even though he was notconnected with a land-owning family. Nevertheless, the degree-holdingindividuals were in most cases connected with land-owning families, andland-owning families had degree-holding members. In general, the gen-try families were the out-of-office reservoir of the degree-holders and thebureaucracy. The big families were the seedbed in which office-holderswere nurtured and the haven to which dismissed or worn-out bureau-crats could return.

In each community the gentry had many important functions of apublic nature (gong as opposed to official guan or private si). To general-ize about such activities by millions of people over several centuries, wewould do well to set up two views at either end of a continuum betweenidealistic and realistic. In the idealistic view that comes down to usthrough the gazetteers and other writings, the gentry-elite were movedby a sense of dutiful commitment to community leadership. So inspired,they raised funds for and supervised public works—the building and up-keep of irrigation and communication facilities such as canals, dikes,dams, roads, bridges, ferries. They participated in the Community Com-pact assemblies and they supported Confucian institutions and morals—establishing and maintaining academies, schools, shrines, and local tem-ples of Confucius, publishing books, especially local histories or gazet-teers, and issuing moral homilies and exhortations to the populace. Intime of peace, they set the tone of public life. In time of disorder, they or-ganized and commanded militia defense forces. From day to day they ar-bitrated disputes informally, in place of the continual litigation that goeson in any American town. The gentry also set up charities for their clanmembers and handled trust funds to help the community. Obviously, noone person could do all of these things. They are listed here to show thewide range of opportunities for gentry action.

Another function was to make contributions at official request tohelp the state, especially in time of war, flood, or famine. So useful werethese contributions that most dynasties got revenue by selling the lowest

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literary degrees, thus admitting many persons to degree-holding statuswithout examination. While this abused the system, it also let men ofwealth rise for a price into the upper class and share the gentry privi-leges, such as contact with officials and immunity from corporal punish-ment.

The realistic view of the gentry’s public functions begins with evi-dence from Song times that they might supervise the local periodic mar-kets and play a role in the allocation and collection of taxes—in otherwords, undertake duties that officials had performed down to the earlyTang. By Prasenjit Duara (1988) and others this has been seen as part ofthe gentry’s “brokerage” function in local administration. It began withtrade but was extended also into land tax collection, where it becametax-farming (promising to remit revenue quotas while keeping above-quota collections as personal fees).

In trade, the wholesale brokers (yahang) were middlemen who per-formed facilitative services for a fee. For example, an itinerant merchantwould need reliable local assistance in dealing with dialects, customs,currency, porters, inns, markets, and the like. A local broker of this sort,probably a man of means, might be licensed by the state and might se-cure fees for his services, such as warehousing of goods, lodging, andtransportation, as well as record-keeping for the state. He might be awell-to-do merchant himself. The wealthy salt merchants of Yangzhou,and the Cohong merchants in foreign staple trade at Guangzhou, wereonly the most famous among the innumerable brokers all over Chinawho were licensed by and acted for the government. Since the gentry-elite were “licensed” by receiving their examination degrees, they can beseen as a specific subclass of “brokers” in the broad sense. Thus, whenthe gentry as private persons were used to oversee public activities in thefield of taxation as well as public works, they might also receive fees orcommissions as part of their income. As one might expect, their commu-nity leadership was not pure philanthropy but paid its way. This it con-tinued to do as the Late Imperial gentry, having outgrown the availableresources of land that could generate income, became more active in thepublic sphere as gentry managers, handlers of welfare institutions, andgentry merchants.

The local leadership and management functions of the gentry fami-lies explain why officialdom did not penetrate lower down into Chinesesociety. Or to put it the other way in terms of origin, the gentry hademerged to fill a vacuum between the early bureaucratic state and theChinese peasant society that in the Song was outgrowing its control.

China’s Greatest Age: Northern and Southern Song 105

City studies inspired by G. W. Skinner (1977) have noted how in thetwo millennia from early Han to mid-Qing the territorial administrativestructure of successive dynasties failed to grow, while the Chinese pop-ulation increased sixfold. The basic-level counties or sub-prefectures(xian) totaled in the heyday of those regimes 1,180 in Han, 1,255 in Sui,1,235 in Tang, 1,230 in Song, 1,115 in Yuan, 1,385 in Ming, and 1,360in Qing, while the empire’s population may have totaled 60 million inad 80, 80 million in 875, 110 million in 1190, 200 million in 1585, and425 million in 1850. Thus a county magistrate was responsible for50,000 people in late Han but for 300,000 in late Qing. Skinner submitsthat the Qing administration simply could not have functioned with asmany as 8,500 counties managed from Beijing. Instead of building upmechanically to such an unmanageable level, the Chinese state as it wasexpanding consolidated the counties in populous core areas while it cre-ated new counties on the peripheries. Meanwhile, it reduced its local ad-ministrative functions. For example, after the Tang the officially admin-istered city marketing system was given up, the government stopped its“minute regulation of commercial affairs” generally, and it steadilywithdrew from official involvement in local affairs. In its place came therise of the gentry and their local functions.

In this way the imperial government from Song times on remained asuperstructure of about the same nominal size. For example, there wereabout 18,000 official posts listed in the Tang, 20,000 in the Song, and20,000 in the Qing. (Tables of organization were inherited.) The govern-ment did not directly enter the villages because it rested upon the gentryas its foundation. The many public functions of the local degree-holdersmade a platform under the imperial bureaucracy and let the officialsmove about with remarkable fluidity and seeming independence of localroots. Actually, the emperor’s appointee to any magistracy could admin-ister it only with the cooperation of the gentry in that area. All in all, in acountry of over 400 million people, a century ago, there were fewer than20,000 regular imperial officials but roughly 1.25 million scholarly de-gree-holders.

Continued superiority of the gentry families over the peasant masswas assured not only by landowning but also by the fact that the gentrymainly produced the “scholar-gentlemen” (shi) who carried on the greattraditions of calligraphy, painting, literature, philosophy, and officiallife. If we stand back and look at China’s gentry society in comparisonwith Europe until recent times, we cannot avoid being impressed. In thegreatly changed circumstances of today, the belief system of the Neo-

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Confucianists can again, in adjusted form, command respect and evenallegiance. Its central message of the overriding need for self-discipline inthe service of social order rings a welcome bell for many listeners.

The special Chinese need for order (and therefore authority) is expli-cated by social anthropologists like Patricia Ebrey (1984), whose studyof a Song official’s Precepts for Social Life forms a salubrious obligato tothe philosopher’s teaching. Under 200 topics the author advises how toget along with relatives, how to improve personal conduct, and how tomanage a big family’s affairs. Certain realities are at once thrust upon us:first of all, the extraordinary complexity of interpersonal relations whenrules govern the roles assigned by status in kinship, age, sex, and law. Weare reminded of the integral importance of servants, as well as concu-bines, maids, and others, in the “ministate” of the big household. Howto beat a servant (don’t do it yourself), how to buy a slave girl, how todiscipline a son—the reader is offered practical and sensible guidanceworthy of a Chesterfield or an Ann Landers. “The general rule withmaids and concubines is to be careful of what is begun and take precau-tions concerning how things may end.”

Most striking overall is the high degree of control to which everyone,including the master, is subjected. This is exerted not least by the ethicalopinion of the group. Unlike the philosopher’s ideal of absolute adher-ence to principle, the master of a gentry household is advised to thinkahead, consider all sides, and be ever ready to compromise.

China’s Greatest Age: Northern and Southern Song 107

5The Paradox of Song China

and Inner Asia

The Symbiosis of Wen and Wu

While Chinese creations in technology, government, art, thought, socialorganization, and the like all reached a high point in the Song, so did theinvasion and takeover of power within China by the non-Chinese tribalpeoples of Inner Asia. It seems a startling paradox that at its acme of civ-ilization, China should be conquered by outsiders. The mystery deepensif we note that this conquest did not happen all at once but in fact beganin 907 before the Song dynasty was set up and continued in fits andstarts over three and a half centuries until 1279. So long-drawn-out a de-velopment can hardly be called accidental. What long-term trends werebehind it?

One element of Song weakness was the buildup of a bureaucratismburdened with the costs of defense. Paul J. Smith (1991) even declaresthat “by the Southern Song the state had become parasitic.” Behind thislay the Confucian disdain for the military, which classed them evenlower than merchants. So deep-laid was this dislike that the militarywere excluded from the standard Confucian list of the four occupationalgroups or classes—scholar (shi), farmer (nong), artisan (gong), and mer-chant (shang). Derk Bodde (1991) tells us that this four-part division ofsociety was never put forward by Confucius or Mencius but first ap-peared probably among Legalist writers of late Zhou and early Han. Fortwenty-one centuries since that time, however, the four classes have beenstandard fare in the lore about China.

Since military power founded dynasties and maintained them, builtempires and defended them, there was usually a big military establish-ment. It is easy to argue that warriors—the military—were also an oc-

108

cupational group or class in China. Some have suggested that the shi re-corded on Shang oracle bones were at that time “warriors” or later“servitors.” Plainly the military were not listed as a fifth occupationalclass because the Confucian wenren (literati) who did the listing re-garded practitioners of wu (violence) as their mortal enemies, incarnat-ing the very evil of brute force that it was the Confucians’ moral duty toextirpate in the cause of civilized behavior. To list them as a fifth profes-sion would seem to condone them, legitimize their existence, give themmoral stature.

A Confucianist might say further that the use of military force was al-ways one of the measures available to the scholar-official ruling elite.One entered that class by becoming a scholar, then an official; an officialmight command troops. Scholar-generals often wielded military power.The troops were at first merely recruited or conscripted farmers. Theonly discrete military “class,” a scholar might tell us, consisted of surren-dered bandits, mercenary cavalry, drill sergeants, bowmen, or the like, amiscellaneous group, far down in the official system. The military exam-inations, rankings, and posts, though parallel to the civil ones, were ex-plicitly disesteemed by the literati. As practitioners of violence, soldierswere part of the emperor’s inner court, beyond control by the wen-com-plex of the bureaucracy. Eunuchs sometimes commanded troops.

Why have China scholars for 2,000 years gone along with this Con-fucian refusal to accept the military establishment as an occupationalclass? Professional military forces turn up all the time in Chinese history.Our refusal to look at them as a military class suggests that China schol-ars are still under the sway of the great Confucian myth of the state, gov-ernment by virtue. Looked at from another angle, we see here one of theglories of old China, a reasoned pacifism, and one of its deepest weak-nesses, an inability to avoid alien conquest from the grasslands.

Judging by the examination questions, says Peter Bol (1992), theSouthern Song were quite conscious of their military problems, but theynevertheless relied upon mercenary troops from the dregs of society,who were poorly disciplined and could not be entrusted with decision-making powers even at the command level. Civilian domination of themilitary was part of the ruling elite’s control of the state, but it left thestate militarily weak. In size and military resources the Song more thanequaled the Jin (and later the Mongols), but the Song civilian official-dom had little taste for violence. Charles Hucker (1975) and others con-clude that the Chinese portion of the China–Inner Asia empire had be-come so civilized they lacked the martial values and sense of ethnicity

The Paradox of Song China and Inner Asia 109

(as opposed to culturalism) with which to fight off the invaders, whoordinarily promised to rule in the Chinese fashion. In effect, the Confu-cianists were specially fitted for administration, not for holding ultimateimperial power. After all, they had been trained to be civil servants in aliteral sense, and they could foresee that resort to violence would breedmore violence. Yet when all this has been said, the fact remains that theSouthern Song held the all-conquering Mongols at bay for 45 years, al-most two generations.

Perspective on Chinese rulers’ Inner Asian relations is provided byThomas J. Barfield’s chronological account of the succession of tribalpeoples in the grasslands. He concludes that in times of strength the Chi-nese connection with a tribal power fostered its hegemony in Inner Asia.Thus the Han, when strong, saw the long-continued Inner Asian domi-nance of the Xiongnu, and the Tang of the Uighur Turks. A balancedview of such relations is hampered by the evidence coming mainly fromthe Chinese side.

Lack of contact with Inner Asia handicapped the Song by making itharder to secure horses for warfare. The Qin-Han and Sui-Tang dynas-ties had all been in touch, through traders and envoys, with the powerconfigurations of Inner Asia. They were adept at finding allies and usingsome peoples against others. The ineptitude of Song diplomacy—as intheir initially helping the Ruzhen against the Qidan, only to be defeatedlater by the Ruzhen, and then helping the Mongols against the Ruzhen,only to be overrun later by the Mongols—was presumably due to theirlack of direct contact with and only marginal participation in the lifeof Inner Asia. Song China after all coexisted with several peripheralstates—Vietnam on the south, Nan Zhao on the southwest, Tibet, theTangut Western Xia (Xixia) state on the northwest, and the Qidan Liaoon the north—so that China was in fact, as Morris Rossabi (1983) putsit, diplomatically “among equals.” The Ming claims of universal superi-ority would be asserted only after the Mongol empire of the thirteenthcentury had set an example.

From the Song period on, one sees within the imperial Confucianpolity a civil administrative complex and a military power-holding com-plex ruling in tandem. Both were necessary to govern the state. The civilcomplex includes the examination degree-holders and scholar-officialcivil servants trained in Neo-Confucianism, together with the local eliteor gentry class that produced them. The second and less studied com-ponent, the military complex, consists of the emperor, his family, andtheir nobility, army striking forces and garrison troops, plus the palace

110 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

eunuchs and security apparatus (as we would now call it) that were allespecially attached to the emperor.

Perhaps we can discern a certain division of functions between thesetwo complexes. As suggested above, imperial autocracy was a necessarycounterpart to bureaucratic administration. It could be a nonroutinized,autonomous source of innovation or sudden intervention. It was natu-rally unpredictable, often ruthless, potentially disastrous. In the well-or-ganized Confucian order the emperor functioned both at the apex of thestructure and yet at the same time represented in its highest form theprinciple of violent disorder. He was, for one thing, the great execu-tioner.

Almost from the beginning the government of China had been a co-dominion of these two functions. Inner Asian tribal warriors had con-tributed to the imperial power-holding function through a continuingpattern of pastoral nomadic militarism. The other function was per-formed by Chinese Confucian civil administrators. Dynasties were mili-tarist in origin, but once established, their bureaucracies were civilian.The ideology of each was suited to its needs. The men of violence whofounded dynasties believed in the Mandate of Heaven, which was con-firmed as theirs when resistance ceased. The scholar-administrators whostaffed their bureaucracies looked down upon men of violence, who bytheir recourse to force (wu) showed themselves lacking in cultivation(wen). The central myth of the Confucian state was that the ruler’s exem-plary and benevolent conduct manifesting his personal virtue (de) drewthe people to him and gave him the Mandate. This could be said as longas rebels could be suppressed, preferably by decapitation.

The great weakness in this Confucian myth of the state was that theruler, if he wanted to keep on ruling, could never dispense with his mili-taristic prerogative of decapitating whom he pleased pour raison d’etat,to preserve the dynasty. Thus, government under imperial Confucianismwas conducted by bureaucrats who served under an autocrat, and theydepended upon one another. In practice, a balance was often reached be-tween wen and wu when Confucian-trained territorial administratorswere allowed to command troops to destroy rebels. Many scholars spe-cialized in military matters; some became able generals. Yet all heldpower only at the whim of the emperor.

While the Chinese under the Song perfected the classical examina-tion system as the device for training obedient bureaucrats, the con-temporary non-Chinese invaders of China—the Qidan (Liao dynasty),Ruzhen (Jin dynasty), and Mongols (Yuan dynasty)—proved the utility

The Paradox of Song China and Inner Asia 111

of militarism as the source of imperial power. The ancient adage thatChina could be ruled only in the Confucian civil fashion is only half true.Imperial Confucianism could function only as long as the ruling dynastycommanded enough violence to destroy rebels, and this type of powerwas the specialty of the non-Chinese tribesmen of Inner Asia. Thus onemay discern a specialization of functions historically between Chineseadministrators and Inner Asian power-holders such that Inner Asiannon-Chinese participated increasingly in the imperial government andsometimes took it over.

The Rise of Non-Chinese Rule over China

Let us look back a moment at the rise of this Inner Asian component ofChina’s polity. The Zhou and the Qin dynasties in Northwest China hadderived some of their military vigor from contacts with the northerntribes and intermarriage, as had the Sui and Tang in their turn. It wasonly a further step for northern tribal invaders to take over part of Chinadirectly and rule it with Chinese help but through a non-Chinese dynas-tic house. This pattern of dual Sino-nomadic government was visiblefrom the fourth century ad in southern Manchuria. It would reach itspeak in the complete control that followed the Mongol and Manchuconquests.

Rule by cultural aliens posed an acute problem in Chinese politicaltheory. From earliest times under the kings of Shang, the culture (includ-ing the Chinese writing system, use of ritual bronzes, shamanist consul-tation with the ancestors, and the ruler’s ritual observances toward thepowers of nature) had been part and parcel of the polity. The early tenetof sinocentrism was that the superiority of Zhongguo, the Central State,in wen (culture and civilization) would inevitably dominate the meremilitary violence (wu) of the Inner Asian tribes. This could be done byrequiring that the non-Chinese tribal chieftains acknowledge China’s su-periority by bowing down before the emperor, who held Heaven’s Man-date to govern China and whose magnificent benevolence and compas-sion naturally attracted outsiders to come and also be transformed bycivilization.

In the absence of contact with any other state of equal culturalachievement, Han and Tang foreign policy thus became based on thetribute system, a reciprocal foreign relationship between superior and in-ferior comparable to the Three Bonds that kept China’s domestic societyin order. Since presentation of tribute offerings was normally recip-

112 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

rocated by lavish gifts from the emperor, accepting China’s supremacywas materially worthwhile. In addition, the tribute system early becamethe institutional setting and indeed cover for foreign trade.

With the demise of the Tang central power, the ten or so successorstates of tenth-century China were in a multistate polity a bit like that ofthe Warring States era before the Qin unification. In their relations withone another, the rulers fell back on some practices of those times, such asnegotiating through envoys, although their multistate relations werenow focused on the question of who would revive the central imperialpower. But in this competition, non-Chinese rulers on the periphery ofChina now took part. When non-Chinese for the first time began to gov-ern a Chinese populace in North China, the old amalgam of polity andculture had split apart. The Chinese world order set up by the Han andrevived by the Tang as a system of thought and institutions to handle for-eign relations had now collapsed.

Alien rule began with the rise of the Qidan (a Mongolian people fromwhom North China got the medieval European name Cathay), whomaintained an empire for more than two centuries (916–1125) overparts of North China, Manchuria, and Mongolia. In origin the Qidanhad been only seminomadic, relying on agricultural crops, especiallymillet, as well as on sheep, horses, and pigs. They rose to power by strad-dling the frontier between steppe and sown, where they could combinethe military force of nomad cavalry with the economic sustenance ofpeasant tillage. The federation of tribes that founded the empire was ledby the imperial Yelü clan, who prolonged their rule by adopting the Chi-nese institution of hereditary monarchy and many of the forms of Con-fucian government. As studied by K. A. Wittfogel (Wittfogel and Feng,1949) and others, the Liao empire, as it called itself, was a dual state: itssouthern section encompassed 16 prefectures of North China (out ofsome 300 in the Song empire; see Map 13), and these were governed inthe Chinese style through institutions of civil bureaucracy inherited fromthe Tang. The much larger northern part of the Qidan domain was gov-erned by men on horseback as before. Thus, while the Qidan emperor’sofficials for the southern area were being recruited through a classicalexamination system, the mounted archers of the north were being mobi-lized and trained to serve in his elite guard, the ordo (from which derivesour term “horde”). Eventually a dozen ordos were set up in separate ar-eas, totaling perhaps 600,000 horsemen, a mobile shock force held in re-serve.

This dual state rested on a population of perhaps 4 million, which

The Paradox of Song China and Inner Asia 113

made it somewhere about 1/15th the size of the Song empire to thesouth. Yet the Liao cavalry had such striking power that the Song finallypaid them annual subsidies to keep peace on the border. The NorthernSong emperors at Kaifeng bought off the Qidan by concluding treatiesin 1005 and 1042 under which the Song accepted inferior status andpaid an annual tribute. In 1044 similar terms were accepted in a treatywith the Tangut rulers of the Western Xia (Xixia) state in northwestChina. For all its wealth and progress, the larger Song empire lackedthe determination more perhaps than the means to conquer these bar-barians.

114 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

13. The Northern Song and Liao (Qidan) Empires, ca. 1000

It is a striking fact, as Needham tells us, that gunpowder had beencreated by Chinese alchemists in the ninth century. Against the nomadinvaders the Chinese used both simple bombs and fire-lances. This greatbreakthrough in military technology evidently had little significance forthe classically trained Song statesmen. Here we find Confucianism slowto mount on the back of technology.

In 1125 the Liao state was taken over by the Tungusic Ruzhen(Jurchen) tribes from northern Manchuria, who took the dynastic nameof Jin or “Golden.” At first the pattern of dual government was contin-ued. Like the Liao, the Sino-nomadic Jin empire could combine thehorses of the grasslands and the grain of North China to mount militaryassaults and force the Song southward. From their founding in 960 theSong had had their capital at Kaifeng on the Yellow River at the head ofthe Grand Canal, but by 1126 the Jin attacks forced them to abandonNorth China. Song resistance to the Ruzhen Jin attacks was hamstrungby controversy over whether to fight or to appease the invaders. Theissue came to a head in 1141 when the chief councilor and negotiator(Qin Gui) arranged the murder of a leading fighter, General Yue Fei,who was thereby immortalized as a model for later Chinese patriots.In 1142 the Southern Song by treaty ceded North China down to theHuai River and agreed to be a vassal of and pay annual tribute to theJin. The North China plain combined with the lower Yangzi region hadbeen the heartland of Chinese life, so that now for the first time a con-siderable segment of the Chinese people came under non-Chinese rule(see Map 14).

Once they had conquered North China, the Ruzhen of the Jin dy-nasty (1115–1234) totaled about 6 million in a North China populationof about 45 million. The Qidan remaining from the Liao dynasty of916–1125 may have made up about 4 million out of this total, so thatthe Ruzhen had to govern some 35 million Chinese subjects. For thistask they relied at first on sinicized Qidan and on Han Chinese who hadserved the Qidan. They also recruited officials from the pool of Chinesegovernment clerks. But the Ruzhen emperors soon found they had tosustain their central power in competition with their own Ruzhen triballeaders, military aristocrats from the north who expected to controllands and peoples they had conquered. In self-defense the Jin emperorbuilt up an imperial bureaucracy patterned on Confucian ways of gov-ernment. Finding they needed classically trained examination candidatesto staff this bureaucracy, in the last quarter of the twelfth century the Jinrulers at Kaifeng set up Ruzhen-language schools, translated the Con-

The Paradox of Song China and Inner Asia 115

116 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

14. Southern Song and Jin (Ruzhen) Empires in 1142

fucian classics into Ruzhen, and set examinations for Ruzhen candi-dates. The major flow of recruits, however, came from the Han Chinese:in the quarter century after 1185 the expanded Chinese examinationsproduced at least 5,000 metropolitan (jinshi) degree-holders. Also im-portant, as Peter Bol points out, was the spread of Confucian culture:“Tens of thousands acquired an examination education.”

“Sinicization,” however, is an inadequate description of what theRuzhen rulers were seeking. Instead of “becoming Chinese,” they were,on the contrary, developing their role as supporters of civil order (wenzhi, “civilization”). Their role had a supra-ethnic value as the means bywhich Chinese subjects and nomadic invaders could live together inpeace and prosperity under a universal empire. In other words, China’soriginal “culturalism” (the “Confucian” way of thought and action)could be promoted by non-Chinese rulers, who maintained their ethnicidentity while functioning as rulers over China and Inner Asia. TheRuzhen thus developed the theoretical foundation for the multiethnicempire that would be brought to its highest point under their eventualdescendants, the Manchus.

In claiming their dynasty’s “legitimate succession” to its predecessors(zhengtong), the Jin rulers were aided by their adoption of traditionalcentralizing institutions and also by their performance of the appro-priate imperial rituals. As outlined by Hok-lam Chan (1984), these rit-uals began with the reverence for the forces of nature and especially forthe ancestors as practiced by the Shang; they maintained the belief inthe Mandate of Heaven asserted by the Zhou along with the doctrine ofbenevolent rule by sage kings as propounded by Mencius and inter-preted by the Confucian scholar-elite. The correlative cosmology of Ear-lier Han, centered around the cyclical theory of the Five Phases, was alsocontinued. This theory, postulating correspondence between the orderof nature and human events, had stressed the importance of the phase,color, and so forth to be associated with, and so legitimate, each dy-nasty. Han Wudi, for example, chose the Earth phase for Han plus thecolor yellow, the number 5, and so on. Later dynasties, small and big,continued to assert their legitimacy according to the Five Phases cycle—for example, Tang claimed its affinity to Earth in succession to Han,while the Song claimed Fire and the color red as its symbols of legiti-macy. The Jin rulers therefore claimed the Earth power in succession tothe Song.

The Ruzhen had moved their capital from Ha’erbin to Beijing in

The Paradox of Song China and Inner Asia 117

1153 and then to the Northern Song site at Kaifeng in 1161. Some em-perors achieved new heights of brutality by beginning a regular practiceof having top officials flogged in open court in front of the emperor, quitecontrary to the classic Chinese exemption of literati and especially of-ficials from corporal punishment. Some executed hundreds of kinsmen,officials, and military leaders, trying to forestall opposition.

One of the last Jin emperors, on the other hand, has come down inhistory as a model Confucian ruler. In his era occurred a cultural revivalled by Chinese Confucianist subjects of the Jin state morally committedto supporting the inherited culture of civil order. Between them, theConfucianist-minded Ruzhen rulers and their Chinese literati officialsasserted that a non-Chinese dynasty could indeed support a “Chinese”(that is, Chinese and Inner Asian) cultural tradition. In any case, the Jindynasty’s legitimacy was formally established when its official historywas written under the Mongol Yuan dynasty.

The advent of Neo-Confucianism in Southern Song set up broadercriteria for dynastic legitimacy. Such factors as victory in warfare, gov-ernment procedures like the promotion of an imperial cult of ancestors,plus rituals and symbols, scholastic theories, control by intimidation,and mutual surveillance and popular (or elitist) acceptance all figured inlegitimation in China much as they did in West Asia and Europe. Butthanks mainly to Confucian scholarship, the Chinese criteria were farmore unified and homogeneous. To some degree the Song philosophers’stress on the universality of their cosmology and values accommodatedthe non-Chinese invaders. On the level of political theory China wasthereafter prepared, whenever the need arose, to accept government bytribal peoples of Inner Asia.

In the final analysis, the legitimation of non-Chinese rule in Chinaconsisted of the fact that it could not be avoided and so had to be ratio-nalized. As Korean observers would later find, in China under the Man-chus Chinese scholars might hate Qing rule but would leave no record ofthe fact. This inner hatred and outer acceptance was like that of mostvictims of despotism then and now. It required that one practice self-con-trol and a sort of hypocrisy, a “feigned compliance,” outwardly accept-ing while inwardly denying the validity of the ruling power. For mostpeople this could lead to a seeming indifference to politics as none oftheir business, just as the rulers claimed.

Looking ahead, we may posit that the dynasties of conquest—Liao,Jin, and Yuan—form a connected sequence of incursions of Inner Asianmilitary power into China and must be viewed as a single, if sporadic

118 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

process. Liao lasted longest but occupied only a strip on the northernedge of North China. Yuan occupied all China but was the briefest. Thisputs the Jin dynasty in the strategic position of having learned how alieninvaders could govern China’s heartland, the North China plain, by co-opting Chinese personnel inherited from the defeated Northern Song. Jinrule in China seems comparatively neglected, overshadowed by theMongol conquest.

China in the Mongol Empire

The Mongol conquest was a forerunner to the Western imperialism ofnineteenth-century China, when Chinese society was again laid open tothe culture shock of discordant foreign influences. The Yuan dynasty(1279–1368), in other words, must be examined as the seedbed of im-portant phenomena that we see in the Ming and Qing (1368–1644–1912).

As a first step we must note the dramatic achievements of the Mon-golian people in the creation of their great empire. The Mongol warmachine was the culmination of a millennium of the mounted archer’smilitary prowess all across Eurasia. After Chinggis Khan united thetribes in 1206 and his Mongol hordes erupted in all directions, his sonsand grandsons ruled four khanates respectively in Persia, South Russia,Central Asia, and China (see Table 3). As conquerors, the Mongols’ fe-rocious destructiveness gave them a bad reputation, especially among

The Paradox of Song China and Inner Asia 119

Table 3. Divisions of the Mongol empire underChinggis Khan’s successors

Great Khan (East Asia): Ogodei (third son of Chinggis), 1229–1241; Mongke(Mangu),* 1251–1259; Khubilai,* 1260–1294 (ruled over all China after 1279);Mongols expelled from China by Ming, 1368

Khanate of Chaghadai (Djaghatai, in Turkestan): Chaghadai (second son ofChinggis), 1227–1242; western part incorporated after 1370 in empire of Timuror Tamerlane, 1336–1405

Khanate of Persia (Il-khans): built up by Hulegu*; capture of Baghdad, 1258;dissolution after 1335

Khanate of Kipchak (Golden Horde) on lower Volga: built up by Batu,* 1227–1255; dominated Russia; conquered by Tamerlane and broken up in fifteenthcentury

*Grandsons of Chinggis Khan.

15. Mongol Conquests and the Yuan Empire in 1279

moral-minded Confucians. For example, their first invasion of the Jinempire in North China had left more than 90 towns burned to rubble.

The Mongols extinguished the Jin in 1234, and finally conquered theSouthern Song only 45 years later, in 1279. Between those two dates theyruled the North China heartland, which had already experienced a cen-tury of alien domination, and learned that the empire could be con-quered on horseback but not ruled on horseback, much as nineteenth-century European imperialists would learn that bayonets were no use forsitting on.

Eventually Chinggis’s ablest grandson, Khubilai Khan, who reignedas chief of the Mongol world from 1260 to 1294, built his capital atBeijing (see Map 15). He became emperor of China in 1271, calling hisdynasty Yuan (“origin”) and ruling in Chinese style. Yet he was dis-tracted by imperial politics and rivals for power. He also had to cater tohis Muslim constituency as defender of the faith; and for the Mongol fol-lowers of Tibetan Lamaism he had to be a Buddhist universal ruler. Thisdiversity of faiths reflected the cosmopolitanism of the multiethnic Mon-gol world, where even Nestorian Christianity from Central Asia had itsdevotees within the ruling family.

Although it is obvious that the humiliation of inferior status in theirown country inflamed Chinese anti-Mongol feeling both at the time andin retrospect, the actual conditions of Chinese life in the Yuan era, asJohn Langlois (1981) suggests, present a mixed picture that calls formore reappraisal than it has yet been given. On the score of militarism,first of all, there is little doubt of the Mongol influence. The Chinese clas-sical ideal had been that every farmer should also be potentially a self-sustaining soldier. Under the dynasties from Qin to Tang the army hadbeen conscripted. The Qin-Han required all able-bodied males to servefor two years as a corvee obligation. Sui and early Tang used the fubingmilitia system, by which certain families, in return for tax exemptions,supplied soldiers to be available for service and provide their own equip-ment and rations. The early Tang had some 633 militia units, each ofabout 1,000 men, located mainly in the northwest and around the cap-ital. The fubing were abolished in 749, and late Tang and Song raisedhired-service mercenary armies whose personal qualities generally putthem in bad repute.

In contrast, the Inner Asian tribesmen were by nurture and custompotential cavalrymen who easily became after their conquests a profes-sional and also hereditary armed force. Each-farmer-a-soldier had beenonly an ideal, but each-hunter-a-soldier easily became a fact. The Ru-

The Paradox of Song China and Inner Asia 121

zhen’s basic unit of 300 families had supported 100 soldiers. ChinggisKhan by 1206 had under him 95 units, each of 1,000 with their sup-porting families and assigned pastures. Just as the Mongols were the firstInner Asians to conquer and rule all of China, so their greatest contri-bution to the empire was in military matters. As Ch’i-ch’ing Hsiao(1978) says, the Mongol conquerors “remained chiefly concerned withpower. They tended to think in military terms” and gave China a newarmy organization that “contained most of the members of the conquer-ing nation.”

Once China was taken over, the Mongol garrison troops had to gettheir livelihood from their own agriculture and that of their slaves on thedepopulated lands allotted to them in North China. The fighting capac-ity of their hereditary military households soon deteriorated. Mongol of-ficers formed a segregated and self-perpetuating salaried aristocracy—the superior military wing of the imperial bureaucracy—but in generalthe Mongol soldiery in China became impoverished. They married Chi-nese women, but many lost their lands, even had to sell their families,sometimes absconded and became vagrants. To be hereditary soldiers inpeacetime turned out to be a disaster.

One question debated by historians has been the degree to whichMongol rule made the Confucian government of China more despotic.The answer seems to be affirmative, but the reasons do not lie whollywith the Mongols. Perhaps the founder of the Ming would later bethe most positive witness. The Mongols were despised—Chinese likedto say that they stank so that you could smell them downwind—andMongol rule lasted less than a century, more brief than Ruzhen rule hadbeen in North China. Except along the Great Wall the Mongols couldnot take root. But this does not mean some of their ways were not imi-tated.

In ruling China the Mongols’ first problem was cultural. As full no-mads from Outer Mongolia without much earlier contact with China,the Mongols were too different in speech, dress, customs, and back-ground to bridge the cultural gap between themselves and the SouthernSong Chinese. Being generally illiterate and comparatively few in num-ber, in government they used West Asians (Uighur Turks, Arabs, evensome Europeans like Marco Polo) and Sino-Ruzhen personnel of theconquered Jin empire. Southerners were slighted as of dubious loyalty,and they responded by avoiding government service. Yan-shuan Lao (inLanglois, 1981) has illustrated how southerners with top degrees werewilling to be masters of private academies but refused to teach in gov-

122 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

ernment schools, which would make them officials even though at thelowest rank.

On the whole the cultural gap made for light government. Yuan pun-ishments were apparently less severe than the Song; there were fewerirregular exactions added to the taxes. While Khubilai to be sure patron-ized Lamaism and Daoism as well as orthodox Confucianism, he pur-sued no literary inquisition. Mongol princes could enjoy their appanagesand squabble among themselves. The Mongols could garrison keypoints, but they could not administer the government, police local com-munities, censor Chinese literature and drama, or provide China’s intel-lectual and cultural leadership.

Comparing the Liao, Jin, and Yuan dynasties, Herbert Franke (inSchram, 1987) suggests that all three had a looseness of administrationalmost like colonial governments because of the oil-and-water mixtureof Chinese and tribal ways. Thus, in their multiethnic, multilingual re-gimes each nationality used its own script—Qidan, Ruzhen, or Mongol.The Chinese continued to expect hereditary succession in a hierarchy ofauthority, whereas the invaders determined successors by election in asomewhat democratic or at least collective assembly of chieftains. Forthe Chinese the laws were uniform and pervasive, whereas the nomadsapplied to each person his customary tribal law. This diversity made forless centralization and not for monolithic despotism.

Since the examination system was not restored until 1315, the lackof administrators was made up by the increased use of yamen clerks.Many Chinese entered government by this route, but the clerks’ weak-ness in Confucian indoctrination as well as the lack of Mongol surveil-lance fostered widespread corruption. To sustain Mongol power in thelocal scene, the Mongols used an extra layer of territorial officials. Tocritical places the court sent omnicompetent Mongol and sometimesChinese officials who could act in both military and civil capacities,trouble shooters called darugaci (daluhuachi), who held their commis-sions directly from the emperor. In the last decades of Yuan rule, Confu-cian ways were being studied and used by Mongol governors to good ef-fect, but they were undone by civil war among their unsinicized anddiehard countrymen.

One trait of the Mongols was their nomadic yen to keep on themove, seeking more loot and slaves. Having expanded over the knownworld and finally overrun China, they used the captured Song fleet withits experienced captains and crews to send expeditions overseas. Yuanfleets of thousands of ships attempted to conquer Japan in 1274 and

The Paradox of Song China and Inner Asia 123

1281, invaded Vietnam and Champa (in southern Indo-China), the Liu-qiu Islands, and in 1292 Java, all without success. Burma and Siam werealso invaded. While the Mongol warriors had an urge to expand, theydid little to get China’s sea trade into the early maritime world systemthat was beginning to take shape on the sea routes around Asia. Mongolrule brought China several decades of domestic peace and caravan tradeacross Asia. A number of Europeans reached China by this route. It is aplausible theory that bubonic plague, which drastically reduced China’spopulation in the years roughly from 1331 to 1354, was also transmit-ted through Mongol channels to Europe, where it became the BlackDeath of 1348–1349.

Khubilai’s great public works such as the second Grand Canal systemcontributed to some degree of economic prosperity (see Map 16). Thesea trade from West Asia and India was still largely in Arab hands be-cause, as noted above, the Islamic diaspora had brought Muslim mer-chants to China not only over the Silk Road but also by the Spice Routethat carried spices from the East Indies to China as well as to the easternMediterranean for Europe. Muslim merchant groups active in caravantrade across Central Asia as well as in maritime commerce were regu-lated and given loans by the Mongol rulers to invest in trade. As taxfarmers they also helped the Mongols collect the agrarian surplus andchannel some of it into trade. Commercial growth was signaled by theextensive issue of paper money, superintended by Muslim financiers atcourt.

By not using the southern Chinese in government but leaving theirlocal communities intact, Mongol rule stimulated private Chinese schol-arship. Many thousands of Chinese scholar-gentlemen found themselvesunemployed by the state and free to pursue private ends, to becomeleaders in their communities and preservers of the Confucian Way. Thusthe Yuan era saw the rise of Chinese drama, and painting flourished.Among these private scholars Zhu Xi’s stress on the moral self-cultivation of the individual as the foundation of social order and goodgovernment was vigorously promoted. While the Zhu Xi school urgedstudy of the practical world, the followers of another Neo-Confucianphilosopher, Lu Xiangshan, advocated a more inward-looking contem-plation. Along with these more philosophical trends developed theschool of statecraft, a pragmatic how-to-govern approach to politicalinstitutions. Both these schools of thought, the moral and the utilitarian,stressed the virtue of loyalty, not so much to a given dynasty as to the

124 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

The Paradox of Song China and Inner Asia 125

16. The Grand Canal System of the Sui,Song, and Yuan Dynasties

Neo-Confucian Way. The Yuan era also saw a new attention to law asan antidote to arbitrary government.

Interpreting the Song Era

No high period of civilization can be characterized in simple terms. Yetscholarly interpretations of a great period have often become part of itshistorical record. So comprehensive and spectacular were the changes ofthe Song era that a Japanese historian (NaitÃ Konan) saw in them thebirth of “modern” China, by which he meant the China that persisteduntil the late Qing in his own day, early in the twentieth century. NaitÃsaw two levels of power in this modern era: the despotic emperor withhis “entourage and underlings,” and “local Chinese society beneath thecentrally appointed bureaucrats.” This new modern age was character-ized by the “decreasing importance of government for the vast majorityof the Chinese people, accompanied by the increasing importance of cul-ture” (Fogel, 1984). As part of this process NaitÃ saw the shift thatwe have noted from government by an oligarchy of aristocratic clans togovernment by a stronger imperial-dynastic clan through a trained andexamined bureaucracy and local gentry-elite. Removed from daily infor-mal contact with his old oligarchic colleagues, the emperor became moreautocratic. “The result,” as Denis Twitchett (in CHOC 3) puts it, “wasa growing gulf both between the emperor and society and between theemperor and the officials through whom he ruled.” NaitÃ’s thesis, headds, “has stood up remarkably well to the progress of modern re-search.” Yet it does not deal in particular with the enormous drama ofthe Song efflorescence and the nomadic conquests that helped checkit. An updated appreciation of China’s spectacular growth under theSong and Yuan dynasties and of factors that eventually stunted it seemsoverdue.

A theory seems to me to emerge from the works of many scholarswhen surveyed and connected by a single observer. Others have ex-pressed much the same thing in somewhat different terms. The hypo-thesis may be stated as follows: (1) that early China created a politicizedstate organized for purposes of central control both by bureaucraticmethods of philosophic persuasion and by the imperial autocrat’s use ofviolence; (2) that non-Chinese invaders from Inner Asia became integralparticipants in the Chinese polity by their military prowess and admin-istrative skill; and (3) that the resulting Sino-nomadic imperial power

126 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

continued to maintain the primacy of central political control over thesubordinated processes of economic growth and cultural diversification.

In short, from the very beginning, the non-Chinese invaders helpedmaintain the political domination over economic and cultural life thathad been inherited from ancient China. Politics was still (or especially) incommand. The propensity for control above all was reinforced by theNeo-Confucian ideology that stressed loyalty to authority in a hierarchicsocial order and esteemed agricultural self-sufficiency over the less con-trollable growth of trade and foreign contact. Yet along with this persis-tent and increasing autocracy in government went the attendant trendmentioned above, “the increasing importance of culture” for the Chi-nese people. In other words, we are discussing here two levels: the stateand the society lying beneath it.

Thus NaitÃ’s second point about the diminished role of governmentand increased role of culture in local society is borne out by the forma-tion of gentry society outlined above. This growth at the local level,however, left the emperor and court at his higher level still autocratic.

The influence on China of the great fact of alien conquest under theLiao–Jin–Yuan dynasties is just beginning to be explored. Its economicimpact seems still uncertain. Certainly it was traumatic and probably,over all, a tremendous psychological disaster. Its effect on Ming Chinasoon became quite obvious.

The Paradox of Song China and Inner Asia 127

6Government in the

Ming Dynasty

Legacies of the Hongwu Emperor

During the 276 years of the Ming from 1368 to 1644 China’s populationdoubled, from about 80 million to about 160 million. Destructive do-mestic warfare was largely avoided, and great achievements in educationand philosophy, literature and art, reflected the high cultural level of theelite gentry society. But the Yuan-to-Ming transition was not very prom-ising. The Ming regime was first militarized to drive out and hold off theMongols and subsequently tried to maintain domestic stability andavoid influence from outside China. The Chinese resurgence that threwout the Mongol conquerors did not attempt a continuation of the Songbut tried in theory to go back to the models of Han and Tang, all thewhile in fact continuing certain features of the Yuan.

The character of the Ming dynasty began with the mentality of thedynastic founder, Zhu Yuanzhang, who reigned as the Hongwu (“VastMilitary”) Emperor from 1368 to 1398. He was a peasant who hadstarved and begged as a boy, got his literacy from Buddhist priests, andjoined an anti-Mongol religious sect. Rising as a rebel warlord, he bestedhis competitors in violence in the lower Yangzi region, got Confucianscholars’ help in issuing pronouncements and performing rituals toclaim the Mandate, drove out the fissiparous Mongol princes in 1368,and built a great capital at Nanjing (see Map 17).

The personality of this new autocrat, though extolled like that ofany dynastic founder, on balance seems to have been a disaster forChina. Ugly to look at, Hongwu was fiercely energetic, had violent fitsof temper, and became paranoidally suspicious of conspiracies against

128

himself. Frederick Mote (in CHOC 7) observes that many peculiaritiesof Ming rule stemmed “from the personal characteristics of this strangeand powerful man.”

Hongwu’s aim was to maintain centralized control over the world’slargest and most diversified state. To this end he issued a flood of admo-nitions and regulations to guide his subjects’ conduct—law codes, com-mandments, ancestral instructions, a series of grand pronouncements,village and government statutes, and ceremonial regulations. As EdwardFarmer says, these codes constituted a blueprint of the ideal social orderand included sanctions to back it up. Hongwu was less a militarist thanan ideologue, full of ideas.

When it came to practical action, Hongwu from his own experienceunderstood the plight of the farming villages and used the repertoire ofstatecraft devices to hold down the land tax, to plant trees against ero-sion, to maintain the dikes on the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers, to keep thegranaries stocked against famine, to support mutual-responsibility sys-tems to suppress banditry and encourage the gentry to succor the needy.But his economic vision was limited to the conventional Confucian viewof agriculture as the source of the country’s wealth, trade as ignoble andparasitic, and frugality as the prime imperial virtue. His governmenttried to foster self-sufficient communities and so to have the populacepolice themselves, the army to feed itself, and the rural populace to pro-vide the corvée labor for local roads and yamen services. His frugalityextended to paying officials purely nominal salaries so that they had tomaintain their establishments by nonstatutory fees. Thus Hongwu’s ver-sion of no-new-taxes led inevitably to corruption.

Hongwu’s main concern, however, was military. Because China hadto prevent a Mongol resurgence, he copied the Yuan military system, es-tablishing Chinese garrisons at strategic points and creating a hereditarymilitary caste of soldiers who would sustain themselves by farming butbe ever ready for war. Where the Mongol princes had formed a scatterednobility with big estates, Hongwu now made his commanders into aChinese military nobility with ranks and emoluments superior to thoseof the top civil officials—at least until he suspected them of treason andkilled a great number.

When required to choose between wen and wu—the civil and mili-tary complexes in imperial government—Hongwu was on the side of vi-olence despite all the laws and moral homilies that he put out. Findinghis prime minister plotting against him in 1380, he had him beheaded,along with everyone in his family or remotely connected, which totaled

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over the years about 40,000 persons. (Guanxi networks have their dan-gers!) Continued beheading of officials and several later purges mayhave swelled this total to 100,000 victims. The resulting loss of talentand reign of terror hardly allowed Confucian government to prosper.Beating (flogging with large or small bamboo staves) for punishment andhumiliation in open court became a regular feature of Ming terrorism.The victim was held prone by men at his hands and feet and his bare but-tocks were bastinaded while the prescribed blows were counted one byone. No ritual could have been more demeaning or life-threatening, forthe skin was soon broken and infection of bloody tissue was hard toavoid. In 1519, for recommending that the emperor not continue to stayin the south away from his duties, 146 men were beaten, 11 of whomdied. In 1524 officials objected to imperial honors for the emperor’smother and father because he had inherited the throne from his cousin:134 were beaten and 16 died. One gets the impression that the emperorand his bureaucrats were often locked in an institutional struggle thatimperial violence could not resolve.

Hongwu’s mistakes of judgment can be traced in general to his all-consuming determination to assert and maintain his personal control.Thus Hongwu’s obsession to hold central power (an imperative inher-ited from history) led him in 1380 to abolish the central secretariat andprime ministership so that he as emperor would be the civil and militaryCEO of the realm. This gave him control but also an extraordinary bur-den. One top specialist on Ming administration, Charles Hucker, notesthat in one eight-day period Hongwu received 1,600 dispatches (calledmemorials) in which 3,391 issues were presented. At the rate of 200 doc-uments in a 10-hour day, each document could get on average three min-utes’ consideration. In previous regimes day-to-day administration hadbeen handled by a prime minister (or chancellor) with a staff. In theMing and Qing governments this burden now fell upon the emperors.Since not all of them were supermen, the imperial office often became abottleneck, and the government more easily sank into inefficient routine.

In abolishing the prime minister’s office and secretariat, Hongwu haddecapitated the civil bureaucracy. Its echelons of personnel and paperwork had been headed by the prime minister as the top official of theOuter Court (the six ministries, censorate, and other offices at the cap-ital). This meant that the Ming emperors had to govern through theirpersonal entourages (the Inner Court), which led to reliance on eunuchsin administration as well as in military and other special matters. Even-tually the court would have 70,000 eunuchs.

130 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

Government in the Ming Dynasty 131

17. The Ming Empire at Its Greatest Extent

Fiscal Problems

The most glaring inadequacies in Hongwu’s legacy, from the viewpointof a fiscal historian like Ray Huang (1974), were in finance. To beginwith, there was no separation between the government’s funds and theemperor’s. The third emperor Yongle (1402–1424) usurped the throne ina civil war and moved the capital to Beijing because that was his area ofpersonal strength and also the strategic point for keeping the Mongols incheck. In the Imperial City that surrounded the Forbidden City (palacecomplex) in Beijing was a three-square-mile area where more than 50service offices or supply shops employed about 100,000 artisans andothers to meet the needs of the imperial household, without any distinc-tion between public and private functions. This accorded with the factthat the emperor’s personal life and ceremonial conduct were a key partof the state’s activity and subject to the scrutiny and comment of Confu-cian scholar-moralists in many ways.

Under eunuch management, palace expenditures went up withoutreason. So did the cost of the emperor’s personal troops, the Embroi-dered-uniform Guard, who acted not only as bodyguards but also asspecial police and ran a fearsome prison for political offenders’ “specialtreatment.” The Guard began in 1382 with about 16,000 men but even-tually grew to 75,000.

Hongwu himself, whatever his court and heirs may have done, aimedat extreme frugality. He set the land tax at about 10 percent of the agri-cultural product, not an onerous rate. By this seemingly benevolentlightness of taxation, he starved his government of revenue. From amodern point of view this prevented its performing service functionsthat could have helped the economic life of the people. In place of thegovernment he expected local communities to make all sorts of privateoutlays in connection with tax payments. For control and tax purposes,the peasantry were organized from 1381 in registered groups of 110households in a system known as lijia. Each year ten households headedby one leading household took responsibility for superintending tax pay-ments and labor services (corvée) of the whole group. They also updatedthe official Yellow Registers of all lands and families. These duties ro-tated year by year for ten years and then began again in a self-perpetuat-ing cycle.

This ingenious arrangement shared with similar inventions, like thebaojia mutual surveillance and security system, a major drawback. Itwas a blueprint to show the masses how to perform the many kinds of

132 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

duties devised for them by scholar-administrators; but its details left lit-tle room for alterations. When the system had to be adjusted to the reali-ties of terrain and personal relations in village life, abuses kept creepingin so that in no long time it was riddled with corruption. As examples ofthis disastrous syndrome, let us look at taxation, army maintenance, andthe provision of currency, all of which became sooner or later inade-quate. Underlying all these problems was the freezing of governmentstructure and institutions in the rigid mold decreed by the founder, sothat the Ming administration was eventually unable to adjust them toChina’s changing needs.

In taxation, first of all, to obviate the burden of conveying to Beijingthe revenues from localities all over the empire, transfers were arrangedto move income directly from a specific revenue source to an authorizedexpenditure. The result was a complex criss-crossing network of auto-matic or at least statutory income and outgo, that hardened into inflex-ible precedent yet could not be policed against corruption because it wasnot kept in view by any one official. Ray Huang concludes that the ma-jor concern in the Ming fiscal system “was always governmental stabil-ity.” Because every fiscal office had to get its revenue from innumerabledifferent sources, the local officials could not assert their independenceor improve the quality of their administration. No financial base wasever developed adequate to sustain a rebellion. “The empire’s fiscal op-erations were so fragmented as to make them virtually safe from cap-ture.”

This fragmentation of revenue and expenditure left the central gov-ernment impotent. A vast panoply of yamen runners, clerks, and othersubofficial persons was almost constantly engaged in collecting the manykinds of taxes at the various times they were alleged to be due during theyear. Since the land tax in its total amount was not inordinately burden-some to the economy, the real burden was the inefficiency of collectionand the overstaffing of collecting agencies. In other words, millions ofmiddlemen lived off the revenue system by participating in its cumber-some processes.

For example, there was no budget item to finance the maintenance ofthe Grand Canal. It was maintained by local corvée labor without anyfinancing from the central government. By the mid-fifteenth centurythere were 11,775 grain boats handled by 121,500 officers and troops,who were supposed to receive their pay from their army rations. Sincethese transportation troops were seldom paid, they had to rely on car-rying private cargo in their grain barges. In general, since every item of

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revenue had been listed before received as an expected payment, and thestanding orders for delivery led to nominal disbursal before funds werecollected, there was no flexibility possible. Any calamity like a flood re-quired crisis management to raise special funds.

Second, the Ming records praising the self-sufficiency of the militaryin farming for their own food supply are unreliable. Ray Huang says thatthe army nowhere near paid for itself. The record stated the ideal, notthe facts: Military officials kept no records, and Ming historians wantedto make the dynasty look good. The whole military farming programwas a blueprint put out with no preparation, research, or experimenta-tion to guide it. No control agency was set up, and administration wasvery lax. Households were pressed into military service but frequentlydeserted. Soldiers did not receive regular pay but only occasional un-scheduled awards. The system merely turned soldiers back into farmers.The military establishment declined because its rations were cut. Soldierstherefore sold or mortgaged their land. The army went more and moreunpaid, and its ranks were thinned by desertion. Military units shrank insize down to about 10 percent except on the frontiers, where the armyhad to be supplied. But since the unrealistic legend of a self-sufficientarmy still persisted, its financing methods could not be abolished or reor-ganized.

Third, the currency system was a failure, quite unable to keep upwith the growth of trade. At first the government relied on paper cur-rency, but Hongwu was unaware that unlimited paper money producesinflation, so he kept on handing out paper currency as awards. By 1425the paper notes had only 1/40 to 1/70 of their original value. In the end,paper currency went out of use. Meanwhile, the government forbade theuse of silver.

China’s copper coins were made by casting, not stamping, and allhad to be trimmed by hand. The Ming produced far fewer coins than theSong, although the demand was much greater. Often the governmentminted no new coins at all, and private counterfeiters filled the vacuum.The job of minting was then given to the provinces. But when producersused some lead in the mixture they lowered the coins’ value. There con-tinued to be a great coin shortage. Government failure to do a properminting job led to most coins’ being counterfeit, and their value declinedto 6,000 to 1 tael of silver as opposed to the old standard of 1,000 to 1tael. In short, the Ming government signally failed to provide a coppercoinage for the use of the people, just at the time when growth of tradewas increasing the need for money.

134 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

During the sixteenth century, the growth of foreign trade led to asporadic but massive importation of silver especially from Japan and byvarious routes from the New World. As a result, China’s original com-modity economy became monetized. Payments to government in goodsand services under the reform trend known as the Single Whip weregradually combined and commuted into money payments. The lijia taxpayments demanded from local residents were gradually absorbed intothe land tax even when preserved in the accounts. In doing their lijia la-bor service, instead of working on the roads or other public works, thosewho could would hire substitutes. Finally, they simply made money pay-ments instead of performing services.

Unfortunately, the inflow of Japanese and New World silver did notgive China a silver currency. Both copper cash and silver bullion wereused in what amounted to a sort of bimetallic system. Local day-to-daytransactions among the people used copper cash, though the governmentcould seldom refrain from debasing it. But it was not possible to main-tain a minted currency of fixed value in silver because the Ming nevertried to mint silver dollars. Tax payment in raw bullion was not plannedbut merely resorted to out of necessity in the failure of all other curren-cies. In the clumsy circulation of pure lump silver, the unit of account(the ounce or tael) varied from place to place and also as between tradesand between agencies of government. Twenty different silver tael units ofaccount might be in common use in one city at one time, requiring a dif-ferent “currency” for each major commodity, like salt or cotton cloth,and for payments going to certain other places. Each ingot had to beweighed and also assayed for its purity. The resulting multiplicity of sil-ver tael units, and exchange arrangements among them, represented thedomination of the money manipulator, who profited by this complexity,over any investor who wanted to put his money into planned productiveenterprises.

The fiscal establishment seems to have followed the founder’s strongsense of frugality because of his conviction that profit was in itself evil.Mercantile interests were felt to be inherently in conflict with those of so-ciety and the state and had to be curbed as far as possible. At the sametime the state had to refrain from “enriching itself” because any gain tothe government, in this naive view, automatically meant a loss to thepeople. The government failed to develop its potential economic powerand resorted instead to political control as its basis of governing. It thuspersistently neglected to build up the minimum financial strength re-quired to operate its fiscal machinery. It neglected to invest even in trans-

Government in the Ming Dynasty 135

18.

The

Voya

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Zhen

portation facilities for the public. In this niggardly situation the ex-tensive commandeering of services from the general population wasunavoidable.

Overall, says Ray Huang, when certain sectors of China showed atendency to grow through industry or foreign trade, the Ming govern-ment saw no reason to help them but rather opposed such a growth ofimbalance which “in turn would threaten the empire’s political unity.” Itwas better to keep all the provinces on the same level as the more back-ward sectors.

Huang concludes that both Song and Yuan were more sophisticatedand showed a higher quality of administration than the Ming. “TheT’ang, the Sung and the Yuan never imposed such a rigid fiscal structureas did the Ming” nor did their top government officers assume so littleoperational responsibility. “The Ming system represents a significantbreak in Chinese fiscal history. From this time onwards the main aim ofgovernmental finance was to maintain the political status quo and itceased to exhibit any dynamic qualities.” In keeping with this dictumwas the spectacular Ming withdrawal from the maritime world.

China Turns Inward

Southern Song and Yuan had seen a great advance in Chinese shipbuild-ing, nautical technology, and maritime trade to Japan and Southeast andSouth Asia. By 1400 the countries in sea trade with Ming China hadbeen known for hundreds of years, while Chinese merchant shippinghad been exporting silk, porcelain, and copper coins. Concurrently withhis five military expeditions north against the Mongols, the Yongle Em-peror ordered the Grand Eunuch Zheng He to mount naval expeditionson the routes of trade to the south of China. Zheng He was a Muslimoriginally surnamed Ma, whose father had made the pilgrimage toMecca. He led a can-do group of eunuchs whom the emperor commis-sioned to perform special tasks.

Zheng He’s seven voyages between 1405 and 1433 were no smallaffairs (see Map 18). The shipyards near Nanjing from 1403 to 1419alone built 2,000 vessels, including almost a hundred big “treasureships” 370 to 440 feet in length and 150 to 180 feet abeam. J. V. G.Mills (1970) estimates they must have displaced about 3,000 tonsapiece. With four to nine masts up to 90 feet high, a dozen water-tightcompartments, and stern-post rudders, they could have as many as 50cabins and carry 450 to 500 men. The fleet of the first voyage of 1405—

Government in the Ming Dynasty 137

1407 set out with an estimated 317 vessels, of which 62 were treasureships. (The Spanish Armada of 1588 would total 132 vessels.) Zheng Hewas accompanied by a staff of 70 eunuchs, 180 medical personnel, 5 as-trologers, and 300 military officers, who commanded a force of 26,800men. The first three voyages visited India and many ports en route. Thefourth went beyond India to Hormuz, and the last three visited ports onthe east coast of Africa, as far south as Malindi (near Mombasa), whereSong porcelains and copper coins had long preceded them. Detachmentsof the fleet made special side trips, one of them to Mecca. As one majorfunction Zheng He carried tribute envoys to China and back homeagain. He conducted some trade but mainly engaged in extensive diplo-matic relations with about 30 countries. Though seldom violently ag-gressive, he did fight some battles.

Three points are worth noting. First, these official expeditions werenot voyages of exploration in the Vasco da Gaman or Columbian sense.They followed established routes of Arab and Chinese trade in the seaseast of Africa. Second, the Chinese expeditions were diplomatic, notcommercial, much less piratical or colonizing ventures. They exchangedgifts, enrolled tributaries, and brought back geographic information andscientific curiosities like giraffes, which were touted as auspicious uni-corns. Third and most striking, once these voyages ceased in 1433 theywere never followed up. Instead, the records of them were destroyed bythe vice-president of the War Ministry about 1479 and Chinese overseascommerce was severely restricted until 1567. In the great age of sail thatwas just dawning around the globe, Ming China was potentially far inthe lead but refused to go on. It took the Europeans almost another halfcentury even to get started. After 1433 it would be another 37 years be-fore Portuguese explorers on the west coast of Africa got as far south asthe Gold Coast, and 59 years before Columbus set sail with three smallvessels totaling 450 tons.

Edward Dreyer describes how the great Chinese voyages werestopped by Confucian-trained scholar-officials who opposed trade andforeign contact on principle. Ray Huang stresses the regime’s fiscal crisisthat made funds really unavailable for these very costly ventures. For ex-ample, the Ming intervention in North Vietnam in 1407 had been re-pulsed by 1428 at considerable cost to the Chinese court, which had torecognize Vietnam as an independent tributary state in 1431. The of-ficials at Beijing were also jealous of the eunuch power that the YongleEmperor was using in military and security channels to counter the

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growing hold of the classical examination graduates upon the Ming gov-ernment.

By mid-century Beijing also faced a revival of Mongol power andborder raids. In 1449 a sycophantic chief eunuch took the emperor outto chastise the Mongols. Instead, the Mongols captured him. When theMongols approached Beijing to trade him in a deal, a new emperor wasquickly installed. Ming policy became transfixed by the Mongol menace.Arthur Waldron (1990) has traced the interminable policy discussionsamong officials who generally feared to attack the Mongols yet refusedto let them trade with China so as to reduce their raiding. After 1474 andduring the sixteenth century the building of brick-and-stone-faced longwalls with their many hundreds of watchtowers created today’s GreatWall (see Map 17). It proved to be a futile military gesture but vividly ex-pressed China’s siege mentality.

The decline of Ming naval power, once shipbuilding was restricted tosmall-size vessels, opened the door to a growth of piracy on the SouthChina coast, ostensibly by Japanese but in fact mainly by Chinese. In-stead of counterattacking, the Ming forced a costly Chinese withdrawalfrom the seacoast, vainly aimed at starving out the pirates. This defen-sive posture included restricting foreign trade by demanding that it all bein the guise of tributary trade. Sarasin Viraphol (1977) describes how theimport of Siamese rice by Sino-Siamese merchants had to be conductedas if it were connected with tribute missions. The tribute system reachedits high point under the Ming as a form of defense connoting not powerbut weakness.

In short, anticommercialism and xenophobia won out, and China re-tired from the world scene. The military declined and bureaucrats ranthe show except when the big eunuch establishment, handling surveil-lance and investigation for the emperor, produced from time to time, un-der weak rulers, eunuch dictatorships that terrorized the scholars. Thecontradiction between Ming China’s superior capacity for maritime ex-pansion and conservative Neo-Confucian throttling of it suggests thatMing China almost purposely missed the boat of modern technologicaland economic development.

This disparaging judgment comes out of the context of the late twen-tieth century, when technology and growth have created innumerabledisorders in all aspects of life all over the world without disclosing asyet the principles of order that may postpone the destruction of humancivilization. In time the self-contained growth of Ming China with its

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comparative peace and well-being may be admired by historians, whomay see a sort of success where today we see failure.

Factional Politics

In the domain of literati thinking, the ideas of the statesman-philosopherWang Yangming (Wang Shouren, 1472–1529) gained many adherentsand inspired scholars to follow a new bent in Neo-Confucianism. Wangwas a very competent scholar-official and general who suppressed rebel-lions over a number of years and also devoted himself to building up thelocal community through the use of the Community Compact (xiang-yue). This institution was one of Confucianism’s closest approaches torevivalism. As a philosopher, Wang pursued the idea of Zhu Xi’s contem-porary, Lu Xiangshan, in developing a less practice-centered and morecontemplative approach to moral training and self-cultivation. Wangtaught that the world of principle is a unity and lies within as well as out-side one. Therefore, one should learn to be guided by intuitive knowl-edge achieved through careful thought and meditation. This had Bud-dhist overtones. Wang’s famous insistence on the unity of theory andpractice really demanded, as Willard J. Peterson (1979) notes, “the unityof moral knowledge and social action.” Wang Yangming’s teaching hadwide influence in Japan as well as in China.

After the Ming collapse, Qing critics would later decry Wang’s influ-ence as too abstract, passive, and individual-centered. This contributedto the view that Ming learning had fostered a righteous morality overpractical technology. Neo-Confucian classical training in the schools ofboth Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming taught Ming officials to assert thatethical conduct was the root of good government, while technology wasa matter for craftsmen and inferiors.

This stress on moral principles in turn provided the stuff of factionalattacks between rival groups of scholar-officials. Factionalism thus in-spired the moral homilies of bureaucrats, who criticized the emperor’serrant ways or combatted the sinister eunuch influence. The most notori-ous of many cases began under the Wanli Emperor’s reign of 48 years(1573–1620).

In the first decade of this reign, the senior grand secretary (ZhangJuzheng) with great determination enforced austerity and accumulatedfunds in the central treasuries. He was not afraid to step on toes andattack sinecures, providing he always had the emperor’s approval. Hedid not aim at reform but at making the regime solvent. However, his

140 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

methods cut corners and flouted conventions. After he died, his high-handed ways were condemned in retrospect.

The Wanli Emperor then became so disenchanted with the moralisticattacks and counterattacks of officials that he was thoroughly alienatedfrom his imperial role. He finally resorted to vengeful tactics of blockingor ignoring the conduct of administration. For years on end he refused tosee his ministers or act upon memorials. He refused to make necessaryappointments. The whole top echelon of Ming administration becameunderstaffed. In short, Wanli tried to forget about his imperial responsi-bility while squirreling away what he could for his private purse. Con-sidering the emperor’s required role as the kingpin of the state, this per-sonal rebellion against the bureaucracy was not only bankruptcy buttreason.

The malfeasance of Wanli and the corruption of powerful eunuchshelped inspire a new level of factionalism in the Lower Yangzi provinces.They produced more than their proportion both of land tax revenues forthe court and of prominent officials. Eventually a reform movement cen-tered in the Donglin (“eastern forest”) Academy near Wuxi, where agroup of these generally high-minded Confucian scholars exhibited apreoccupation with morality that lent animus to their attacks on officialshigh and low. The practical problems of government were seldom intheir sights, but Confucian principles were extolled as absolutes andtheir targets in the administration were damned accordingly. It has be-come difficult to say what group had the better of the argument becauseit concerned ethical demands and personal vituperation more than thepractical problems of administration. In the 1620s the eunuch dictatorwho came into power after the death of Wanli terrorized the Donglinscholars with great violence, though some of them survived to have thelast word against him. The factionalism of the late Ming led to dividedcounsels and imperial inaction just when the dynasty needed vigorousleadership.

By the early 1600s the Dutch and British East India Companies,added to the Portuguese and Spanish trade already under way, were re-sponding to the activity of Japanese and Chinese merchants and officialsin a lively international commerce. Within China, large-scale productionof ceramics, silk, and cotton cloth accompanied the spread of trade insalt and cereals, the growth of cities, and of a more affluent merchantclass engaged in interregional trade. The flow of silver into China wasonly one factor in this growth. A number of historians point to lateMing achievements in literature, art, and urban life as harbingers of a

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dynamic renewal in society and culture as well as in the economy. Butcommerce and Western contact threatened to upset the political order.The Japanese in the early 1600s in decisive fashion closed their countryto Western merchants and missionaries. In China a new dynasty sup-planted the Ming but inherited their anxiety about foreign trade andWestern contact. China’s late Ming renewal seems to have been frus-trated.

142 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

7The Qing Success Story

The Manchu Conquest

The Manchu conquest of 1644 showed once again that taking overChina might be easier from outside than from inside because the essen-tial mixture of militarism and civil administration, wu and wen, could beput together outside the Wall more readily than within it. Geographywas the key to this opportunity. Manchuria in the sixteenth century hadbeen brought under the Chinese type of intensive agriculture only in thesouthernmost region below Mukden (modern Shenyang). The Ming hadrecognized the frontier nature of this region by organizing it in militarydistricts rather than under a civil administration only. By establishing he-reditary and registered military units at strategic points, separate fromthe civil administration of the agricultural area, the Ming sought tomaintain both a military buffer against nomadic inroads and a checkupon any separatist tendencies of local Chinese officials; for they couldnot overlook the fact that South Manchuria was a hostage to fortunethat could be cut off from North China at the bottleneck of Shanhai-guan, where the Great Wall escarpment comes to the sea (see Map 19).

In their rise to power the Manchus took full advantage of their stra-tegic position on a frontier where they could learn Chinese ways and yetnot be entirely subjected to Chinese rule. The founder of the state, Nur-gaci (1559–1626), began as a minor chieftain on the eastern border ofthe agricultural basin of South Manchuria. The people he came to leadwere a mixed lot but mainly descendants of the seminomadic Ruzhentribes who had established their Jin dynasty in North China in thetwelfth century. Like Chinggis among the Mongols, Nurgaci broughtadjoining tribes under his personal rule and early in the seventeenth cen-

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tury set up his Later Jin dynasty, with its capital at Mukden. His son andsuccessor, the very able Hong Taiji (Manchu name Abahai), subjugatedKorea on the east and made alliances with the Mongol tribes on the westin Inner Mongolia. In 1636 he gave the name Manchu to his people andproclaimed the Qing (“Pure”) dynasty. Meanwhile, a written Manchulanguage had been developed and some of the Chinese classics translatedinto it.

By 1644 the Manchus had made several incursions into North Chinabut had not yet been able to defeat the Ming. The Ming regime in Chinahad grown progressively weaker. Rebellion was already endemic. A Chi-nese rebel named Li Zicheng had raided widely in Northwest China andeven into Sichuan and the Yangzi valley. He had finally secured literateadvisers and begun to set up a framework of dynastic government. In1644 he succeeded in capturing Beijing and had the dynastic succession

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19. Rise of the Manchus

within his grasp. But he proved unable to consolidate institutionally theposition that he had won by force.

The Ming military in North and Northeast China had meanwhilebecome thoroughly disaffected toward the still squabbling literati-officials at the capital, who came mainly from the Lower Yangzi.Through their predominance in the examinations, the landed families ofthis east-central region were heavily represented in the Beijing govern-ment but manifested few warlike capacities. Able Ming commanderswere well acquainted with the Manchu striking power, yet as the Mingforces in North China still outnumbered them, some hoped the Man-chus could be used within the Wall. This led the Ming general Wu San-gui and several of his colleagues to welcome the Manchus, whom theyhad been fighting, to come into North China and help suppress the re-bels in Beijing. The Manchus, once inside the Wall, proceeded to takeover.

Studies of this turbulent period by Frederic Wakeman, Jr. (1985), andLynn Struve (1984) among others point up the very different concernsanimating the Lower Yangzi landed families and the Ming commandersin North China. Between them the Manchus found their opening. In vig-orous campaigns they destroyed the rebels in the north and then tookover the Lower Yangzi heartland. They made use of Confucian ritualsand precedents and showed also a capacity for imperial ruthlessness. Forexample, the Ming holdouts at Yangzhou on the Grand Canal were mas-sacred in a ten-day orgy that sent a message to all adjoining areas. Mingofficials and commanders faced the severe choice between disloyalty anddeath. When the wife of one Ming official heard in 1621 that the Man-chus had captured him, she assumed he would die rather than shift hisloyalty and so she led 42 “household retainers and relatives” into sui-cide. The more practical-minded husband, however, had decided theMandate had passed, and he had surrendered to serve the Manchus.When in 1677 his grandson, a high Qing official, refused to surrender tothe anti-Qing rebels and was killed, his wife led 38 members of hishousehold in suicides that “went on through the night.” With such loy-alty from Chinese officials (and their wives), the Manchus could governthe empire. Some Ming officials chose death, but some became high ad-ministrators for the Manchus and helped smooth the takeover.

Though the Manchus seized Beijing in 1644, their conquest of Chinaremained incomplete for a whole generation. Three of their Chinese col-laborators, General Wu Sangui and two others, took over large satrapiesin South and Southwest China and entrenched themselves in territorial

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power. In 1673 these so-called three feudatories rebelled and took overmost of the southern provinces. The young Kangxi Emperor, just start-ing to rule, needed eight years to reestablish Qing control. His richLower Yangzi base was of help. So also was the feeling of loyalty to theQing. Wu Sangui, after all, had been twice disloyal, both to the Mingand to the Qing.

The efficiency of Sino-barbarian rule was quickly proven. Destruc-tion at the end of the Ming was mainly due to Chinese rebellions, partic-ularly the one led by Zhang Xianzhong, which significantly lowered thepopulation of Sichuan. Both Zhang and his competitor Li in the north-west tried in vain to enlist the help of scholars and set up a dynastic-styleregime. Both failed. The Manchu success where Chinese rebels hadfailed was essentially an achievement in the creation of political institu-tions.

Institutional Adaptation

The Manchus’ first problem had been to develop beyond the state oftribal politics. This they did by creating from about 1601 a unified ter-ritorial administration over their lands, paralleled by a military organi-zation of all the Manchu fighting men in eight divisions, each with adifferent flag or banner. The Manchu bannermen had lands assigned tothem, but these lands were kept scattered, and the banners did not be-come territorial units. Mongols and Chinese who came over to the Man-chus were taken into the system and organized in their own bannerunits. The resulting 24 banners were all fighting men personally attachedto the emperor. Pamela Crossley (1990) has traced their origin to theTurkic-Mongolian institution of hereditary military servitude. The em-peror was not their father in Confucian style but rather their owner inthe nomad style. The bannermen enjoyed booty in warfare and stipendsof rice and cash in peacetime. They cherished their highly ritualized slav-ery as “an emblem of their importance to and intimacy with the court.”It called forth their loyalty in the highest degree. Witness the fact thatabout 150,000 invincible bannermen (only 169,000 were even listed onpaper at the time) took over Ming China, albeit helped by Chinese col-laborators.

Although the banner organization was advertised as multiethnic,Chinese bannermen actually made up three quarters of the total in 1648,while 8 percent were Mongols and only 16 percent Manchus. By 1723the Manchu component rose to 23 percent, still far from one third of the

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total. In any case, bannermen (as well as Chinese bondservants) were agreat improvement on eunuchs as trustworthy servitors of the emperorand adjuncts of the Inner Court. They formed a talent pool from whichindividuals could be chosen to function as civil bureaucrats. Nurgaci hadappointed his sons to head the banners, but their power was brought un-der central control in a state council. In this way the originally personalrelations between the head of the state and his loyal chieftains and tribes-men were institutionalized.

Finally, the early Manchu rulers, like the Jin and Yuan emperors be-fore them, took over the terminology, forms, and ideas of Confucianismand used them, as they were meant to be used, for the support and main-tenance of political authority. They promoted study of the classics andthe veneration of ancestors, set up the state cult of Confucius, talked andwrote of the “way of the ruler” (like the Japanese in Manchukuo threecenturies later), extolled the Confucian virtues, and accepted the ideathat the ruler rules by virtue of his moral goodness.

More than a decade before the Manchus’ entrance into China, theyhad created in Mukden a miniature civil administration in imitation ofBeijing. The Six Ministries and other elements typical of Ming govern-ment were formally established and staffed by a bureaucracy in whichManchus, Mongols, and Chinese were represented. By the time they en-tered North China and assumed the Mandate of Heaven they were fullyprepared to solve their fundamental problem, how to rule in the Chineseway but maintain their identity as Manchus.

Several circumstances aided them. Unlike the Mongols, they had novast empire to the west to distract them from the all-important problemof China. Having come from the frontier of South Manchuria, ratherthan from the Mongolian steppe, they did not have to leap the great cul-tural gap between the steppe and the sown. Because of the unusuallylong and vigorous sixty-year reigns of two early emperors, three rulersduring 133 years provided a strong executive leadership: the Kangxi Em-peror (reigned 1662–1722), Yongzheng (1722–1736), and Qianlong(reigned 1736–1796). They were all hard-working and conscientioussovereigns who commonly saw their ministers every day at dawn, stud-ied the classics assiduously, and maintained a vigorous personal rule.

The various devices by which the Manchus sought to preserve theirdynastic vitality and identity are an interesting study. By spending sum-mers in Inner Mongolia, the Manchu emperors set a quite un-Confucianexample of physical fitness for riding, hunting, and shooting. Theyclosed their homeland to Chinese immigration and maintained North

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Manchuria as a hunting land outside the Chinese agricultural economy.To check Chinese immigration from South Manchuria northward, theyreinforced a willow palisade several hundred miles long (a big ditch withwillows planted along it) to mark the boundary beyond which the Chi-nese should not expand (see Map 19). They organized Manchuria undera Manchu military government. North of the Chinese pale in the south,Manchuria remained a sparsely populated vacuum down to the lateeighteenth century—a tempting prize for Russian and Japanese imperial-ists later.

The Manchus also sought to preserve themselves by maintainingtheir racial purity. They banned intermarriage between Chinese andManchus and fostered differences of custom between the two groups.Manchu women, for example, did not bind their feet (see Chapter8). Manchus were not supposed to engage in trade or labor. The Man-chu clan organization was preserved by their shamanistic religious sys-tem.

Manchu military control of China was maintained by the establish-ment of banner garrisons at strategic points. The only Chinese troopsgiven a recognized existence were provincial forces that were usedmainly as a constabulary on the post routes and against bandits butwhich lacked any training as a striking force.

In order to preserve strong leadership, the early Manchu emperorsarranged that the imperial princes should be pensioned and given wealthbut not allowed to become territorial lords. They were kept at Beijingout of power. Until 1860 the dynasty avoided government by empressesand by eunuchs, which had resulted so often in previous dynasties in pal-ace intrigue.

In the civil administration of China the Manchus used a system ofdual appointments, whereby both Chinese and Manchus were placed incharge of important functions. Jonathan Spence (1990) has shown howat first they relied on Chinese allies from South Manchuria who had beenenrolled usually as Chinese bannermen or bondservants, especially de-pendent upon and loyal to the Manchu rulers. Eventually the formulawas to have capable Chinese do the work and loyal Manchus check upon them. At the capital Manchus outnumbered Chinese, but in the prov-inces Chinese officials far predominated. In order to draw into their ser-vice the most able and promising Chinese, the Manchus saw to it that theexamination system continued to function with highest prestige and ef-ficiency.

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The devices of synarchy (joint administration by two or more par-ties) were fully used, not only by having Mongol and Chinese bannerswithin the banner system but also by dual administration through jointChinese and Manchu presidents of the Six Ministries at the capital(hence called Boards by Westerners) and the pairing in the provinces ofManchu and Chinese governors-general and governors. Often a Manchugovernor-general was in charge of two provinces that were each under aChinese governor. These high officials reported jointly to the emperor di-rect while in each province the central organization sent its routine re-ports to the Six Boards at the capital. The censors in 15 different circuitsas well as at the capital continued to investigate and report on officialconduct. Censorial remonstrances might also be presented (not often) di-rectly to the emperor.

As part of their system of control the Manchu rulers tried to preservethe Manchu language and followed the Qidan, Ruzhen, and Mongol ex-amples in creating a Manchu documentation that was generally unavail-able to Chinese officials. Most important was the Imperial HouseholdDepartment, which had its own treasury and was staffed by the em-peror’s bannermen and bondservants. As a secret echelon of governmentparallel to the formal ministries at Beijing, it collected enormous reve-nues from lands, trade monopolies (including the antigeriatric root fromthe northeast called ginseng), customs taxes (including the Guangzhoutrade), the salt gabelle, silk textile manufactories, loans, fines, and trib-utes. All this helped the dynasty to profit from the growth of trade andindustry. While this inner government began as a device to keep the pal-ace eunuchs under control, to obviate their inveterate corruption, in duetime it became corrupt itself. Yet in this way the Qing rulers preservedunder their own immediate control large resources beyond the reach ofthe civil administration.

The Qing established control in Inner Asia by first organizing theMongols in the Ming fashion under separate leagues and with assignedpasturage. This immobilized and divided the Mongols beyond hope ofunification under a new Chinggis Khan. The Qing also supported theYellow Lamaist sect of Tibetan Buddhism, which had spread among theMongols and oriented them toward Lhasa. These arrangements in InnerAsia were under a special Ministry of Dependencies, Lifan Yuan, whilethe Board of Rites continued to handle the tribute missions arriving fromcontiguous areas like Korea and Vietnam and also arriving from foreigncountries by sea.

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The Manchus attempted no social revolution. They slaughteredthose who resisted but confirmed the status of Chinese gentry families ifthey accepted Qing rule. The most visible evidence of this, required fromall male Chinese, was the distinctive Manchu tonsure—keeping theirforeheads shaved and braiding their back hair in a queue. The Qing alsohad perforce to accept the inadequacies of the Ming government: itsfiscal weakness due to a tax structure that collected less than five percentof the gross national product, and its anticommercialism—for instance,the inefficient use of pure silver exchanged in a great variety of units ofaccount (taels or ounces). As Inner Asians themselves, the Manchus alsoshared the Ming lack of interest in maritime trade and relations.

In his reign from 1722 to 1736 the Yongzheng Emperor propped upthe administrative system with useful reforms, first in taxation. Hefound that especially in the fertile Lower Yangzi provinces, well-connected landlords connived with yamen clerks to reduce their owntaxes by wily subterfuges and put the tax burden mainly on the farmingpopulace. Madeleine Zelin (1984) has described how Yongzheng’s audi-tors tried without much success to collect taxes from the gentry land-owners. In one reform the accumulated small surcharges were substi-tuted by a single surcharge of 15 to 20 percent on the basic rather lowland tax. Provinces used the proceeds partly to pay higher official sala-ries to “nourish honesty.” But the networks of personal connectionsor guanxi that helped each individual’s career were far too deeply inlaidin the structure of government to be eliminated. Today they are still aproblem.

In administration Yongzheng escaped the stifling effect of bureau-cratic procedure by developing an “eyes only” type of dispatch (memo-rial) inaugurated under Kangxi which came directly to the emperor fromcertain provincial officials and was returned to them with the emperor’sred notations—a whistle-blowing device that gave him informantsthroughout the bureaucracy. In 1729 he also set up a secret Office ofMilitary Finance of selected top officials to handle urgent business. Itbecame the chief agency of the Inner Court, and became known to for-eigners as the Grand Council.

The Grand Council when finally developed was an unusually effec-tive center of Inner Court decision-making—first, because of its infor-mality. The number of councillors averaged about seven. They wereManchus, Chinese, and occasionally Mongols serving for indefiniteterms while also carrying on their duties in high posts in the Outer

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Court, all in complete secrecy. Their 32 secretaries were talented youngmen with a future.

Second, Beatrice S. Bartlett (1991) has shown how the Grand Coun-cil built up its own secret files, including the eyes-alone palace memorialssent directly to the emperor. Much important documentation was inManchu. Much of the Council’s editorial work concerned bannermen(predominantly Chinese) who were specially devoted to the emperor.

The Jesuit Interlude

The Ming-to-Qing dynastic transition in the first half of the 1600s coin-cided with the arrival of Europeans in East Asia by sea. Missionaries fol-lowed the trade routes. China’s first contact with Europe was an extraor-dinarily fruitful interlude because the Jesuit missionaries were learnedmen capable of dealing with Chinese scholar-officials in intellectualterms. By 1601 the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci was permitted to reside inBeijing on an imperial stipend as a Western scholar. His successors weregiven charge of the office of astronomy that fixed the official calendar.The Jesuits’ success in using astronomy, cartography, European clock-work, the technique of mnemonics (memory training), and other exoticato attract Chinese scholars’ interest had been accompanied by a cleverpolicy of “accommodation.” They accepted early Confucianism as an-cient ethics, attacked only Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism, and sanc-tioned their Christian converts’ reverence for their ancestors as a “civilrite” compatible with Christian faith.

The Jesuit order was under attack in Europe on several fronts. Soonthe mendicant friars of the Dominican and Franciscan orders, coming toChina from the Spanish Philippines and trying to preach to commoners,denounced the Jesuits, who catered mainly to the Chinese elite. The dis-pute was referred to the Pope, who sent two envoys to explain to theQing emperor the papal supremacy in matters of religion. Within thepalace Jesuits also became involved in Manchu court politics. Result: in1724 the emperor banned Christianity as heterodox. Jesuits were al-lowed to remain only in Beijing.

This self-destruction of the Catholic mission to China is a well-known tale, like the original success story of Matteo Ricci so vividly re-counted by Jonathan Spence (1984). Beginning with a translation of Eu-clid’s geometry, the Jesuits published in Chinese, in addition to theirChristian works, more than a hundred treatises on Western science and

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technology. The possible influence of these writings in China awaitsfuller exploration, but there is no doubt of the importance of the Jesuitcultural outpost and the exchanges of ideas it did (and did not) makepossible.

Meanwhile, China’s influence on the eighteenth-century EuropeanEnlightenment has been pursued along two main lines: first on the levelof political thought among the philosophers, and second through thevogue of “chinoiserie” in gardens, pagodas, furniture, ceramics, andother lines. China’s impact on Europe through the Jesuits is a large fieldof study.

Growth of Qing Control in Inner Asia

The Manchu dynasty’s vitality in the eighteenth century was manifestedin its expansion in Inner Asia, specifically in Mongolia, Tibet, and Chi-nese Turkestan. This last was a vast region that included the Yili (Ili)grasslands north of the Mountains of Heaven (Tianshan) and south ofthem the arid desert and oases of Kashgaria.

Since the peripheries of empires must either be taken under controlor be lost, the Qing in the 1600s moved to counter the spread of Russianfur traders and explorers across Siberia and into the Amur valley on thenorth of Manchuria. By developing water transport from south to norththe Qing military were able to outnumber and overawe the few Russiansat the end of their trans-Siberian supply route. The result, with BeijingJesuits doing the interpreting and drafting, was the multilingual land-mark treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689. Together with a later treaty of 1727,these negotiations set a Sino–Russian boundary, let a Russian ecclesiasti-cal mission function quietly in Beijing, and permitted a rather exiguousRussian caravan trade to reach the capital.

West of Manchuria the Mongol tribes were kept under control byQing administrative arrangements and by the religious sect of YellowHat Lamaism centered under the Dalai Lama in Lhasa. This made Tibetone key to power in Mongolia and brought Qing forces to stay in Lhasa.Like Khubilai Khan in the thirteenth century, the Manchu emperors usedreligions for political purposes: Russian Orthodox Christianity for Rus-sians in Beijing, Catholic Christians for European contact at the court,and Yellow sect Lamaism in Tibet and Mongolia.

In between on the Far West, however, lay the mountains and desertsof Chinese Turkestan. Here the Qing confronted an unstable frontier on

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which the Western Mongol tribes became in the sixteenth and early sev-enteenth centuries a warlike and expansive force, threatening the stabil-ity of the Qing overlordship in Mongolia. To meet this danger, Qingbannermen led a series of expeditionary forces over routes familiar totheir Han and Tang predecessors and during the 1750s subjugated theWestern Mongols in Yili.

Typically for conquerors, the Qing found it imperative to take overthe adjacent oases of Kashgaria south of the Tianshan, and here theyfound still another but more formidable religious community to dealwith—Islam. In Kashgaria the populace generally lived by the Islamiccalendar, and their religious, educational, and cultural life was domi-nated by the leaders of the faith. Once Qing rule was established by con-quest in the 1750s, order was imposed on the Muslim population by ap-pointing local chieftains as governors (begs). As Muslims, the begs leftlegal cases to be settled by Islamic law. The Qing rulers at Beijing col-lected taxes, especially on trade, and tried to keep order. But imperialConfucianism could not digest and could only occasionally co-opt theself-sufficient and all-embracing order of Islam.

In this way the High Qing rounded out its imperial frontiers far be-yond the scope reached by the Ming. In short, Inner Asia was now takenover by the rulers at Beijing, part of whose success no doubt lay in thefact that as Manchus they were Inner Asians themselves and flexible inideology. The Qing hegemony over Inner Asia after 1755 began a newera in the perpetual interplay between agrarian China and the tribes ofthe steppe. China was the nomads’ supply house for grain, silk, andother products they wanted. The Chinese and the Inner Asian tribal peo-ples formed a geopolitical community. In the end the Chinese nation ofthe twentieth century would have its own version of a colonial empire todeal with in Inner Asia.

The era from late Ming to 1800 or so showed continued Manchu cre-ativity but within a context of mounting problems. For example, whenwe note how the final Qing conquest of the Western Mongols in the1750s consolidated the Qing continental control over Mongolia, CentralAsia, and Tibet, we must also note the Western context. The contempo-rary struggle between the British and French empires during the SevenYears’ War of the 1750s secured Canada and India for British sea powerand enterprise. Thus, while the Qing gained control of the marginal car-avan routes of arid Central Asia, Britain began to conquer the world’sseas at a higher level of power altogether.

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The Attempted Integration of Polity and Culture

To retain power, which was their primary aim, the Qing rulers facedtwo tasks—first to preserve the social and political order of imperialConfucianism, and second to retain power as non-Chinese rulers. Theseaims overlapped but were not identical. As eventually became evident,Manchu rule was trapped by history into opposing in China the senti-ment of ethnic nationalism that was obviously becoming a major moti-vation among states in the rest of the world.

In the first task—Confucian governance—the dynasty’s major aimwas to integrate its rule with Chinese culture in mutual dependence. Thepolitics was clearcut: dynastic power established by warfare was sanc-tioned by the need for unity under one ruler, unchallenged. This unity inturn was sanctioned by the need for order, and order depended upon cer-emonies and proper behavior, with punitive force held in reserve.

In today’s media environment where citizens observe events directlywith less need but more supply of symbols, it is not easy to appreciate theimportance of ritual and ceremony in an earlier time. One basis of thegovernment of imperial China was the proper performance of ceremo-nies at all levels of society. The son kowtowed to his father as his fathermight do toward the emperor and his officials, for the essence of the civilorder was to differentiate the hierarchy of relationships. Proper conduct,it was hoped, externalized one’s inner values; but even in the absence ofinner feelings, one’s performance of ritual could provide a common for-mal bond with others. In this way the appearance of harmony could as-sure it. As Naquin and Rawski (1987) put it, “luan was the disorder thatcould arise within the state, the community, the household or the indi-vidual when ethical norms and correct ritual were not followed. The de-sire to promote order and prevent luan permeated Chinese society fromtop to bottom.”

The emperor was the great promoter of order. Before the public hisposition was asserted and reinforced by a variety of activities, beginningwith his daily solicitude for his mother and his performance of ceremo-nies for the reverence of his dynastic ancestors. Another strength of Con-fucian government lay in its constantly seeking the moral approval ofthe people governed. This was done by its support of books and educa-tion in the teachings of Neo-Confucianism; its maintenance of the ritu-als marking the seasons of the year and the interplay of relations be-tween man and nature; and its daily demonstration of the exemplaryconduct of the ruler which gave him, it was hoped, a virtue that com-

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manded obedience. The ruler’s activities included several that aimed atthe public welfare, such as dike-building for flood control and maintain-ing the ever-normal granaries for famine relief and grain loans in time ofdearth. The ruler also encouraged morality by the bestowal of rewardson aged and virtuous persons, especially chaste widows.

With this wide support of morality went the menace of the criminallaw and punishment of malefactors against morality, especially againstthe dynasty. This application of the law against evildoers or the merethreat of evildoing included the uninhibited investigation of people intheir households and personal lives and the use of judicial torture to en-courage confessions. The ankle squeezer used in court was stepped up soas to maximize pressure, and it could turn bones into jelly when skillfullyapplied. When in doubt as to what law had been violated, the magis-trate-judges could fall back on the statute against “doing what ought notto be done,” whatever it might have been.

By these rewards and punishments it was hoped the common peoplecould be kept in the proper path. The punishment of relatives was a reg-ular part of the punishment of the criminal. The ancient device of groupresponsibility meant in effect guilt by association.

In the theocratic Chinese state that extolled the emperor as Son ofHeaven, heterodoxy was perpetually guarded against. The strategic elitestratum was the local leadership that began with the roughly one millionlower gentry or holders of the first-level (shengyuan or jiansheng) de-grees, which did not qualify one for official appointment but conferred aprivileged status and opportunity to seek higher degrees. To these wereadded possibly five million male commoners, more or less, who hadachieved some amount of classical education. With their help, the indoc-trination of the common people was pursued by the elite as a Neo-Con-fucian duty.

As an example let us cite the use of the Sacred Edict (shengyu) of theKangxi Emperor issued in 1670 as 16 maxims for the guidance of dailyconduct. Each maxim seven characters long, they conveyed, as VictorMair (in Johnson et al., 1985) says, “the bare bones of Confucian ortho-doxy as it pertained to the average citizen.” After 1670 appeared com-mentaries, paraphrases, adaptations, and so on, in a considerable liter-ature. The idea of explicating classical texts in written colloquialversions seems to have begun in the Yuan dynasty. A precedent in theearly Ming appeared as the Six Maxims of the Hongwu Emperor. TheQing Sacred Edict was now used in the Community Compact or villagelecture system originally promoted by Zhu Xi, which in the Ming and

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Qing continued to combat heterodoxy and give a religious tinge to thesupport of orthodoxy.

For example, in the poorest back country among minority peoples,magistrates would use vernacular versions and have the text sung as anincantation. The usual community meetings might use ritual, incense,candles, flower vases, and musicians, plus the singing of a cantor alongwith drums and clappers. The audience would be told when to kneel,bow, and kowtow. The magistrate might also record notes on the meet-ing, how the villagers responded, their styles of behavior and the amica-ble settlement of conflicts. In the early eighteenth century efforts weremade to have sessions on the Sacred Edict twice a month. The text usedwould be modified to suit the audience, either in simple vernacular orembellished with classical allusions or with memorable jingles for thesimple country folk.

After all this the Yongzheng Emperor had issued in 1724 his “ampli-fied instructions” on the Sacred Edict, approximately 10,000 characterslong. The emperor wanted things to be clear. However, his text couldhardly be comprehended by most of his audience, and officials thereforedeveloped vernacular paraphrases. These versions were generally ex-pected to be read aloud to the people even if the Mandarin dialect couldnot be understood by them. An orator would speak the local dialect. At areading session the aged, over 80 or 90, would sit behind the gentry andbe served tea while the commoners “were ordered to stand and listen.”An increasing concern about heterodoxy is evident in the phraseology ofthe Ming Six Maxims, the Sacred Edict of 1670, and the amplified in-structions of the Sacred Edict of 1724. Mair lists ten versions of the ex-plication, which he sees as examples of “the bearers of high culture con-sciously and wilfully trying to mold popular culture.” But it is still tooearly to say what was achieved.

Another area for imperial leadership was in popular religion, in par-ticular the deification of public figures famous in earlier times. The mostprominent example is that of Guan Yu (162–220), who began as a body-guard of the founder of one of the Three Kingdoms. Prasenjit Duara(1988) notes how Guan Yu became a ubiquitous folk deity, the god ofloyalty, of wealth, of literature, protector of temples, patron of actorsand secret societies, as well as the god of war. Many social groups thusused him as a mythic symbol. In 1614 the Ming gave him imperial rankas Guandi. In 1725 “the Guandi cult was brought under systematic im-perial control.” The best endowed of the hundreds of popular Guanditemples in every county was “selected as the official Guandi temple.” By

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1853 the Qing raised his worship in the official sacrifices to the samelevel as that of Confucius. He was thoroughly Confucianized as a masterof the classical teachings; Guandi became a heroic protector and pro-vider, a warrior loyal above all to constituted authority and the estab-lished order. Duara concludes that cults like those of Guandi served tointegrate the village with the larger society. Guandi’s many symbolicfunctions at the popular and imperial levels reinforced one another.

Similarly, James L. Watson (in Johnson et al., 1985) has traced how“the promotion of state-approved cults in South China was so successfulthat by the mid-Ch’ing [Qing] local gods had been effectively supersededby a handful of approved deities.” An example was the Empress ofHeaven (Tian Hou), also known as Ma Zu, the patron goddess of fisher-people, sailors, and maritime merchants. She emerged as a minor deityon the coast of Fujian in the tenth century. The cult began with a womanof the Lin family who took thought for the safety of mariners and be-came known as “Aunt Lin.” Gradually she became a goddess incorpo-rated into the state-approved pantheon through established bureaucraticprocedures not unlike the validation of saints in the Catholic Church.The emperor took formal note of the goddess’s service to the state andconferred honorific titles upon her, beginning in 1156. In 1278 she wascommended by no less than Khubilai Khan. By 1409 she was the celestialconcubine who protected the people. The Qing emperors, as they soughtto control the southern coast, made her more important. Finally in 1737the emperor made her “Empress of Heaven.” In Taiwan there were of-ficial and unofficial temples to this goddess, who became the patron ofseveral merchant guilds with interests in Fujian, as well as of pirates whopreyed upon the merchants.

When dominant local lineages adopted her as their patron deity, sheprovided a useful symbol at both the official and the local levels. The lo-cal elites who used the goddess were cooperating in a way approved bythe state. She had become a symbol of joining the mainstream Chineseculture. The cult incorporated people from widely varied social back-grounds who might have different beliefs about it. Yet by approvingwhat the people accepted, the state strengthened its integration with theculture.

Another form of integration which amounted to integral subordina-tion was ensured by what David Johnson (in Johnson et al., 1985) termsthe “structure of dominance”—the fact that few commoners could beindependent of their relations with rural landlords if they were tenantsor with urban employers if they were apprentices. This sense of depen-

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dence upon superior authority was reflected in the cultural activities ofthe common people. The written records of popular culture included awide range, from almanacs to the scriptures of religious sects. Localoperas or other dramas were organized and enacted at market towns orat the village level or often by lineages. But throughout the popular cul-ture dissident voices were not permitted to be heard and were destroyedif possible.

The integration of polity and culture sustained the Manchus’ legiti-macy in their second task—to preserve their power as an alien dynasty.Already the dry rot of assimilation was reducing the Manchu garrisontroops to penury. Unable to survive on their farm lands, many troop-ers had lost both land and livelihood, and had even married Chinesewomen. Meanwhile the Manchu leadership, still in control of the state,had to keep the loyalty of the Chinese gentry-elite. To absorb the ener-gies of Chinese scholars produced by the examination system far in ex-cess of the posts available, the Manchu emperors became great patronsof literature and sponsored enormous projects of criticism and compila-tion. This was not simply smart opportunism but inhered in the dis-charge of imperial duty. Certain emperors of Han, Sui, Tang, Song, andMing had all sponsored official catalogs of their imperial libraries. In1409 the third Ming ruler sponsored the Yongle dadian, an encyclopediain 10,000 manuscript volumes into which many works were copied. TheKangxi Emperor produced the famous Kangxi Dictionary and an enor-mous encyclopedia in 5,020 chapters. R. Kent Guy (1987) points outthat such projects manifested the emperor’s responsibility for and con-trol over all writings in parallel with his responsibility for and controlover the education and thought of all scholars.

During the decade after 1772, the Qianlong Emperor, who in hisreign sponsored some 60 publications, pursued a project to collect andreproduce all major Chinese works in the four categories of the classics,histories, philosophy, and belles lettres. The resulting Complete Libraryof the Four Treasuries was derived from the examination of 10,869works, of which 3,697 were deemed worthy of inclusion. They were toolarge to print, and only seven copies each in 36,500 chapters (juan) weremade by hand. The printed catalog alone ran to 4,490 pages. (PulitzerPrize committees inundated with books today should take heart.) Theadvocates of the Qing scholarship of evidential research (kaozheng,“rectification through investigation”) dominated the project.

Guy shows how the critiques of histories and classical commentariesdrafted by unofficial scholars of the conservative “Song Learning” or of

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the more venturesome “Han Learning” of the kaozheng movement wereedited by the bureaucrats of the compilation commission under thewatchful eye of the paternal autocrat. The whole process buttressed hislegitimacy, for it showed he was doing his job. Chinese emperors “hadvery different prerogatives over scholarship and intellectual life thanthose to which we are accustomed in the West.” They were “not only po-litical leaders, they were sages and stewards of the classical canon.” Thisdoctrine, one may add, had survived at the center of the Chinese polityever since the Shang.

Increasingly the Manchu court used this vast book collection mech-anism to conduct a literary inquisition. Although Guy believes it had notbeen the original aim, as Western scholars first assumed, an effort wasmade to suppress all works that reflected badly on alien rulers. Insearching out rare books and complete texts for inclusion in the mas-ter library, the compilers were able at the same time to search out allheterodox works that should be banned or destroyed. They paid highprices for rare works and even conducted house-to-house canvasses. Theworks proscribed included studies of military or frontier affairs, criti-cism antibarbarian in tone, and above all items that extolled the preced-ing Chinese dynasty of the Ming. Altogether, some 2,320 works weresuppressed. Ostentatious punishments raised the level of terror amongthe thousands of literati and officials involved. A certain Wang Xihouhad printed a dictionary that criticized the Kangxi Dictionary and trea-sonously printed in full the taboo temple names of the Qing emperors.For this Wang was executed and 21 of his family were enslaved. TheJiangxi governor who had supported the publication was also executed.

Truly the price of alien despotism was eternal vigilance. In the sor-cery scare of 1768 Philip Kuhn (1990) has demonstrated how the Qian-long Emperor tried to combat the soul-stealing that was popularly be-lieved to be achievable by clipping off part of a man’s queue. It was aform of sorcery that menaced the public. Soon, however, the worriedemperor saw in queue-clipping a seditious attack on the Qing tonsure asthe symbol of loyal subjection to his rule. Qianlong’s worried demandsfor evidence built up a widespread record because prolonged courtroomtorture could elicit from impoverished monks and beggars whateverconfessions the officials desired. In the end the Grand Council’s closerlook revealed that the “evidence” tortured out of people had all beenfabricated.

This imperial sensitivity to the slightest sign of sedition, even at thevery height of Qing magnificence, calls into question how far the Man-

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chus had really succeeded in both avoiding assimilation themselves andfostering Chinese fealty to them. This raises an unresolved question.Right down to 1911 did not the effort to keep the dynasty in control re-quire an unbudging conservatism that held China back?

The same question may be asked of the scholar-official class. W. T. deBary (1991) in describing “the trouble with Confucianism,” vividly re-minds us how defenseless were the Confucian scholars vis-à-vis the statepower. They had no power base of their own except as they remainedloyal to the ruler or joined in factions formed by like-minded colleagues.Seventeenth-century critics after the Ming disaster had no theoretical ba-sis for questioning the imperial autocracy. They resurrected fengjian(“feudal”) ideas: for example, to strengthen the local magistrate againstthe corrupt yamen underlings and local gentry by dropping the rule ofavoidance and letting him stay longer in office in his native place. Thiswould give the magistrate more incentive and opportunity to improvelocal conditions. But the Qing would not accept the risk of fostering lo-cal interests. Except for a sprinkling of conscientious questioners, Qingscholars found their security lay in supporting orthodoxy. Critical viewsmight seem heterodox. Even the most trenchant critics of dynastic gov-ernment, like Huang Zongxi in the seventeenth century, assumed the ne-cessity of a single exemplary ruler exercising the final power of the state.Lacking much contact with Western books or ideas, the literati as of1820 remained integrated in the Neo-Confucian establishment.

Overall, details of city life and literati culture show government play-ing only a minor role in the mid-Qing era of high civilization. Yet withincertain regions of the Chinese subcontinent the state’s economic activitywas sometimes spectacular. At Jingdezhen the imperial porcelain-mak-ing industry employed about 100,000 workers. The fires of two to threehundred kilns would glow in the night. In the late 1600s several millionpieces of porcelain were sent to Europe every year. Similarly, the imperialsilk manufactory at Suzhou by 1685 counted 800 looms and 2,330workers. Commercialization continued apace as did privatization ofbusiness. Eighteenth-century textile factories with hundreds of loomsand workers were hailed in Maoist China as “sprouts of capitalism” thatwould have modernized China’s economy if not cut short by Western im-perialism. Meanwhile, the merchant class came to the fore. At Beijing be-fore 1800 there were about 23 native-place guilds catering to merchantsfrom other provinces; by 1875 they would total 387. So one might con-tinue with impressive examples of commercial growth.

160 rise and decline of the imperial autocracy

In their survey of eighteenth-century China as visible in its macro-re-gions, S. Naquin and E. S. Rawski (1987) begin by noting the good re-pute of China in the European Enlightenment before the denigrationthat accompanied closer contact in the nineteenth century. They pointout that European observers of the earlier era were generally “dazzled byChinese sophistication and splendor.” The 120 years after Kangxi’s con-solidation of Qing rule in the 1680s was a “dynamic” time when theChinese empire expanded to its greatest extent as part of the resumptionof a surge of economic growth and social change that had begun in lateMing. European savants of the Enlightenment were rightly impressedwith China’s grandeur.

If we ask whether such grandeur amounted to eighteenth-centuryChinese “prosperity,” we fall into the trap of holistic generalization thatour study of macroregions aims to avoid. The vitality of new develop-ments in core areas says something about potentialities for the future,not about current conditions countrywide. We know that gross nationalproduct, because it averages millionaires and paupers, may statisticallyshow a nation to be well off even when many of its citizens are destitute.It is even harder to generalize meaningfully about premodern times.Naquin and Rawski caution that “it is important to be impatient withnational-level generalizations.” In the absence of census and trade fig-ures, research on local history in the High Qing gazetteers and local re-cords faces great but onerous opportunities.

Given the overhang of long-established customs and institutions, ahypothesis may be offered concerning the comparison of China and Eu-rope in early modern times: In China, the economic and social develop-ments of the Late Imperial age were less innovations than continuations.Though comparable to Europe in bulk, activity, and sophistication, eigh-teenth-century China was at the end of a period of high civilization thathad begun in the Northern Song eight centuries before, while Europe ofthe Enlightenment was just embarking on a quite new phase of worldhistory. Or to put it another way, new things in China could arise onlywithin the inherited matrix of imperial autocracy and gentry society thatwould remain dominant throughout the nineteenth century. This is thefocus of our next section.

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P A R T T W O

Late Imperial China1600–1911

Lat e i m p e r i a l c h i n a from 1600 to 1911 saw a doublingif not actually a tripling of population and a correspondinggrowth in production and trade and the institutions that sup-port them. The disorder of the seventeenth-century transition fromMing to Qing dynastic rule was followed by a High Qing periodfrom about 1680 to the early nineteenth century. Only after ca.1820 did Western contact begin to get out of control. By that timethe decline of the Qing dynasty had already begun.

In this dramatic story of material growth and political decay theautocratic state maintained in theory its claim to dominate all as-pects of Chinese life, but in fact it played a minor part in the dy-namic growth of Chinese economy and society of Late Ming andQing. In Part Two our main interest therefore shifts from politics toeconomics, from the state to the society.

The old Victorian stereotype of a China that remained passiveand unchanging while the progressive West exploded over theglobe is long since out of date. Instead we have to imagine as of1750 an Asia of big countries—Japan at 28 million was larger thanFrance or Germany, while both China at, say, 200 million and In-dia at perhaps 100 million were much bigger still. Europe wasmerely a peninsula of the Eurasian land mass, crowded between theMediterranean and Baltic Seas. The Americas had perhaps 10million Native Americans, while the European element consistedmainly of settlements up the St. Lawrence River and along the At-lantic and Gulf coasts, in addition to the older Iberian settlementsof Mexico and Central and South America. Thus a mere 250 years

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ago the world population was distributed much differently than to-day.

After about 1750 the Industrial Revolution brought a great in-crease in the use of steam in manufacturing and transport. Its auto-motive, electronic, and other successors have remade the humancondition worldwide. But we still lack unanimous agreement onprecisely what has been happening. Even the question of just howthe Industrial Revolution got started even today is a subject of dis-pute among economic historians. The importance of a dozen ormore factors in the process is still being evaluated. These factors in-clude the growth of the market, use of the factory system, inven-tions, science and technology, public education, the security of pri-vate property, the agricultural revolution, foreign trade, populationgrowth, supply of capital and credit, increased supply and produc-tivity of labor, rate of investment, and the like. These factors allstimulated industrialization in Europe. Perhaps the real dynamiclay in their interaction as mutual stimulants.

Our inherited images of early modern China show her deficientin many if not most of those factors. A comparable industrializa-tion did not occur in nineteenth-century China; yet the disparity intechnological and material development that so impressed the Vic-torians is now viewed from a new perspective that stresses the vastsize and maturity of China’s domestic trade and the growing powerof her merchant class in the Ming and early Qing, a power only in-directly acknowledged in the official records. Even Adam Smithcould perceive that China’s home market was as big as that of allthe different countries of Europe put together. The extensive inter-provincial trade meant that China was already highly commercial-ized yet largely self-sufficient. Lancashire textiles, for example,failed to sweep the Chinese market simply because China’s hand-woven “Nankeen” cotton cloth was a superior and on the wholecheaper product for local purposes; it still supplied most of NorthChina’s needs as late as 1930. After the long struggle to “open”the Chinese market, China’s chief imports for mass consumptionturned out to be a drug, opium, and a fuel, kerosene—a productmore of geological conditions than of Western industrial preemi-nence. China’s modern economy when it did develop would be to alarge extent in Chinese hands.

The reasons why the late Qing achieved so little industrializa-tion despite its enormous material growth were not only economic

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but also social, political, and cultural. This is not a question thatcan be settled simply by applying economic concepts. Thus in PartTwo, before turning to the Western invasion after 1820, we willnote two elements: first, the extent of China’s domestic growth andof certain institutional constraints that would limit its capacity toindustrialize; and second, the dynamism of the Chinese overseas—Maritime China—and the foreign trade that would contribute toChina’s entrance into the outside world.

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8The Paradox of Growth

without Development

The Rise in Population

An increase in population has usually been accompanied (indeed facili-tated) by an increase in trade. One can hardly occur without the other. Inthe Western experience, commerce provided the conditions that allowedindustrialization to get started, which in turn led to growth in science,technology, industry, transport, communications, social change, and thelike that we group under the broad term of development. In China suchdevelopment did not occur, at least not on anything like the scale in theWest. Researchers like Philip Huang (1990) believe that in looking atChina we must give up our common assumptions based on European ex-perience and the reaction to it of European economic theorists like AdamSmith and Karl Marx. China’s economy had its special problems. Forone thing, China was so large that evidence can be found for very diverseconditions and trends in different areas at the same time.

To begin with, the massive increase of population that in Europe wasat first attributed to industrialization occurred also and during the sameperiod in China, even though there was no comparable industrialization.An estimated population of 60 million as of ad 2 in mid-Han had beenmatched by roughly the same figure in mid-Tang, suggesting a thousandyears of ups and downs with only a modest overall increase. Then the es-timated total rose under the Song to well above 100 million but was re-ported as considerably less under the Mongols and the early Ming. Bythe time of the Qing takeover in the seventeenth century the total seemsto have risen only slowly during a period of 600 years.

The Manchu dynasty in 1651 recorded 10 million families or house-holds, each of which was estimated at six persons. But we know that the

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official population estimates of dynasties erred on the short side. Thiswas because tax payments were due from an administrative area partlyaccording to the estimated population total. This created an incentivefor short reporting both by the people and by the authorities responsiblefor tax payments. China before the 1980s never had a genuine census ofthe modern type, recording precise data as of a given date on age and sexdistribution, marital status, migration, and the other minutiae necessaryfor scientific analysis. The Chinese figures, on the contrary, resulted fromregistration and estimation for government purposes, to find out thenumbers capable of cultivating land, laboring on public works, bearingarms, or paying taxes. Popular cooperation was not to be expected.Whole categories of persons were omitted. Uniform schedules, accuratemaps, trained enumerators, all were lacking. The estimates were oftenproducts of bureaucratic ritual. Henan province, for example, duringmuch of the nineteenth century reported an increase of 1,000 persons ev-ery other year!

One may guess that the Chinese population by 1600 was close to 150million. The Ming–Qing transition may have seen a decline. From 1741to the outbreak of the great Taiping rebellion in 1851 the annual figuresrose steadily and spectacularly, beginning with 143 million and endingwith 432 million. If we accept these totals, we are confronted with a situ-ation in which the Chinese population doubled in the 50 years from1790 to 1840. If, with greater caution, we assume lower totals in theearly eighteenth century and only 400 million by 1850, we still face astartling fact: something like a doubling of the vast Chinese populationin the century before Western contact, foreign trade, and industrializa-tion could have had much effect.

To explain this sudden increase we cannot point to factors constantin Chinese society but must find conditions or a combination of factorsnewly effective during this period. Among these is the almost completeinternal peace maintained under Manchu rule during the eighteenth cen-tury. There was also an increase in foreign trade through Guangzhouand some improvement of transportation within the empire. Control ofdisease, like the checking of smallpox by variolation, may have been im-portant. But of most critical importance was the food supply.

Confronted with a multitude of unreliable figures, economists havecompared the population records with the aggregate data for cultivatedland area and grain production in the six centuries since 1368. Assum-ing that China’s population in 1400 was about 80 million, DwightPerkins (1969) concludes that its growth to 700 million or more in the

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1960s was made possible by a steady increase of the grain supply, whichevidently grew five or six times between 1400 and 1800 and rose another50 percent between 1800 and 1965. This increase of food supply wasdue perhaps half to the increase of cultivated area, particularly by migra-tion and settlement in the central and western provinces, and half togreater productivity—the farmers’ success in raising more crops per unitof land.

This technological advance took many forms: one was the continualintroduction from the south of earlier-ripening varieties of rice, whichmade possible double-cropping. New crops such as corn (maize) andsweet potatoes as well as peanuts and tobacco were introduced from theAmericas. Corn, for instance, can be grown on the dry soil and marginalhill land of North China, where it is used for food, fuel, and fodder, andprovides something like one seventh of the food energy available in thearea. The sweet potato, growing in sandy soil and providing more foodenergy per unit of land than other crops, became the poor man’s food inmuch of the South China rice area.

Productivity in agriculture was also improved by capital investments,first of all in irrigation. From 1400 to 1900 the total of irrigated landseems to have increased almost three times. There was also a gain infarm tools, draft animals, and human fertilizer (night soil), to say noth-ing of the population growth itself, which increased half again as fast ascultivated land area and so increased the ratio of human hands and ofnight soil available per unit of land. Thus the rising population was fedby a more intensive agriculture, applying more labor and fertilizer to theland.

In this broader perspective, population growth in China over the last600 years has averaged only about four tenths of one percent a year, nota rapid rate overall. But the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centurydoubling and redoubling of numbers was something like the contempo-rary European population explosion triggered partly by the spread of thepotato. Recently, some have speculated that the contemporary earlymodern growth in China, Russia, and Europe was due to a global warm-ing of the climate in early modern times, which lengthened the growingseason. Possibly this is a major explanation of China’s growth, but it stillawaits detailed study and cannot be called a probability.

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Diminishing Returns of Farm Labor

Despite enormous growth in population and food supply, the Late Impe-rial era saw a decline of productivity per laborer in agriculture. This de-cline struck at the very sector that Confucian scholar-officials regardedas the root of the state and were most committed to fostering. Indeed,their studies and manuals of agricultural technology were models fortheir day. Unfortunately, the authors were not input–output economists.Because farm families were so busy and hard-working, most observersmissed the fact of diminishing returns, especially in rice culture.

The technology of rice culture had steadily advanced along with theincrease of production. After the fall of Northern Song to the Jin dynastyin 1126, emigration from North China southward increased, and theYangzi valley and areas to the south grew in population and rice culturesimultaneously. Land was converted to paddy by vigorous effort. RobertHartwell (1982) reports, for example, that between 1170 and 1225 newdikes or polders “resulted in the reclamation of nearly all the arable landfrom Lake T’ai to the sea and from the mouth of the Yangtze to thecoastal districts of northern Chekiang.” All along the southeast coastfrom Zhejiang to Guangzhou new land was formed by diking fields inthe coastal lowlands. Meanwhile, the terracing of hills and mountainsincreased rice acreage all across South China.

The hand-cultivation of rice requires the fine-tuning of many factors:choice of seed and cropping pattern, the ploughing, irrigating, and fertil-izing of fields, the transplanting, weeding, harvesting, winnowing, anddrying of the crop, and its storage, transportation, and sale. There aremany fine points to consider. Increasing skill and unremitting effort canoften increase rice yields in comparison with alternative crops or house-hold handicrafts. Yet the almost indefinite growth of rice yields whenabundant labor power is available cannot forever obviate the law of di-minishing returns.

Today, looking at the terraced fields that mold the landscape in somany parts of China, an observer may be impressed by the beauty of thelevel contours imposed by man upon nature and awed by the past invest-ment of muscle power they represent. The economic-minded may calcu-late the productivity per farmer possible in such a scene. Rice was able tosupply more calories per unit of land than any other crop, making it thestaff of life in China from Song times onward. But it is indeed labor-in-tensive.

Consider, for example, the extra labor required to add another ter-

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race on top of several already in use: the physical effort in climbing theterraces to prepare the new top field, to bring up seedlings for transplant-ing, to adjust the flow of irrigation, to carry up and apply fertilizer, tomonitor, weed, and finally hand-harvest the crop. Kang Chao (1986) es-timates that in China’s labor-intensive farming system, labor input into aunit of land may be 10 to 20 times the labor input usual in extensiveplow cultivation elsewhere. In effect, the rice farmer was married to hardlabor. As time went on, the total rice crop grew along with the popula-tion. Dwight Perkins has shown how the cultivated area increased withpopulation growth, though the new increments of land were of courseless accessible and efficient. When effort was shifted from rice to othercrops or from agriculture, say, to handicraft production, the same limita-tion would sooner or later begin to operate. The farmer got less and lessproduct for every increase of his effort.

While “population pressure,” meaning a surplus of people makingland more scarce than labor and labor therefore cheap, has been one ofthe major generalizations about China, the judgment of “overpopula-tion” is a technical question for economic historians. There is as yet noconsensus on how great it has been in China at what times and places.Major statistics of land and people are still in dispute. Yet one can pointto several facts leading to the general conclusion that population pres-sure has slowed China’s economic and industrial growth.

Land hunger, for one thing, has led to a steady encroachment offarmers on China’s lakes. Peter Perdue (1987) has found that around thebig Dongting Lake in Hunan by the present century some 900 dikes hadbeen built, stretching almost 4,000 miles. Reduction of lake area re-duced the catchment basin for flood waters, exacerbating the flood prob-lem. R. Keith Schoppa (1989) has traced how the Xiang Lake nearHangzhou over the course of nine centuries was filled in and disap-peared.

Behind this land hunger lay a steady worsening of the man-to-landratio. In the era of the equal-field land allotments between 485 and themid-700s, cultivated land per household had been estimated at 80 mou(a mou or mu is roughly one sixth of an acre). By the twelfth century itwas around 20 to 30 mou, and in 1936 the average for a family farm inChina would be estimated at 3.6 mou. The precise significance of termsand statistics in the voluminous but various Chinese records bedevils thework of researchers, but there can be no question as to the long-termdownward trend in the man/land ratio.

Another noteworthy datum to indicate the plight of Chinese farmers

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is the fact that the great Chinese inventions in technology such as silk,porcelain, canal locks, the clock escapement, the stern-post rudder,printing, gunpowder, the mold-board iron plow, and all the rest so copi-ously set forth by Joseph Needham and his coworkers came generally toan end in the Song. Thereafter the abundance of muscle power made la-bor-saving inventions less needed. Kang Chao notes that the 77 inven-tions for use in agriculture (like the bucketed water wheel or noria for ir-rigation) listed in a 1313 handbook were not appreciably added to inlater such works.

Farm household industries making silk and tea, or later weaving cot-ton, offer another line of evidence. It seems strange that after the Songcities of Kaifeng and Hangzhou were established, no great cities of over amillion emerge in China until the nineteenth century. This seems to bepartly because industry, as Chao puts it, was “ruralized,” or as PhilipHuang says, “familized.” That is, handicrafts by farm women producedgoods more cheaply than could city factories or silk filatures. Farmwomen could run their own unobtrusive sweatshops at home to manu-facture household supplies and marketable goods for less than a livablewage. It was less a symptom of incipient capitalism than of the Chinesefarmer’s ingenuity in supplementing his inadequate return from too-small plots of land. Handicraft products could be sold at the local mar-kets that grew up in the Song and after to eke out a bit of extra in-come. They bespoke the farm family’s abject poverty, which obliged thefarmer’s wife and children to keep at work spinning and weaving to gainonly a pittance that would nevertheless help fend off starvation.

Can the recorded growth in China’s population and production bereconciled with evidence of “immiseration,” a worsening of living stan-dards at least in some areas? Economists are still arguing over this anom-aly. To allege “overpopulation” in a China that doubled its population inthe Ming and again in the Qing, preparatory to doubling once again af-ter 1949, may seem to fly in the face of the evidence. The issue, however,is not whether the population could feed itself and continue to increasebut whether its overall standard of living could be maintained.

Several results flowed from this population pressure in the late nine-teenth century: machines competed with cheap manpower in transportand industry and so seemed to threaten popular livelihood. Povertymeant lack of purchasing power and lack of a market for manufacturedgoods. Lethargy in mechanization and in standardization handicappedChina’s capacity to compete even as a source of handicraft products—

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witness India’s supplanting China in tea production and Japan’s rise todominance in silk production.

China’s loss on the land in the per capita productivity of her farm la-bor force was exacerbated by the artificial weakening of her womanpower, through the practice of footbinding.

The Subjection of Women

The low status of women in the old China is cited in all accounts of thefamily system. But merely to state that women married outside theirfamilies of birth, did not own property, and were seldom educated doesnot give the busy reader a graphic picture. This lack can be met in partby focusing on the very distinct custom of footbinding.

When my wife and I lived in Beijing for four years in the early 1930s,three things impressed us as unusual. First, we were non-Chinese but be-cause of earlier imperialist foreign invasion we enjoyed the privileges ofthe Chinese ruling-class elite. The police did not bother us. Second, man-power was so abundant and cheap that our easiest transportation wasby ricksha with an intelligent human horse between the shafts. He couldgo faster if you asked him. If trotting about and sweating in the cold gavehim a bloody cough, he could always find us a successor. Third, allwomen of middle age or over had bound feet, stumping about awk-wardly on their heels as though the front sections of their feet had beenamputated. Traveling in the countryside of five North China provinces,we never met a farmer’s wife over the age of 30 whose feet were notbound. All three of these undesirable phenomena—foreign special privi-leges, an excess of manpower, the bound feet of women—were part andparcel of the culture.

In the old China women were first of all the product and the propertyof their families. Until well into the present century their subjection wasdemonstrated and reinforced by the custom of footbinding. So generalhas been Chinese avoidance of the topic of footbinding that modern Chi-nese publication on it is meager. Westerners studying China naturally im-bibe Chinese sensitivities, and few are muckrakers by temperament. Yetfootbinding darkened the lives of most Chinese women for several cen-turies, with social and psychic repercussions that call for historical ap-praisal. Most obvious was the economic loss through the impairment offarm women’s muscle power and capacity for labor.

The first thing to note about footbinding is that the feet did not cease

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to grow. They were simply made to grow into a deformed shape. Imag-ine yourself a girl child who—for some six to ten long years, beginning atage 5 to 8 and lasting until 13 or 15, the years of your childhood and get-ting your growth—has her feet always bound in long strips of bindingcloth night and day with no letup in order to deform them into 3-inch-long “golden lilies.” To make your feet thinner under the constant pres-sure, your four minor toes on each foot are pushed down around and un-der the balls of your feet. If you tried to walk in a normal way, youwould be putting your weight on your toe bones under your feet. Fortu-nately, however, you cannot do this because in the meantime in order tomake your feet shorter the binding cloths have compressed them fromfront to back. Under this constant pressure your arches have graduallybeen broken and bowed upward so only the back edge of your heels cansupport your weight. As the arch is gradually broken, the flat of yourheels and the balls of your foot (or plantar) are gradually moved fromhorizontal to perpendicular, facing each other, so that an object like a sil-ver dollar can be inserted in the narrow space between them. The resultis that you will never run again and can walk on the base of your heelsonly with difficulty. Even standing will be uncomfortable. After your feethave stopped growing the pain will be gone, but you will continue towear your binding cloths partly to give your feet support, and partly be-cause they are unlovely objects, horribly misshapen and ugly to look at.You let no one see them unshod.

This self-inflicted and inexorable pain in your formative years is wel-comed in theory as a way to get a good marriage that may help yourfamily with a fine bride price. Marriage brokers stressed the importanceof foot size. Your mother went through it all and helps you do the same.She teaches you the art of not blocking circulation lest it produce gan-grene and pus, of keeping your bent-under toenails manicured so theywill not puncture your skin, of changing the bindings daily to keep thepressure even, of washing to reduce the smell, massaging your legs to re-duce the pain, and wearing cute little shoes to advertise your achieve-ment and entice male attention. As you go into marriage hoping to pro-duce a male baby, you find your life confined largely to household duties.If you happen to be a servant standing before your bound-foot mistress,she may let you lean against the wall to reduce the discomfort of stand-ing. In a very literal sense you cannot run away. Among other things,your unused leg muscles have atrophied and your legs become ungainlyspindles.

Missionaries in the 1880s estimated from what they had heard that

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about 10 percent of the girls who underwent footbinding did not surviveit. Of course a large proportion of Chinese children suffered mortality inany case. We shall never be able to quantify such an immeasurable ques-tion, but there is evidence that girls during the first years of foot-bindinghad trouble sleeping, to say nothing of moving about. Some placed theirfeet at night beneath their mother or rested them on a bed-board, in ei-ther case to dull the pain by making their feet numb from lack of bloodcirculation.

Behind footbinding lay a male sexual fetish that has been noted bymany but seldom really investigated. Apparently footbinding had begunat court in the tenth century. Howard Levy (1966) reproduces a poemfrom the early Song statesman-poet Su Shi (Dongpo, 1036–1101):

Anointed with fragrance, she takes lotus steps;Though often sad, she steps with swift lightness.She dances like the wind, leaving no physical trace.Another stealthily but happily tries on the palace style,But feels such distress when she tries to walk!Look at them in the palms of your hands, so wondrously smallthat they defy description.

The cruelest aspect of footbinding was that the peasant massesamong the Chinese imitated the upper class. Among Mongols, Manchus,and most other minorities footbinding was not practiced. The Manchu(Qing) emperors inveighed against it, as did iconoclastic scholars. Butamong Chinese farm women who had to lead lives of hard work,footbinding became widespread. We lack studies of when and how farthis happened. Apparently the custom was maintained in some areas butnot in others. But binding was a widespread practice in the nineteenthcentury, and its effects were still visible in the 1930s.

What was the psychic and social, to say nothing of the economic,cost of footbinding? Village women accepted it like the pains of child-birth and ridiculed anyone with normal feet. Did they believe the maletheory that footbinding produced muscles that increased a husband’senjoyment of copulation? In mutilating themselves did they suffer anyloss of self-respect, of self-confidence? Did true Confucianists apply towomen the dictum that our bodies as given us by our parents are sacredand should not be allowed to suffer mutilation? Whether the great prop-agator of Neo-Confucianism Zhu Xi backed footbinding is disputed.He did not champion female freedom. In the end could a bound-footwoman feel anything but inferior? a victim of remorseless fate? fearful

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of breaking convention? The trauma, conscious or unconscious, musthave become part of the personality of Chinese women.

Unfortunately, footbinding is not a social practice that can be studiedcomparatively. Wasp-waisted Victorian women who had the vaporsfrom fashionably constricting their mid-sections are not comparable,any more than African women who gradually elongated their necks byadding brass rings around them. Possibly the practice of clitoridectomy,in certain parts of Africa, performed by women upon women, is in someways comparable, yet as a social iniquity visited upon hundreds of mil-lions of women, footbinding is in a class by itself, a unique aspect of Chi-nese culture. Consequently it is not a topic listed in general works of so-ciology. Strangely, social historians of China, both men and women,have hardly yet acknowledged its existence. It is the least studied aspectof Chinese society. The fascinating complexity of marriage arrangementsand the general inequality meted out to women have been brilliantly ex-plored, but not footbinding. Its avoidance perhaps represents the occu-pational quirk of sinologists, a secondary patriotism or sinophilia thatmay lead otherwise hard-headed scholars to want to say no evil of theobject of their researches.* Nevertheless, a social evil that becomes insti-tutionalized though shameful to recall must still be faced. African slav-ery in the United States has been healthily confronted by historians frommany angles. Footbinding in China should not be swept under the rug. Itwas a fact with causes and repercussions still to be understood.

Domestic Trade and Commercial Organization

The expansion of China’s domestic trade, which accompanied thegrowth of population, began with agriculture. Raising farm productsand producing farm handicrafts for sale gradually swelled the arteries oftrade within macroregions and then between regions. Thus the raw cot-ton of North China could be taken down the Grand Canal to the textileproduction centers of the Lower Yangzi. The Shanghai area became fora time a leading exporter of cotton yarn to Guangdong. Specializedproducts like the ceramics of the Jingdezhen kilns in Jiangxi would nat-urally be sold across regional boundaries in all directions, while the

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*For an outstanding example of sentimental sinophilia see my statement in ForeignAffairs, October 1972, that in a certain context the Maoist revolution was “the bestthing” that had happened to the Chinese people in many centuries.

brick tea supply of central China went up the Han River for exchange atthe tea-horse markets on the Inner Asian frontier.

William T. Rowe’s (1984, 1989) masterly study of Hankou (1760–1890) offers a primary example of this commercialization. In addition towater transport up and down the Yangzi, Hankou was the crossroads ofwater-borne commerce on the Han River from the northwest and on theXiang River south through Hunan all the way to Guangzhou. This routemight exchange rice for spices from Southeast Asia. Timber, rice, andlater opium came down the Yangzi from Sichuan, and salt came up-riverfrom the salt flats on the coast north of Shanghai. The best tea camenorth from the hills of Fujian province. By the nineteenth century therewas a considerable interregional trade within China, while silk and teaexports were going abroad in greater quantities from Guangzhou andlater Shanghai and Fuzhou.

This growth of domestic trade was naturally accompanied by agrowth in marketing systems. Villagers visited their standard markets,which in turn were tributary to central markets on up the scale. As itiner-ant merchants moved about within the area, these markets provided anoutlet for a farmer’s handicraft products like raw silk or woven cloth, inaddition to food products.

More commerce led to the growth of market towns (zhen) devoted totrade and industry that were not originally created to be administrativecenters. Particularly in the Yangzi delta, the new-grown towns sawhandicraft workshops begin to use labor on a capitalist basis. The townelite were merchants, while a freely mobile labor force began to appearas a genuine proletariat, often organized into labor gangs managed byboss contractors. More and more farmers shifted their focus from farm-ing to handicrafts, while others went into the growing sector of trans-portation.

China’s extensive water-transport network was already available toaccommodate the growth of trade. One index to growth was the increaseof shipping by the many varieties of Chinese junk on the Yangzi and itstributaries and along the coast. They carried the sugar of southeastChina from ports like Shantou (Swatow) and Xiamen (Amoy) to south-ern Manchuria and returned with cargoes of soybean cake to use in thesouth as fertilizer.

Another index to growth was the proliferation beginning in the lateeighteenth century of trade guilds and particularly of native-place guilds,that is, associations in various provincial centers to accommodate mer-chants and others who shared the same place of origin. Rowe traces the

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rise of the guild organizations that handled specific trade goods like teaor textiles and the native-place guilds like that of the Ningbo merchantsat Hankou. These guilds that served traders from a distance in the inter-regional trade provided them not only with the amenities of a meetingplace in their guild halls but also might provide warehouse space, livingquarters, a shrine to the patron deity of the guild, an opera stage, aschool for examination candidates, and a widespread membership.

Guilds were financed by entrance fees and might own real estate andbe landlords with large rent payments coming in. They could also raisefunds by bond issues. They put out and enforced regulations concerningtrades; they were engaged in and might organize boycotts as well as me-diating disputes. As staple trades became well established, the guilds hadincreasing functions and influence. With public spirit as well as concernfor their own interest, they maintained fire-watching towers and fire-fighting teams in the easily inflammable city. In the local harbor theymight maintain rescue boats. They would contribute to charities and payfor soup kitchens in time of famine, and for watchmen against disorder.They might keep up a thoroughfare, build bridges, or improve the watersupply. They exhibited a Confucian “public-mindedness.” In short, theguilds became municipal institutions, capable of organizing militia orboycotts or mediating in trade disputes but without being under the di-rect control of the local magistrates.

Naturally, the growth of trade led to improvements in fiscal technol-ogy. The Ningbo bankers who from the late eighteenth century domi-nated the Shanghai banking world developed an arrangement known asthe transfer tael in order to balance their accounts from day to day. TheShanxi remittance banks, built up by family partnerships in towns alongthe Fen River, the ancient heartland of the Sui and Tang dynasties, devel-oped during the nineteenth century a capacity to transfer funds by lettersof credit and orders on their branches elsewhere so as to obviate thecross-country shipment of silver bullion under convoy against bandits.Rowe lists as innovations “bills of exchange, deposit banking, booktransfers of funds between depositors, overdraft credit and . . . negotia-ble and transferable credit instruments.”

This admirable commercial growth in Late Imperial China unfortu-nately occurred in a context that enmeshed both farmer and merchantin long-established situations that they could not easily change. LateImperial China’s commercialization was not followed by industrializa-tion on the Western model even though researchers have found abun-dant evidence for the kind of proto-industrialization in China that was

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followed by industrialization in Europe. Thus the rise of commercialtowns, of merchant entrepreneurs managing a putting-out system ofhousehold handicraft production, and the appearance of an urban wage-labor class or proletariat can all be documented in certain parts of Chinalike the Yangzi delta. Yet these Europe-like phenomena were superficialto certain long-lasting rural facts in China: the farm household had solittle land that sideline and handicraft production especially in silk andcotton became an integral part of its subsistence. The farm householdwas thus commercialized, to be sure, but through a maximum of laborinput, far beyond the point of diminishing returns, and a minimum inputof capital. Both their agricultural income and their handicraft incomewere necessary for the farm family’s mere subsistence. The result, asPhilip C. C. Huang (1990) puts it, was that “in agriculture wage labor-based farms could not compete with familized peasant cultivation. In in-dustry urban workshops could not compete with low cost home produc-ers.” The farm economy was tied to involution, that is, growth of prod-uct without any increase of productivity per hour of labor. In thisinvoluted situation a market economy in Adam Smith’s sense could notoperate. The expectations of economists like Smith and Marx, derivedfrom the European experience, were not adequate to explain the hardfacts that had accumulated in China.

Although the merchant class was growing in strength and capacity, itremained subject to the arbitrary action of officials seeking contributionsfor meeting crises like floods or defense, and also seeking to be paid offwith gifts from holders of licenses, monopolies, and properties. Indus-trial investment by merchants continued to take second place to their in-vestment in land and real estate in an attempt to protect themselves byjoining the still dominant class of landed degree-holders (gentry). Withthe onset of urbanization, subordination of merchants to officials slack-ened, but merchants never broke free of official supervision, if not domi-nation.

Merchant–Official Symbiosis

The merchant was kept in check by the official as an ally whose activitiescould be used and milked in the interest of either the officials personallyor of the state. As Etienne Balazs pointed out, commercial transactionswere always subject to the superintendence and taxation of the officials.Government monopolies of staple articles, like salt and iron in ancienttimes, or like tea, silk, tobacco, salt, and matches more recently, ex-

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pressed the overriding economic prerogatives of the state. No merchantclass had been allowed to rise independently and encroach upon theseprerogatives.

This was ensured in practice by the official disregard for rights of pri-vate property. This meant that official patronage and support were nec-essary to protect any big commercial undertaking. The result was a closecommunity of interest between the merchant and the official. Both couldprofit where neither could succeed alone. Merchants, bankers, brokers,and traders of all sorts were therefore a class attached as subordinates tothe bureaucracy. As handlers and manipulators of goods and capital,they assisted the officials in extracting the surplus not only from com-merce but also from agriculture.

By Late Imperial times merchants were accorded a status that re-flected the importance of wealth in the growing economy. They couldmove with some ease into the gentry class through purchase of land andexamination degrees and through intermarriage. Unlike Europe, Chinahad little organized foreign trade in which a merchant could invest. In-deed, for 200 years the Ming had banned private trade abroad, as wehave seen. Though less profitable than commerce, land was more secureand so remained the great object of investment. The merchant class pro-duced landlords more readily than independent commercial capitalists.

China’s premodern financial system also inhibited capitalism. Sav-ings that represented accumulated capital were ordinarily invested inmoneylending because of the high interest obtainable. Usurious rateswere an index of the farmer’s high seasonal demand for money, both topay his taxes and for subsistence until the next harvest. Short-term cred-its to farmers paid higher interest than long-term industrial loans. As aresult there was less incentive for investment of savings in industrial pro-duction.

In short, capitalism failed to prosper in China because the merchantwas never able to become established outside the control of the landlordgentry and their representatives in the bureaucracy. In feudal Europe themerchant class developed in the towns. Since the landed ruling classwere settled in their manors upon the land, the European towns couldgrow up outside the feudal system instead of being integrated in it.Medieval burghers gained their independence by having a separate habi-tat in these new towns, and a new political authority to protect them,in the persons of the kings of nation-states. In China these conditionswere lacking. The early abolition of feudalism and the dependence of theemperor and his officials upon the local gentry left no political power

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outside the established order to which the merchant could turn for spe-cial protection. The towns usually grew up first as administrative cen-ters. The essential connection of the gentry with officialdom drew theminto the towns both as cultural centers and as walled havens against ban-dits or irate peasants. The gentry family’s best security lay not in a solereliance upon landowning but in a union of landowning with officialprerogatives. Family property in itself was no security, but officials whowere family members could give it protection. Thus, the gentry class, asan elite stratum over the peasant economy, found their security in landand office, not in trade and industry. Between them, the gentry and of-ficials saw to it that the merchants remained under control and contrib-uted to their coffers instead of setting up a separate economy.

Private enterprise might develop freely in small-scale farming, bro-kerage, or petty trading within the grip of government taxation, but thiswas not a capitalist type of private enterprise. From the peasants’ moreassiduous cultivation of their privately owned land, the bureaucracywould garner a greater surplus by taxation. By the same principle, theyalso stood ready to collect from the merchant or industrial producer anysurplus he might accumulate. Many merchants appear in the records ofancient China but seldom as a class having political power. The growthof commerce was less important to the rulers than continued supervisionof the agricultural economy. The Ming and early Qing depended uponland taxes more than trade taxes.

In premodern China, the merchant had an attitude of mind quite dif-ferent from that of the Western entrepreneur extolled by our classicaleconomists. According to the latter, the economic man can prosper mostby producing goods and securing from his increased production what-ever profit the market will give him. In old China, however, the economicman would do best by increasing his own share of what had already beenproduced. The incentive for innovative enterprise, to win a market fornew products, had been less than the incentive for monopoly, to controlan existing market by paying for an official license to do so. The tradi-tion in China had been not to build a better mousetrap but to get the of-ficial mouse monopoly.

A modern-minded entrepreneur in Late Imperial China had also tocontend with the bureaucratism of officials in government. To put Chi-nese bureaucratism in a Western perspective, let us first recall that in1800 the great Ohio-Mississippi-Missouri River basin of the MiddleWest was largely uninhabited, save for a few million Native Americans,whereas the great Yangzi River system supported the livelihood of at

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least 2oo million people. China had invented bureaucracy 2,000 yearsbefore, whereas the American civil service legislation began mainly inthe 1880s, following the Grant administration and just a hundred yearsbefore that of Ronald Reagan. Our brief century of experience hasbarely begun to acquaint us with institutional pitfalls that are an ancientstory in China.

The imperial officials were held responsible for all public eventswithin their jurisdiction but not for all public funds. Budgeting and ac-counting procedures were rudimentary. The bureaucracy lived by whatwe today would call systematized corruption, which sometimes becameextortion. This went along with the system of intricate personal relation-ships that each official had to maintain with his superiors, colleagues,and subordinates.

“Squeeze” operated through forms of politeness rather than secrecy.Junior officials in the course of their duties gave their superiors custom-ary “gifts.” But like all prices in old China, the amount of such a giftresulted from the working out of a personal relationship. The squeezesystem was no more cut-and-dried than any other part of the man-to-man bargaining that pervaded Chinese life. The extralegal sums thatpassed between officials were larger but no different in kind from thesmall commissions extracted from every money transaction by under-paid household servants.

Nepotism supported the squeeze or “leakage” system by giving anadded sanction for personal arrangements contrary to the public inter-est. Even classic texts extolled duty to family, and particularly filial piety,as superior to any duty to the state. Thus the interest of the imperial ad-ministration at the capital, which needed the sustenance of revenue fromthe provinces, was constantly in conflict with the multifarious private in-terests of all the officials, each of whom had to provide for his relativesand his further career.

High office commonly meant riches. The favorite minister of theQianlong Emperor (Heshen), when tried for corruption and other crimesby that emperor’s successor in 1799, was found to have an estate worthin our terms of that period more than one billion dollars—probably anall-time record. I would not suggest that Westerners have been back-ward or less adept in the art of graft. But in China, corruption has re-mained longer into modern times an accepted bureaucratic institution,unashamed and unafraid. It did not provide a helpful milieu for entre-preneural capitalism.

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Limitations of the Law

It is a minor paradox that dynastic China had a well-developed legal sys-tem that was, however, of little help in fostering capitalism. By pre-mod-ern standards the Chinese legal codes were monuments of their kind.The great Tang code of the eighth century and its successors in the Song,Yuan, Ming, and Qing periods still invite analysis. Early European ob-servers were well impressed with Chinese justice. It was only after theeighteenth and nineteenth century reforms of law and punishments inthe modern West that Chinese law seemed “backward.”

Nevertheless, the Chinese concept of law was fundamentally differ-ent from legal conceptions in the West. First of all, the law was not re-garded as an external and categorical element in society; there was no“higher law” given to mankind through divine revelation. Moses re-ceived his golden tablets on a mountain top, but Confucius reasonedfrom daily life without the aid of any deity. For his rules of propriety, hedid not claim any metaphysical sanction. He merely said they came fromthe moral character of the natural universe itself, from this world, notfrom another world beyond human ken. It followed that legal rules werebut one expression of this morality—models or examples to be followed,or working rules of administration or ritual observance. So the breakingof such rules was a matter of practical expedience rather than of reli-gious principle. Laws were subordinate to morality. Their sanction lay inreason or the common social experience that underlay morals. This sys-tem avoided the unhappy dualism that grew up in the West between theletter of the law and the dictates of commonsense morality.

The Chinese imperial code was chiefly penal, a corrective for theuntutored. It was also administrative, and prescribed the details of therites. The code was partly accumulated out of administrative decisions.It was nearly all public law, referring to procedures, marriage, inheri-tance, and other matters relative to and important in government ad-ministration. The law occupied a comparatively small share of the pub-lic scene. The people generally avoided litigation in the magistrate’scourt, where plaintiffs as well as defendants could be interrogated withprescribed forms of torture and everyone would have to pay fees to theyamen underlings. The magistrates hired personal law secretaries to ad-vise them; aside from these there was no legal profession, no privatelawyer class to represent clients. Justice was official, weighted on the sideof the state and social order. It operated vertically, from the state upon

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the individual, more than it did horizontally, to resolve conflicts betweenone individual and another.

Within its limited sphere, the Qing legal system was elaborately or-ganized, and it functioned, once it got into action, with a good deal ofexactitude. The five punishments (beating with the light and heavy bam-boo, penal servitude, exile, and death) were imposed by a hierarchy ofmagistrates’ courts running from the county magistrate’s yamen upthrough the prefecture and province to the capital and eventually, fordeath sentences, to the emperor. Cases were reported to and reviewedby superiors. Appeals could be made. Magistrates were under deadlinesto apprehend criminals and could be severely disciplined for wrongjudgments. The great Qing code listed 436 main statutes and about1,900 supplementary or substatutes, which provided specific penaltiesfor specific crimes. The magistrate’s problem was to find the statute mostapplicable to a given case. In doing so he might follow precedent or rea-son by analogy, but the law was not built up by cases, and althoughthousands of cases were collected and published with private commen-taries to help the magistrates, there was rather little development of gen-eralized doctrine and principles. The statutes were sometimes contradic-tory and their applicability uncertain. In general, the law was neitherprimary nor pervasive within the state. To appeal to the letter of the lawwas to disregard true morality or to admit the moral weakness of one’scase.

One major aim of this legal system was to preserve the Confucianhierarchy of relationships, the social order. Thus penalties for the sameact varied according to the social and especially the kinship status of theactors. Filial disobedience was the most heinous crime. A son whomerely struck his parent could be decapitated, while a parent who beathis son to death, if provoked by the son’s disobedience, would deserveonly 100 blows (by custom “100” was normally 40 blows) of the heavybamboo and might be let off entirely. A wife’s striking her husband de-served 100 blows, whereas a husband’s striking his wife was punishableonly if she was badly injured and lodged a complaint. A younger man’sscolding his paternal uncle was more heavily punished than his scoldingthe grandson of his great grandfather’s brother. Contributing to thedeath of one’s parent was a capital offense even when quite unintended.T. T. Ch’ü (1961) cites a Qing case: “Teng Feng-ta fell while engaged in afight, his opponent on top of him. The latter picked up a stone andTeng’s son fearing that it would be hurled at his father grabbed a knifeand made for the attacker. The latter moved and the knife entered Teng’s

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father’s belly, killing him. The authorities considered that the son hadsought to rescue his father. They presented his case to the emperor andasked that his sentence be reduced from ‘dismemberment’ to ‘immediatebeheading.’ This was granted.” Behind such provisions lay a concern tomaintain the ritual order as one support of the social order. Punishmentwas the necessary ritual retribution when the social order had been vio-lated.

In short, the law was not an independent specialty, like modern lawin America, but a tool of administration in general. Within the broadview of the Confucian philosophy in which the ruling class was edu-cated, the law was a means to be used in the ceaseless struggle to sustaina moral order. Many Chinese officials, in Thomas Metzger’s (1977) view,“felt themselves to be poised between harmony and chaos . . . Confu-cians perceived the society around them as corrupted and in tensionwith ideals almost beyond the possibility of implementation.” But thiswas a moral problem. They could find no refuge in the mere letter ofthe law.

Nineteenth-century Westerners were most concerned over the Chi-nese system’s lack of due process to protect the individual. An accusedperson might be arrested arbitrarily and detained indefinitely, was pre-sumed guilty, might be forced to incriminate himself through confession,and had no advice of counsel nor much chance to make a defense. Theindividual was unprotected against the state.

Since formal law mainly served the interests of the state, private orcivil law remained only informally developed in this legal system. Reso-lution of conflicts among the people was therefore achieved through var-ious customary and nonofficial channels. Conflicts arising from businessdeals and contracts might be settled within craft or merchant guilds.Disputes between neighbors might be mediated by village elders, neigh-borhood associations, or gentry members. In particular, the heads ofextended family (lineage) or clan organizations, in addition to maintain-ing the religious rituals of ancestor reverence, supporting schools forclan members’ children, and arranging their marriages, would makeevery effort to keep their members out of court by assuring their taxpayments and settling disputes among them. After all, the legal systemwas part of the government, which remained superficial, far above thelevel of daily life in the villages. Most conflicts were therefore resolvedextralegally by mediation and appeals to old customs and local opinion.

This nondevelopment of Chinese law along lines familiar to the Westwas plainly related to the nondevelopment of capitalism and an indepen-

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dent business class in old China. There was no idea of the corporation asa legal individual. Big firms were family affairs. Business relations werenot cold impersonal matters governed by the general principles of thelaw and of contract in a world apart from home and family. Businesswas a segment of the whole web of friendship, kinship obligations, andpersonal relations that supported Chinese life. In old China due processof law, sanctity of contract, and free private enterprise never became thesacred trinity that they became in the capitalist West.

This chapter has suggested that nineteenth-century China would beslow to industrialize. The reasons would be social and political as well aseconomic. The Chinese state and society, in other words, had become in-ured to counterproductive attitudes, goals, and practices that would im-pede modernization. The Confucian disesteem of profit, the rulers’ con-cern always to maintain control, the law’s unconcern for protectingprivate investment, the officials’ custom of utilizing the merchant, dimin-ishing productivity and footbinding on the farm all combined with thescholars’ overweening pride and the common people’s xenophobia tocreate inertia. Late Imperial China could not easily respond to the attackof Western commerce and culture.

Nonofficial capitalist enterprise and state fostering of industry failedto take center stage in nineteenth-century China. We are left with the im-pression that as of 1750 or so the preindustrial societies of China andEurope had much in common; indeed, they probably seemed in appear-ance to be more like each other than either one was like the Westernstates that would emerge transformed by the Industrial Revolution in thenineteenth century. Yet we must acknowledge that such a similarity inappearances was superficial. Beneath the surface lay great differences insocial structure, culture, and ideas, as the nineteenth century woulddemonstrate.

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9Frontier Unrest and the

Opening of China

The Weakness of State Leadership

Whether China was opened by British gunboats or opened of its own ac-cord is no longer a great issue for debate. Growth of population and for-eign trade were both impelling China toward greater contact with theoutside world. This trend precipitated rebellions on both domestic andforeign frontiers. Meanwhile, the one thing essential for the industrial-ization of late-comers like Japan or Russia was government leadership.Unfortunately, in nineteenth-century China, government grew weakerand more myopic just when its strength and foresight were needed.

By the end of the eighteenth century, population pressure was in-creasing the vulnerability of the populace to drought, flood, famine, anddisease. These in turn presented the creaking machinery of Qing govern-ment with problems it could not meet—flood control, famine relief, in-creased need for taxes, increased difficulty in getting them. The problemis illustrated by Pierre-Etienne Will’s (1990) study of famine relief. In themid-Qing era, officials maintained the ever-normal granary stocks, com-batted price increases, appraised famine conditions, shipped grain infrom other provinces, and supervised its careful distribution. But in the1800s after the population had doubled, the official system broke down,and gentry managers more and more had to take on the public task offamine relief. Such weaknesses combined with official demoralizationand self-seeking to make government less effective and weaken its pres-tige. The nineteenth century became a long story of dynastic decline.

Three motifs dominated China’s nineteenth-century experience—domestic rebellion, foreign invasion, and the efforts of the ruling elite tocontrol both and preserve their rule (see Table 4). Since attempts at re-

187

bellion, invasion, and control became even greater in the twentieth cen-tury, this chapter offers only a foretaste of more recent disasters andachievements.

Recent studies have remade our image of imperialism in China. TheHobson–Lenin thesis at the turn of the century stressed the economic illeffects of imported foreign manufactures destroying native handicraftlivelihood and of foreign finance capitalism impoverishing native gov-ernments. More recent research has led to a less stark economic picture,in which foreign trade, investment, and technology sometimes stimu-

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Table 4. Events in China, 1796–1901

Domesticrebellion

Foreigninvasion

Official and eliteresponse

White Lotus1796–1804

Turkestan1826–1835

Anglo–ChineseOpium War1839–1842

Increasingmilitarizationunder local elite

Taiping1851–1864

Suppression ofrebellions

Nian1853–1868

Anglo–French1856–1860

Chinese MuslimSW 1855–1873NW1862–1873

Qing Restorationca. 1861–1876

Self-strengthening1861–1894

French1883–1885

Sino– Japanese1894–1895

Reform movement1895–1898

Imperialistencroachment1898

Boxer Rising1898–1901

Boxer War1900

Qing reforms1901–1911

lated native growth and technological progress. Today’s historians aremore likely to stress the social disruption and psychological demoraliza-tion caused by foreign imperialism. In these dimensions the long-termforeign invasion of China proved to be a disaster so comprehensive andappalling that we are still incapable of fully describing it. Innovationslike Christian missions, Western education, and foreign investment be-came two-edged, often seen as forward steps in our long-term foreignview yet also frequently destructive of China’s contemporary well-being.At stake was an entire way of life, a civilization on a grander scale thanthe economics or psychology of imperialism.

On balance I believe “imperialism” has become a catch-all term like“feudalism,” too broad to accept or deny overall, more useful in adjecti-val form to characterize concrete situations. In any case, China’s nine-teenth-century troubles began at home with rebellion, not invasion.

The increasing weakness of Qing government was graphically dem-onstrated in its initial inability to suppress a domestic rebellion at theend of the Qianlong reign. Other small risings followed. Manchu skillwas evident in calming domestic rebels in Sichuan and Xinjiang, but thesame formula when applied to the handling of Western rebels at Guang-zhou would prove disastrous. We therefore look first at the problems ofdomestic rebellion and then at the forces operating to create rebellion inthe foreign trade.

The White Lotus Rebellion, 1796–1804

In the countryside, manpower and food supply were the sinews of war-fare, which might be mobilized to unseat the reigning dynasty. Conse-quently, cults such as the White Lotus Society, a religious sect datingfrom the Mongol period, sometimes had to be secret in self-defense. Inmobilizing its adherents, the White Lotus Society appealed to the hopesof poverty-stricken peasants by its multiple promises that the MaitreyaBuddha would descend into the world, that the Ming dynasty would berestored, and that disaster, disease, and personal suffering could be ob-viated in this life and happiness secured in the next. In the late eigh-teenth century the sect had spread through the border region where theprovinces of Hubei, Sichuan, and Shaanxi join, in the region north ofthe Yangzi gorges and on the upper waters of the Han River. This moun-tainous area, rather inhospitable to agriculture, was a domestic frontierarea only recently opened to settlement under official Qing auspices.Migration of poor settlers, although encouraged officially, had not been

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accompanied by an equal development of imperial administration overthem. The communities of settlers lived on the very margin of subsis-tence and tended to be a law unto themselves. The leaders of the WhiteLotus cult soon added to their popular appeal an anti-Manchu racialdoctrine.

The rebellion began in 1796 as a protest against the exactions of mi-nor tax collectors. Though the imperial garrisons were able to get eachsmall uprising under control in turn, new outbreaks continued to erupt,too numerous to control. The populace had already organized self-de-fense corps against the aborigines to the south and had collected armsand food. When these groups rebelled, they could move into easily de-fensible mountain redoubts before the imperial forces could arrive. Thesystematic corruption permitted under the now senile Qianlong Em-peror handicapped the imperial military. They lacked supplies, morale,and incentive as well as vigorous leadership. Both sides ravaged the pop-ulace instead of fighting.

The White Lotus Rebellion was suppressed only after the JiaqingEmperor assumed real power upon the death of the Qianlong Emperorin 1799 and supported vigorous Manchu commanders. By pursuing therebels tenaciously, on the one hand, and establishing tighter control ofthe manpower and food supply of the area, on the other, the Manchugenerals eventually put down the rebellion. First of all, the Qing mobi-lized the villagers to build several hundred walled enclosures in whichthe local peasantry could be concentrated. These walled villages werethen protected from the rebels by newly organized local militia, whocould by this time be enrolled more easily because the devastation of thecountryside had seriously hindered their farming and sustenance. In thisway the populace was brought under imperial control. Meanwhile themilitia were trained to join in the campaign of extermination against therebels. At the same time a policy of conciliation was pursued toward themen the rebels had impressed into their bands, so as to secure their sur-render; and other measures were taken to prevent refugees from continu-ing to join the rebels. By this combination of force, leniency, and admin-istrative arrangements, the imperial commanders gradually starved therebels of their new recruits and food supplies.

The policy of “strengthening the walls and clearing the countryside”eventually sapped the strength of the rebellion, and it died out about1804. But the repercussions of the uprising were enormously damagingto the dynasty. It had cost the imperial regime the rough equivalent offive years’ revenue (2oo million ounces of silver). Worse still, it had de-

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stroyed the Manchu banner forces’ reputation for invincibility. It wasfound that the militia troops when properly trained became professionalsoldiers, warlike and dangerous, and subsequently an effort had to bemade to recover their arms from them.

In 1813 the sect of the Eight Trigrams, a sort of White Lotus off-shoot, staged a rising in a North China county and actually sent a groupto try to invade the Forbidden City in Beijing. Even though it was soonsuppressed, Susan Naquin (1976) concludes that 70,000 people werekilled in the process.

While these stirrings of peasant rebellion gave an ominous cast to theearly decades of the nineteenth century, an equally dire situation was de-veloping in China’s maritime relations. Here again the bearers of badnews were Chinese, not foreigners, but Chinese who had gone abroad indefiance of Ming and early Qing prohibitions. In short, a neglected wingof the Chinese people, which we call Maritime China, was about to be-come a major force in Chinese history.

Maritime China: Origins of the Overseas Chinese

The contrast between Maritime China and Continental China was al-most as great as that between China and Inner Asia. Few classically edu-cated chroniclers, concentrated as they were upon imperial government,ever went to sea. Chinese seafarers did not write memoirs. Because thesea, unlike the steppe, did not harbor rivals for power, it had been givenlittle importance in Chinese history. Yet Chinese life from the start hadhad a maritime wing more or less equal and opposite to the Inner Asianwing.

Once we approach the sea from China, we meet a fundamental factof geography known as the monsoon, a seasonal wind that blew north insummer from the equatorial zone and south in winter. The predictabilityof these monsoon winds was far more reliable than the rainfall on whichNorth China agriculture depended. Consequently, seafaring had devel-oped in Neolithic times long before written history, a fact that accountsfor Neolithic type-sites being found in Taiwan. With the monsoon, navi-gating to and from the island was not difficult, even if punctuated bysummer typhoons.

Many thousands of years later the reliability of sea transport facili-tated the Qin-Han absorption of the area of Guangzhou and NorthVietnam as part of China’s first unified empire. Access to the area byland alone, following barge routes on rivers and portage roads connect-

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ing them, could never have reached so far with power adequate to takecontrol. Experienced and massive coastal seafaring was essential to thisearly extension of the empire to southernmost China. The conclusive ev-idence is the funerary ship model excavated in Guangzhou of the Hanperiod, with a centered stern-post rudder—a key invention of nauticaltechnology that appeared in Europe only a thousand years later. It be-speaks a high degree of early Chinese nautical sophistication.

Given such early Chinese skill in seafaring, it seems strange to findthat the first long-distance international traders in the ports of SoutheastChina were Arabs. After the founding of Islam in Arabia in the seventhcentury, Muslim seafarers and invaders took off in all directions, as me-dieval Europe soon became aware.

Those readers who missed the world history lecture on Islam may bereminded that the religion was founded by the prophet Muhammad in622 ad in Medina. Called Muslims, his followers believed in the OneGod, Allah, in the teachings of Muhammad’s book, the Koran, in God’spredestination, and in the Day of Resurrection. Their strict regimen offive daily prayers attesting the faith, along with other duties like a pil-grimage to Mecca, Muhammad’s birthplace, prepared them to wage aHoly War against the infidel. Combined with Arab trading skill and sea-faring, their faith impelled the Arabs on a Diaspora of expansion eastand west.

Muslim forces soon conquered Syria, Persia (Iran), Iraq, and Egypt.Despite rebellions and civil wars, they took over North Africa and Spainand invaded southern France until defeated in 732. Meanwhile, on theeast, Muslim forces had taken over Afghanistan, the lower Indus valleyin northwest India, and the Central Asian trading cities of Bokhara andSamarkand. More important than the kaleidoscopic flux of wars andrulers, Muslim cities from Baghdad to Bokhara became centers ofachievement in science and the arts.

By the tenth century, the Muslim states of conquest linked the seatrade of the Mediterranean with that of the Indian Ocean and so madepossible a seaborne commerce that brought spices like pepper, nutmeg,and cinnamon all the way from the islands that produced them in theEast Indies to their European market at Alexandria. This spice trade,which eventually helped motivate European expansion to the Far East,much earlier and more easily reached China, where spices were equallyprized for preserving food in the absence of refrigeration. The extensiveMuslim contact with China under the Mongols was both by land across

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Central Asia over the Silk Road and by sea at coastal ports. The story iscomplicated by the fact that within the Muslim world Arabs were joinedby Persians and Turks and some Indians in the shifting configuration ofMuslim states and their rivalries. Against this complex background wemay imagine a plenitude of Chinese trading junks on well-establishedcoastal routes providing a matrix for the long-distance Muslim com-merce at China’s big Fujian ports like Quanzhou (Arab Zayton).

While Arab traders had come first to China, Chinese merchant junksbegan by at least the tenth century to trade at ports along the peninsulasof Southeast Asia and the islands of the East Indies. Beginning even be-fore the Tang, references in the dynastic histories to Chinese trade withSoutheast Asia grow more and more numerous. By the time of the ZhengHe expeditions of the years 1405–1433, Chinese trade goods were find-ing markets all across southeast and south Asia and even the east coastof Africa (see Map 18). A score or more of petty states recorded in 1589as sending tribute to the Ming were mainly the ports of call on the twotrade routes that went respectively down the coast of Malaysia to thestraits of Malacca and through the Philippines and the island kingdomof Sulu to the East Indies. Chinese traders naturally established theiragents or other connections at these ports of trade, where Overseas Chi-nese communities of sojourners began to grow up. By 1818 ports of callon the Malay peninsula like Ligor, Sungora, Patani, Trengganu, Pahang,and Johore were listed in Chinese government records more realisticallyas “non-tributary trading countries,” that is, places frequented by Chi-nese merchants that paid no tribute to Beijing. This far-flung Chinesetrading community was already established when the Portuguese andSpanish invaded East Asia in the sixteenth century.

As Wang Gungwu (1991) reminds us, Chinese sojourners’ communi-ties abroad were not under Chinese official control. Growth of the Over-seas Chinese settlement was not fostered nor even countenanced by theChinese imperial government. In China, while the gentry-elite let nomerchant subculture grow up comparable to that in Japan and Europe inthe sixteenth century, the Chinese abroad in Southeast Asia were underquite different local, official, and social restraints. They were often ableto accumulate capital and became risk-taking entrepreneurs with theirown style of life. Their family enterprises in the British, Dutch, andFrench colonial areas (in Burma, Malaysia, the East Indies, and Indo-China) usefully benefited from the rule of European law. In Bangkokand Manila they advanced through marriage ties with local patricians.

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Philanthropy and conspicuous consumption were less useful overseasthan in China, while economic development was more appreciated bythe local rulers.

In a way curiously reminiscent of the local gentry in China, the Over-seas Chinese in Southeast Asia found their social level and functionssandwiched between the European rulers and the local villages. Chinesebecame brokers who helped in tax collections and in maintaining localservices like ferries, bridges, and bazaars. They were generally a stabiliz-ing element in colonial communities, too few to seize power, interested inprofiting from services rendered as well as from local trade.

The example of the Chinese role at Manila is instructive. When theSpaniards arrived in the Philippines in force in the 1560s and began tobuild a colony based on Christian teaching and Filipino plantation labor,they found themselves endangered by the breakdown of the Ming banon sea trade and the upsurge of Japanese maritime adventurers linkedwith Chinese coastal pirates. The Ming prohibition of Chinese sea trade,a dead letter long since, was lifted in 1567. By the time the Spaniards be-gan to build their capital at Manila, 150 or so Chinese were on hand. By1600 there were 25,000 living in a special part of Manila set aside forthem. (Chinese converts to Christianity were not so confined.) Two Chi-nese communities thus began to develop—the commercial one of so-journers who managed all the shops and crafts of a Chinese city, and themixed one of Christian mestizos who would become Filipino leaderspartly of Chinese descent.

In general Overseas Chinese created fraternal associations and secretsocieties for protection of their interests, as well as guilds with their tem-ples to Guandi and the Empress of Heaven for their commercial welfare.Their trade was not dominated by large corporations with a modern ca-pacity to invest and manage overseas transactions. The durable and sea-worthy sailing junks that carried the trade were privately owned, andtheir cargoes were generally the property of individuals or family mer-chant firms. Many Chinese quickly learned the European commercialtechnology of the day.

As time went on, these Chinese trading communities overseas be-came the active outer fringe of a Maritime China that countered theland-based and agrarian-centered style of the Ming and Qing empires.As a minor tradition from early times, this Maritime China had grownup in the ports where the river traffic from inland China met the shipsfrom Chinese enclaves abroad. Leonard Blusse (1986) notes that despiteBeijing’s ban on overseas trade, during Ming and early Qing about a

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hundred big Chinese junks traded every year with Southeast Asia. Thesetraders were ready to expand into international commerce as opportu-nity allowed. Their principal entrepot on the China coast was Xiamen(Amoy), a port in Fujian that, unlike nearby Quanzhou and Fuzhou, hadnot been the site of an official superintendency of merchant shipping(shibosi).

European Trading Companies and the Canton Trade

Sea trade with Europe quickened the growth rate of Maritime China.The East India Companies, inaugurated about 1600 by the British andDutch, were powerful corporate bodies that accumulated capital fromjoint stock investors and were empowered by their national kings to mo-nopolize trade and govern territories abroad. These powerful engines ofcommercial expansion created British India and the Dutch East Indies.The British developed a staple trade with China in exports of tea, silk,and porcelain and imports of silver, woolen textiles, and eventuallyopium from India. At first they followed the routes and used the pilots ofthe Chinese junk trade. Chinese and foreigners in international com-merce became a trade-centered community that formed the first Sino–Western meeting place of the modern age.

Although Xiamen had been a major focus of the Chinese trade toSoutheast Asia and up the China coast, after 1759 Guangzhou (Canton)was made the sole port open for Europeans. The Canton trade, as it hasbeen known in the West, was organized on typical Chinese lines: the gov-ernment commissioned a group of Chinese merchant families to act asbrokers superintending the foreign traders. Responsibility for each West-ern ship was taken by one Chinese firm, acting as its security merchant.The security merchants formed a guild, called the Cohong (hong meanstrading firm), which answered the commands of the emperor’s speciallyappointed superintendent of maritime customs for the Guangdong re-gion. This official, usually a Manchu from the Imperial Household De-partment of the Inner Court in Beijing, was known to foreigners as theHoppo. The Cohong and the Hoppo had the job of taxing the foreigners’imports and especially their exports of teas and silks.

Until 1834, when the British East India Company lost its royal char-ter to monopolize British staple trade with China, the Company fittedinto this special “Canton system.” Its supercargoes sent by the East IndiaCompany board of directors in London lived in style in the British Fac-tory (business center and residence) on the banks of the river outside the

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big provincial capital of Guangzhou during the trading season, from Oc-tober to March. In the off season from April to September they retireddownriver to the Portuguese coastal settlement of Macao.

Since the Hoppo was accustomed to squeezing the Hong merchantsfor special sums to meet imperial needs, these Chinese merchants wereoften short of capital to purchase the cargoes of teas and silks to lade onthe East Indiamen, as contracted with the Company. Thus they tended togo into debt to the British, and when official exactions kept these li-censed merchants in debt or even bankrupt, the British complainedabout this effect of the merchant guild monopoly. This shortage of in-vestment funds for the tea and silk cargoes to England was a continuingproblem for the Company.

Another factor in the Sino–foreign trade was the continued importa-tion into China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of silver, espe-cially from Japan and the Americas. Estimates suggest that as much as$10 million worth of silver annually came into China’s domestic trade.As in Europe, this inflow led to rising prices, greater monetization, andincreased commerce. In the middle decades of the seventeenth century,however, events in Japan, Spain, and China combined in what some havecalled a “seventeenth-century crisis” to reduce China’s silver import. Theconsequences, including a sudden fall of prices, were disastrous. In thisway China was drawn into the international trading world long beforethe fact was realized.

Late Imperial China’s foreign trade played a subordinate but impor-tant role both as a source of imported silver and as a market to stimulateproduction for export. One estimate is that as much as one seventh ofthe tea that went to market in China was bought by the British East IndiaCompany in its high period after 1759, especially after the rival Euro-pean smugglers of China tea into the British market were undone by theCommutation Act of 1784, which lowered the duties collected in Eng-land.

An omen of China’s future was provided in 1793 when the BritishEast India Company, which would continue to rule India until 1858,sent a diplomatic mission to China. Its head, Lord George Macartney,took scientists and artists in an entourage of 100 on a 66-gun man-of-war plus two escort vessels loaded with examples of British manufactur-ing technology that the Qing court promptly labeled “tribute fromEngland.” The Industrial Revolution was gaining momentum, but re-mained quite unknown to the senescent Qianlong Emperor. The Britishrequests for broader trade opportunities under a published tariff, as well

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as diplomatic representation at Beijing, were an invitation to China tojoin the modern world then being born. Beijing politely and compla-cently turned it all down. Twenty-three years later another embassyunder Lord Amherst in 1816 was rudely treated and sent away. By thistime Britain and British India were already playing key roles in openingChina to international trade. Unfortunately, the Qing court was littleconcerned with Maritime China and had no idea of the outside world itwould soon have to deal with. Its concern was to preserve its authorityboth within China and on its sea and land frontiers. Early in the nine-teenth century while trouble was brewing at Guangzhou, rebellionflared up in Inner Asia over control of non-Chinese on the imperial fron-tier.

Rebellion on the Turkestan Frontier, 1826–1835

From the oasis cities on the ancient Silk Road in Turkestan (Xinjiang)trade crossed the Pamirs especially between Kashgar and the state ofKokand west of the mountains. Early in the nineteenth century a crisisarose on this frontier. The Central Asianist Joseph Fletcher (in CHOC10) has described how saintly families, descended from the Prophet orother early religious leaders, had great popular influence. In fact, one ofthese lineages had ruled Turkestan for a time before the Manchu con-quest of the 1750s. In exile west of the Pamirs in Kokand, they nursedtheir claims and sometimes led cavalry raids across the mountain passesinto Kashgaria.

One scion of this line was Jahangir, who became a problem just afterthe Daoguang Emperor came to the throne in 1821. Jahangir’s holy waragainst the Qing was triggered by a dynamic conjunction of faith andcommerce. In brief, the westward trade of Kashgar was dominated bymerchants of Kokand, whose ruler paid tribute to the Qing emperor, theusual practice in order to smooth the path of foreign trade. Kokand hadtherefore enrolled as a tributary, had kept Jahangir confined, and in turnhad been paid a large yearly gift from the Qing as a reward for such ad-mirable loyalty. But, as Kokandian merchants became more influential inthe principal market at Kashgar, Kokand asked for special privilegesthere—lower taxes on its trade and appointment of its own resident tosuperintend Kokandian traders in Kashgar.

When these demands were refused in 1817, Kokand released the im-petuous Jahangir, who eventually achieved a devastating invasion ofChinese Turkestan in 1816. A Qing relief expedition of 22,000 men

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crossed the arid trail from one oasis to the next and so reconqueredKashgar in 1827. Jahangir was betrayed and sent to Beijing, where Dao-guang had him ritually presented at the imperial temple of ancestors be-fore being quartered.

The Qing reestablished its rule over the area, but Kokand’s commer-cial power and military nuisance capacity had been amply demon-strated. In subsequent negotiations Beijing’s envoys gradually workedout an administrative settlement which by 1835 provided that (1) Ko-kand should station a political representative at Kashgar with commer-cial agents under him at five other cities; (2) these officials should haveconsular, judicial, and police powers over foreigners in the area (most ofwhom came from Kokand); and (3) they could levy customs duties onthe goods of such foreigners. In addition, the Qing indemnified tradersthey had dispossessed during the hostilities.

As we shall see in the rest of this chapter, this was the backgroundfrom which Daoguang would approach the British problem developingat Guangzhou. That Qing policy toward the British in 1834–1842would be based on Qing experience on the trading frontier of CentralAsia in 1826–1835 was perfectly natural. The Turkestan settlement withKokand in 1835 had been an exercise in barbarian management, whichachieved a stable frontier by giving local commercial concessions andpaying some money.

Opium and the Struggle for a New Orderat Guangzhou, 1834–1842

After 1759 European trade at Guangzhou under the Cohong and theHoppo was still nominally conducted as though it were a boon grantedto tributary states. Opium imports from India to China now precipitateda crisis.

Opium was produced and sold at auction under official British aus-pices in India and taken to China by private British and Indian traders li-censed by the East India Company that (until 1858) still governed India.Opium sales at Guangzhou paid for the teas shipped to London in athriving India–China–Britain triangular trade. The drain of silver to payfor ever-increasing imports of opium began to alarm Qing administra-tors: they noticed silver becoming more dear in terms of the copper coinsused by the populace to buy their silver for tax payments, and thisthreatened both the government’s revenues and the popular livelihood.The exhaustive research of Man-houng Lin (unpublished), has analyzed

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the Qing officials’ reactions to this monetary crisis. While pinpoint-ing the outflow of silver to pay for opium, they remained generally un-aware of China’s fiscal involvement in world trade. Many of the vari-ables involved—such as silver imports from Japan, silver production inLatin America, copper cash production in China, debasement, hoarding,world trade depression—were still invisible to them.

In 1834 London ended the East India Company’s monopoly of Brit-ish trade with China, and a British official was sent to superintend Brit-ish trade there. Two issues thus urgently arose for China: how to stop theopium trade, and how to deal with the British official.

Under the Guangzhou system the East India Company monopolistshad played ball with the brokers called Hong merchants, who handledtheir trade ship-by-ship and collected duty payments for the Hoppo. Butafter free trade broke out in 1834, the British private traders like Jar-dine, Matheson & Co., who had been importing the opium, now beganalso to export the teas and silks in place of the Company. The British of-ficial sent to superintend them refused to deal like a trader with the Hongmerchants and demanded to deal with the Qing officials on a basis ofdiplomatic equality. He was flouting the tribute system.

To accept Britain’s diplomatic equality would destroy the emperor’ssuperiority to all other rulers, which helped him to maintain his positionin China. To tolerate the opium trade any further would not only furtherupset the silver/copper exchange rate but would also damage his moralprestige. Opium smoking, though less powerfully addictive than modernderivatives, was a social curse that destroyed both individual smokersand their families. Land was wasted for poppy growing, while the highprice of the drug as contraband led to violence and corruption betweensmugglers and officials. The Chinese demand grew up in situations of de-moralization not unlike the American inner cities of today. This tremen-dous social evil was sparked by the lust for profit among the British In-dian government, the foreigners who took opium to China, and thecorrupt Chinese distributors. To Americans of today this pattern soundsdistressingly familiar.

Several years of argument and uncertainty were due to the Qing ad-ministrators’ doubts that they could destroy the Chinese smugglers orembargo the trade of the British, whose new steam gunboats were thelast word in mobile firepower. Some in 1836 advocated legalizing theopium trade since it could not be stopped. The intransigent oppositionto appeasement was led by ambitious Chinese officials who used as theirmeeting place a poetry reading club at Beijing. This faction’s opportunist

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moral righteousness, which has been newly explored by James Polachek(1992), won out in 1839 when the Daoguang Emperor sent an incorruptImperial Commissioner, Lin Zexu, to compel the foreign traders to stopbringing opium to China. Lin suppressed the Chinese opium purveyorsin Guangzhou, but he had to barricade the foreigners in their factoriesbefore they finally surrendered their current stocks of opium. They knewmore opium, now higher priced, was en route from India and, moreover,that the British government might recompense them for their losses.

Commissioner Lin’s righteous coercion precipitated war, in whichBritish commercial interests were heavily involved. Dr. William Jardinewent to London and helped Lord Palmerston work out the war aimsand strategy. The Jardine trading firm leased vessels to the British fleet,lent pilots and translators, provided hospitality and intelligence, andcashed the army quartermaster’s bills on London. But the British expedi-tionary force led by new paddle-wheel steamers was sent to Guangzhouand thence up the coast to secure privileges of general commercial anddiplomatic intercourse on a Western basis of equality, and not especiallyto aid the expansion of the opium trade. The latter was expanding rap-idly of its own accord and was only one point of friction in the generalantagonism between the Chinese and British schemes of international re-lations.

In half a dozen engagements along the southeast coast, Britain’s gun-boats won the Opium War of 1839–1842 and secured Qing agreementto the Treaty of Nanjing in August 1842.

Joseph Fletcher has pointed out how the Anglo–Chinese treatysettlements at Nanjing and later all followed the 1835 example withKokand. The treaty provisions included (1) extraterritoriality (foreignconsular jurisdiction over foreign nationals), an upgrading of an oldChinese practice, (2) an indemnity, (3) a moderate tariff and direct for-eign contact with the customs collectors, (4) most-favored-nation treat-ment (an expression of China’s “impartial benevolence” to all outsid-ers), (5) freedom to trade with all comers, no monopoly (long thecustom at Kashgar). Moreover, designated places for trade (now to becalled treaty ports) were an old Chinese frontier custom, and equal rela-tions without the kowtow’s three kneelings and nine prostrations hadbeen common on the Kokand and Russian frontiers far from Chinaproper.

Manchu statesmanship was consistent on the two frontiers, but therewere two major differences: First, Britain, the United States, and Francewere aggressive maritime powers from another world, a world of sea-

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borne commerce and war, ruled by law and treaty rights, and for themthe first treaty settlements of 1842–1844 were only the beginning of en-croachment. Second, the concessions that the Qing could use to stabilizeKokand-Kashgar relations far off in Central Asia could only damageQing prestige if used in China proper. The Manchus, when they tookpower at Beijing, had inherited the tradition of China’s central superior-ity. Anyone who ruled there had to exact tributary obeisance from out-siders as part of the job of being Son of Heaven. So the unequal treatieswere a defeat that grew bigger as time passed.

To appease the British, the Qing gave them the barren island of HongKong in perpetuity and opened the first five treaty ports. The top Man-chu negotiator even visited Hong Kong on a British gunboat! Yet theprinciples embodied in the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 were not fully ac-cepted on the Chinese side, and the treaty privileges seemed inadequatefrom the British side. Consequently, the treaty system was not really es-tablished until the British and French had fought a second war againstthe Qing and secured treaties at Tianjin in 1858. Even then the new or-der was not acknowledged by the reluctant dynasty until an Anglo-French expedition occupied Beijing itself in 1860. The transition fromtribute relations to treaty relations occupied a generation of friction atGuangzhou before 1840, and twenty years of trade, negotiation, and co-ercion thereafter.

Inauguration of the Treaty Century after 1842

Although China’s treaties with Britain (1842–43), with the United Statesand France (both in 1844), and with all of them and Russia in 1858 weresigned as between equal sovereign powers, they were actually quite un-equal. China was placed against her will in a weaker position, open tothe inroads of Western commerce and its attendant culture. By the twen-tieth century, after three generations of energetic Western consuls haddeveloped its fine points, the treaty structure was a finely articulated andcomprehensive mechanism. It was based first of all on treaty ports, atfirst five in number and eventually more than eighty (see Map 20).

The major treaty ports had a striking physical and institutional re-semblance to one another. Each had a crowded, noisy waterfront (bund)and godowns (warehouses) swarming with coolies (a foreign word forChinese laborers), who substituted for machinery. All this activity wasunder the supervision of Chinese compradors (foreign-hired businessmanagers), who managed affairs beneath the overlordship of the foreign

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20. Foreign Encroachments

taipans (firm managers). Each treaty port centered in a foreign sectionnewly built on the edge of a teeming Chinese city and dominated by thetall white flagstaff of Her Majesty’s consulate. Its foreign institutionsincluded the club, the race course, and the church. It was ruled by aproper British consul and his colleagues of other nations and protectedby squat gunboats moored off the bund. At Guangzhou, Xiamen, andFuzhou the foreign community got further protection by being estab-lished on an island. At Ningbo, Shanghai, and other places the foreignarea was separated from the Chinese city by a river, canal, creek, or otherwaterway.

These coastal enclaves began as offshoots of Western culture—likecities in European colonies, outposts of empire. Yet from the beginningthey had a Chinese component, for alien invaders needed the help ofChinese servants and shopmen just as much as the Chinese upper classdid. The treaty ports quickly became Sino–foreign cities where the for-eigner played an increasing role in China’s urbanization.

Extraterritoriality, under which foreigners and their activities inChina remained answerable only to foreign and not to Chinese law, wasnot a modern invention. In a manner rather like that of the Turks at Con-stantinople, the Chinese government in medieval times had expected for-eign communities in the seaports to govern themselves under their ownheadmen and by their own laws. This expressed the Chinese imperialpreference for minimalist government, getting people to police them-selves. This had been true of the early Arab traders in China. The Britishand Americans at Guangzhou before the Opium War demanded extra-territoriality because they had become accustomed to the protection oftheir own laws in their relations with the Muslim states of North Africaand the Ottoman Empire and had suffered from Chinese attempts to ap-ply Chinese criminal law to Westerners, without regard for Western rulesof evidence or the modern Western abhorrence of torture. Most of all theforeign traders needed the help of their own law of contract.

A further essential of the treaties was the treaty tariff, which by itslow rates would have prevented the Chinese from protecting their nativeindustries, in the event that they had recognized the desirability of doingso before the 1890s. In the 1840s Chinese customs collectors were wontto make their own deals with merchants and also lacked authority andmeans to coerce the foreigners, so that the administration of even thelow treaty tariff was not impartial or effective in Chinese hands. Foreigninspectors were therefore appointed as Chinese officials to run the Chi-nese customhouse at Shanghai in 1854. The Chinese employment of for-

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eigners followed ancient precedents and was one of the most construc-tive features of the treaty system. Under (Sir) Robert Hart as InspectorGeneral, the Westerners who served as commissioners of Chinese Mari-time Customs became leading figures in every port, guardians both of theequality of competition (by enforcement of the regulations for foreigntrade) and of the modest Chinese revenue of about 5 percent derivedfrom it. The growth of foreign trade gave Beijing and the coastal prov-inces important new revenues that could be used for modern needs.

By the most-favored-nation clause (a neat diplomatic device) all for-eign powers shared whatever privileges any of them could squeeze out ofChina. The treaty system kept on growing as the fortunes of the Qing dy-nasty deteriorated. The opium trade that had begun as a joint Sino-for-eign traffic was taken into the country. After the 1880s China’s nativeopium production began to supplant the Indian product, importation ofwhich ceased in 1917. The India-to-China opium trade had continuedfor more than a hundred years under British auspices.

The “treaty century” would occupy the years from 1842 until 1943,when the United States and Britain formally gave up extraterritorialityas the linchpin of the unequal treaty system. By making the foreigner im-mune to Chinese legal control, extraterritoriality put the Chinese rulingclass into a situation reminiscent of earlier times, obliged to governChina under a degree of alien hegemony. The treaty century, measuredchronologically, would last almost as long as the Ruzhen Jin dynasty(1115–1234) in North China and several years longer than the MongolYuan dynasty (1279–1368). In cultural terms its influence would bemore pervasive than that of the Ruzhen, the Mongols, or the Manchus,even though China’s sovereignty was only impaired and not supplantedby foreign rule, as happened in the Yuan and Qing periods. This compar-ison is still to be worked out by historians.

For example, how far was the invasion of Western traders in thenineteenth century reminiscent of the invasions by Inner Asian tribeswho traded and fought on China’s frontier in the fourth to fourteenthcenturies? Or in Linda Cooke Johnson’s terms, to what extent was theShanghai International Settlement in its beginning stages comparable toa native-place guild, with its headman (the consul) responsible for itsmembers and fostering their trade with official permission? The implicitsuggestion is that in China’s long experience the nineteenth centurybrought less discontinuity than we might think.

The fact remains that 1842–1943 (or 1842–1949) can be seen as asingle period characterized by (1) China’s increasing openness to foreign

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contact, (2) foreign military invasions running from the peripheral at-tacks of the British and French to the two invasions by Japan (1894–1895, 1931–1937–1945), (3) Western commercial and religious inva-sions beginning at Guangzhou as early as the 1830s and steadily increas-ing at least until the 1930s, and (4) the Chinese comeback first under theNationalists and second under the Communists.

From the foreign side, the treaty century can be divided into threephases. The first, lasting until the 1870s, was dominated by the Britishcommercial “imperialism of free trade.” After setting up the treaty sys-tem in the warfare of 1840–1842, 1858, and 1860, Britain supported theweakened Qing regime during its Restoration in the 1860s and later.

The second phase, roughly from the 1870s to 1905, saw the imperi-alist rivalry in China of the industrializing powers, during which Russia,France, Germany, and Japan as well as Britain all invaded Qing territory.The brief Anglo-Qing co-dominion of the China coast was supersededby the Anglo–Japanese alliance of 1902. The Europeans’ imperialist ri-valry in Asia and Africa eventuated in their effort to destroy one anotherin World War I.

Meanwhile, the more constructive third phase of the treaty centuryin China (to be discussed in Part Three) lasted from the 1900s to the1930s and 40s.

The treaty century’s openness to foreign contact contrasts with theclosed posture of the Qing tribute system before 1842. Viewed from out-side China, the third (or early twentieth-century) phase of the treaty cen-tury was to be the preeminent era of foreign participation in the life ofthe Chinese people, a high point of cultural interchange in world historybefore the electronic age. The Chinese patriots’ understandable urge is tocreate and possess their own history, minimizing foreign participation init. The fact that one cannot leave the Shanghai Municipal Council out ofthe history of Shanghai nor Jardine, Matheson & Co. out of the historyof Hong Kong suggests that we must see the treaty century as an era ofinternational history as well as of Chinese history.

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10Rebellion and Restoration

The Great Taiping Rebellion, 1851–1864

After 1850 the Qing regime was almost overwhelmed by widespread re-bellions. The emperor’s inability to subdue the British barbarians in1842, even though the Opium War was fought at only half a dozenplaces on the seacoast, had shaken imperial prestige. In 1846–1848,moreover, flood and famine were widespread among China’s expandedpopulation. It is not surprising that a great uprising finally commencedin 1850.

It began in the southernmost provinces between the Guangzhou re-gion and its hinterland. This area had been longest connected with thegrowing foreign trade and had been last conquered by the Qing. Theirmilitary hold was relatively weak in the very region that had been mostfully subjected to the upsetting effect of foreign trade. The local society,as analyzed by Frederic Wakeman, Jr. (1966), was dominated by largeland-owning clans, whose militia bands in this area of weak governmentoften carried on armed feuds between clan villages or groups of villages.Such local wars were fostered by ethnic fragmentation, due to the factthat South China had received infusions of migrants from the north,such as the Hakka people, whose customs set them apart both from theearlier Han Chinese inhabitants and from the tribal peoples in the hills.Finally, as population grew and conditions worsened, the foreign opiumtrade gave a key opportunity to the antidynastic secret societies, whosesworn brotherhoods, especially on the trade routes, offered mutual helpand a social subsystem to the alienated and adventurous. In the tradi-tional pattern the natural candidates to lead rebellion would have been

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the branches and offshoots of the Triad Society, whose network was al-ready widely dispersed among Chinese overseas and in foreign trade.

The fact that the Taiping movement did not join with these estab-lished agencies of revolt springs from the personality of its founder,Hong Xiuquan. The faith Hong preached was his own version of OldTestament Protestant Christianity, and his Heavenly Kingdom of GreatPeace (Taiping Tianguo) ruled at Nanjing from 1853 to 1864. But manythings doomed it from the start, beginning with its theology. After Honghad failed a fourth time in the Guangzhou examinations of 1843, he ex-ploded in rage at the Manchu domination of China and then read someChristian missionary tracts he had been given. These tracts, which re-mained Hong’s major source of Christian doctrine, had been written bythe early Cantonese convert Liang Fa, who saw in the Old Testament astory of a chosen few who with God’s help had rebelled against oppres-sion. Liang stressed the righteous wrath of Jehovah, more than thelovingkindness of Jesus, and gave Hong barely a fingerhold on Christiantheology. Nevertheless, the tracts seemed to explain the visions he hadduring an earlier mental illness: God the Father had evidently called himto save mankind, and Jesus was his Elder Brother.

Hong became a militant evangelist for a moral life to serve the onetrue God. A month with a Baptist missionary with the memorable nameof Issachar Jacox Roberts in 1847 gave him examples of how to pray,preach, sing hymns, catechize, confess one’s sins, baptize, and otherwisepractice fundamentalist Protestantism. With his first two converts Hongcreated an iconoclastic monotheism potent enough to set up the Taipingtheocracy yet too blasphemous to win foreign missionary support, toointent on the one true God to permit cooperation with secret socie-ties like the Triads, and too bizarre and irrational to win over Chineseliterati, who were normally essential to setting up a new administra-tion.

The God-Worshipers’ Society, as the sect first called itself, got startedin a mountain region of Guangxi west of Guangzhou, variously popu-lated by Yao and Zhuang aborigines and Chinese Hakkas like the Hongfamily, that is, migrants from North China several centuries before, whoretained a northern dialect and other ethnic traits, like opposition tofootbinding. As a minority in South China, the scattered Hakka commu-nities were uncommonly sturdy and enterprising, as well as experiencedin defending themselves against their frequently hostile neighbors.

How Hong became the rebel king of half of China is a story like thatof Napoleon Bonaparte or Adolf Hitler, full of drama, the mysteries of

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chance, and personal and social factors much debated ever since. Hisconverts had the faith that God had ordered them to destroy Manchurule and set up a new order of brotherhood and sisterhood among God’schildren. Leadership was taken by six activists who became swornbrothers, among whom Hong was only the first among equals. The chiefmilitary leader was an illiterate charcoal burner named Yang, who hadthe wit to receive God’s visitations and speak with His voice in a waythat left Hong sincerely speechless. Several of the other leaders were low-level scholars. None was a mere peasant. They got their political–mili-tary system from the ancient classic the Rituals of Zhou. Their move-ment was highly motivated, highly organized, and at first austerely puri-tanical, even segregating men from women.

Taiping Christianity half-borrowed and half-recreated for Chinesepurposes a full repertoire of prayers, hymns, and rituals, and preachedthe brotherhood and sisterhood of all mankind under the fatherhood ofthe one true and only God. Unlike the political passivity of Daoism andthe otherworldliness of Buddhism, the Protestant Old Testament offeredtrumpet calls to a militant people on the march against their oppressors.The original corps of Hakka true believers were the bravest in battle andthe most considerate toward the common people. And no wonder!Hong’s teaching created a new Chinese sect organized for war. It usedtried and true techniques evolved during 1,800 years of Christian historyto inculcate an ardent faith in each individual and ensure his or her per-formance in its service. Taiping Christianity was a unique East-Westamalgam of ideas and practices geared to militant action, the like ofwhich was not seen again until China borrowed and sinified Marxism–Leninism a century later.

Guangxi in 1850 was far from Beijing, lightly garrisoned by Manchutroops, and strongly affected by the influx of opium runners and piratesdriven inland along the West River by the British navy’s pirate huntingalong the coast. The growing disorder inspired the training of local self-defense forces, including both militia and bandits, with little to choosebetween them since all lived off the people. The small congregation ofGod-Worshipers, like other groups, armed for self-defense, but secretlyand for a larger purpose. By late 1850 some 20,000 true believers an-swered Hong’s call to mobilize, and they battled imperial troops sent todisperse them. On January 11, 1851, his thirty-eighth birthday, Hongproclaimed himself Heavenly King of a new dynasty, the Heavenly King-dom of Great Peace.

The militant Taiping faith inspired an army of fierce warriors, who

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in the early years kept to a strict moral discipline, befriended the com-mon people, and by their dedication attracted recruits and terrified op-ponents. They carried a multitude of flags and banners, partly for identi-fication of units. Instead of shaving their foreheads and wearing thequeue that the Qing dynasty required as a badge of loyalty (such a tan-gible symbol!), the Taipings let their hair grow free and became the“long-haired rebels,” even more startling for establishmentarians to be-hold than student rebels of the Western counterculture a century or solater.

Civil War

The war that raged from 1851 to 1864 was tremendously destructive tolife and property (see Map 21). Some 600 walled cities changed hands,often with massacres. While the American Civil War of the early 1860swas the first big contest of the industrial era, when rail and steamshiptransport and precision-made arms were key factors, the Taiping–impe-rialist war in China was the last of the premodern kind. Armies movedon their feet and lived off the land. No medical corps attended them.Modern maps and the telegraph were lacking. Artillery was sometimesused in sieges, but the favorite tactic was to tunnel under a wall, plantgunpowder, and blow it up. Navies of junks and sampans fought on theYangzi and its major lakes to the south, but steamships were a rarity.Muskets were used, but much of the carnage was in hand-to-hand com-bat with swords, knives, pikes, and staves. This required motivationmore than technical training.

An invading army might make up its losses by local recruitment, con-scription, or conversion of captives, but a commander could not alwayscount on such troops’ standing their ground, much less charging the en-emy. Imperial generals brought in Manchu and Mongol hereditary war-riors, but the humid South often undid them, and their cavalry wasno good in rice fields. The struggle was mainly Chinese against Chi-nese. Official reports of armies of 20,000 and 30,000 men, sometimes200,000 and 300,000, make one wonder how they were actually fed andwhat routes they traveled by, in a land generally without roads. Trooptotals were always in round numbers and should probably be scaleddown.

In 1851 the Taiping horde erupted northward, captured the Wuhancities, and early in 1853 descended the Yangzi to take Nanjing and makeit their Heavenly Capital. Their strategy was what one might expect of

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an ambitious committee dominated by an illiterate charcoal burner: ig-norant of the outer world, they left Shanghai in imperial hands andfailed to develop any foreign relations. Dizzy with success, they sent in-adequate forces simultaneously north to conquer Beijing and west to re-cover central China. Both expeditions failed. Commanders operatedpretty much on their own, without reliable intelligence, communica-tions, or coordination, simply coping with situations that arose. Ab-sorbed in religion and warfare, the Taiping leaders were inept in eco-nomics, politics, and overall planning.

Lacking trained administrators, they generally failed to take over andgovern the countryside as a base area for supplies of men and food. In-stead, they campaigned from city to city, living off the proceeds of lootand requisitions, much like the imperial armies. As Philip Kuhn (inCHOC 10), remarks, they remained in effect “besieged in the cities”while the local landed elite remained in place in the countryside. All thisresulted from their narrow religiosity, which antagonized, instead of re-cruiting, the Chinese scholar-gentry class who could have run a govern-ment for them.

Meanwhile, a watering down of their original faith and austerity hitthe movement. Within Nanjing the leaders soon each had his own army,palace, harem, and supporters. They spent much time elaborating sys-tems of nobility, honors, and ceremonies. Missionaries who called uponthe Taiping prime minister in 1860 found him wearing a gold-embroi-dered crown and clad like his officers in robes of red and yellow silk.Egalitarianism had continued for the rank and file only.

The original leadership had destroyed itself in a bloodbath in 1856when the Eastern King, Yang, the chief executive and generalissimo,plotted to usurp the position of the Heavenly King, Hong. Hong there-fore got the Northern King, Wei, to assassinate Yang and his supporters,only to find that Wei and his supporters, drunk with power, had to be as-sassinated by the Assistant King, Shi, who then felt so threatened that hetook off to the west with much of the army, leaving Hong sitting on arump of his own incompetent kinfolk.

Both Nationalists and Communists of a later day have tried to sal-vage from the Taiping movement some positive prototype of anti-Manchu nationalism and social reform. The Taipings were against allthe usual evils—gambling, opium, tobacco, idolatry, adultery, prostitu-tion, footbinding; and they gave special scope to women, who supportedand sometimes served in the army and ran the palaces in place of eu-

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nuchs. But the Taiping calendar and examination system, using tractsand Hong’s writings, were no improvement on the old; the ideal commu-nal groupings of twenty-five families with a common treasury neverspread over the countryside; the Westernization program of the lastprime minister, Hong’s cousin, Hong Ren’gan, who had spent someyears with missionaries, never got off the ground. Meantime, the igno-rance and exclusivity of the Taiping leadership, their lack of an economicprogram, and failure to build creatively on their military prowess led tothe slaughter and destitution of the Chinese populace. Mass rebellionhad seldom commended itself in China. Now it gave a bad name toChristianity, too.

The Protestant missionaries resented the infringement on their stu-dious monopoly of God’s Word. The more literal-minded were outragedat Hong’s claim to be Jesus’ younger brother and his injection of theChinese family system into the Christian Heaven in the person of God’sand Jesus’ wives. Hong’s adaptations may strike us today as undoubt-edly the best chance Christianity ever had of actually becoming part ofthe old Chinese culture. What foreign faith could conquer China with-out a Chinese prophet? But the few missionaries who ventured to Nan-jing, though well received, got the distinct impression that TaipingChristianity did not look to them for basic guidance. Even the TaipingChinese viewed themselves as central and superior, though generally po-lite to all “foreign brothers” (wai xiongdi). Their Sixth Commandment,“Thou shalt not kill or injure men,” used the traditional Chinese gloss,“The whole world is one family, and all men are brothers.” Hong’sThree-Character Classic for children to memorize recounted God’s helpto Moses and the Israelites, Jesus’ life and death as the Savior, and theancient Chinese (Shang and Zhou) worship of God (here unwittinglyfollowing the Jesuit line). But the rulers of Qin, Han, and Song had goneastray until Hong was received into Heaven in 1837 and commissionedto save the (Chinese) world by driving out the Manchu demons. Thiswas true cultural miscegenation, but few missionaries could stomach it.Meanwhile, Catholic France had opposed Taiping Protestantism onprinciple as still another outcropping of the evil unleashed by MartinLuther.

The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom went the way of Carthage—onlythe name survived. The record is biased because the imperialistsdestroyed most Taiping writings, except for those preserved mainly byforeigners (some were found only in this century in French and British

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libraries). Leaders of ability emerged in the final years, but too late. Acause for which so many gave their lives must have had much to offer,but only in comparison with the effete old order under the Manchus.

The Qing Restoration of the 1860s

That the Qing managed to survive both domestic and international at-tacks is due largely to the policy and leadership changes known as theQing Restoration. By 1861 the Manchu dynasty’s mandate seemed trulyexhausted. The diehard anti-Western faction in charge of Qing policyhad been defeated by the Anglo–French occupation of Beijing in 1860,which secured final acceptance of the unequal treaty system. Mean-while, a new Taiping commander destroyed the Chinese camp besiegingNanjing, invaded the delta, and in early 1862 would threaten Shanghai.The crisis led to a coup d’etat in Beijing in 1861 that brought into powera new Manchu leadership under the Empress Dowager (Cixi) as regentand headed by two Manchus, Prince Gong and Grand Councillor Wen-xiang. They were dedicated to a dual policy: in foreign relations, to ac-cept the treaty system in order to appease the foreign powers; in domes-tic relations, to put more Chinese in positions of real power in order todefeat the rebels. This more flexible policy began a restoration of Qingpower. (“Restoration”—zhongxing—was a traditional term for a dy-nasty’s “revival at midcourse.”)

The new commander against the Taipings was a Chinese Confucianscholar from Hunan, Zeng Guofan. Sent home from Beijing to organizemilitia in 1852, Zeng was appalled by what he saw as the Taiping’s blas-phemous and violent attack on the whole Confucian order. He was de-termined to defeat it in the time-honored way, through moral revival. Hetherefore set himself to build an army for defense. He recruited com-manders of similar character, personally loyal to himself, who selectedtheir subordinate officers, who in turn enlisted their soldiers man byman, creating in this way a network of leaders and followers personallybeholden to one another and capable of mutual support and devotion inwarfare. It was a military application of the reciprocal responsibilitiesaccording to status that animated the family system. And it worked. Sol-diers were carefully selected from proper families and well paid andtrained.

Zeng developed an inland navy on the Yangzi, set up arsenals, andhusbanded his resources. As the Taipings’ original Hakka soldiers fromSouth China became depleted, Zeng’s Hunan Army began to win. Once

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the Manchus recognized that their best hope lay in trusting Chinese loyalto the old order, Zeng was able to put his chief lieutenants in as provin-cial governors and so mobilize a concerted war effort. He methodicallyhemmed the Taipings in from upstream, where the Hubei–Hunan capitalof Wuchang had changed hands six times, and from downstream, whereAnglo-French forces finally abandoned neutrality and helped defend theShanghai–Ningbo area.

By accepting the Western treaty system and supporting the conserva-tive Chinese scholar-generals in the provinces, the new leaders at Beijingunder the regency of the young Empress Dowager (Cixi) achieved thesuppression of the Taipings by 1864 and gave their dynasty a new leaseon life. The idealistic picture of this era envisions a genuine conservativeeffort at a “Restoration” similar to those that had occurred after thefounding of the Later Han or after the great mid-Tang rebellion. The pi-oneer Western historian of the Restoration, Mary Clabaugh Wright(1957), has eloquently described how during the 1860s the componentsof the traditional Confucian state were energized to function again: agroup of high-principled civil officials, chosen by examination in theclassics and loyal to the reigning dynasty, sternly suppressed rebellionand tried to minister benevolently to the agrarian economy and the pop-ular welfare. Order was restored in the central provinces, taxes remitted,land reopened to cultivation, schools founded, and men of talent re-cruited for the civil service, even though more was advocated by the topofficials than could be actually achieved at the rice roots. While revivingthe traditional order in this fashion, the Restoration leaders also beganto Westernize. They set up arsenals to supply modern arms, built steam-ships, translated Western textbooks in technology and international law,and created a prototype foreign office in the form of a special committee(the Zongli Yamen) under the Grand Council. Soon their new provincialand regional armies with modern arms made peasant uprisings impossi-ble. In these efforts they were aided by the cooperative policy of theWestern powers, whose imperialist rivalries did not become intense untilthe 1870s.

Recent comprehensive appraisals are less upbeat. They note that theRestoration brought into power the ignorant and obscurantist EmpressDowager. Westernization was left largely to the Chinese provincial au-thorities where Chinese power had become dominant, and this put theManchu court on the defensive. However, these provincial efforts wereuncoordinated and not backed from Beijing. In the end the Qing admin-istration’s renewed vitality could not overcome the inertia of the tradi-

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tional Chinese polity. It could function only on its own terms, whichwere out of date. The Restoration leaders clung conservatively to thepreeminence of agriculture as the basis of state revenue and popular live-lihood. They had no conception of economic growth or development inthe modern sense but were austerely antiacquisitive; they continued todisparage commerce, including foreign trade, as nonproductive. Rather,they tried to set before the peasantry and bureaucracy the classical idealsof frugality and incorruptibility, so that the product of the land couldmore readily suffice to maintain the people and the government. To as-sist agriculture, they tried without much success (as Kwang-Ching Liuhas shown (in CHOC 10) to reduce land taxes in the lower Yangzi re-gion but did not try to lower rents or limit landlordism. They tried to re-vive the necessary public works systems for water control but could notcontrol the Yellow River any better than their predecessors.

The Restoration lost vitality after 1870 for many reasons. Its leaderswere conscientiously reviving the past instead of facing China’s new fu-ture creatively. They could not adequately inspire the lower levels oftheir bureaucracy nor handle the specialized technical and intellectualproblems of Westernization. The very strength of their conservative andrestorative effort inhibited China’s responding to Western contact in arevolutionary way.

Suppression of Other Rebellions

The Restoration’s one undoubted success had been in suppressing rebel-lions. During Taiping control of the lower Yangzi region there arose ontheir north between the Huai and Yellow rivers another movement of re-bel bands called Nian (see Map 21). Based in fortified earth-walled vil-lages on the southern edge of the North China plain, they organized cav-alry forces in their own banner system for raiding abroad and controlledtheir territorial base by taking over the local militia corps. Though lack-ing the dynastic pretensions of the Taipings, the Nian movement from1853 to 1868 supplanted the imperial government in a sizable regionand harassed it with raids to plunder food supplies from neighboringprovinces.

Imperial efforts to root the Nian out of their fortified nests repeat-edly failed. Walls were leveled only to rise again. The scholar-generalswho had defeated the Taipings tried to deprive the Nian of their popularsupport in the villages by promising security to the populace, death tothe leaders, and pardon to the followers. Meanwhile, other risings flared

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21. Nineteenth-Century Rebellions

up in several parts of North China. They and the Nian were eventuallyput down by new provincial armies with modern weapons. They cut therebel cavalry off from their supplies of food and manpower and eventu-ally, with blockade lines and counter-cavalry, destroyed them on theplain.

In the aftermath of these revolts that convulsed Central and NorthChina there were also sanguinary risings of Chinese Muslims in thesouthwest and northwest during the 1860s and 1870s—bitter strugglesthat are only now beginning to be studied. All in all, the movement forchange in modern China began by following the traditional patterns ofpeasant-based rebellions and a Restoration that suppressed them. In theprocess many millions of hapless people were killed. The fighting eventu-ally ran out of steam. Modern estimates are that China’s population hadbeen about 410 million in 1850 and, after the Taiping, Nian, Muslim,and other smaller rebellions, amounted to about 350 million in 1873.

Thus, the coercion of China by Western gunboats and even the An-glo–French occupation of Beijing in 1860 were brief, small, and mar-ginal disasters compared with the mid-century rebellions that swept overthe major provinces. The Europeans and Americans who secured theirspecial privileges in China’s new treaty ports were on the fringe of thisgreat social turmoil, not its creators. For some Chinese at the time theyrepresented a new order and opportunity, but for the majority they wereunimportant.

Nevertheless, an informal British–Qing entente took shape in theearly 1860s. Britain wanted stability for trade and so, for example,helped Beijing buy a fleet of steam gunboats (the ultimate weapon of theday), although the deal broke up over the question of who would com-mand it. Robert Hart and his Maritime Customs Service, working asQing officials, spearheaded the British encouragement of modern fiscaladministration and facilitation of trade. At the same time, by helping tomaintain Qing stability, they played a role in China’s domestic politicsthat patriots later could attack.

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11Early Modernization and the

Decline of Qing Power

Self-Strengthening and Its Failure

During the decades following the Qing Restoration of the 1860s, leadingpersonalities, both Manchu and Chinese, tried to adapt Western devicesand institutions. This movement, studied by Albert Feuerwerker,Kwang-Ching Liu and others, was posited on the attractive though mis-leading doctrine of “Chinese learning as the fundamental structure,Western learning for practical use”—as though Western arms, steam-ships, science, and technology could somehow be utilized to preserveConfucian values. In retrospect we can see that gunboats and steel millsbring their own philosophy with them. But the generation of 1860–1900clung to the shibboleth that China could leap halfway into moderntimes, like leaping halfway across a river in flood.

Under the classical and therefore nonforeign slogan of “self-strength-ening,” Chinese leaders began the adoption of Western arms and ma-chines, only to find themselves sucked into an inexorable process inwhich one borrowing led to another, from machinery to technology,from science to all learning, from acceptance of new ideas to change ofinstitutions, eventually from constitutional reform to republican revolu-tion. The fallacy of halfway Westernization, in tools but not in values,was in fact apparent to many conservative scholars, who therefore chosethe alternative of opposing all things Western.

The leaders in self-strengthening were those who had crushed theTaipings, scholar-officials like Zeng Guofan and his younger coadjutor,Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), who set up an arsenal at Shanghai to makeguns and gunboats. As early as 1864 Li explained to Beijing that theforeigners’ domination of China was based on the superiority of their

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weapons, that it was hopeless to try to drive them out, and that Chinesesociety therefore faced the greatest crisis since its unification under theFirst Emperor in 221 bc. Li concluded that in order to strengthen herselfChina must learn to use Western machinery, which implied also thetraining of Chinese personnel. This simple line of reasoning had beenimmediately self-evident to the fighting men of Japan after Perry’s arrivalin 1853. But the movement for Westernization in China was obstructedat every turn by the ignorance and prejudice of the Confucian literati.This lack of responsiveness in China, during the decades when Japanwas being rapidly modernized, provides one of the great contrasts ofhistory.

China’s difficulties were repeatedly illustrated. To make Westernlearning available, for example, some eighty Jesuit missionaries duringthe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had produced Chinese transla-tions of over 400 Western works, more than half on Christianity andabout a third in science. Protestant missionaries of the early nineteenthcentury published about 800 items, but nearly all as religious tracts ortranslations of scripture, mainly directed in simple parlance at the com-mon man, not the Chinese literati. At the Shanghai arsenal during thelast third of the century, one gifted Englishman (John Fryer) collaboratedwith Chinese scholars to translate more than a hundred works on sci-ence and technology, developing the necessary terminology in Chinese asthey went along. But the distribution of all these works was limited,rather few Chinese scholars seem to have read them, and their produc-tion depended on the initiative of foreigners or of a few officials con-cerned with foreign affairs, not under guidance from the throne.

At the capital an interpreters’ college had been set up in 1862 as agovernment institution to prepare young men for diplomatic negotia-tion. With an American missionary as head and nine foreign professorsand with Robert Hart’s prompting and Customs support, this new col-lege soon had over 100 Manchu and Chinese students of foreign lan-guages. Yet antiforeign literati objected to the teaching of Western sub-jects. The erroneous excuse had to be offered that “Western sciencesborrowed their roots from ancient Chinese mathematics . . . China in-vented the method, Westerners adopted it.”

The jealousy of a scholar class whose fortunes were tied to Chineselearning was most vigorously illustrated in the case of a Chinese student,Yung Wing, who had been taken to the United States by missionaries in1847 and graduated from Yale in 1854. When he returned to Chinaafter eight years abroad, he had to wait almost a decade before he was

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used by Zeng Guofan as an agent to buy machinery and as an interpreterand translator. Yung Wing’s proposal to send Chinese students abroadwas not acted upon until fifteen years after his return. In 1872 he headedan educational mission that brought some 120 long-gowned Chinesestudents to Hartford, Connecticut. Old-style Chinese teachers came withthem to prepare these prospective Westernizers of China for the exami-nations in the classics, a preparation still essential to their becoming of-ficials. Yung Wing was also given as colleague an obscurantist scholarwhose mission was to see to it that Western contact did not underminethe students’ Confucian morals. In 1881 the whole project was aban-doned.

Similar attitudes handicapped early industrialization. Conservativesfeared that mines, railroads, and telegraph lines would upset the har-mony between man and nature (fengshui) and create all sorts of prob-lems—by disturbing the imperial ancestors, by assembling unrulycrowds of miners, by throwing boatmen and carters out of work, by ab-sorbing government revenues, by creating a dependence on foreign ma-chines and technicians. Even when modernizers could overcome suchfears, they still faced enormous practical difficulties such as the lack ofentrepreneurial skills and capital. Major projects had to be sponsoredby high officials, usually under the formula of “official supervisionand merchant operation.” This meant in practice that enterprises werehamstrung by bureaucratism. Merchant managers remained under thethumb of their official patrons. Both groups milked the new companiesof their current profits instead of reinvesting them. An ongoing processof self-sustaining industrial growth through reinvestment was neverachieved.

Thus, China’s late-nineteenth-century industrialization proved gen-erally abortive in spite of the early promise of many officially sponsoredprojects. For example, the China Merchants’ Steam Navigation Com-pany founded by Li in 1872 was subsidized to carry the tribute rice fromthe Yangzi delta to feed the capital. Almost every year since 1415 longflotillas of grain junks had moved these shipments up the Grand Canal.Now they could go quickly by sea from Shanghai to Tianjin. To providecoal for the steamer fleet the Kaiping coal mines were opened north ofTianjin in 1878. To transport this coal, China’s first permanent railwaywas inaugurated in 1881. Yet by the end of the century these mutuallysupporting enterprises had made little progress. The China Merchants’Company, plundered by its patrons, managers, and employees, lostground to British steamship lines. The Kaiping mines, heavily in debt to

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foreigners, were taken over by Herbert Hoover and others in 1900. Rail-road building was neglected by China and promoted by the imperialistpowers in their spheres of influence after 1898.

During the latter part of Li Hongzhang’s thirty years of service asgovernor-general at Tianjin, his chief rival was Zhang Zhidong, whoserved eighteen years at Wuhan. There he set up an iron foundry that be-came a steel mill, as well as military academies and technical schools fortelegraphy, mining, railways, and industrial arts. Yet Zhang’s primaryhope was to fit all this technology into the classical Confucian scheme ofthings.

The modernization of China thus became a game played by a fewhigh officials who realized its necessity and tried to raise funds, find per-sonnel, and set up projects in a generally lethargic if not unfriendly envi-ronment. Hope of personal profit and power led them on, but the Em-press Dowager’s court, unlike the Meiji Emperor’s in Japan, gave themno firm or consistent backing. She, on the contrary, let the ideologicalconservatives stalemate the innovators so that she could hold the bal-ance. Since South China was as usual full of bright spirits looking fornew opportunities, especially in the rapidly growing treaty-port cities,the late nineteenth century was a time of much pioneering but little basicchange. Westernization was left to the efforts of a few high provincial of-ficials partly because this suited the central–local balance of power—thecourt could avoid the cost and responsibility—and partly because treaty-port officials in contact with foreigners were the only ones who could seethe opportunities and get foreign help.

The payoff from self-strengthening came in the Sino–Japanese Warof 1894–1895. Because of her size, the betting was on China, but LiHongzhang knew differently and tried to forestall the war. China hadbegun navy building in the 1870s. During the 1880s Li purchased steelcruisers and got instructors and advisors from Britain, but later Kruppoutbid Armstrong and two bigger German vessels were added. In the late1880s, however, funds for the Chinese navy were scandalously divertedby a high-level official conspiracy to build the Empress Dowager’s newsummer palace instead. By Hart’s estimate, the navy “ought to have abalance of 36,000,000 taels [say U.S. $50 million], and lo! it has nota penny.” In September 1894 he found “they have no shells for theKrupp’s, and no powder for the Armstrong’s.” In the war with Japan,only Li Hongzhang’s North China army and fleet were involved (notthose in Central and South China), and some of the navy’s shells werefound to be full of sand instead of gunpowder.

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When the Japanese intervened in Korea in 1894, ostensibly to quellKorean rebels, they routed Li’s North China army, and in one of the firstmodern naval battles, off the Yalu River, sank or routed his fleet. It wascommanded by an old cavalry general who brought his ships out lineabreast like a cavalry charge, while the Japanese in two columns circledaround them. Today when tourists visit the marble boat which stands inthe Summer Palace lake outside Beijing, they should be able to imagine acaption on it: “In memoriam: here lies what might have been the lateQing navy.”

From our perspective today, the startling thing is that China’s firstmodern war should have been left on the shoulders of a provincial of-ficial as though it were simply a matter of his defending his share of thefrontier. The Manchu dynasty has of course been blamed for its non-na-tionalistic ineptitude, but the trouble was deeper than the dynasty’s be-ing non-Chinese; the fault evidently lay in the imperial monarchy itself,the superficiality of its administration, its constitutional inability to be amodern central government.

The Qing dynasty had survived rebellions of the Chinese people, butits foreign relations now got out of hand. Japan’s victory over Chinathrew the Far East into a decade of imperialist rivalries. In order topay off the indemnity, China went into debt to European bondholders.In 1898 Russia, Germany, Britain, Japan, and France all occupied orclaimed spheres of influence in China. These consisted usually of a majorport as a naval base, a railway through its hinterland, and mines to de-velop along it. In order to check Japan, China invited Russia into Man-churia—until the Russo–Japanese War of 1905 left Russia confined tothe north and Japan triumphant in South Manchuria and Korea.

All in all, China seemed about to perish. Could a new generationwith a new teaching come to the rescue? Could the new teaching inspirea national regeneration under a strong ruling power?

The Christian–Confucian Struggle

To most Chinese, Christian missionaries seemed to be the ideologicalarm of foreign aggression. The conflict, begun in the seventeenth centuryand resumed in the nineteenth, went on at many levels: political, intellec-tual, and social.

Politically, Christianity was heterodox. At first it had seemed to bemerely another sect of a Buddhist type, with a belief system, a savior,moral guilt, and a way to atone for it—elements that most religions have

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in common. Since most religious sects in China had long since been pro-scribed, like the White Lotus, they generally had to be secret organiza-tions. After the spectacular Jesuit contact of the 1600s foundered uponthe Rites Controversy that pitted the Pope at Rome against the Emperorof China, Christianity was banned in 1724. The ban was not lifted until1846 at French insistence. Meanwhile the Chinese Roman Catholiccommunities had survived, but foreign priests had to work clandestinely.

Protestant missionaries by their calling were reformers at heart, andtheir efforts at once brought them into conflict with the Confucian estab-lishment, which believed in its own kind of reform. Missionaries and theChinese gentry-elite were natural rivals. Both were privileged, immuneto the magistrate’s coercion. Both were teachers of a cosmic doctrine. Ri-valry was unavoidable. Paul Cohen quotes as representative an earlymissionary who saw behind the outward show of the Confucian elite’spoliteness and refinement “nothing but cunning, ignorance, rudeness,vulgarity, arrogant assumption and inveterate hatred of everything for-eign.” This view was reciprocated. To the scholar-gentry, missionarieswere foreign subversives, whose immoral conduct and teachings werebacked by gunboats. Conservative patriots hated and feared these alienintruders, but the conservatives lost out as modern times unfolded, andmuch of the record thus far available is polemical or else comes mainlyfrom the victorious missionaries and Chinese Christians. The record soably summarized by Cohen (in CHOC 10) shows few Chinese convertsto the Christian faith but a pervasive influence from missionary aggres-siveness.

The period from 1860 to 1900 saw the gradual spread of mission sta-tions into every province under the treaty right of extraterritoriality, andalso under the right of inland residence illegally slipped into one treatyby a devout French interpreter. Building on its old foundations, the Ro-man Catholic establishment totaled by 1894 some 750 European mis-sionaries, 400 native priests, and over half a million communicants.Protestant missions had begun at Guangzhou, where Robert Morrisonwas employed by the British East India Company after 1807. The firstAmericans arrived in 1830. By 1894 the Protestant mission effort sup-ported over 1,300 missionaries, mainly British, American, and Cana-dian, and maintained some 500 stations—each with a church, resi-dences, street chapels, usually a small school, and possibly a hospital ordispensary—in about 350 different cities and towns. Yet they had madefewer than 60,000 Christian converts among the Chinese. Plainly, Chinawas not destined to become a Christian nation.

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After 1860 the increase of contact led to continuing friction be-tween gentry and missionaries. Especially among Hunanese who had re-sisted the “Christian” Taipings, a militant anti-Christian movement or-ganized ideological defenses and fomented violent action. Typically,gentry would spread rumors of missionary immorality when men andwomen worshipped together. A lurid pornographic literature, revivedfrom the seventeenth century, described the bestial orgies of priests,nuns, and converts. Gentry had only to post placards stating a time andplace for the populace to assemble to touch off a riot. Thousands of inci-dents occurred and hundreds were reported in diplomatic channels bymissionaries demanding redress and official protection of their treatyright to proselytize.

Gunboat blackmail obliged Qing officials to take the foreigners’ sideand enforce the treaties, further damaging the dynasty’s prestige. TheCatholics in particular supported their converts in lawsuits. Having littletrade, the French championed Catholic missions, whose bishops claimedand sometimes received a sort of official status.

On their part, the Protestant missionaries, organized under a dozendenominations, had an early struggle to master the Chinese languageand work out the terminology they needed to convey their message.China had a full vocabulary already in place to designate God, the soul,sin, repentance, and salvation. Missionary translators were up against it:If they used the established term, usually from Buddhism, they could notmake Christianity distinctive. But if they used a neologism, they could beless easily understood. This problem became most acute at the centralpoint in Christianity, the term for God. After much altercation, the Cath-olics ended up with Lord of Heaven, some Protestants with Lord onHigh, and others with Divine Spirit. One translation into Chinese of theBible produced a stalemate in which the missionaries could not agree onwhat to call the basic kingpost of their religion.

In the “Christian occupation of China,” as it was unwisely called,Protestant missionaries brought their small schools and rudimentarymedicine into the major cities, where examination candidates could oc-casionally be leafletted. But for the most part the Americans, who hadusually come from farms, found that life in the countryside was morecongenial and offered a better prospect of competing with Confucian-ism. The growth of the Protestant Christian church was slow but steady.The number of Chinese converts and practicing Christians rose by 1900to over 100,000, a mere drop in the Chinese bucket, but the Protestantmissionaries were great institution-builders. They set up their com-

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pounds with foreign-style houses managed by Chinese servants and soonwere developing schools and dispensaries or public-health clinics. Thefirst Chinese they won for Christ were often clients or coworkers, likethe cook or the tract distributor, but they also included some gifted andidealistic men who were impressed by foreign ways and were willing toembrace the foreign religion. In the late nineteenth century many Chi-nese reformers took on Christianity partly because the trinity of indus-try, Christianity, and democracy seemed to be the secret of Westernpower and the best way to save China.

The Reform Movement

In Late Imperial China trends in Chinese scholarship took a long time tocatch up with the trends in China’s foreign relations. During the sameyears as China’s widespread commercial growth, there was a movementin scholarship that Benjamin Elman (1984) calls “from philosophy tophilology.” The essence was that Confucian scholar-officials’ concern tomake moral judgments in terms of great principles gave way to moreprecise technical studies that were less culture-bound, and perhaps betterpreparation for confronting specific modern problems.

The Lower Yangzi delta where so much of the new interregionaltrade centered in the late eighteenth century was in the same period thehome of a new type of scholarship known as “evidential research”(kaozhengxue). Chinese dismay at the Ming collapse in the early 1600shad pinpointed the cause in Neo-Confucian philosophy, with its subtleadmixture of Buddhist-Daoist abstractions. Scholars were “dissatisfiedwith the empirically unverifiable ideas that had pervaded” Song andMing interpretations of Confucianism. The stress on moral principles(Song Neo-Confucianism was known as Lixue, “the learning of princi-ple”) had contributed to the righteous moral denunciations amongfactions that had hamstrung late Ming administrations. Under the Man-chus, some classical scholars therefore turned from philosophy to phil-ology, and also to mathematical astronomy, specifically to the concreteanalysis of texts, their authenticity, interpolations, and exact meanings.One result was that from internal evidence forgeries were discovered invenerated classics. They were no longer sacrosanct.

This new look in Qing scholarship was commemorated in 1829 in acollection of 180 works by 75 seventeenth- and eighteenth-century au-thors, half of whom had held the top degree of jinshi. It happened, ironi-cally, that this great achievement of scholarship was due to the editorial

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leadership of the eminent bibliophile Ruan Yuan, who was also the em-peror’s top official in charge of Guangdong province and the Europeantrade.

It is true of course that many authors in Ruan Yuan’s great collec-tion had come from merchant families. The legendary wealth of theYangzhou salt merchants, for example, enabled them to finance acade-mies and support talent. With the patronage of high officials, scholarswere mobilized to work on big imperial projects of compilation such asthe Ming History and the Qing geographical gazetteer. There were morethan 150 such imperial projects. Out of all this work emerged a sensethat evidential research was indeed a profession, separate from office-holding.

Academies and their libraries to foster this research proliferated espe-cially in the Lower Yangzi provinces. Though at first stand-offish, theemperor after 1733 began to sponsor academies that prepared studentsfor the examinations. After 1750, however, officially sponsored but in-ternally somewhat autonomous academies emerged to support study,discussion, and research alone. The “Han learning” of evidential re-search, basing itself on the New Texts of the Han period, showed the in-tellectual capacity and vitality of an established community of Qingscholars. They communicated partly by letters written for eventual pub-lication. Their achievements in critical evaluation of the inherited textsled them into epigraphy, phonology, and a beginning of archaeologicalanalysis of bronzes and stone monuments.

By the 1840s the sudden triumph of British seapower led to thedrawing together of two lines of Chinese reformist thought—the NewText movement to reappraise the classics and the statecraft movementfor the scholar-official elite to become more involved and more effectivein administration. The scholar-official Wei Yuan (1794–1857) was aleader in both. In 1826 he had compiled over 2,000 exemplary writingson fiscal and other practical aspects of administration. He proposed car-rying Beijing’s rice stipend from the Lower Yangzi by sea around Shan-dong instead of over the toilsome Grand Canal route. He helped reformthe salt gabelle, wrote an account of the ten successful Qing militarycampaigns, and at Guangzhou helped Commissioner Lin by compilingan influential account of the countries overseas—altogether a criticalnew look at China’s problems, none too soon. Wei Yuan brought theoutside world that Britain represented onto the horizon of the late Qingreformers.

The continuity between evidential research and modern Chinese

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scholarship would be evidenced in the 1890s when scholars versed inbronze and stone inscriptions recognized the significance of the “oraclebones” left from the Shang dynasty. This marked the start of modernChinese archaeology, as noted in Chapter 1, though it did little to helpthe late Qing meet the Western invasion.

By the 1890s the growth of cities, most of which were treaty ports,had brought great material and social changes. In the coastal and river-ine ports, Western-style buildings, street patterns, and city services ofgas lighting and water supply, plus steamship transportation and foreigntrade, were all connected with (or extensions of) the world outsideChina. In these ports a modern Chinese economy took shape as a jointproduct of foreign and Chinese enterprise in commerce, banking, andindustry. Simultaneously appeared the modern mass media—Chinesejournalists, newspapers, and magazines—and a new intelligentsia ofwriters and artists not oriented toward careers as government officials.In the modern cities under foreign administration, where Chinese busi-nessmen prospered as bankers and compradors assisting foreign firms,as well as independently, a Chinese public opinion began to find expres-sion.

As Christian converts began to form a decentralized community, mis-sionaries began to put out a Chinese magazine, the Review of the Times(Wanguo gongbao), which reported on the international scene. Weeklyfrom 1875 to 1883 and monthly from 1889 to 1907 this journal spreadworld news to the Chinese scholar class. Partly because it was so ablywritten in classical Chinese by the Chinese editors, the journal being firstin the field gave the missionaries a direct channel to the scholars and of-ficials who were grappling with the problems of the outside world. In the1890s the ablest missionaries (like the Welshman Timothy Richard) pur-sued a program of reaching the scholar class and so had influence on thereform movement.

From China’s perspective, Japan’s victory of 1895 was not merely adefeat of China by some other civilized power but a real subjection to thepowers of darkness represented by the West. Consider that the West-erners had the morals of animals, men and women both holding handsand actually kissing in public. By inventing powerful machines this out-side world had overwhelmed the order of man and nature that had cre-ated civilization and the good life. Chaos was at hand.

In 1895 several factors had suddenly converged. First was the foreignmenace, which had produced four wars and four defeats for Chinathrough naval firepower on the coast. New weapons of war, incredibly

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destructive, were now wielded by these outsiders. To this fact of foreignpower was added the second undeniable fact of foreign skill, not only atwar-making but in all the practical arts and technology of life. The steamengine on ships and railroads had sped up transportation beyond allcompare, and paved roads, gas lighting, water supply, and police systemsnow characterized port cities such as Shanghai. Third, to those peoplewho felt that technology and the arts were an expression of basic moraland intellectual qualities, it was plain that traditional China was some-how lacking in these capacities that the foreigner demonstrated.

The crisis and humiliation produced by these considerations led tothe inescapable conclusion that China must make great changes. BecauseChina’s common people did not contribute to the government and mostof the elite were too well ensconced in habitual ways to provide intellec-tual leadership, only scholars could tackle this problem.

The list of desirable reforms had been steadily growing since theOpium War. Several secretaries and advisors of Li Hongzhang had con-tributed; so had Christian missionaries, Taiping rebels, diplomats whowent abroad, and early Chinese journalists in Hong Kong and Shanghai.For such people the Western countries and now Japan offered a cornuco-pia of new ways that might be adapted to China’s needs. On the broadestlevel, parliaments could create a firmer bond between ruler and people.Government patents or rewards could encourage inventions, repair ofroads could help trade, mineralogy could improve mining, agriculturalschools could increase production, translations could broaden educa-tion—the list was endless.

However, before the reform movement could gain broad support, aphilosophical sanction had to be found for China’s borrowing fromabroad and changing the old ways. This sanction had to be found withinConfucianism, for it was still the vital faith of China’s ruling class. Itcalled for statesmanship in the service of the Son of Heaven. Only an in-sider, a latter-day sage, could perform the intellectual task of updatingthis Confucian tradition. This was Kang Youwei’s great contribution. Hewas a precocious scholar from Guangzhou, imaginative, sublimely self-confident, and expert at finding in China’s classical tradition the prece-dents that would justify its adaptation to the present.

Kang’s starting point was the New Text movement, in which Qingscholars had attacked the authenticity of the Ancient Text versions ofthe classics upon which the Neo-Confucian orthodoxy since the Songperiod had been based. The whole subject was at a level of complexitylike that of the Christian doctrines of the Trinity or of predestination.

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No slick summary can do it justice. But for us today the point is that theNew Text versions came from the Earlier Han (bc), while the AncientText version had become the standard in the Later Han (ad) and had re-mained so for the Song philosophers who put together the synthesis wecall Neo-Confucianism (in Chinese parlance the Song Learning). To re-pudiate the Ancient Text versions in favor of the New Text versions(which were really older) gave one a chance to escape the Neo-Confu-cian stranglehold and reinterpret the tradition. The New Text school ofthought believed in adapting institutions to the times and so generally fa-vored reform.

As Benjamin Elman (1990) has shown, the New Text reform move-ment in late Qing was actually a continuation of the late Ming effort ofLower Yangzi scholars (of the Donglin or “Eastern Forest” academy) toextirpate imperial despotism. Instead of an evil eunuch as in the 1620s,the symbol of the autocracy’s moral iniquity in the 1790s was the agedQianlong Emperor’s corrupt favorite, Heshen. Beginning in the sameLower Yangzi region as the Donglin (Changzhou prefecture), New Textreformers during the nineteenth century demanded, often in their memo-rials of remonstrance (qingyi), a greater imperial concern for publicneeds. Kang Youwei, consciously or not, represented a growing gentryinterest in government reform.

In 1891 he published his Study of the Classics Forged during the XinPeriod (ad 9–23). He asserted that “the Classics honored and ex-pounded by the Song scholars are for the most part forged and not thoseof Confucius.” This bombshell was eruditely crafted and very persuasive(though not then nor now generally accepted). Kang also cited New Textclassical sources to buttress his theory of the three ages of (1) disorder,(2) approaching peace and small tranquility, and (3) universal peace andgreat unity. The world was now entering the second age in this progres-sion, which implied a doctrine of progress. Kang Youwei had securedmost of his ideas from earlier writers, but he marched to his own drum-mer. This enabled him to smuggle the ideas of evolution and progressinto China’s classical tradition at the very moment when these ideas weresweeping the international world.

Indeed, Kang Youwei and his best student, the Cantonese LiangQichao, were quick to accept the Social Darwinism of the 1890s. Theywrote books on the sad fate of hidebound nations like Turkey and Indiaand the success stories of Peter the Great’s Russia and Meiji Japan in thestruggle for survival of the fittest among nations. In short, these radical

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reformers at heart were ardent nationalists but still hoped that the Qingmonarchy could lead China to salvation. Profiting from the example ofProtestant missionaries, they began to use the modern devices of thepress and of study societies that sponsored discussion of public problemsboth in print and in group meetings. Kang even advocated making wor-ship of Confucius into an organized national religion. But his main hopewas a traditional one: to gain the ear of the ruler and reform China fromthe top down. His chance came in 1898, when each imperialist powerdemanded a sphere of influence and China seemed about to be carvedinto pieces. Since 1889 the idealistic Emperor Guangxu had been al-lowed nominally to reign while his aunt, the Empress Dowager, keptwatch on him from her newly furbished summer palace. The emperor,now twenty-seven, had been reading books, not a safe activity for a fig-urehead, and his old imperial tutor, a rival of Li Hongzhang, recom-mended Kang Youwei to him. As the crisis deepened in 1898 the em-peror gave him his confidence.

Between June 11 and September 21, during one hundred days,Guangxu issued some 40 reform decrees aimed at modernizing the Chi-nese state, its administration, education, laws, economy, technology,military, and police systems. Many of these reforms had been advocatedby writers for decades past, only now they were decreed by the emperor.Unfortunately, unlike the first hundred days of Franklin D. Roosevelt,which legislated the New Deal in 1933, the radical reforms of 1898 re-mained largely on paper while officials waited to see what the EmpressDowager would do. She waited until nearly everyone in the establish-ment felt threatened by the proposed changes and then staged a mili-tary coup d’etat. Kang and Liang escaped to Japan, but she confinedGuangxu to the southern island in the palace lake and executed the sixradicals she could catch.

Informed mainly by the self-serving writings of Kang and Liang,many have viewed the fiasco of the Hundred Days of 1898 in black andwhite terms, seeing Kang, Liang, and the emperor as heroes defeated byevil reactionaries. The opening of the Palace Museum Archives in Taibeiand the Number One Historical Archives at Beijing has now allowed arevisionist like Luke S. K. Kwong (1984) to reinterpret the events of1898 and specialists like Benjamin Elman to question some of his ques-tionings. The Beijing politics of 1898 require fuller appraisal.

In any case, the most die-hard Manchu princes, whose palace up-bringing had left them ignorant of the world and proud of it, soon be-

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came patrons of a peasant secret society, the Boxers. This turning of theManchu court to active support of a fanatical cult was an obvious act ofintellectual bankruptcy.

The Boxer Rising, 1898–1901

In northwest Shandong on the floodplain of the Yellow River, the ratherdense population had become so poor that few gentry lived in the vil-lages, and banditry had become a seasonal occupation that inspiredintervillage feuds. The Qing government and gentry were losing control.During the 1890s aggressive German missionaries had attracted con-verts to Catholicism partly by supporting them in lawsuits against non-Christians. After their seizure of Shandong as a sphere of influence in1898, the Germans’ arrogance heightened the anti-Christian sentimentthat had long been accumulating as Christian missions spread into theinterior while the European powers and Japan repeatedly humbled theChinese government. Antimissionary riots had led the foreigners to ex-act such onerous penalties that Qing policy required magistrates toavoid antagonizing the missionaries and their converts. In this situationShandong peasants defended their interests through secret societies. Insouthwest Shandong, for example, the Big Sword Society became a forcefor bandit suppression. In 1898 a disastrous Yellow River flood followedby prolonged drought put the villagers in dire straits. North China be-came a tinderbox.

Joseph Esherick’s (1987) masterly study of the Boxers’ origins pin-points the combining in northwest Shandong of two peasant tradi-tions—the technique of the martial arts or “boxing” (featured in operasand storytelling and visible today in movies of gongfu combat) and thepractice of spirit possession or shamanism. (We may recall from Chapter2 that the king of the Shang dynasty had acted as the chief shaman.)The Spirit Boxers, who later took the name Boxers United in Righteous-ness, put together these two elements. After appropriate rituals, Boxerswent into a trance, foamed at the mouth, and arose prepared for combatbecause they were now invulnerable to swords or bullets. Anyone couldbe possessed and so for the moment become a leader. No hierarchicorganization was necessary. The aim was the simple slogan, “Supportthe Qing, destroy the foreign.” Once ignited in the propitious circum-stances of the times, the Boxer movement spread across North Chinalike wildfire. The Manchu princes, and even the Empress Dowager for atime, felt they heard the voice of the common people, the final arbiter of

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Chinese politics. They proposed to work with the movement, not againstit, and so get rid of foreign imperialism.

In the sequence of events, each side aroused the other. Legationguards in the spring of 1900 went out shooting Boxers to intimidatethem. By June 13–14 Boxers broke into Beijing and Tianjin, killingChristians and looting. On June 10, 2,100 foreign troops had startedfrom Tianjin to defend the Beijing legations but got only halfway. OnJune 17 a foreign fleet attacked the coastal forts outside Tianjin. OnJune 21 the Empress Dowager and the dominant group at court for-mally declared war on all the powers. As she said, “China is weak. Theonly thing we can depend upon is the hearts of the people. If we losethem, how can we maintain our country?” (By country she meant dy-nasty.)

The Boxer Rising in the long, hot summer of 1900 was one of thebest-known events of the nineteenth century because so many diplo-mats, missionaries, and journalists were besieged by almost incessantrifle fire for eight weeks (June 29–August 14) in the Beijing legationquarter—about 475 foreign civilians, 450 troops of eight nations, andsome 3,000 Chinese Christians, also about 150 racing ponies, who pro-vided fresh meat. An international army rescued them, not without bick-ering, after rumors they had all been killed. The Empress Dowager, withthe emperor safely in tow, took off for Xi’an by cart. The allied forcesthoroughly looted Beijing. Kaiser Wilhelm II sent a field marshal, whoterrorized the surrounding towns, where many thousands of ChineseChristians had been slaughtered; 250 foreigners, mainly missionaries,had been killed across North China. Vengeance was in the air.

But the Chinese provincial governors-general who had led the effortat self-strengthening also coped with this crisis. Li Hongzhang atGuangzhou, Zhang Zhidong at Wuhan, and the others had decidedright away in June to ignore Beijing’s declaration of war. They declaredthe whole thing simply a “Boxer Rebellion,” and they guaranteed peacein Central and South China if the foreigners would keep their troops andgunboats out. This make-believe worked. The imperialist powers pre-ferred to keep the treaty system intact, together with China’s foreign-debt payments. And so the War of 1900, the fifth and largest that theQing fought with foreign powers in the nineteenth century, was localizedin North China.

The Boxer protocol signed in September 1901 by the top Manchuprince and Li Hongzhang with eleven foreign powers was mainly puni-tive: ten high officials were executed and one hundred others punished;

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the examinations were suspended in forty-five cities; the legation quarterin Beijing was enlarged, fortified, and garrisoned, as was the railway,and some twenty-five Qing forts were destroyed. The indemnity wasabout $333 million, to be paid over forty years at interest rates thatwould more than double the amount. The only semiconstructive act wasto raise the treaty-based import tariff to an actual 5 percent.

Demoralization

The Confucian-based system of government stressed the impeccableconduct of rulers, officials, and leaders in family and community as thesanction for their superior position and privileges. To an unusual degree,China was governed by prestige. Emperors might in fact be knaves orfools, but the imperial institution was sacrosanct. Official pronounce-ments were aimed at maintaining and improving the image of the power-holders. Losers were stigmatized as lacking in morality, which accountedfor their losing out. A man’s maintenance of his good name was as im-portant as his life, an idea that applied even more to women. Peoplewhose reputations had been blackened could redeem themselves by sui-cide. In the society as in the government, reputation was all-important.In this context where moral opinion outranked legal considerations, de-moralization could be a stark fact of immeasurable significance. Loss ofconfidence, sense of humiliation, personal or collective loss of face, con-sciousness of failure in conduct—there were many forms of this disasterin the nineteenth century.

In the most general sense, then, the last century of the Qing standsforth in retrospect as a unified period surcharged with demoralization onmany fronts. The century began with the inordinate corruption of theQianlong Emperor’s favorite, Heshen, which besmirched the emperor’sreputation. At the same time the failure of the bannermen to quell theWhite Lotus uprising was a defeat for the dynasty, which had to recruitnew troops from the Chinese populace.

If we skip along touching only highlights of moral disaster we mustnote the rise of the opium trade at Guangzhou and its expansion alongthe southeast coast. Long since denounced as immoral, opium caused afiscal crisis when it led to the outflow of silver and upset the silver/copperexchange ratio, to the detriment of peasants who had to pay taxes bypurchasing silver with copper coins. China’s acceptance of British termsat Nanjing in 1842 could be advertised by the negotiators as skillfuldeflection of the foreign menace, but the whole empire could see that

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opium was still arriving in increasing amounts and the problems ofGuangzhou were being multiplied at four new ports of trade. Whilethese were peripheral matters of the frontier, they figured at Beijing inthe struggle between money-minded appeasement and suppression ac-cording to moral principle. Commissioner Lin could not be cashieredwithout his moral posture being betrayed. The opium trade, legalized bytreaty in 1858, was suborning Chinese officialdom, and the court had togo along in a tremendous loss of face. Very shortly came the TaipingRebellion, which spread so rapidly, once ignited, that one must assumethat a lack of imperial repute paved its way from the West River toNanjing.

Suppression of the rebellion was achieved only after the Qing rulersat Beijing accepted a basic revision of the balance of power between theManchu dynasty at the capital and loyal Chinese officials in the prov-inces. Beijing had to put its trust in provincial leaders like Zeng Guofanand Li Hongzhang and their new armies, which were financed by newprovincial taxes on trade. It was a fundamental change in the Qingpower structure, evidenced, for example, in the fact that Chinese of-ficials thereafter held the top governor-generalships in the metropolitanprovince around Beijing and in the Lower Yangzi rice basket at Nanjing.The Qing also had to accept a degree of foreign participation in Chinesepolitical life.

To say, as we are justified in doing, that the downward course ofQing fortunes was arrested by the Restoration of the 1860s is neverthe-less a confession that the dynasty’s days were numbered. The expediencyof the Restoration was evident in the Qing acceptance of an informalalliance with the British and French after the humiliating invasion ofBeijing and burning of the Summer Palace in 1860. The long process ofwar and negotiation during the 1850s and 60s between China and theWestern powers had been marked by a general Chinese readiness to fightin defense of principle and a general Manchu readiness to appease theinvader in the interests of preserving the dynasty. The appeasementachieved by Prince Gong and his backers, including the young EmpressDowager, was a very expedient move and gave the dynasty another gen-eration of existence. Yet its practical implications were to make the Qingin some ways a minor partner in the Anglo–Qing co-dominion of theChina coast.

The Imperial Maritime Customs Service built up in the treaty portsby Robert Hart under the wing of the leading Manchu in the GrandCouncil, Wenxiang, exhibited the double edge of imperialism. During

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the first half or more of his constructive administration Hart providedthe Qing with a modern revenue agency as well as a device for managingbellicose foreigners in their treaty ports. This was on the whole a greatboon to the Chinese state, but after 1895 when the loans had to be con-tracted to pay the indemnities to Japan and after 1901 to the Boxer pro-tocol signers, Customs became an obvious agent of imperialism by levy-ing upon the Chinese state the repayment of indemnities.

Behind this comparative success in Manchu–Chinese cooperationwith the treaty powers for the maintenance of order, there was a split be-tween the interests of the Manchu dynasty and the interests of the Chi-nese people, which could gradually be seen as two separate things. Butbeneath this was the larger query as to China’s capacity to meet the for-eign incursion not only in military and economic matters but also on theintellectual plane.

Not only was the performance of the Chinese state inadequate, thebasic principles of the Neo-Confucian order were called into question.This was a greater crisis than had faced the late Ming or any earlier dy-nasty except perhaps the Song. But whereas the Song had shown theircultural superiority even when defeated, the Chinese who became ac-quainted with Western matters could not conclude that the superiority ofChinese culture was still a fact. The growth of opium addiction through-out the society was a persistent witness to the loss of self-confidence.Jonathan Spence has made a well-informed guess that by 1900 therewere about 40 million Chinese consumers of opium, of whom about 15million were addicts. This meant that for every Chinese converted toChristianity there were some 15 addicted to opium.

Finally, a sense of doom and disaster demoralized the scholar class,the central guardians of the Neo-Confucian faith. The next chaptertherefore concentrates on the relations of the dynasty with the gentry-elite.

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12The Republican Revolution

1901–1916

A New Domestic Balance of Power

After its defeat by expeditionary forces of all the major powers in 1900,the Qing dynasty survived until 1912 only because there was no regimein sight to replace it—and because both Chinese and foreigners in Chinapreferred order to disruption. During the decade from 1901 to 1911 thepace of change in the treaty ports on China’s coastal and riverine littoralsteadily widened the gap between modern-urban China and the count-less villages of the interior. This widening gap had begun with the treatysystem, which gave reform-minded Chinese their chance to organize andpublicize political opinions—something that the Qing regime did notpermit. Even so, the early protagonist of rebellion, Sun Yatsen, in 1905became head of the Revolutionary League at a meeting of Chinese stu-dents in Tokyo only with the help of Japanese expansionists. Chinese na-tionalism was growing but still dormant.

In this buildup of social forces that would emerge in 1911, the key re-lationship was that between the imperial government and the gentry-elite. In the era from 1850 to 1911 three stages are broadly visible. Thefirst was the success of the gentry-elite in supporting the dynasty againstthe Taiping and other mid-century rebels. This was done by setting upmilitia bureaus throughout the countryside, selecting soldiers on the ba-sis of personal loyalty, and financing it all with gentry contributions andthe new likin tax on trade.

A second stage came in the post-Taiping era of reconstruction, whengentry-elite became active in a revival and growth of Confucian educa-tion in academies and became gentry managers of a wide range of urbanwelfare and other community works. The gentry class changed its com-

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position as landlords moved into cities and merchants were received intogentry status by purchase of degrees and by joining in officially spon-sored commercial and industrial projects. Big families had the funds andaccounting procedures to join in economic development. Meanwhile, ur-banization allowed a large injection of foreign examples, ideas, and con-nections.

In a third stage beginning in the late 1890s, along with the rise of na-tionalism came a reformist urban elite, who enlisted under the banner ofprovincial development, local self-government, and constitutionalism.They started along many lines of modernization, but they found theManchus too slow, obstructive, and incapable of leading a Chinese na-tion.

We turn first to the gentry’s role in suppressing rural rebellion.

Suppressing Rebellion by Militarization

One consequence of the great Taiping rebellion after 1850 was themilitarization of the countryside to maintain order over a swelling andrestive rural populace. This raised an institutional problem—how tomaintain the dynasty’s central control over the military, the wu-elementin imperial rule. Dynasties had avoided mass conscription of troops eversince the Qin. The Han and later regimes had used prisoners, paupers,mercenaries, or professional, often hereditary, fighting men. Under theQing, strategic garrisons of bannermen had been supplemented by a dis-persed Chinese constabulary, but both had proved inadequate to quellthe White Lotus rising. During the early nineteenth century the increaseof local disorder led to a proliferation of local militia forces.

Militia were locally supported part-time soldiers, as Philip Kuhn(1970) remarks, “neither purely military nor purely civil” but a bit ofboth. Their chief feature in late Qing was their management by localgentry. For example, Frederic Wakeman, Jr. (1966), has described howthe Guangzhou gentry organized villagers to oppose the British in the1840s and 50s. Qing officials there were caught in a dilemma: to opposethe popular xenophobia might turn it against the dynasty; to go alongwith it might provoke British retaliation. Militia as a form of militarypower in the hands of the people or at least of the local gentry was atwo-edged sword. Beijing had backed away from setting up militia(tuanlian) under gentry leadership and financing unless they were strictlycontrolled by the local magistrates in a system of “official supervisionand gentry management” (guandu shenban). On this basis hundreds of

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villages with thousands of militia could be organized over wide areas torespond to official orders transmitted through widespread gentry associ-ations.

Such a mobilization might be assisted by several networks already inplace. One was the baojia registration of all households with their able-bodied manpower. Another was the strength of lineage networks thatconnected people through kinship, common property, and ancestor rev-erence at ancestral halls. Still another was the market community of thevillages of a market area. Intermeshed with all these networks—adminis-trative, social, and economic—a militia system had the potential notonly to control rural areas but to supplant the government’s control overthem. Consequently, in the 1850s Beijing had commissioned trusted of-ficials like Zeng Guofan to organize militia in their native areas only as alast recourse in desperate circumstances.

The reliability of a militia network depended upon all its fightingmen being locally connected and identified. Secret societies like theTriads, who operated among smugglers along transport routes, and va-grant refugees, who might flood the roads in time of famine, flood, inva-sion, or other disasters, were incongruous elements that were hard tocontrol. Most dangerous of all were sectarian rebels like the Taipings,who were animated by a specific faith that held them together.

Two things were therefore necessary to check the Taiping rebels’ fa-naticism. One was a revival of the Confucian ideology of social order ex-pressed in personal relations between commanders and officers and be-tween officers and men. In short, command, to be effective, had to bepersonal, based on the interpersonal motives of loyalty, respect for au-thority, and exemplary leadership. Case studies especially from Hunanshow how scholar-commanders of the type of Zeng Guofan developedby trial and error the ideas and practices that eventually created theHunan Army and similar regional forces that defeated the rebellion.From locally based militia, these troops had advanced to the status offull-time warriors (yong, “braves”).

The other requirement for success was the levy of taxes to financethe war effort. Contributions secured from well-to-do gentry were a pri-mary source once the ideological struggle had been consciously joined.Sale of degree status and even of official posts were other devices of a dy-nasty in extremis. But the main recourse after 1853 was a new tax ontrade, collected on goods in transit or in stock, at a very low rate andhence called likin (lijin, “a tax of one thousandth”). This new tax bat-tened on the recent growth of domestic trade. (Foreign-owned trade

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goods moved through the interior, subject to a comparable levy of “tran-sit duties” prescribed by treaty.)

The point about likin was that it began under local and provincial,not central, control. Susan Mann (1987) has traced how likin spreadinto every province, where elaborate networks of taxing stations wereset up on major routes and in cities, all beyond the immediate purviewof Beijing. Gradually the central authorities would get a nominal report-ing of likin receipts and expenditures. By the end of the century likin col-lections would equal the salt taxes in central government revenue ac-counts. In short, likin taxes, like the militia (tuanlian) system and theregional armies they supported, were all made agencies of the state innominal terms, even though they created a new balance between the cen-tral and provincial governments that was to shift steadily in favor of thelatter.

Thus led and paid for, the regional armies that wiped out the Tai-pings had been organized by men who not only shared a general outlookand ideology but were also personally related by the bonds that inte-grated China’s ruling class—kinship including marriage, teacher-studentrelations, same year graduation, and similar relationships. As Kuhn putsit, “the close integration of the Hunan elite” was due to both “the Qingacademic system and the network of patronage and loyalty that ranthrough the bureaucracy.” Under the threat of heterodoxy as well as for-eign invasion, they had survived as a ruling class loyal to the Confucianorder. After the 1860s their unity of thought and action gradually dissi-pated.

Meanwhile, the regional armies became regular provincial forces,and new naval and military academies began to train officers who hadthe new prestige of being scholar-soldiers. They became professional of-ficers in the specialties of modern militarism. Their best graduates wouldlead the warlord generation of 1916–1927 under the Republic.

Elite Activism in the Public Sphere

During the post-rebellion reconstruction of the late Qing decades, thegentry managers who had militarized the countryside had their succes-sors in an urban gentry class who handled activities of value to the com-munity. Many of these matters had been associated with the local eliteever since the Song, but in the rapid rise of cities in the late nineteenthcentury new responsibilities were taken on. They provided an outlet forthe energy of an elite that could not be wholly employed in the bureau-

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cracy. The Qing examinations continued to produce far more degree-holders than the government could absorb into official posts. The Ming–Qing “minimalist form of government,” as Mary Rankin (1986) termsit, continued to rely on the gentry to deal with public matters that lay inbetween the official and the private levels.

In this public (gong) sphere, gentry had first of all taken on the man-agement (with official sanction) of irrigation water, including dams anddikes. The old reasoning of K. A. Wittfogel (1957) and others that theneed for central control of water resources was responsible for the inevi-table rise of an all-powerful Chinese state can now be turned on its headand applied to the rise of power among the local gentry. This criticalcommunity resource had to be managed in each case according to localcircumstances and could not be imposed from a distance. Along withmanagement responsibilities came a degree of autonomy and power. Soquickly are simplistic theories undone!

The urban gentry also made their influence felt in the sphere of edu-cation through an increase of academies. Ideally an academy might shel-ter and sustain a few dozen scholars in a secluded rural spot, wheresimple living and high thinking might be pursued close to nature. Inpractice, however, most academies became preparatory schools for ex-amination candidates and were situated in cities. From Song times on-ward their number steadily accumulated until there were many thou-sands in the empire—for example, 565 academies had been establishedbetween 1506 and 1905 in Guangdong province; almost 500 had beenset up between 960 and 1905 in Jiangxi; and Zhejiang had 289 acade-mies during the nineteenth century. Though some were privatelyfounded, most were set up under official sponsorship and continued su-perintendence. In either case, the land endowment, trust funds, rents,and contributions or subsidies came from officials personally, from gen-try and merchants. A spate of academy foundings followed the suppres-sion of the Taipings. Though not funded by the government, they weresemiofficial institutions.

Welfare activities traditionally in gentry hands also took on a newurgency. Caring for the ill and for widows and foundlings, maintainingtemples, bridges, and ferries, fighting fires, and burying the dead wereall customary gentry-aided services. They were now coordinated inmany localities under omnicompetent welfare agencies headed by prom-inent local figures and often backed by native-place guilds. These leadersof the local elite were obeying Confucian moral injunctions and at thesame time trying to ensure social stability and community cohesion.

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Their motivation harked back to the “feudal” (fengjian) ideal of Confu-cian reformers, who wanted local leaders to bear greater responsibilityfor local government.

All this elite activism was extra-bureaucratic. In 1878 a famine inNorth China inspired a mobilization of prominent managers at differenturban levels and across provincial boundaries. The managerial elite’s ca-pacity to deal with social problems was outpacing that of the Qing bu-reaucracy. In a variety of forms the gentry had expanded their publicfunctions to meet local community needs, while the Qing bureaucracygrew only informally, by adding on more advisers and deputies. Gentrymanagers were preferable to the uneducated and corrupt yamen clerksand runners. The bureaucracy’s sanction for elite activism, though stillnominally required, was becoming less necessary. The public sphere wasgrowing faster than the governmental.

The land-holding gentry who managed the rural militarization thatdefeated the Taipings and the urban gentry-merchant activists who man-aged elite education and social welfare in later decades shared certainfeatures. Both remained upper-class, eager to use devices of statecraft topreserve social stability, not by any means ready to lead peasant rebel-lion to change China’s two-level social structure. From the perspective ofmodern times they were conservatives. Their eventual alienation fromthe effete Manchu ruling house would be based on the cultural national-ism of Chinese patriots determined to preserve not only their country butalso their own social leadership and domination.

The Japanese Influence

Both the late Qing reforms after 1901 and the Revolution of 1911 werenurtured in Japan. In 1890 the poet-diplomat Huang Zunxian publishedhis Treatise on Japan, describing to his countrymen the modernizationof a country considered by China’s elite to be a cultural offshoot ofChina, where, for example, the philosophy of Wang Yangming (òYÃmei) had a wide appeal, especially among the samurai. Japan’s unex-pected and crushing defeat of China in 1895 made her the country toemulate. Japan’s benevolent though arrogant concern for China was ex-pressed in the doctrine that Japan’s successful modernization gave herthe duty of helping the backward Chinese along the same path. Expan-sionist secret societies and the Japanese military became thorough inves-tigators of Chinese life and conditions, while scholars studied the com-mon culture (tongwen, dÃbun) of the two countries. After 1900 Chinese

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students crowded into Tokyo, about half of them sent by provincialmodernizers like Zhang Zhidong.

The Qing reform program of New Policies that he proposed in 1901followed the Japanese example in many respects: for instance, in thepublic school system, in the administrative reform of central govern-ment, in the promise (made only in 1908) of a constitution and parlia-ment after nine years, and in the emperor’s grant to the people of consti-tutional rights that the emperor could thereafter rescind at will. Bothself-government to mobilize the people and police systems to controlthem were part of the Qing borrowing from Japan. The Qing reformswere in fact aided by Japanese advisers and a generation of Chinesetrained in Japan.

Japan’s influence on China by example was supplemented after 1905by Japan’s inheritance from the defeated Russians of their leasehold ofthe Liaodong peninsula in southern Manchuria, together with the SouthManchurian Railway. This lodgement of Japanese forces on what wasstill Qing territory went along with the rapid growth of Japan’s “infor-mal empire” in China. Using their privileges under the British-inventedunequal treaty system, the Japanese penetrated China’s terrain and econ-omy farther than all the Westerners put together. By 1914 Japan wasahead of Britain in direct trade, trading firms, and resident population.By 1930 Japan would have displaced Great Britain as the paramountforeign economic power in China.

Unfortunately, these achievements were cast under a cloud first by Ja-pan’s attempt to get ahead of the other imperialists in her 21 Demands of1915 and finally by her seizure of Manchuria in 1931.

The Qing Reform Effort

With the onset of the twentieth century, the welter of events in China andthe wide spectrum of interest groups and actors all take on a moderncomplexity. This puts a great premium on sorting out the major move-ments and forces at work. We are dealing here with a decade of reformfrom 1901 that precipitated the revolution of 1911 and was followed bythe setting up of the Chinese Republic and the attempt of the first presi-dent, Yuan Shikai, to rule as a new emperor (see Table 5). This sequenceof three phases—reforms that stirred things up, a rebellion that led topolitical confusion, and an effort to reassert central control by dictator-ship—seems reminiscent of other great revolutions that led to the rise ofa Cromwell, a Bonaparte, or a Stalin.

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By 1901 the Qing court had got the message that it could becomemodern only by centralizing power at Beijing. But it was too late to dothis. Major governors (including governors-general) had set up bureaus(ju) to handle their provinces’ foreign relations on such matters as trade,loans, and investments, as well as provincial industry and railways. Somany other new developments had outdated the old imperial systemthat its revival by metamorphosis was a forlorn hope. Nevertheless, theeffort was made. The Empress Dowager and her stand-pat Manchu sup-porters, who had rejected the sweeping blueprints of Guangxu’s “Hun-dred Days of Reform” edicts in 1898, felt obliged by 1901 to embracereform as unavoidable. But their aim of using it to strengthen the Qingposition tarnished the enterprise from the start. Formally the lead wastaken by the impeccable loyalist Zhang Zhidong and the remainingmember of the Chinese victors over the Taipings, Liu Kunyi. When they

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Table 5. Major turning points, 1901–1916

1901 Proposal of New Policies by Zhang Zhidong et al.

1904 New school system decreed

1904–5 Japan’s defeat of Russia in Manchuria

1905 Abolition of old examination system

1906 Ancient Six Ministries supplanted by a dozen modern departments ofgovernment at Beijing

1908 Constitutional government projected

October 14 and 15: Death of Emperor Guangxu and Empress DowagerCixi

1909 Provincial assemblies meet

1910 National Assembly meets

1911 October 10 rebellion at Wuhan cities

1911 January 1: Sun Yatsen provisional president of Chinese Republic atNanjing

February: Qing emperor abdicates, Sun resigns, Yuan Shikaiprovisional president of Chinese Republic at Beijing

1911–13 Struggle between parliament and president

March: Yuan has Song Jiaoren, parliamentary leader of the newNationalist Party, assassinated

1913 Yuan dissolves parliament and takes dictatorial powers

1916 Death of Yuan; warlordism ensues

put forward in 1901 their New Policies, the most portentous was educa-tional reform.

A hierarchy of modern schools was to be set up in counties, prefec-tures, and provinces, with a Japanese-style curriculum of old and newsubjects. China’s many academies would be converted to this use. Newschool graduates would enter the classical examination system, whichwould be a bit modernized to accommodate them.

Alas, it was soon found that students would continue to aim mainlyat the old examinations as a more prestigious and much cheaper route ofadvancement, bypassing the difficult modern curriculum and greatercost of the modern schools. There was nothing for it but to abolish theclassical examinations entirely in 1905. This great turning point stoppedproduction of the degree-holding elite, the gentry class. The old orderwas losing its intellectual foundation and therefore its philosophical co-hesion, while the student class that replaced it would be buffeted by dis-cordant fragments of Chinese and Western thought. Education began tobe the grab-bag that it has since remained, pulling students into technicalspecialities that in themselves did not constitute a moral order. The Neo-Confucian synthesis was no longer valid, yet nothing to replace it was asyet in sight.

The speed of change now became very unsettling, beginning with theway things looked. Military officers put on Western-style uniforms (anddecorations!); high-level ministers and merchants began to wear busi-ness suits; radical students began to cut off their queues in defiance of theManchus. Protestant missionaries assisted in crusades against foot-bind-ing and opium smoking. The training of new armies went on apace onlines already established, and the new press and publications offeredbroader views of the world as well as of events in China. The spread ofliteracy and of news helped the emergence of public opinion, more broadand significant than the literati opinion (qingyi) of the past. Mass nation-alism among the urban population had been aroused as early as the1880s by the undeclared warfare with France. In the foreign-tingedtreaty ports new professions began to be followed—not only those of in-dustrialist, teacher, journalist, engineer, medical doctor, and other scien-tists but also those of independent writer, artist, and even revolutionaryagitator, like Sun Yatsen.

Facing this vortex of change, Beijing pursued systematic policies in-spired partly by foreign examples. The aim was to bring the professionalactivities of the new elite in business, banking, law, education, and agri-culture under state regulation and control. This was to be done by set-

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ting up professional associations (fatuan, “bodies established by law”)to form new elite institutions with quasi-administrative functions. Thefirst were chambers of commerce in 1904, which were expected tobe four fifths drawn from guilds. They were followed by educational as-sociations (1906), agricultural societies (1907), lawyers’ associations(1912), and bankers’ associations (1915). In each case the fatuan wereintended to be subordinate to government and were to be used as mech-anisms to control local elites. The most wide-ranging was the programfor local self-government, which opened information offices after 1907.The slogans of the day at Beijing focused on rights recovery, constitu-tionalism, and self-government.

Constitutionalism and Self-Government

Meanwhile, in the dynamic urban environment of the treaty ports, pro-vincial reformers had found many opportunities. This third generationof the late Qing elite were no longer based in the countryside. Landlordbursaries typically collected their rents, dissolving the erstwhile personalbonds between landlord-patron and tenant. Joseph Esherick (1976) seesthis generation as neither still a gentry class nor as yet a bourgeoisie. Hetherefore calls them an “urban reformist elite.” They reacted to foreignimperialism by joining in the Rights Recovery movement to combat for-eign control of China’s industries, especially mines and railways. Duringthe decade from 1901 to 1911 they invested in industrial enterpriseswith the customary assistance of official connections, monopoly rights,government loans, and tax advantages, all reminiscent of the bureau-cratic capitalism of the self-strengthening movement. Whenever theirprojects’ under-capitalization and lack of market demand necessitatedthe securing of foreign loans, the aim of rights recovery was quitethwarted. Chinese gentry business managers, by aiming at politicalgoals, courted financial disaster.

When Japan’s constitutional monarchy defeated Russia’s tsarist au-tocracy in 1905, constitutionalism seemed to have proved its efficacy asa basis for unity between rulers and ruled in a national effort. EvenRussia now moved in 1905 toward parliamentary government. Consti-tutionalism in China, it was hoped, if combined with government reor-ganization to strengthen the central administrative power, might give therising provincial interests a meaningful share in the government and sokeep them loyal to it. Between 1906 and 1911 Beijing actively pursuedthis dual program, combining administrative modernization and consti-

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tutionalism. Such changes, however, precipitated a struggle for power,both within the central government and between it and the provinces.

In the power struggle at the capital, the Empress Dowager’s support-ers succeeded in maintaining, or even enlarging, their grip on key posts.This pro-Manchu and therefore anti-Chinese coloration at the capitalhandicapped Beijing’s efforts to create a new and more centralized rela-tionship with the provinces. It ran into anti-Qing sentiment that camenot only from the revolutionary students in Tokyo but also from a risingspirit of nationalism within China. This was manifest in 1905 in China’sfirst modern boycott against the United States’ discriminatory treatmentof Chinese, particularly the total exclusion of laborers. In this boycott,the old tradition of cessation of business by local merchant guilds wasexpanded nationwide to most of the treaty ports, especially Shanghaiand Guangzhou, where students joined merchants in mass meetings andmodern press agitation. American trade was damaged for some months,and Beijing hesitated to repress this popular anti-imperialist movementlest it become antidynastic also.

Under the pressure of rising nationalistic sentiment, the court senttwo official missions in the first half of 1906 to study constitutionalismabroad. One visited mainly the United States and Germany; the other,Japan, England, and France. Japan’s Prince ItÃ lectured the visitors onthe necessity of the emperor’s retaining supreme power, not letting it fallinto the hands of the people. On their return they recommended follow-ing this Japanese view, that a constitution and civil liberties includ-ing “public discussion,” all granted by the emperor, could actuallystrengthen his position because he would remain above them all. In Sep-tember 1906 the Empress Dowager promised a “constitutional polity”after due preparation. Further missions visited Japan and Germany in1907–1908.

In order to build up a modern central government, the Six Boards inNovember 1906 were expanded to make eleven ministries (Foreign Af-fairs, Civil Appointments, Internal Affairs, Finance, Rites, Education,War, Justice, Agriculture-Industry-and-Commerce, Posts-and-Commu-nications, and Dependencies). Parallel with this executive echelon ofgovernment it was proposed to retain the old military and censorialstructures and add on a purely advisory “popular assembly” to givevoice to public opinion. This would be very far indeed from the creationof a legislative branch equal in power to executive and judicial branches.The idea of the separation of powers could not take root in the absenceof the supremacy of law.

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In August 1908 the Empress Dowager proclaimed a set of constitu-tional principles to guide a nine-year program to prepare for constitu-tional self-government. Accordingly, consultative provincial assemblieswere to be convened in 1909 and a consultative national assembly in1910. The electorate for the provincial assemblies of 1909 was carefullylimited to those qualified by education (having taught for three years orgraduated from middle school, or gained mid-level examination degrees)or by property (worth at least 5,000 Chinese dollars). On this basisabout 1,700,000 men were registered to vote, say 0.4 percent of a popu-lation of 400 million. Each electoral district was allotted a number ofprovincial assemblymen according to its number of registered voters.John Fincher (1981) has noted that about nine tenths of those electedwere degree-holders of the gentry elite. They were a third generation,counting from the 1850s, and also a final generation. They would haveno successors as an identifiable, indoctrinated, and relatively like-minded stratum of society.

Once the provincial assemblies came together in 1909, new patternsof conduct were required. A few members became orators, while mostavoided such embarrassing ostentation. The principle of organizationwas by loyalty to leaders of factions or personal cliques rather than ac-cording to legislative programs or principles. The clear definition andsupport of interests, which would seem selfish, was generally obscuredby the utterance of admirable platitudes. Trained lawyers who coulddraft legislation were hard to find.

Along with constitutionalism, the movement for self-governmentaimed to mobilize the populace under local elite leadership in supportof the reforming imperial state. There were precedents for self-government not only in the ancient fengjian idea of local administrationby local people but also in modern cities. In Chinese Shanghai outsidethe foreign-run areas, a Shanghai city council had been set up in 1905.In 1907 a Tianjin county assembly had been established as a model bythe reformist official Yuan Shikai. In 1908 Beijing issued regulations tospecify the tax levies that could finance subcounty government—mainlyexcise and land taxes. Local self-government measures at the countylevel and below were pursued by the local elite, who tried to avoid theonerous taxation and corrupt administration to be expected from sub-officials at that level. Their opening of new schools to educate and mo-bilize new citizens was combined with the inauguration of police net-works for purposes of control. Yuan set the style by having the new

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police bureaus compile electoral lists for the new local assemblies. Aswith the national assembly, these local bodies would allow the elite toadvise and even participate in reform by setting up public services likeelectrification and waterworks that would have been customary for gen-try in the past. Political power would remain with the officials. The issueof mobilization versus control thus was joined.

The reformist elite wanted separate and honest financing for the re-forms. In 1909–1910 self-government regulations were issued for cities,market towns, rural townships, counties, and prefectures, all of whichwould have assemblies. New commercial and land taxes were levied sep-arate from the old bureaucratic structure. As it turned out, however, theold-style gentry-elite would become fewer and lose their position of lead-ership in the countryside, and in the end a new official system would su-pervene.

Insoluble Systemic Problems

The late Qing reformers, too late, made a vigorous effort to increase thedynasty’s central power. Two principal means were to build new rail-ways and train the New Army to enhance their control of the state,while the new ministries after 1906 tried to deal with all the specializedaspects of government. But the late Qing official reformers faced impos-sible tasks, first of all in remaking the structure of state power. Theimperial autocracy, undiminished in its claims to absolutism, presidedover two bureaucratic structures, one at the capital, the other in theprovinces.

At Beijing the Inner Court centered in the Grand Council. Every dayits half dozen ministers read incoming memorials and prepared the im-perial edicts in reply that energized official action over the land. Theyused the memorial–edict loop between the high provincial officials andthe imperial court directly via the official horse post. The Outer Court ofthe six ministries, censorate, and other bodies at Beijing handled routinebusiness in correspondence with their subordinate counterparts in theprovinces, but on important matters they were also in a memorial–edictloop with the emperor. For this the telegraph was coming into use.

All administration headed up in Beijing. Both reporting memorialsand decision-making edicts flowed to and from the emperor, but at twolevels, routine and urgent. For routine matters it was a rather centralizedunitary system. Provincial offices of personnel, finance, and so on re-

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ported to their superior ministries at Beijing. On urgent matters, how-ever, the provincial governors and the capital ministers were on an equalfooting under the emperor. There was no way to centralize power so thatprovincial governors could be put under Beijing ministries.

It was even more impossible to marry the memorial–edict procedureof the imperial law-giver and executive with the attempted legislative ef-forts of assemblies still labeled “advisory.” The incipiently “representa-tive” nature of the assemblies and their voting by majority rule were notheld to their credit. No Confucian had ever believed in simply countingheads.

Reform was also checked at every step by Beijing’s fiscal weakness.Payment of the Boxer indemnity of 1901 was now taking much of thecentral government’s revenue just at the moment when uncommittedfunds were most needed. Here foreign imperialism—the punitive de-mands of the powers—was plainly holding China back. At the sametime, however, the Qing government’s capacity to meet the demands ofmodernization was limited by the revenue system inherited from theMing. Financial reform was difficult, not only because it threatened somany “rice bowls” (individual incomes) but also because the inheritedfiscal system was so superficial and weak to begin with.

In the first place, the actual tax collections over the empire remainedlargely unknown, unbudgeted, and unaccounted for. Local tax collec-tors, as well as the provincial regimes above them, had to live on whatthey collected. What they should report to Beijing was fixed by tradi-tional quotas. At a guess, it was perhaps a third, possibly only a fifth, ofthe actual collection.

Second, the taxes officially received, more or less according to quota,were not centralized in a “common purse.” Instead, they were listed asa congeries of fixed sums due from a multitude of specific sources andallotted to a multitude of specific uses. Sums listed at Beijing were sel-dom received or disbursed there, for revenues from a province were al-lotted in bits and pieces to meet needs in it or elsewhere. Of the 18provinces, 13 regularly forwarded fixed allotments for specific purposesto other provinces. This ad hoc procedure tied the imperial revenues toan infinite number of vested interests, mainly the support of officials andsoldiers.

Moreover, even at Beijing there was no single fiscal authority. Theimperial revenues around 1905 totaled on the books roughly 102 mil-lion taels (say 70 million dollars or 14.5 million pounds sterling), a smallsum for so large a country. To make up this total, the Board of Revenue

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listed its receipts from the land tax and tribute grain still at the tradi-tional figure of about 33 million taels, to which the salt tax added 13million and other taxes about 7 million. After 1869 the Board had listedthe provincial likin collections at the nominal figure reported to it (14million taels in 1905). Meanwhile, the new and growing Maritime Cus-toms revenue, 35 million taels in 1905, was handled separately, andin any case was earmarked for foreign indemnity and loan payments.Thus, the new trade taxes—customs and likin—were hardly under Bei-jing’s control, while the traditional land-tax quotas remained inelastic.With authority thus divided, actual revenues unknown, and many ex-penditures entrenched as vested interests, fiscal reform could come onlythrough an unprecedented assertion of central power, changing the bal-ance on which the Manchu dynasty had so long maintained itself.

Late Qing fiscal development had occurred mainly in the provincesoutside or in addition to the established system. When Beijing tried in1884 to regularize and secure central revenue from the various provin-cial measures for military financing, the provinces objected to so manydetails that the effort had to be given up. New provincial agencies likearsenals, factories, steamship lines, and banks were administered by de-puted officials (weiyuan) or others commissioned for the purpose byprovincial officials. Not appointed by Beijing, they did not usually reportto Beijing. The ancient Board of Revenue, though reorganized in 1906as a Ministry of Finance, could not centralize fiscal control. Other min-istries continued to receive and expend their traditional revenuesand even set up their own banks, like the Bank of Communications(1907).

A novel effort to make a national budget began with nationwide rev-enue surveys in 1908 and the compilation of budget estimates in 1910, inwhich central and provincial government revenues and expenditureswere differentiated from local. This produced estimates of total revenues(297 million taels) and expenditures (national, including provincial, 338million taels; local, 37 million taels) which presaged a sizable deficit (78million taels). Unfortunately, planning and budgeting, collecting statis-tics, and setting tax rates went on in both the central ministries and theprovinces, uncoordinated, with the provinces not subordinate to theministries and yet expected to supply the revenues.

These inadequacies of the old regime in administration and financewere deeply rooted in Chinese custom, political values, and social struc-ture. It became apparent that the Qing government had been superficial,passive, and indeed parasitic for too long. It could not become modern.

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The Revolution of 1911 and Yuan Shikai’s Dictatorship

The issue of the Manchu central power’s dominating the provinces in thenew age of industrial growth and Chinese nationalism came to a head in1911 over railway-building in Sichuan. Local elite who had invested inpromoting railways there were determined not to let central governmentofficials profit from this new venture, to be financed by foreign loans.Qing military efforts at suppression backfired. On October 10 (“doubleten”), 1911, a revolt at Wuchang (opposite Hankou) touched off the de-fection of most provinces, which declared their independence of theQing regime. The professional agitators of the Revolutionary League,who had made Sun Yatsen their leader in Tokyo in 1905, set up the Chi-nese Republic on January 1, 1912, at Nanjing, with Sun as provisionalpresident.

There was general agreement that China must have a parliament torepresent the provinces, that unity was necessary to forestall foreign in-tervention, and that the reform-minded Yuan Shikai, Li Hongzhang’ssuccessor and chief trainer of China’s New Army, was the one man withthe capacity to head a government. Through a noteworthy series of com-promises, China avoided both prolonged civil war and peasant risings aswell as foreign intervention. The Qing emperor abdicated, Dr. Sun re-signed, and in March 1912 Yuan became president.

Of the forces active in the 1911 revolution, the strongest in eachprovince was the combination of the military governor with his NewArmy and the urban reformist elite in the new provincial assembly.These two elements headed each seceding province. In a general way themilitary governor was the third-generation product of the militarizationmovement that had defeated the Taipings, while the provincial assemblystemmed from the gentry managers of public projects in the precedinglate Qing generation. Constitutionalism had become the slogan of theday, but constitutional monarchy was made impossible by the narrow-minded and self-concerned Manchu princes left in charge by the Em-press Dowager after her death in November 1908 (one day after that ofthe reformist Guangxu Emperor—what a coincidence!). She evidentlypreferred to be succeeded by a three-year-old baby rather than an adultreformer.

The Chinese Republic began its history with certain attributes of lib-eralism—an uncontrolled press; elected assemblies representing the lo-cal elite in many counties, prefectures, and provinces; and a nationalparliament organized mainly by the newly created Nationalist Party

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(Guomindang). Unfortunately, China’s imperial autocracy had not beenextirpated, and nothing was found adequate to take its place.

Yuan Shikai, like a dynastic founder, was a military man, later to becalled the “father of the warlords.” As an experienced Qing official,Yuan was versed in the inherited repertoire of legal, administrative,fiscal, and military arrangements that could manipulate the people fromthe top down by using regulations as well as arms, rewards, and punish-ments, playing upon their hopes and fears to secure their compliance.The discordant proposals and political factionalism of 800 parliamentmembers impressed Yuan as adversely as the moralistic rhetoric of hisbureaucrats had impressed the Wanli Emperor of the Ming three centu-ries before. Authority must have a single source, and so Yuan concludedthat his only hope of governing China lay in a reassertion of autocracy.He began by eliminating the new revolutionary leader, Song Jiaoren,who had combined Revolutionary League members with smaller groupsto form the Nationalist Party. It had won election in 1913 from some 40million qualified voters, making Song leader of the parliament. In March1913 Yuan had him assassinated, and then went on to intimidate andabolish the parliament.

The new provincial, prefectural, and county assemblies still threat-ened to create a pluralistic semirepresentative polity not under centralcontrol. By 1914 county assemblies of 20 members drawn from the eliteeligible to vote were generally functioning along with the county magis-trates, and both coexisted with subcounty assemblies. Yuan abolished allthese assemblies in 1914 and followed this by requiring that magistratesappoint a deputy to serve as county self-government manager. In short,the local elite lost their assemblies, and the magistrates regained control.Assemblies continued in demand, however, and in the 1920s wouldmake a comeback, but magistrates still controlled policy and finances bysetting up executive boards. As R. Keith Schoppa (1982) would find instudying Zhejiang’s political development in the 1920s, the modernizingelite could lead the way in managing public functions in core areas, butthe official bureaucracy in league with old-style elite oligarchies wouldstill dominate peripheral areas.

Unfortunately, the centralized polity of the Qing had fragmented. AsErnest Young (1977) demonstrates, Yuan’s efforts to modernize werehamstrung by his lack of central government revenues coming in fromthe provinces. As a result, his reforms (carried over from the late Qingprogram) often became plans on paper not realized in action. Much talkof an independent judiciary (which would facilitate the abolition of for-

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eign rights of extraterritoriality) led to setting up an active supreme courtat Beijing and courts at provincial, prefectural, and county levels, butsoon the county-level courts were abolished to save expense and to goback to relying on the magistrate. Prison reform was also pursued. In ed-ucation Yuan subscribed to four years of universal free schooling plus asecond track of special preparatory schools for an elite seeking highereducation. Economic development was also on the drawing boards.

Yet all these many programs for modernization were handicappedby a basic assumption that they must be centrally decreed and con-trolled. The provincial regimes could not be allowed to develop newinstitutions on their own lest the central government be weakened be-yond repair. Yuan’s philosophy was not “Trust the people” nor even“Trust the educated men of talent,” but “Trust only the central power.”Democracy, in short, was not on Yuan’s agenda. In 1915 he tried tomake himself emperor but died without success in 1916. While provin-cial and local assemblies had a second vogue in the 1920s, mobilizingpopular participation in China’s political modernization would soon be-come the prerogative of a new central power, to be known as partydictatorship. The job could be done from the top down but not from thebottom up.

The young revolutionaries nominally headed by Sun Yatsen, afterhalf a dozen failures to start a conflagration, had no experience in gov-ernment and little following at the ruling-class level. Their exploits in1911–1912 later enlivened the heroic founding myth of the NationalistParty dictatorship. However, the fact that the military governors andprovincial assemblies of 1911–1912 had inherited the dominant powerof the gentry upper class gave them an aversion to prolonged disorderbecause it could energize peasant violence. They favored stability. JosephEsherick (1976) concludes that the imperial autocracy “had not onlylimited the political freedom and initiatives of the Chinese people, it hadalso prevented the local elite from excessively oppressing the rest of thepopulation.” Having initiated the 1911 revolution that ended the impe-rial check on their power, the provincial elite now resumed their stancefor stability and so “gave pivotal support in 1913,” says Esherick, forYuan’s assumption of dictatorial powers. Their instinct was to saveChina from the chaos that they feared further change would create.

In this way conservatism thwarted any social revolution. Militarygovernors whose power rested on the newly increased armed forcescould become no more than regional militarists or warlords. Conserva-tive gentry could not revive the Neo-Confucian faith so as to mobilize

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the new urban classes in support of a Chinese nationalism. On the con-trary, local elites had broken out of the gentry mold, and lineages werepreserving their local dominance by all manner of means. Recent re-search shows in detail how these means included commerce, industriessuch as silk and salt, warlord power, corporate property, and overall cul-tural hegemony. Yet these new sprouts of local elite dominance had nonew philosophy. It was time for a new leadership to make a fresh begin-ning with new ideas.

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P A R T T H R E E

The Republic of China1912–1949

This era was sharply bifocal. In a cultural focus it saw anunprecedented influx of foreign goods, ideas, and ways, morecomprehensive than at any earlier time. Influences of modernitywere piled upon influences from many specific nations. Everythingwas changing. Yet in another social-political focus were several fea-tures characteristic of an interregnum between dynasties. A failedattempt to revive the empire was followed by a decade of warlord-ism that unsettled the countryside, while foreigners played key eco-nomic and administrative roles in the treaty ports. This inspired anationalist revolution against foreign imperialism, which was ac-companied by the crude beginnings of a social revolution to mo-bilize the farming masses on the land.

Among the great powers, Britain and the United States—thechief sources of Protestant missions—in the Anglo-Saxon fashionpreferred reform as more constructive than revolution. Their aidto reform came largely through private nonofficial channels butwas both little and late. The USSR, in contrast, supported violentsocial revolution through aid to both Nationalists and Commu-nists. Meanwhile, Japan’s cultural and economic influence onChina early in the century gave way to a military aggression thatsidetracked China’s history from 1931 to 1945. Japan’s aggression,merging into World War II, added immeasurably to the Chinesepeople’s desperation.

Partly because the warlord era from 1916 to 1927 was a lowpoint of state power, it was paradoxically a time of considerableachievement along cultural, social, and economic lines. The rela-

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tive freedom of this new growth would contrast with the bureau-cratic control that would be reimposed upon China after 1927. Thecontrast would highlight two themes that continued during China’sera of party dictatorships. One theme was authoritarian statism,the primacy of state-building, beginning with loyalty to autocraticcentral power and putting political unity above all. The othertheme was cultural creativity and social improvement as part of aprocess of civil growth. This theme was evident in autonomous de-velopments not under direct control of officialdom in China’s ad-aptation to the modern world. They did not, however, offer muchpromise of a unified state power.

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13The Quest for a Chinese

Civil Society

The Limits of Chinese Liberalism

Civil society may be defined as the democratic type of society that grewup in Western Europe beginning with the rise of towns independent ofthe feudal system. It is a pluralist society in which, for example, thechurch is independent of the state, religion and government are separate,while civil liberties (recently expanded as human rights) are maintainedunder the supremacy of law. Civil society is a matter of degree, seldomneatly defined. It is part of a country’s state-and-society but has a mea-sure of autonomy, freedom within limits. It is not to be found in Islamnor in the modern totalitarian regimes of fascism, Nazism, or commu-nism, nor in the Chinese dynastic empires described in Part One.

However, in Late Imperial China new trends began to move towardthe creation of institutions, functions, and individual occupations—awhole sector of society—not under the direct control of the Qing state.This general trend appeared most obviously to foreigners in the treatyports, but its impulse probably came from within China more than fromthe outside world, specifically from the expanding activities of the gentryelite in the public (gong) sphere of community life. To this tradition ofunofficial elite activism were now added after 1911 several modern fac-tors: the growth of the Chinese press, of education, and of business.Civil society was inherent in the expansion of knowledge and of thedivision of labor, which enabled specialists to claim autonomy withintheir spheres of special competence. Yet such autonomy always seemedto threaten unity and order in the Chinese state, which its rulers feltdepended upon the state’s pervasive supervision of the people’s lives.This universal social problem of balancing individual autonomy or lib-

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eralism against state-imposed unity and order was unusually acute andpersistent in China. One evidence was the difficulty of achieving parlia-mentary government when the supremacy of law was not acknowledgedin practice and therefore no division of powers could be accepted be-tween legislature and executive. Parliaments, though convened and oftenvociferous, functioned less as lawgivers than as symbols of the execu-tive’s legitimacy.

Individualism and liberalism in Chinese thinking were strictly limitedparts of a larger collectivity. The Chinese individual was subordinate tothe group. Chinese laws were less commanding than the claims of moral-ity. The Western concept of civil society had a meaningful counterpart inChinese thinking, but it had to be defined. For example, individual self-expression and property-holding, the essential features of Victorian lib-eralism, were to be enjoyed in China only with the blessing of of-ficialdom.

These limitations had been evident in late Qing thought. Althoughthe Neo-Confucian belief system had to accept “foreign matters” (mod-ernization) and the New Learning for their utility at least as part of state-craft, it proved impossible for the last Qing generation to foreswearConfucianism entirely. As we might expect, many tried to find in foreignmodels a way to reaffirm certain inherited Chinese values.

Japanese reformers facing modernization had proposed to combine“Eastern ethics and Western science.” In China, Zhang Zhidong as thetop ideology-fixer of his day, put forward his famous formula, “Chineselearning for the substance [the essential principles or ti] and Westernlearning for function [the practical applications or yong].” This was slickbut inconsistent, because ti (substance) and yong (function) referred inChinese philosophy to correlative aspects of any single entity. Thus, Chi-nese and Western learning each had its own substance and function. Thephrase was widely used, nevertheless, since it seemed to give priority toChinese values and decry Western learning as merely a set of tools.

Confucian-minded Japanese offered one useful concept—thatWestern-type parliaments could bring harmony between ruler and ruled.But the rationale was different. Western political thought had built upthe concept of interests—the personal desires and goals of individualsand groups in their inevitable competition with one another. Interestswere seen as motivating political actors in the West, from the king ondown to the swineherd. Representative government was a procedure forworking out mutual compromises among competing interests. Not so inChina. Interests were by definition selfish, and Confucian morality de-

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cried selfishness as an antisocial evil. Instead, it extolled the ideal of har-mony, which reformers hoped somehow to attain through representativegovernment.

Another liberal concept that was bent out of shape as it moved fromWest to East was that of individualism. As Benjamin Schwartz (1964)noted long ago, reformers like Yan Fu, who translated the Western lib-eral classics (Thomas Huxley, Adam Smith, J. S. Mill, and others) at theturn of the century, praised the growth of individualism as a means tosupport the state, not stand against it. The most influential reformer,Liang Qichao, promoted the notion of each individual’s unselfishly de-veloping his capacities, the better to strengthen and enrich the state.Only thus could individuals benefit all their fellow citizens. Liang quotedthe Swiss jurist Bluntschli: people are born for the state, not the state forthe people. From this statist starting point, which Confucianists had al-ways been taught to begin with, it followed that rights of all sorts wereeither to be granted by the state or to be withheld by it when in its owninterest. All Chinese constitutions have listed many rights but only asprogrammatic ideals, not necessarily as laws to be enforced.

Behind this Chinese version of “liberalism” lay the prior assumptionthat the ruler’s power was unlimited, still autocratic. His devices ofstatecraft might expand to include constitutions, parliaments, and citi-zens’ rights (as well as duties), all to improve the state’s stability andcontrol. Typically, rights were guaranteed “except as limited by law,”that is, by the fiat of the authorities. Chinese constitutions did not be-come sacred fonts of law, as did the Constitution of the United States,but rather expressed ideals and hopes, more like American party plat-forms.

This part-way nature of liberalism in China suggests it might best betermed proto- or Sino-liberalism. It had its roots in the wen side of Chi-nese government, where scholar-officials had written proposals in essaysand memorials but usually lacked the responsibility or power to putthem into practice. The modern Sino-liberal, for example, had a limitedfreedom of expression because he could not afford to attack local power-holders specifically and in person without danger of violent retaliationfrom their wu-component of government. More serious than this pru-dential caution was the cast of mind that could not disengage, in VeraSchwarcz’s (1986) phrase, from the Neo-Confucian “cult of ritualizedsubordination . . . the ethic of subservience” implanted in early familytraining.

Western-type liberalism under law in China was handicapped, fi-

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nally, by the company it kept, namely, the unequal treaty system. Thewarlord era in the 1910s and 20s coincided with the high point of for-eign influence during the treaty century. Warlord armies despoiling the“interior” outside the ports were potent sanctions for keeping foreigngunboats at hand in the ports. Thus, the stirrings of a Chinese type ofcivil society in China were modeled in part on Western institutions andyet were protected by the very imperialist presence that had inspired therise of China’s new nationalism.

At bottom we would do well to keep in mind the differing valuesfounded on the difference of historical experience in China and in theWest. One need not abandon one’s hope for liberal individualism in civilsociety in order to acknowledge the long-continued efficacy of China’sauthoritarian collectivism and the modern Chinese intellectuals’, excru-ciating task of having to find some midpoint between them.

The Limits of Christian Reformism

Republican China in the decade after Yuan Shikai consisted of two areasand two regimes—warlord China and treaty-port China. The warlordswere military personalities, trained perhaps by Yuan, who controlled re-gions by commanding troops and keeping them fed. Several had begunas military governors. Their talents were devoted mainly to fighting, orthreatening to fight, one another. The treaty-port cities, on the otherhand, included most of the centers of urbanization, where most of themodern Chinese banks, industries, universities, and professional classescould be found. It was a joint Chinese and foreign community. Thetreaty-port part of the Chinese state’s power structure provided a degreeof stability during the years of warlord disruption. In fact, it set limits tothat disruption. Chinese patriots had to confront the paradox that theunequal treaties, while humiliating in principle, were often of materialhelp in fact. For example, in June 1921 Chinese merchants at the treatyport of Yichang, after twice suffering warlord pillaging, asked the for-eign ministers in Beijing to set up a foreign concession area in Yichang asa form of protection against the marauding warlord troops.

After the Boxer settlement of 1901, two Chinese and foreign trendshad converged: reform-minded Chinese had built up education in theNew Learning, while Christian efforts in China more and more stressedthe “social gospel,” to address the problems of modern city life. The re-spective Confucian and Christian fundamentalists, who had for years

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denounced each other but seldom met, were now succeeded by friendlycooperators for the betterment of China. For example, the ChineseYoung Men’s Christian Association, an offshoot of the internationalYMCA, found Chinese merchant and upper-class backing for its workamong city youths and students with help from its foreign advisers. JohnHersey’s novel The Call offers an inside account of the Y’s activity inSino–foreign cooperation in public education and other projects from1907 to 1937. The Sino–foreign Christian community enjoyed a briefgolden age of about two decades from 1905 to 1925.

This era of Christian cooperation was marked by signal achieve-ments such as the road-building and rural credit work of the China Inter-national Famine Relief Commission, the research and training at theRockefeller-supported Peking Union Medical College, Rockefeller Foun-dation support of the social sciences as at the Nankai Institute of Eco-nomics, growth of Yanjing University and other Christian colleges, in-cluding agricultural research at Nanjing University, and the MassEducation Movement under Yan Yangchu (Jimmy Yen).

Three aspects of these institutional accomplishments should benoted: first, they depended more than the Chinese YMCA upon foreign,chiefly American, funding and support. Second, they gave sinophileAmericans a sense of satisfactory participation in Chinese life thatwould later give substance to “the loss of China” feeling in Cold WarAmerica. Third, they barely scratched the surface of the Chinese people’sproblems. Most of these foreign-aided activities were pilot-model treat-ments, not on a scale capable of transforming China directly.

This superficiality of the Western-inspired or aided projects in Chinawas unavoidable partly because China’s educated ruling-class elite, towhich the foreigners were attached, was itself such a tiny proportion ofthe Chinese population. For example, in education, if we accept E.Rawski’s (1979) estimate of late Qing male literacy at 30 to 45 percentand female at 2 to 10 percent, we still confront estimates of elementaryschool enrollment in China running from a million in 1907 to 6.6 mil-lion in 1922, while in the same period middle school enrollment rosefrom 31,000 to 183,000—abysmally small figures for a country teemingwith 400 million people.

Liberal efforts at creating a Chinese civil society must therefore beseen as points of growth, like spores growing in a biological laboratory’sbroth, scattered over a large surface. Given enough time, each group ofenterprising reformers—social, scientific, medical, mass educational—

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might have expanded their work to reach many of China’s people. Yet somassive were the people’s problems that in the end only the state couldtake them on.

The Tardy Rise of a Political Press

The emergence of the independent modern press in China, roughly a cen-tury later than in Western Europe and a generation later than in Japan,rounds out our picture of late Qing inertia. The old order had kept astranglehold on self-expression regarding government policy, which wasstill the emperor’s preserve.

During the millennium since the spread of printed books in the earlySong, the ingredients of a modern press had steadily accumulated: of-ficial and private libraries, literary connoisseurship and editorial skills,religious texts, great official publication projects, a ceaseless flow of doc-umentation from Beijing to provincial centers, local gazetteers, vernacu-lar literature, private publications—all were on hand. In the early 1890sa dozen Chinese-language newspapers were being published in majorport cities. Shenbao at Shanghai, started in 1872, had a circulation of15,000. Their news, partly acquired by telegraph, was mainly commer-cial. That China’s modern press took so long to get into politics was atribute to the imperial control of thought and print.

Modern Chinese journalism started with treaty-port Chinese likeWang Tao, who had been James Legge’s assistant in translating the Con-fucian classics in the 1860s and spent two years with him in Scotland.In 1874 Wang Tao began in Hong Kong the first newspaper whollyunder Chinese auspices, printing both commercial and general news andadding his own reformist editorials. They were informed, as his biogra-pher, Paul Cohen (1974), points out, by Wang’s almost unique “fieldexperience” in the West. But in the 1880s Wang still had only a smallaudience.

Given this brilliant beginning, how could Chinese journalism marktime for 20 years until the crisis of the 1890s inspired the reformist pressset up by Liang Qichao and others in Shanghai and provincial centerslike Changsha? The reason, in brief, was that the gentry elite werestrictly warned not to trespass on the policy-setting prerogative of theimperial regime. Only when specifically permitted could ideas be pre-sented to the throne, and in the 1870s and 80s the strident submissionsof literati opinion (qingyi) had contributed more moralistic heat thanpractical light. Only after the Qing dynasty had been defeated in 1900

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by all the powers, including Japan, did its mandate begin to slip away.Liang Qichao’s journals of political opinion published in Japan markedthis shift, as the urban reformist elite turned to provincial fields of ac-tion.

Once started in the protective environment of the port cities, publica-tion of Chinese newspapers, magazines, and books during the next 20years increased many times over. Their circulation was aided by the ser-vice of the new imperial post office after 1896 as well as by the spread ofelementary schooling and literacy. Assuming with Zhang Pengyuan thatevery copy of a magazine had an average of about 15 readers, Leo Leeand Andrew Nathan (in Johnson et al., 1985) have estimated the totallate Qing readership as between 2 and 4 million, say one percent ofChina’s population. The new urban readership and the crises of the1890s fostered a rapid growth. (By 1893 the urban population wasabout 23.5 million, say 6 percent of China’s population.)

But even as late as the mid-1930s China had only 910 newspapersand about an equal number of magazines. Some papers sold 150,000copies. Readership of the papers alone totaled between 20 and 30 mil-lion. Thus the proportion of the public reached by print was still smallcompared with other modern nations. Even so, the Shanghai Commer-cial Press after 1896 became great publishers of textbooks and maga-zines. Writers of the new literature found that urban readers soughtmainly entertainment. The “mandarin duck and butterfly school” of ro-mantic and sentimental fiction, studied by Perry Link (1981), producedsome 2,200 novels in the years 1910–1930. Only political discussionwas in short supply. This went along with the fact that the higher educa-tional establishment was still minuscule for so large a country.

Modern China’s political journalism was generally polemical, aimingto criticize and advocate, not primarily to inform the public as to facts.Lee and Nathan quote Liang Qichao again: “One must intend to useone’s words to change the world. Otherwise, why utter them?” Thus thepress, despite its small size, became a major tool of politics.

Academic Development

Contrary to the Beijing University (Beida) tradition that China’s highereducation originated with its forerunner, the Imperial University, inaugu-rated as one of the 1898 reforms, the recent survey by Wen-hsin Yeh(1990) reminds us that Shanghai was the natural site for the beginning ofChina’s modern education in engineering, technology, and commerce.

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Just as St. John’s College, opened by the American Episcopal Mission in1879, became the pioneer Christian college in China, so Nanyang Col-lege was founded by the Qing government in 1896. It sent studentsabroad and later became Jiaotong (Communications) University, aleader in engineering.

The gap between Neo-Confucianism and the New Learning was wid-ened when modern subjects had to be taught with imported English-lan-guage textbooks. Chinese vocabularies for technical terms had still to beworked out. College entrance and final examinations were often in Eng-lish, as was instruction by foreign professors.

When the ancient amalgam of state and society disintegrated in1912, so did the Neo-Confucian world outlook. In its place flooded indisparate, often conflicting cultural elements in bewildering variety. Thegeneration of the warlord era consequently had to sort things out.

Its problem stands out more starkly if we follow Jon Saari (1990) inhis study of the life experience of scholars born in the 1890s, who beganwith a classical education and yet added onto it in youth an Anglo–American education, including spoken English. This cohort of China’spost–gentry-elite had to achieve not one but two liberations—first fromthe mummified thinking of the old Confucian family system and patriar-chal tyranny, second from the polycultural confusion of the New Learn-ing. For the youth who had just finished his elementary classical training,the New Learning brought an explosion that shattered the intellectualenvironment in which he had just found his place. “Far from being theworld, China was now a fragment of the world.” The young mind’s en-counter with the West was often “a crippling experience,” full of “confu-sion and uncertainty.” It required “a second liberation perhaps more de-cisive than the first,” a release from confusion by finding “a higherintegration or synthesis.” To be emancipated from the discredited bondsof Confucianism left one fearfully at sea, in need of a new way to orderone’s world. A belief in Christianity, or in science, including Darwinism,or a dedication to one of the new professions, or to patriotic revolu-tion—all might help establish one’s new self-image. Without intellectualcourage, one could hardly survive.

Such was the traumatic breaking in of the first republican generationof intellectuals. Despairing of Japan, they looked to Europe and Amer-ica for the key to saving China. This task made them pioneers in bicul-turalism, for the cultural shock of Tokyo was little compared with thatof New York, London, Paris, and Berlin.

A government program for training Chinese in America began when

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the U.S. Congress in 1908 allocated for this purpose roughly half ($12million) of the American share of the Boxer indemnity. From QinghuaCollege set up at Beijing as a preparatory school, 1,268 scholars weresent to the United States by 1929. In 1924 the remaining half of the in-demnity (which would still have to be paid over by the Chinese govern-ment) was allocated to supporting the China Foundation. Guided by aboard of ten Chinese and five American trustees, this foundation madeprivate grants for research as well as training. In this era young Chinesescientists trained in the United States formed in 1914 the Science Society.Soon its journal represented the widespread hope of modern scholarsthat science and the scientific outlook could provide a common ap-proach to China’s problems.

Meanwhile, by the 1920s the hundreds of missionary middle schoolsin China had grown by consolidation into a dozen Christian colleges,usually incorporated in the United States. In the Chinese–American fac-ulties the American members usually enjoyed better housing and werepaid by mission boards in America. Protected by extraterritoriality, theseAmerican-style institutions like Yanjing University at Beijing during the1920s and 30s educated children from the new middle class of the portcities.

One influential private and purely Chinese institution was at Tianjin,where Zhang Boling, after 1904, built up Nankai middle school, college,and university with support principally from local Chinese families. Chi-nese philanthropy also supported Amoy University at Xiamen and twocolleges in Shanghai—the Catholic Zhendan (L’Aurore), founded in1903, and Fudan (1905).

No private institution, however, could outshine Beijing University(Beida) as the focal point of national education. It served to train orretread bureaucrats until two remarkable men came to head it—Yan Fuin 1912 and Cai Yuanpei in 1917. Cai was a Hanlin academician of lateQing vintage who had joined Sun Yatsen’s Revolutionary League. Hehad been the first minister of education in the abortive cabinet underYuan Shikai and then had studied five years in Germany and France. Tofoster diversity of thought at Beida he collected talent widely and stoodfirmly against government interference in education. Cai invited asdean Chen Duxiu, who had absorbed in Paris the spirit of theFrench Revolution and returned to found in 1915 an influential journalof discussion, New Youth (La Jeunesse). At Beida, Chen led the attackon Confucianism and all its evils in the name of science and democ-racy.

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The New Culture Movement

Japan’s aggressive 21 Demands of 1915 tried to set up a sort of Japaneseprotectorate over China. Though not successful, this incident ended Ja-pan’s era of reform leadership in China and heightened China’s modernnationalism. Yet at this very time scholars in the New Learning asserteda new role for themselves—to stay out of government service and eschewpolitics, toward which their forebears had been oriented, in order toscrutinize the old Confucian values and institutions, reject what had heldChina back, and find in China’s past the elements of a new culture.

For this New Culture Movement a first point of attack was the Chi-nese writing system. In the twentieth century a script and vocabularylargely created about 200 bc were still being used. Any major characterhad become like an onion, with many layers of meaning accumulatedover the ages as it was used for various purposes. For a too simple com-parison, suppose the Roman idea expressed as pater had come down tous unchanged in written form and today, perhaps combined with othercharacters, referred to father, patriotism, paternity, patristics, patrimony,patronage, etc., etc. Which meaning to assign to such a character de-pended on its context, which required knowing the classical texts. Thismade the classical writing (wenyan) not a convenient device ready athand to help every schoolboy meet life’s problems; it was itself one oflife’s problems. Without long-continued study of it, one was barred fromthe upper class. The functional literacy for everyday business among or-dinary Chinese was far more accessible than the esoteric terms and eru-dite allusions used by the classical examination graduates.

The first stage in the literary revolution was to use the everydayspeech in written form—the step taken in Europe at the time of theRenaissance, when the national vernaculars supplanted Latin. Protes-tant missionaries had pioneered in this effort, to make the scripturesavailable to the common man. Among the new scholar class the timewas ripe. Leadership was taken by Hu Shi, a student at Cornell andColumbia during World War I, who advocated the use of the baihua, orChinese spoken language, as a written medium for scholarship and allpurposes of communication. Many others joined in this revolutionarymovement, which denied the superior value of the old literary style. Theuse of baihua spread rapidly; the tyranny of the classics had beenbroken.

Hu Shi, a student of John Dewey and of pragmatism, also became aleader in the advocacy of scientific methods of thought and criticism.

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The value of science in technical studies had long been incontrovertible.Its application, as a way of thought, to Chinese literary criticism and his-torical scholarship now marked a further step. The new scholarship vig-orously attacked the myths and legends of early Chinese history and re-assessed the provenance of the classics. It studied Chinese folklore andreappraised the great vernacular novels of Late Imperial times. Its pre-cocity was nurtured by the achievements of evidential scholarship underthe Qing.

The creativity of the New Culture Movement is fully visible only inits historical context. The great World War of 1914–1918 disclosed thebarbaric potentialities of Europe’s arrogant civilization. The empires ofAustria–Hungary, of the Russian tsars, and finally Germany all col-lapsed. Woodrow Wilson proclaimed great principles of self-determina-tion for all peoples and open diplomacy among them. Ideas of severalkinds of socialism, of the emancipation of women, and the rights of la-bor versus capitalists swept around the globe and flooded into Republi-can China. China’s scholar-elite, still a tiny top crust of their ancient so-ciety, instinctively took on the task of understanding and evaluating thisrevolutionary outside world at the same time that it struggled to reevalu-ate China’s inherited culture.

The May Fourth Movement

The incident of May 4, 1919, was provoked by the decision of the peace-makers at Versailles to leave in Japanese hands the former German con-cessions in Shandong. News of this decision led some 3,000 studentsfrom Beida and other Beijing institutions to hold a mass demonstrationat the Tiananmen, the gateway to the palace. They burned the house of apro-Japanese cabinet minister and beat the Chinese minister to Japan.Police attacked the students. They thereupon called a student strike, senttelegrams to students elsewhere, and organized patriotic teams to dis-tribute leaflets and make speeches among the populace. Similar demon-strations were staged in Tianjin, Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan, Fuzhou,Guangzhou, and elsewhere. A few students were killed and others werewounded. The prisons were soon full of demonstrators.

The spirit of protest spread when merchants closed their shops in astrike that spread through the major centers in June of 1919. This de-veloped into a boycott of Japanese goods and clashes with Japanese res-idents. For more than a year student patriots continued to agitate forthe destruction of Japan’s market in China, with an appreciable effect

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upon it. Meanwhile, and most significantly, strikes were staged amongthe recently organized labor unions, which joined in the broadest dem-onstration of national feeling that China had ever seen.

The startling thing about this movement was that it was led by intel-lectuals who brought both the new cultural ideas of science and democ-racy and the new patriotism into a common focus in an anti-imperialistprogram. More than ever before the student class assumed responsibilityfor China’s fate. They even began through their student organizations toreach the common people.

In mobilizing intellectuals, literature led the way through novels andshort stories in the new written vernacular. Most writers were well edu-cated and from the upper class. Leading figures had studied in Japan, butonce they returned to China they lived in urban poverty and often underpolice harassment. Their audience was mainly young students in the cit-ies caught up, like the writers themselves, in a social revolution. They op-posed the bonds of the family system and stood for individual self-ex-pression, including sexual freedom. The romantic individualism andself-revelation of some pioneers, telling all in a first-person narrative ordiary style, was quite shocking to strict Confucian mores.

The outstanding writer of the 1920s, Lu Xun (1881–1936), camefrom a Zhejiang gentry family that fell into disgrace. He took the first-level classical examination, studied science at naval and military acade-mies, began medical training in Japan, and finally settled upon literatureas a means of social reform. Lu Xun leaped into prominence only in1918 by publishing in New Youth his satire, “The Diary of a Madman,”whose protagonist finds between the lines of “benevolence, righteous-ness, truth, virtue” in his history book two words repeated everywhere:“Eat men.” Chinese culture, he wrote, was “a culture of serving one’smasters, who are triumphant at the cost of the misery of the multitude.”

Student leaders at Beida like Fu Sinian and Luo Jialun in their journalNew Tide (Renaissance) advocated a Chinese “enlightenment.” They de-nounced the Confucian family bonds as slavery and championed indi-vidualistic values. As early as March 1919 the students had set up a lec-ture society to reach the common people. In this they joined studentactivists like Zhang Guotao, who were most intent on “saving China.”

Thus, some leaders among the tiny minority of intellectuals—profes-sors, students, writers—leaped into the cultural struggle to abolish theout-of-date evils of the old China and establish new values for a newChina. As would-be leaders, they faced the crippling fact of China’s two-stratum social structure—the ruling elite and the masses. Could their

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new elite connect with the common people? Or would these new com-manders get too far ahead of their troops?

Rise of the Chinese Bourgeoisie

The autonomy of the new academic community was paralleled by a newself-consciousness of functional groups in city life. Recent studies of mu-nicipal institutions arising in Shanghai and in Beijing show the mix ofnew and old, foreign and Chinese, styles of organization.

In Shanghai the nascent bourgeoisie had begun with Chinese mer-chants in foreign trade. After 1842 the brokers in the trade at Guang-zhou, known as Hong merchants, had been succeeded by the compra-dors (“buyers” in Portuguese), who contracted with foreign merchantsto handle the Chinese side of their trade. While the foreigners handledshipping and insurance and invested in imports and exports, the com-pradors’ fortunes came from commissions paid them by their foreignemployers, from interest on funds they handled, fees for acting as trea-surers and managers of funds, and profits from their own personal in-vestments and businesses. Thus, the compradors of the foreign banks inChina had the profitable function of dealing with the Chinese “native”banks that grew up to serve the Chinese merchant community.

Shanghai compradors had come first from Guangzhou in the teatrade and then from Ningbo as well as Jiangsu province. They totaledroughly 250 in 1854, about 700 in 1870, and perhaps 20,000 at the be-ginning of the twentieth century. Comprador posts were passed down tosons and nephews as hereditary family possessions. Instead of investingin land in the old style, compradors often invested in foreign firms thatprotected their funds from encroachment by Chinese officials. There isreally no way to distinguish (as the Chinese Communist Party liked to dofor propaganda purposes) between a “comprador bourgeoisie” and a so-called “national bourgeoisie.” They were all one group.

Since agriculture still produced some 65 percent of China’s nationalproduct, the modern sector of the economy was still marginal. Chinaavoided the role of a semicolony exploited by the foreign powers; it didnot become a great source of supplies for the foreigner, nor did it providea big market for his goods. The only imports with much sale, afteropium, were industrial yarns and kerosene. In short, the traditional eco-nomic system continued to function so well with its low standard of liv-ing that China’s modern economy had comparatively little to offer it.The steamship and steam launch, for example, came into the Chinese

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water network to speed up transport but did not greatly change the sys-tem. Chinese merchants soon were using them, whether run by foreign-ers or by Chinese.

During the late Qing self-strengthening effort, the officials who wereleading it had great networks of collaborators, advisers, secretaries, dep-uties, and partners. This complex had some control over merchants inthe “official supervision and merchant management” system, but the of-ficials did not take responsibility for production. Marie-Claire Bergère(1989) comments that the promoters of the early modernization move-ment depended upon this bureaucratic complex. Power still lay with thebureaucracy. Modernization could be advanced only through personalrelations and profit sharing between officials and entrepreneurs. Thusthe late Qing had opted not for state capitalism but for the bureaucraticcapitalism of officials.

In an imperial edict of 1903 the Qing tried to co-opt the urban eliteby upgrading the status of merchants. Between then and 1907 the newMinistry of Trade gave awards to honor investors, technicians, and en-trepreneurs. By 1912 there were as many as 794 Chambers of Com-merce and 723 education societies along with the local and provincialassemblies. These organizational efforts got out of imperial controlwhen associations developed national programs across provincialboundaries, like that of the Chinese Education Association and the Fed-eration of Provincial Assemblies. Such bodies represented the gentry–merchant elite.

The outbreak in Europe of World War I in August 1914 led to a re-duction of foreign shipping and trade in China and a decline of imports,followed shortly by an increased foreign demand for raw materials to beexported. Simultaneously the price of silver on the world market rosespectacularly and so increased the buying power of Chinese currency.The lack of foreign competition gave Chinese entrepreneurs a great op-portunity, even though the scarcity of shipping delayed much of theequipment they ordered from Europe. By 1919 the Chinese were bene-fiting from heavy export demands from Europe and America as well asthe rise in the value of silver against gold, which encouraged Chinese im-ports.

Unlike the self-strengthening movement of the late nineteenth cen-tury, this wave of industrialization favored production of consumergoods for immediate consumption and profit. Between 1912 and 1920,says Bergère, Chinese industry achieved an annual growth rate of 13.8percent. Dozens of cotton mills were established in China, a total of 49

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in 1922 alone. Flour mills grew up at Shanghai, and cigarette, paper, andmatch industries around Guangzhou. In Shanghai between 1912 and1924 some 200 new workshops for mechanical engineering were set upboth to maintain and repair equipment and also to produce knitting ma-chines, looms, and other industrial machinery. By 1920 about half ofthem were using electric power.

World War I in China also saw the rise of modern-style Chinesebanks. These included not only the Bank of China and the Bank of Com-munications, which had Beijing-government connections. A dozen oth-ers were connected with provincial governments handling mainly statefunds and loans, but another dozen or so were strictly commercialbanks. By 1920 Shanghai also had 71 old-style native banks. Special-izing in short-term loans, they handled the funds of opium merchantsand the dye trade in chemicals. A stock exchange and a national bankwere still lacking.

The population of Shanghai, including the International Settlementand French Concession as well as the surrounding Chinese suburbs andChinese city, totaled 1.3 million in 1910 and 2.6 million in 1927. Over-seas Chinese played a role when in 1919 the big department stores fromHong Kong of the Sincere Company and the Wing On Company (origi-nally of Penang) opened their shops on Nanjing Road. On the Bundarose the big modern buildings of the Hong Kong and Shanghai BankingCorporation and of Jardine, Matheson & Co.

After 1925 the Shanghai Municipal Council of the International Set-tlement included Chinese councilors; and Chinese administrations grewup in the suburban areas more or less autonomously until their unifica-tion in Chinese Greater Shanghai in 1927. The Chinese Ratepayers As-sociation functioned in the International Settlement, and there weremany Chambers of Commerce for businessmen. The most prominentwas the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce. The Chinese who de-veloped big textile factories and flour mills formed a new entrepreneurialclass linked with but not controlled by landed gentry. This new localelite, especially in Shanghai, stayed clear of government control and se-cured the appointments of magistrates from among local scholars. Theirbureaucrats were recruited on the spot.

In their urge for autonomy, the new entrepreneurs were running par-allel with the academics centered in Beijing in the May Fourth Move-ment of 1919 and later. The industrialists favored the new education,with its teaching of pragmatism and respect for the individual. For ex-ample, the New Education Movement led by Jiang Menglin, who fol-

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lowed Cai Yuanpei as head of Beida, was much indebted to the supportof the powerful Jiangsu Education Association. Through extended fam-ily relations there were many links between the academics and the entre-preneurs in the 1920s. For example, a daughter of Zeng Guofan, the vic-tor over the Taipings, married the director of the Shanghai Arsenalnamed Nie Qigui. Their sons became directors of cotton mills, and one,Nie Yuntai (C. C. Nieh), became also president of the General Chamberof Commerce.

This new Shanghai bourgeoisie created its own organizations. Publi-cation of the Bankers’ Weekly in 1917 led to setting up the ShanghaiBankers Association in 1918. This example in Shanghai led to the set-ting up of bankers’ associations in other cities—Hankou, Suzhou,Hangzhou, Beijing, Tianjin, and Harbin. By 1920 they had amalgamatedto form the Chinese Bankers Association. A Chinese cotton mill owners’association had also been formed. They studied the world market andswitched their allegiance from the traditional aim of monopoly to that ofgrowth. They were international-minded. Some leading bankers had gottheir higher education in Japan. One of the best known to foreigners,Chen Guangfu (K. P. Chen), had graduated from the Wharton School ofFinance at the University of Pennsylvania.

The organization of general partnerships or private companies beganto give way to joint stock companies, even though they would still bedominated by family connections. How the family system served as thebackbone of the entrepreneurial class was illustrated by the Rong family.About 1896 the founder had opened Chinese banks in Shanghai andWuxi. In the third generation there were eleven Rong men who served asmanagers or directors of flour mills and cotton mills. In 1928 the Rongbrothers held 54 executive posts in their twelve flour mills and seven cot-ton mills, constituting more than half of the top management.

The importance of regional and family structures among the new en-trepreneurial class indicated that they had not sharply broken awayfrom Chinese society but might instead be called “Confucian moderniz-ers.” Bergère questions how far an “entrepreneurial, liberal and cosmo-politan bourgeoisie” could be grafted onto the old mandarin and peas-ant civilization of China. The one evident fact was that the new typeof businessmen had become alienated from the dynasty, and this ledthem to support the provincial reformist elite in the Revolution of 1911–1912.

In the early 1920s the businessmen agreed with the call of Hu Shiand his Beida colleagues for the Chinese elite to take action, professional

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skills to be developed, and good government to succeed in being finan-cially responsible and planning ahead. Hu Shi represented the liberalBeijing intellectuals, and they found much in common with the Shanghaibusiness community. For example, the businessmen supported the cur-rently popular concept of provincial federation, reminiscent of theAmerican states’ first form of union (though it proved inadequate). Theyall favored provincial autonomy and federalism. Another practical mea-sure was the creation of merchant militia. The contradiction was thatwhile they sought autonomy and freedom from state control in theireconomic functions, they also craved centralized order.

From March 1923 the businessmen through the Chambers of Com-merce participated in a national convention at Shanghai that addressedthe problem of political reorganization and unity and the control oftroops and finances. At a high point of their sense of autonomy in June1923 the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce declared its indepen-dence from Beijing even though it had no territorial or military basis. Itset up a committee of a People’s Government, which soon negotiatedwith the local warlords to reduce hostilities. Here, however, the Shang-hai bourgeoisie, like the Beijing scholars, showed their inability to func-tion in more than the wen part of government. The business class wereunable to mount military strength. At Shanghai the Chinese merchantssoon stood opposed to the new and leftist labor movement. In this stancethey had foreign support. In reflecting many years later on his raisingfunds at Shanghai for crushing the labor movement, Chen Guangfustated the aim had been to topple militarism, the warlords, and support amodern government. Like Hu Shi, Chen was a Sino-liberal who couldprovide leadership in his sector of society but not control the force of thestate. Both these leaders were anti-imperialists and wanted to see Chinafree of the foreign treaty privileges. They were caught in the dilemma ofcraving autonomy but first needing a strong government that mightamount to autocracy.

In the walled capital of Beijing, industry and commerce were second-ary to a population of Manchu bannermen and tradesmen servingmainly the imperial court. After foreign forces occupied the city in 1900,Japanese initiative led to setting up a police academy that would followJapanese and European models to recruit and train uniformed officers,mainly ex-bannermen, who would be salaried and esteemed as a newtype of civil servant. Yuan Shikai then spread police systems to majorcities. David Strand (1989) notes that “even in dilute form, the Confu-cianist mentality with its inclination to scold, meddle and mediate, in-

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spired effective police work,” to say nothing of clientelism and its cus-tomary corruption.

The Beijing Chamber of Commerce organized in 1907 was anothernew agency. Though its membership included only 17 percent of thecity’s 25,000 commercial establishments, it represented their commoninterest in such matters as avoiding banknote inflation. Inevitably itsleadership was drawn into the politics of the warlord era. Beijing had ahundred or so craft and merchant guilds that had been functioning sincetime immemorial. The blind storytellers guild, for example, had some500 members. The old-style Chinese ink makers had about 200 skilledand 300 unskilled workers. When the May Fourth Movement sought tofind a “proletarian base for radical politics,” it discovered that the guildsmade trade unions in the new factories seem less necessary.

Rickshaw travel about town was the new hybrid product of cheapleg muscles and ball-bearing wheels that flourished in East Asia from the1870s to the 1940s. In the 1920s Beijing had 60,000 rickshaw pullers,and in a riot of 1929 they attacked and damaged 60 of the tramwaycompany’s 90 streetcars.

All in all the 1920s in Beijing saw a proliferation of citizens’ groupsadvocating self-government, birth control, and other causes. In the faceof warlord battles and devastation in the countryside, leading citizens setup a peace preservation association that imported food, set up soupkitchens to feed up to 80,000 a day, and paid defeated warlord troops todepart quietly. Such activity must have had many precedents in Beijing—in 1644, for instance, when the rebel Li took over the city but was oustedby the Manchus. The 1920s saw a mix of old and new behavior worthyof a civil society, yet final military power could not arise from within it. Ithad to be imposed from without, as the Nationalist army would do in1928.

Studies of such cities as Hankou, Shanghai, and Beijing convey animage of self-conscious communities energized from time to time by amoral consensus. This was usually a concern for justice or common wel-fare (minsheng) that arose among citizens acting through their estab-lished groups and institutions. This moral community, needless to say,was inherited from Confucianism and often difficult for outsiders tograsp because it combined popular righteousness with a continued sub-servience to (military) authority. The semiautonomous elements in aChinese type of civil society, when they confronted the state power,seemed to have the same vulnerability as Confucian scholar-officials had

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had when confronting the emperor. Their moral righteousness could notbe the final arbiter.

Origins of the Chinese Communist Party

Whereas Chinese businessmen, like New Culture liberals, aimed to stayoutside of politics and government service, some of the activists of MayFourth were drawn into the search for a new state power. Though nur-tured in the academic wing of China’s nascent civil society, they commit-ted themselves to the age-old effort to create a new government thatcould bring China unity, social order, wealth, and power. Thus, the MayFourth intellectuals sorted themselves into two groups—academics likeHu Shi and Fu Sinian, who concentrated as scholars on the modern re-covery and reappraisal of China’s history and culture, and political activ-ists like Chen Duxiu and Zhang Guotao, who joined in forming the Chi-nese Communist movement.

From the early 1900s Marxism in China was preceded by a wide-spread interest in anarchism. Until the Soviet revolution brought Lenin-ism to China after 1917, anarchists were the chief socialists on the scene.Chinese students in both Paris and Tokyo were much attracted to Proud-hon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin and their denunciation of all authority,beginning with governments, nations, militarism, and the family. Anar-chist writers quoted Kropotkin’s dictum that the state had become theGod of the present day. They eloquently put forward ideas of egalitari-anism, especially emancipation of women from family bonds and of thepeasantry from exploitation that would become part of the Chinese vo-cabulary of revolution. Anarchists wanted to rely not on the state buton individual liberation and its bloodless re-creation of the egalitariancommunity of the far past. Yet Peter Zarrow’s (1990) analysis of Chi-nese anarchist writings gives one a feeling that they indulged in utopianhopes that with one great leap they could somehow jump out of theConfucian straitjacket into complete freedom—a pathetically flawedideal. No action but assassination ever eventuated. What could really bedone?

The New Culture Movement, while attractive to scholars, gaveyouth little chance to find a new identity as saviors of China by creatinga new order of society. In 1919 and afterward student discussion groups,encouraged by Cai Yuanpei at Beida, set an example followed by middleschool students and graduates in other centers—Tianjin, Ji’nan, Wuhan,

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Changsha, Guangzhou, and especially Shanghai. Most groups foundedjournals. These activists saw themselves in a new role, not to serve thestate but to serve society. Newly aware of the city laboring class, theyalso wanted to reach the common people. Socialism seemed the greathope; some thought it could bring workers and intellectuals together intime to avert class war. As Arif Dirlik (1989) points out, some Guomin-dang (Nationalist Party) socialists of this period saw land-holding, notcapitalism, as the point to attack.

By 1920 radical study groups were meeting in half a dozen majorcenters, formed by intellectuals of a self-selected type who knew and en-couraged one another. After Professor Li Dazhao formed a specificallyMarxist study group at Beida in March 1920, it set a style. Dirlik con-cludes that Li Dazhao, generally selected by historians as one of the twofounders of the Chinese Communist Party, was not really so intent onparty-founding. He was an enthusiastic propagator of Marxist theory,but when it came to action he hoped to see the unity of all socialists.

The founding of the CCP seems to have owed most to Chen and tothe Comintern. Chen Duxiu’s leadership of the New Culture and MayFourth movements had led only to his being jailed for three months inthe summer of 1919. He went to Shanghai, dispirited but angry, seekinga vehicle for action. The actual organizing of the CCP nuclei in the fallof 1920 owed much to the Comintern agent Voitinsky. When Voitinsky’ssuccessor as Comintern representative, the Dutchman Sneevliet (“Mar-ing”), reached China in 1921, a founding meeting of the CCP could beheld at Shanghai in July. Through the propaganda of journals, book-stores, translations, study groups, and labor organizing, Chinese com-munism quickly established its organizational identity as “an ideology ofaction.” It split with China’s anarchists and guild socialists, asserted theprimacy of class struggle, and became a secret, exclusive, centralizedBolshevik (that is, Leninist) party seeking power. It left the May Fourthenlightenment far behind. The two “founders,” Li Dazhao and ChenDuxiu, did not attend the founding meeting in July 1921, which fol-lowed the lead of the Russian Comintern representative. It took anotheryear for the principle of party discipline to be accepted. By that timeabout half of the original twelve founders had left the movement.

Whether the early CCP members had a real understanding of Marx-ism–Leninism is open to question. One founder, Mao Zedong, had be-gun as a disciple of the May Fourth Movement, a gradualist believing inreform. Only after signal frustrations had he concluded that violent rev-olution was the only feasible course.

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Mao had subscribed, like so many others, to the Kropotkin form ofanarchism, which stressed mutual aid and concerted efforts. In 1914 atage eighteen he made notes on a Chinese translation by Cai Yuanpei ofthe German philosopher Friedrich Paulsen’s System der Ethik. Thisphilosophical popularizer argued that “will is primary to intellect,” andethics are part of nature. The behavior of the universe is ethical and so isthat of the individual. Therefore, subjective and objective attitudes arenot at loggerheads. This attribution of an ethical posture to developmentwas particularly useful to the Chinese generation that had to reconcilehistory and value, the Chinese inheritance of ethical teachings with themodern knowledge of the scientific world.

After he returned to Hunan from Beida just before the May FourthMovement, Mao founded a journal of discussion and put forward thedialectic view that the phase of oppression of the people would be fol-lowed by a phase of their transformation, that the humiliation andweakness of China would be followed by China’s emergence as a leadingnation. This expressed the theme of unity of opposites, which went backa long way in Daoism. Mao’s advocacy of “the great union of the popu-lar masses” argued that unified groups in society had long had the upperhand by reason of their standing together, and it was now time for themasses to get the upper hand by doing the same.

While Mao’s thinking was cosmopolitan and universal in terms, oneof his first activities was in the provincial Hunan self-government move-ment. It tried to establish a constitution for the province as a reflection ofthe then-popular idea of federation of independent provinces as themeans to bring China into modern government. Self-government musthave a popular base and participation, a mobilization of all the people.When his journal was suppressed in late 1919, Mao took another trip toBeijing and Shanghai, where he found kindred spirits. But he was not yeta conspirator or a Marxist, although he organized in 1920 a Russian-af-fairs study group and a Hunan branch of the Socialist Youth Corps.Even after Mao went to the organizing meeting of the Chinese Commu-nist Party in July 1921 in Shanghai, he was not yet committed to classstruggle. In 1923 he organized the Hunan Self-Education College, oneobject of which was to use the old form of the academy (shu-yuan)through which to make available the new content of modern learning.His last activity in Hunan was to work in the labor movement, but hewas obliged to flee to Shanghai in April 1923.

These observations on the time it took CCP founders to absorbMarxism–Leninism suggest that the organization of a secret conspira-

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torial movement for seizing power in China was far easier to achieve inform than was the sophistication of theory needed for guiding it. Count-less rebels over thousands of years had formed secret brotherhoods. SunYatsen indeed had trouble getting beyond this ancient mode of opera-tion. Records of CCP correspondence between the branches and the cen-ter, compiled by Tony Saich (forthcoming), indicate early difficulties inenforcing the discipline of that one-way street called “democratic cen-tralism.” The indigenization of communism in China would be a matterboth of operating style and of ideas. Bolshevism, stressing party powerabove all, was only one offshoot of Marxism, which also had its demo-cratic aspirations. Residual anarchist ideas of mutual aid and “labor-learning” (making intellectuals into laborers and vice versa) would re-main anti-Bolshevik but of little help for a Chinese type of civil society.

In the 1910s and 20s the experience of New Culture academics andof industrial businessmen alike demonstrated their incapacity to estab-lish state power themselves. Needing a new political order, they wouldhave to wait and see what history might bring them.

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14The Nationalist Revolution

and the Nanjing Government

Sun Yatsen and the United Front

The reunification of warlord-divided China, like many previous re-uni-fications, required 30 years, from about 1920 to about 1950. Like allsuch periods, it seemed endlessly confusing because several parallel pro-cesses were under way at the same time. In foreign relations there wasthe Rights Recovery movement of the 1920s to abolish the inequalitiesof the treaty system. But after 1931 this had to give way to China’s patri-otic resistance to the Japanese militarists’ effort to conquer China, de-feated only in 1945. In domestic politics unification was pursued by aunited front of two party dictatorships, both inspired by Leninist Russia.The Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalist Party (Guomindang)both cooperated and competed in the 1920s to smash warlordism androll back imperialism. Breaking apart in 1927, they became deadly rivalsdespite their nominal cooperation again after 1937 in a second unitedfront against Japan. Meanwhile, a third line of struggle was within theGuomindang itself after it set up the Nationalist Government at Nanjingin an allegedly reunified China in 1928. This intraparty contest was be-tween certain elements of a civil society that were still developing and themilitary autocracy sanctioned by Japan’s invasion.

Each of these three lines of conflict was confusing to observers aswell as participants, and altogether they made Republican China anenigma fraught with mystery and misconceptions. Our analysis muststart with Sun Yatsen, a patriot whose sincerity permitted him to bestartlingly nonideological and opportunistic—just what the circum-stances demanded.

Sun was a commoner from the Guangdong delta near Portuguese

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Macao. But he grew up partly in Hawaii (winning a school prize for hisEnglish!), got a medical education in Hong Kong (“Dr. Sun”), and thenin 1896 achieved fame as China’s pioneer revolutionary when the Qinglegation in London seized him but had to release him. In 1905 the Japa-nese expansionists helped him pull together the Revolutionary League inTokyo, and so as a symbolic senior figure he was proclaimed president ofthe Chinese Republic for a few weeks in 1912 until he gave way to YuanShikai.

The ambivalent part-way nature of Sun’s Nationalist cause—its lim-ited aims in the reorganizing of Chinese society—emerged quite clearlyin the 1920s. The occasion was provided by Sun Yatsen’s decision in1922 to learn from, and his successor, Jiang Jieshi’s (Chiang Kaishek’s)decision in 1927 to break with, Soviet Russia.

Leninist theory put anti-imperialism on a more than national basisand made it a part of a worldwide movement. Since political thinking inChina had always been based on universal principles, and the Chineseempire had traditionally embraced the civilized world, Chinese revolu-tionists readily sought to base their cause on doctrines of universal valid-ity. Sun Yatsen, while not subscribing to the Communist idea of classstruggle, fully recognized the usefulness of Communist methods and ac-cepted Communist collaboration in his Nationalist cause.

The Russian Bolsheviks had organized the Comintern (CommunistInternational) out of scattered groups in various countries. Their firstComintern congress in 1919 encouraged revolution in many parts of Eu-rope. But after 1921, when Lenin turned to his New Economic Policy,though the Comintern still competed with the revived socialist parties ofEurope, it was less actively revolutionary, except in China.

Lenin held that Western capitalism was using the backward countriesof Asia as a source of profit to bolster the capitalist system. Without im-perialist exploitation of Asia, which allowed continued high wages forthe workers of the West, capitalism would more rapidly collapse. Na-tionalist revolutions in Asia, which would deprive the imperialist powersof their profitable markets and sources of raw materials, would thereforeconstitute a “flank attack” on Western capitalism at its weakest point—that is, in Asian economies, where imperialist domination exploited theworking class most ruthlessly.

In China the Soviet Russian government had capitalized upon itsown impotence by grandly renouncing the privileges of the tsar’s un-equal treaties. But it subsequently proved a hard bargainer over the oldtsarist rights in Manchuria, and its foreign office continued to deal dip-

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lomatically with the Beijing government and warlords in North Chinawhile the Comintern worked subversively for revolution.

On his part, Sun Yatsen by 1922, after 30 years of agitation, hadreached a low point in his fortunes. He had been proclaimed president ofthe Chinese Republic in 1912 only to see his country disintegrate intowarlordism. His effort to unify China through warlord means had ledhim into dealings with opportunist militarists at Guangzhou. In June1922 Sun was outmaneuvered and fled to Shanghai. Just at this moment,when Sun had demonstrated his preeminence as China’s Nationalistleader but his incompetence to complete the revolution, he joined forceswith the Comintern. In September 1922 he began the reorganization ofthe Guomindang on Soviet lines.

This marriage of convenience, announced in a joint statement by Dr.Sun and a Soviet representative in January 1923, was a strictly limitedarrangement. It stated that Sun did not favor communism for China,since conditions were not appropriate, that the Soviets agreed that Chinaneeded unity and independence, and were ready to aid the Chinese Na-tionalist revolution. As Sun Yatsen wrote to Jiang Jieshi at the time, hehad to seek help where he could get it. The Western powers offered noaid. But although Sun now sought and accepted Soviet Russian aid, com-munism in his mind did not supplant his own Three Principles of thePeople—Nationalism, People’s Rights or Democracy, and People’s Live-lihood—as the program for the Chinese revolution, even though hefound it useful to incorporate in his ideas the Communist emphasis on amass movement fired by anti-imperialism.

On the basis of this uneasy alliance, Soviet help was soon forthcom-ing. Having reestablished his government at Guangzhou early in 1923,Sun sent Jiang Jieshi to spend three months in Russia. He returned tohead the new Whampoa Military Academy at Guangzhou in 1924.Meanwhile, a Soviet adviser, Michael Borodin, an able organizer whohad lived in the United States, became the Guomindang’s expert on howto make a revolution. He helped to set up a political institute for thetraining of propagandists, to teach Guomindang politicians how to se-cure mass support. On the Soviet model the Guomindang now devel-oped local cells, which in turn elected representatives to a party congress.The first national congress was convened in January 1924 and elected aSoviet-modeled central executive committee as the chief authority in theparty. Borodin drafted its new constitution.

In addition to aiding the Nationalist revolution, the ulterior objectiveof the Comintern was to develop the Chinese Communist Party and get

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it into a strategic position within the Guomindang (GMD) so as eventu-ally to seize control of it. Members of the Chinese Communist Partywere, by agreement with the GMD, admitted to membership in it as indi-viduals, at the same time that the Chinese Communist Party continuedits separate existence. This admission of Communists, a “bloc within”strategy, was accepted by the nascent CCP only at the insistence of theComintern representative. It seemed feasible to Sun Yatsen because theCCP were still so few in number, the two parties were united on the basisof anti-imperialism, and the GMD aimed to lead a broad, national,multiclass movement avoiding class war. Sun also felt that there was lit-tle real difference between the People’s Livelihood and communism (atleast as seen in Lenin’s New Economic Policy), that the Chinese Commu-nists were only a group of “youngsters” who hoped to monopolize Rus-sian aid, that Russia would disavow them if necessary to cooperate withthe GMD.

On their side, the Chinese Communists were seeking definite classsupport among urban workers, poor peasants, and students. But theyrecognized that this class basis was still weak. They therefore sought togo along with and utilize the Nationalist movement without antagoniz-ing the major non-Communist elements within it. It should not be for-gotten that the Communist Party in China at this time was still in its in-fancy. It numbered hardly more than 300 members in 1922, only 1,500or so by 1925, whereas the GMD in 1923 had some 50,000 members.Tony Saich (forthcoming), surveying the early CCP documents, remarkson the Communists’ spurious sense of progress under the “bloc within”strategy. In actual fact, getting CCP members into high GMD posts gavethem not power but only influence. When the CCP claimed in May 1926that it led 1.25 million workers simply because their representatives hadattended the CCP-dominated Third Labor Congress, they constructed“no colossus but rather a Buddha” with feet of clay. In the First UnitedFront of the 1920s the CCP failed to establish either urban or rural basesof long-term support.

Thus from the beginning the Guomindang–Communist entente wasa precarious thing, held together by the usefulness of each group to theother, by their common enemy, imperialism, and, while he lived, by SunYatsen’s predominance over the more anti-Communist elements of hisNationalist party.

In 1925 China experienced a great wave of nationwide anti-imperialist sentiment roused by student demonstrations and imperialistgunfire in incidents at Shanghai and Guangzhou (May 30 and June 23,

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1925) respectively). These dramatic proofs that the unequal treaties andthe foreigners’ privileges still persisted gave rise to the nationwide May30th Movement. It included a prolonged boycott and strike against theBritish at Hong Kong.

The Accession to Power of Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kaishek)

After Dr. Sun’s untimely death in March 1925, his followers achieved, in1926–27, the successful Northern Expedition from Guangzhou to theYangzi valley. The newly trained propagandists of the Nationalist revo-lution preceded the armies of Jiang Jieshi, who was aided by Russianarms and advisers. By advance propaganda, popular agitation, and thebribery of “silver bullets,” the Northern Expedition’s six main armiesdefeated or absorbed some thirty-four warlord forces in South China.

Thus Chinese nationalism in the years from 1925 to 1927 hadreached a new height of expression and was focused against Britain asthe chief imperialist power. To defend their position, the British on theone hand restored to China their concessions at Hankou and Jiujiang onthe Yangzi and on the other hand, with the support of the powers, builtup an international force of 40,000 troops to protect Shanghai. In fear ofantiforeignism, most of the missionaries, several thousand, evacuatedtheir posts in the interior. In March 1927, when the revolutionary troopsreached Nanjing, foreign residents were attacked, six of them killed, andthe others evacuated under the protecting shellfire of American and Brit-ish gunboats.

It was at this point in the spring of 1927 that the latent split betweenthe right and left wings of the revolution finally became complete. Fortwo years the right and left within the movement had generally cooper-ated, although as early as March 1926 Jiang Jieshi had arrested leftist el-ements at Guangzhou allegedly to forestall a plot to kidnap him. Histhree-month view of Russia in 1923 had left him aware of Soviet meth-ods and suspicious of Communist aims. The success of the Northern Ex-pedition finally took the lid off the situation.

In brief, the left wing of the GMD together with the Communists byMarch 1927 dominated the revolutionary government, which had beenmoved from Guangzhou to Wuhan. Here were collected, among otherleaders, Madame Sun Yatsen and Wang Jingwei, the widow and thechief disciple of the founder, and Borodin, the chief adviser on revolu-tion. Wuhan had been proclaimed the new national capital. This suitedCommunist strategy because it was a large industrial center. Two mem-

The Nationalist Revolution and the Nanjing Government 283

bers of the CCP had actually been made cabinet ministers. But this gov-ernment was weak in military strength.

Jiang Jieshi, with the support of the more conservative leaders of theGMD, had aimed at the rich strategic center of the Lower Yangzi. Hehad come from a merchant-gentry background inland from Ningbo, ac-quired military training in North China and in Tokyo, and inherited aconventional Sino–Japanese Confucian (not liberal) outlook. In 1927,once the Shanghai–Nanjing region was in his grasp, Jiang was able bymilitary force to forestall the Communists and consolidate his position.In April 1927 at Shanghai foreign troops and warships confronted theCommunist-led labor unions, which had seized local control. UnderComintern orders they awaited Jiang as their ally, only to be attackedand decimated by his forces in a bloody betrayal, aided by the GreenGang of the Shanghai underworld.

Jiang set up his capital at Nanjing, and shortly afterward a local gen-eral seized power at Wuhan and broke up the left-wing government.Some of its leaders fled to Moscow. The new Nanjing government ex-pelled the Chinese Communists from its ranks and instituted a nation-wide terror to suppress the Communist revolutionaries. In this effort itwas, for the time being, largely successful. Small contingents of Commu-nist-led troops revolted, and in December 1927 the Communists at-tempted a coup at Guangzhou. But after this failure to seize power theywithdrew to rural mountain areas, especially in Jiangxi province in Cen-tral China.

This ignominious failure of the Comintern’s laboratory experimentin revolution in China had been affected by a power struggle in Moscow.Trotsky and his followers had criticized the Comintern effort to workthrough the GMD. They foresaw Jiang Jieshi’s betrayal and urged anindependent program to develop workers’ and peasants’ soviets inChina under purely Communist leadership. Stalin and his supporters,however, had argued that an independent Communist movement in sobackward a country would invite suppression all the sooner. They hadlooked forward to the time at a later stage of the revolution when, inStalin’s phrase, the Communists could drop their GMD allies as so many“squeezed-out lemons.”

Much of the Comintern’s ineptitude undoubtedly came from its re-moteness from the scene of action. Stalin could hardly succeed in mas-terminding by the aid of Marxist dialectics the confused stirrings of rev-olution in a place like Shanghai, where the proletariat were barelygetting organized. The Comintern plot in China was also frustrated by

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the Comintern’s own prior act in giving the GMD a centralized Soviet-style party apparatus, which was much harder to subvert than an openWestern-style parliamentary party.

Jiang Jieshi’s break with the Communists represented an effort toconsolidate the gains of the national revolution at a certain level in therevolutionary process, stopping short of class struggle, social revolution,and the remaking of peasant life in the villages. This consolidation in theNanjing government, combined with military campaigns to check revolt,enabled Jiang and the GMD leaders to achieve a superficial nationalunity, secure the recognition of the powers, and begin the process of ad-ministrative development, which would be a necessary prerequisite tothe abolition of the unequal treaties. In the spring of 1928 Jiang led afurther northern expedition from the Yangzi to Beijing, which was occu-pied in June and renamed Beiping (“Northern Peace”). In November theyoung warlord of Manchuria completed the nominal unification of allChina by recognizing the jurisdiction of the Nanjing government. Mean-time, the foreign powers one by one made treaties with it and so gave theNationalist revolution international recognition.

Several conclusions emerge at this point. Although the GMD wonpower, it was composed of so many disparate elements that it was un-able to function as a party dictatorship. Instead, it soon became a JiangJieshi dictatorship. In its early history, the driving impulse had been na-tionalism, first after 1905 against alien Manchu rule, second after 1923against the imperialism of the treaty powers. The GMD ideology, so nec-essary to inspire student activists, was nominally Sun Yatsen’s ThreePeople’s Principles, but these were really a party platform (a set of goals)more than an ideology (a theory of history). The GMD had got no far-ther than regional warlordism at Guangzhou until in 1923 it allied withthe Soviet Union, reorganized itself on Leninist lines, created an indoctri-nated Party army, and formed a United Front with the CCP. The fouryears of Soviet aid and CCP collaboration together with the patrioticMarxist–Leninist animus against the warlords’ domestic “feudalism”and the foreign powers’ “imperialism” helped the GMD to power.

This tangled story suggests that there has been at bottom only onerevolutionary movement in twentieth-century China, that of socialismmainly headed by the CCP. (Perhaps this puts the GMD in a better light,as devoted to state-building and reform rather than to the unending vio-lence of class struggle.) Jiang Jieshi’s treacherous slaughter of the CCPat Shanghai in April 1927, though it led to the powers’ recognition ofhis Nanjing government in 1928, tended to dissipate the GMD’s revo-

The Nationalist Revolution and the Nanjing Government 285

lutionary spirit. Soon it found itself on the defensive against both theCCP and Japan.

The Nature of the Nanjing Government

The Nationalist Government set up at Nanjing in 1928 seemed the mostpromising since 1912. Many of its officials were patriots educatedabroad and competent at the functions of a modern nation-state. Amen-ities of modern life soon filled the city scene—movies, automobiles, thetheatre, arts and crafts, books and magazines, as well as teachers atuniversities. Chinese institutions included the dozen research institutesof Academia Sinica, the Nationalist Government’s Ministry of PublicHealth, its National Agricultural Research Bureau, the many-sided workof the Maritime Customs Service, the Bank of China’s and other researchbureaus, and a multitude of similar agencies. This growth carried on theefforts to build up a civil society noted in Chapter 13.

The Nationalist Government’s potentialities, what it might havedone for the Chinese people, would soon be all but destroyed by Jap-anese militarism, which seized Manchuria in 1931, encroached onShanghai in 1932 and then on the Beijing–Tianjin area, and attackedChina full scale from 1937 to 1945. In the 1930s and 40s Japan’s indus-trial technology and chauvinist spirit set back the cause of civilization inChina, just as similar capacities of the Germans were doing in Europe.The inherent weaknesses of the GMD dictatorship at Nanjing grewworse under the pressures of preparing for war and then having to fight.

A first weakness was the loss of revolutionary aim. In accordancewith Sun Yatsen’s theory of the three stages of the revolution (militaryunification, political tutelage, and constitutional democracy), 1929 wasproclaimed to be the beginning of the period of political tutelage underthe Guomindang dictatorship.

Ever since the First Party Congress had met in January 1924 andadopted a Soviet-style organization, the Central Executive Committee(CEC) had become the chief repository of political authority. High of-ficials of the government were chosen by the CEC and usually from it.Constitutional government was postponed. Party ministries, such as theMinistries of Information, Social Affairs, Overseas Affairs, or Party Or-ganization, functioned as part of the central administration and yet werein form under the Guomindang, not the government. Party and govern-ment thus became indistinguishable.

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But in this way the Guomindang became a wing of the bureaucracyand lost its revolutionary mission. The earlier party supervision of localadministration, its political work in the army, its special criminal courtsto try counterrevolutionaries, all were reduced or abandoned. So alsowere the mass organizations of workers, peasants, youth, merchants,and women. These mass movements had mobilized popular support forthe Northern Expedition, but the Nanjing power-holders now lookedaskance at processions, demonstrations, and mass meetings. They dis-couraged student movements, looking back upon all these activities ofthe mid-twenties as useful tools to beat the warlords but no longer ofvalue, now that power was theirs to organize for purposes of control.With this attitude the Guomindang suffered an actual drop in numbers.By late 1929 its membership totaled barely 550,000, of whom 280,000were military. Members in Shanghai were mainly officials or policemen.

Far from being bourgeois-oriented, the GMD destroyed the semi-au-tonomy of the Shanghai businessmen. Using gangster methods of abduc-tion and assassination, it intimidated merchants into contributing largefunds for the military. By setting up structures parallel to the chambersof commerce while regrouping the guilds and changing personnel, itforced the General Chamber of Commerce to close down and cowed themerchant elite. The new Bureau of Social Affairs now supervised profes-sional organizations, settled conflicts, collected statistics, pursued phil-anthropic works, maintained hygiene and security arrangements, andorganized town planning. Officialdom took over from the merchantclass.

The GMD also took over the management of boycotts, which be-came government-organized and financed against Japanese trade. Boy-cotts became controlled-spontaneous mass movements that could beturned against leading merchants in terrorist fashion. The Municipalityof Greater Shanghai asserted, says Bergère, “what amounted to oversee-ing rights over the Settlement’s officials.” The Green Gang of 20,000 orpossibly even 100,000 members became GMD agents ready to trackdown trade union leaders and Communists just as they continued to ter-rorize wealthy merchants who refused to contribute funds to the govern-ment. The Shanghai concession areas no longer provided much refugefor Chinese nationals.

The Shanghai bankers, like those of Beijing and Tianjin, were nowmaking fortunes by giving public loans to the government. Between1927 and 1931 they underwrote most internal loans, which totaled

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something like a billion dollars. The government bonds were sold belownominal value and gave the banks an actual interest payment of 20 per-cent or more.

Improvements under the Nanjing government included the abolitionof likin in 1931 and recovery of tariff autonomy. A modern mint was es-tablished and the tael abolished in March 1933. The National EconomicCouncil was set up to handle foreign-aid funds. Finally the banking coupof 1935 set up the four major banks as a central bank and the nationalcurrency as a managed currency subject to inflation. The governmentgained control over two thirds of the banking sector, taxed businessmore and more heavily, levied consolidated taxes on production, andraised customs duties.

In general it seemed that the “triumphant bureaucratic apparatuswas about to stifle the spirit of enterprise once again,” as E. Balazs re-marked. High-ranking officials sought personal profits while the govern-ment used modern business to strengthen its own authority, not tostrengthen the economy by investment in productive enterprise. Havingforesworn the land tax and left it to the provincial governments, theNanjing regime lived parasitically on trade taxes, handicapping the in-dustrial sector it should have tried by all means to encourage. Both pro-ductive investment at home and capital loans from abroad were discour-aged by these antidevelopment policies. One hypothesis is that theNanjing decade probably saw continued stagnation in the agrarianeconomy, with no appreciable increase of per capita productivity. Thiswas accompanied, moreover, by a stultifying growth of “bureaucraticcapitalism,” that is, domination of industry and finance by officials andpolitical cliques who feathered their private nests by manipulating gov-ernment monopolies, finances, development schemes, and agencies. As aresult, Nanjing was unable to achieve a healthy and solvent fiscal regime,much less a breakthrough into a genuine process of self-sustaining rein-vestment and industrialization. Savings were channeled into current gov-ernment use or private speculation, while the nation’s capital resourceswere not mobilized, even for military purposes.

Modifying this negative view stands the insistence of economic histo-rians like William C. Kirby (1984) that despite its wartime shortcomingsthe Nationalist regime did achieve a degree of state-building. This wasevidenced particularly in the military industries under the National Re-sources Commission. In either case, most researchers agree that theNanjing government existed not to represent the interests of a bourgeoi-

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sie but rather to perpetuate its own power, much in the manner of dynas-tic regimes.

If the Nationalist Government was not “bourgeois,” was it not atleast “feudal”? In other words, representing the landlord interest? Theanswer is mixed. Since Nanjing left the land tax to be collected by theprovinces, the provincial regimes, strapped for revenue, generally left thelandlords in place. Central government army officers in particular mightbecome large landowners. Nanjing was against mobilizing peasants, butit was for centralization, not dispersal, of power. “Feudal” lacks precisemeaning; it is more useful to see the Nanjing government as having had adual character—comparatively modern in urban centers and foreigncontact, reactionary in its old-style competition with provincial war-lords. On its foreign side it could continue the effort to modernize atleast the trappings of government, while on its domestic warlord side itcontinued to suppress social change. Foreigners were more aware of itspromise, assuming in Anglo–American fashion that the only way for-ward in China would be through gradual reform.

Systemic Weaknesses

The Nanjing government’s claim to foreign approbation lay first of all inits modernity. The big ministries of foreign affairs, finance, economic af-fairs, education, justice, communications, war, and navy built imposingoffice buildings in Nanjing under the wing of the executive branch(yuan) of the government. Meanwhile, in addition to the legislative andjudicial branches, there were established the control, that is, censorial,and auditing branch, and the examination branch for the civil service.Into these new ministries were recruited educated talent very consciousof China’s ignominious place in the world. They began to apply modernscience to China’s ancient problems. There was at first a new atmosphereof hope in the air.

But this ran into a second weakness—the Nanjing government’s lim-ited capacity vis-à-vis the sheer mass of China’s 400 million people.GMD China in its equipment and modern plant was a small show. In in-dustrial production it was smaller than Belgium, in air and sea powernegligible, in the gadgets and equipment of American life not as big as aMiddle Western state. Yet this small and relatively insignificant modernstate wanted to spread out over the protean body of a vigorous peoplein a vast and ancient land. On the whole the Chinese people were not

The Nationalist Revolution and the Nanjing Government 289

yet heavily taxed. Thomas Rawski’s (1989) finding is that in the early1930s central, provincial, and local taxes all together amounted to onlyabout 5 to 7 percent of China’s total output. Yet Nanjing’s modernizerswanted to foster modern agronomy, railroads and bus roads, a nationalpress and communications system, and the modern idea of opportunityfor youth and women. As a Westernizing influence, Nanjing found itsstrongest support in the treaty-port cities, its best revenue in the Mari-time Customs duties on foreign trade, and its greatest difficulty in reach-ing the mass of the peasantry. Indeed, it at first controlled only the LowerYangzi provinces. It was at all times engaged in a political and often mili-tary struggle to dominate provincial warlord regimes.

Finally, the Nationalist Government from the start was plagued bysystemic weaknesses that began with its personnel. Before the NorthernExpedition of 1926 the GMD at Guangzhou had included both the sur-viving Revolutionary Alliance members of Sun Yatsen’s generation andyounger idealist-activists who often had a dual membership in the GMDand the CCP. The Soviet input represented by Borodin had been com-bined with the rising military leadership of Jiang Jieshi. Within fiveyears, however, the vigorous Dr. Jekyll of Guangzhou had metamor-phosed into the sordid Mr. Hyde of Nanjing. What had happened tochange the character of the Nationalist movement in so short a time?

One factor of course was the slaughter of Communists and the rejec-tion or suppression of those who survived. The CCP kind of youthfulidealism was expunged. A second factor was the enormous influence ofnew GMD members from the ranks of the old bureaucracy and the war-lord regimes. The careful selection of members, like the enforcement ofparty discipline, had never characterized the GMD. It had remained acongeries of competing factions not under central control, and it hadcustomarily admitted to membership anyone who applied. Some war-lords brought in whole armies. Once the GMD was in power in Nanjing,its revolutionary idealism was watered down by the admission of cor-rupt and time-serving officials and the accumulation of opportunistsgenerally lacking in principle. As Lloyd Eastman (1974) has remarked,as early as 1928 Jiang Jieshi, who felt the responsibility of leadership,said that “Party members no longer strive either for principles or for themasses . . . the revolutionaries have become degenerate, have lost theirrevolutionary spirit and revolutionary courage.” They only struggled forpower and profit, no longer willing to sacrifice. By 1932 Jiang was de-claring flatly, “The Chinese revolution has failed.”

By coming to power, in short, the GMD had changed its nature.

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After all, it had won power by using the Shanghai Green Gang under-world against the Communists. At the beginning, many Chinese ralliedto the support of Nanjing, but the evils of old-style bureaucratism soondisillusioned them. In addition to its white terror to destroy the CCP, theGMD police attacked, suppressed, and sometimes executed a variety ofindividuals in other parties and the professions. The press, though it per-sisted, was heavily censored. Publishers were harassed and some assassi-nated. Colleges and universities were brought under regulation, requiredto teach the Three Principles of the People, and constantly scrutinized forunorthodox tendencies. Anyone concerned for the masses was regardedas pro-Communist. This anti-Communist stance had the effect of dis-couraging if not preventing all sorts of projects for the betterment of thepeople. Thus the GMD cut itself off from revolutionary endeavor. Sup-pression and censorship were accompanied by corrupt opportunism andinefficient administration. The old watchword “become an official andget rich” was revived with a vengeance.

This disaster put a heavy burden on Jiang Jieshi, who remained anaustere and dedicated would-be unifier of his country. By 1932 he wasthoroughly disillusioned with his party as well as with the Western styleof democracy, which promised no strength of leadership. He began theorganization of a fascist body, popularly known as the Blue Shirts, acarefully selected group of a few thousand zealous army officers, whowould secretly devote themselves to building up and serving Jiang Jieshias their leader in the fashion of Mussolini and Hitler. When a publicNew Life Movement was staged in 1934 for the inculcation of the oldvirtues and the improvement of personal conduct, much of it was pushedfrom behind the scenes by the Blue Shirts. This fascist movement underthe Nanjing government would have grown stronger if the fascist dicta-torships in Europe had not been cut off from China.

One key to Jiang Jieshi’s balancing act on the top of the heap wasthe fact that he committed himself to no one faction. He claimed to bea devout Methodist and got missionary help for reconstruction. Hesometimes supported his GMD organizational apparatus against theBlue Shirts but in general he hamstrung the GMD and left it out ofparticipation in administration, while he balanced the Whampoa cliqueof his former students against other parts of the army or the PoliticalScience (or Political Study) clique of administrators against the CC(Chen brothers) clique of party organizers. His role was such that therecould be no other source of final decision, least of all through a partici-pation by the mass of the people. Like Yuan Shikai twenty years before,

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Jiang found that Chinese politics seemed to demand a dictator. While heheld various offices at various times, he was obviously the one man at thetop, and his political tactics would have been quite intelligible to the Em-press Dowager. One of Jiang’s model figures was Zeng Guofan, who insuppressing the Taipings had been his predecessor in saving the Chinesepeople from a destructive revolution.

In brief, Jiang was the inheritor of China’s ruling-class tradition: hismoral leadership was couched in Confucian terms while the work styleof his administration showed the old evils of ineffectiveness. As Jiangsaid in 1932, “When something arrives at a government office it isyamenized—all reform projects are handled lackadaisically, negligently,and inefficiently.” One result was that paper plans for rural improve-ment seldom got off the ground, while economic development was simi-larly short-changed.

Sun Yatsen’s five-power constitution fared poorly under the Nanjinggovernment. The Legislative Yuan (branch) was overshadowed by theExecutive Yuan, but the latter was rivaled by party ministries not unlikethe Executive Yuan ministries. The Examination Yuan really did notfunction. Eastman reports that “by 1935 for example only 1585 candi-dates had successfully completed the Civil Service Examinations.” Manydid not receive official positions at all. Again, the Control Yuan had in-herited some of the functions of the censorate of old, but it was almostentirely ineffectual. From 1931 to 1937 it “was presented with cases ofalleged corruption involving 69,500 officials. Of these the Yuan returnedindictments on only 1800 persons.” Worse still, the Control Yuan hadno power of judicial decision; and of the 1,800 officials indicted for cor-ruption, only 268 were actually found guilty by the legal system. Ofthese, 214 received no punishment, and 41 received light punishment,yet only 13 were actually dismissed from office.

All of the five-Yuan civilian government was equaled by the MilitaryAffairs Commission headed by Jiang Jieshi, which used up most of theNanjing government revenues and set up a de facto military governmentof its own. Having naturally got rid of the Russian military advisers,Jiang soon began to substitute Germans and establish his military eche-lon quite separate from the civilian government. The general staff andwhat became the Military Affairs Commission with its various ministrieswere under Jiang as commander-in-chief, while the five branches of thecivilian government were under him as president. German military ad-visers set about training an enormous military establishment, for whichthey planned to get German industrial assistance. By 1930 a China

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Study Commission arrived from Germany for three months, and severalcultural institutions were set up to develop closer relations. A Sino–Ger-man civil aviation line was started.

Spurred by the Japanese seizure of Manchuria in 1931, Beijing intel-lectuals among others advocated a national industrial buildup for self-defense. Scientists were mobilized. A German-trained geologist becameminister of education. In 1932 began the organization of what later be-came the National Resources Commission (NRC) under the leadershipof the geologist Weng Wenhao, a first-level graduate of the examinationsystem, who got his Ph.D. in geology and physics at Louvain in Belgium.Impeccably honest and highly intelligent, Weng rose in the NationalistGovernment to high-level posts in economic development. The NRCwas directly under Jiang and the military. Its aim was to create state-runbasic industries for steel, electricity, machinery, and military arsenals.Part of the plan was to secure foreign investment, particularly from Ger-many. By 1933 a German military advisory commission was operating inChina, aiming at military–industrial cooperation. Chinese tungsten be-came important for German industry. The organizer of the modern Ger-man army, General Hans von Seeckt, visited China twice and advocatedbuilding a new elite army with a new officer corps.

Thus at the time of the Japanese attack in 1937 the Nationalist Gov-ernment had worked out a promising relationship with Nazi Germany,but a parallel development of Nazi relations with Japan and the Nazi–Soviet pact of August 1939 soon left China dependent on a still minimalamount of American aid instead of German.

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15The Second Coming of theChinese Communist Party

Problems of Life on the Land

Among the origins of a revolutionary movement, the popular mentalityamong illiterate farmers is least easy to perceive, whereas material liveli-hood can be seen in economic conditions and, with luck, statistics.China’s economic growth during the Republican era from 1912 down toJapan’s attack in 1937 is still being debated. One optimistic view—basedlargely on overall statistics of production, trade, and investment—citesimpressive figures such as China’s great increase in the production andconsumption of cotton textiles, which in the mid-1930s used more cot-ton than Britain and Germany combined. Thomas Rawski has mar-shalled statistics of growth in banking services, money supply, wagerates, transportation and shipping, consumption, and the like, which allgo along with continued population growth. He pictures a society that issteadily industrializing. Yet in so big a country this overall landscapemay have included large urban slums and numberless impoverished vil-lages.

About China’s rural poverty there have been two schools of thought.One school has stressed the exploitation of the farmer by the ruling classthrough rents, usury, and other exactions, resulting in a maldistributionof income. This idea of landlord-class exploitation fitted Marxist theoryand became with many people an article of faith. The other school, asRamon Myers (1970) points out, has been more “eclectic”; it hasstressed the many reasons for the low productivity of the old farm econ-omy: farms of two acres per family were too small; even these tiny plotswere improperly used; peasants had insufficient capital and limited ac-cess to new technology; there was little control over nature; primitive

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transport increased marketing costs. Supporters of this interpretationpoint to the fact that most Chinese farmers owned their land, some werepartly owners and partly tenants, and only about one quarter or one fifthwere outright tenants, so that landlord exploitation of tenants was farfrom the general rule and less of a problem than the general lack of cap-ital and technology compared with the abundant supply of labor. The la-bor supply was assured by the social imperative to beget children whocould care for their parents in old age. This care included the presence ofa son to carry on the family line and specifically to offer the ritual sacri-fices at the family altar that would prevent the spirits of departed parentsfrom roaming about as homeless ghosts.

Whether one stresses inefficiency of production or maldistribution ofthe product, it remains apparent that village social structure was all-im-portant at the rice-roots level. Subcounty administration, a compara-tively neglected area, has been analyzed by Prasenjit Duara (1988)among others. He begins with the fact that “under the late Qing reformsthe village was required to develop a fiscal system to finance modernschools, administrative units, and defense organizations.” This unprece-dented penetration of the state into the rural society was marked by thelevy of new taxes not on individuals or on private property as before buton the village as a new fiscal entity. The result was disastrous for the oldrural society.

It had been organized by what Duara calls the “cultural nexus ofpower.” He uses this term to describe the hierarchies of lineage kinship,or of markets, or of religions or even water control plus the networks ofpatrons and clients or of relations by marriage, and so on, that formedthe “framework within which power and authority were exercised.” Vil-lage leaders, in other words, had derived their authority from the wholecriss-crossing interplay of family relations, commercial transactions, re-ligious observances, voluntary associations, and interpersonal and legalrelationships that altogether constituted the cultural nexus of village so-ciety.

In the reform era beginning early in the century, the chief stimulus torural change came from the new tax-gathering effort. Clerks were ap-pointed by the county magistrates to keep registers, and rural agents(difang, dibao) were appointed without salary to pursue the task of tax-urging and tax-collecting among half a dozen to twenty villages apiece.Duara calls this a “brokerage” function. He finds generally three levelsof tax-gathering activity in this unexplored subcounty area. Thoughterms varied locally, counties (xian) were usually divided into wards

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(qu) and then into townships (xiang) under which were groups of vil-lages. Usually the rural agent would be an entrepreneur acting like a taxfarmer, obliged to make his living as well as his expenses from the sumshe collected to meet the tax quota. On the other hand, villages mightcooperate and club together to pay fees to a rural agent of their ownselection, who would represent their interest and be less predatory. Insuch a case, the agent might serve the community by organizing for self-defense or for crop-watching or to bail out innocent villagers arrested byyamen runners. This kind of “protective brokerage” might thus performfunctions that have heretofore been assumed to be those of the local gen-try-elite. To be sure, the gentry society sketched in Chapter 4 above wasby no means unchanging. Gentry activity has been best documented atthe level of the county magistrate. As the population grew, the lowergentry degree-holders’ (shengyuan and jiansheng) participation at thesubcounty and village levels may have become attenuated at the sametime that the quality of such personnel deteriorated.

State penetration of the village generally worsened the already pre-carious situation of the villagers. In stable times a moral economy hadoperated on the basis of personal relations of patron and client, as be-tween landlord-moneylender and tenant-borrower. Reciprocal civilitiessuch as presentation of gifts or invitations to feasts lubricated these in-terpersonal relations. Each party had a proper role to play.

Hard times, however—either disasters of nature or warfare or pres-sure of the officials—could shatter these social relations and leave the vil-lage community leaderless and at sea. Under the state’s new pressure fortaxes, well-to-do patrons would withdraw from posts of village leader-ship, to be supplanted by a “local bully” type of tax-farmer who was onthe make and often from outside the village. Similarly, respected peas-ants began to avoid acting as middlemen to oversee and guarantee con-tracts under customary law. Meantime, large property owners moved tothe city. With political power no longer tied into the cultural nexus, vil-lages became the “hunting grounds of political predators.” In short,state-building by the government put tax demands on village leaders thatalienated them from their constituencies. As unscrupulous tax-farmerstook over the tax collecting, corruption increased. In the Lower Yangziregion the breakdown of the cultural nexus came, as we have noted, withthe growth of absentee landlordism and the management of landlord–tenant relations by a bursar incapable of maintaining the personal land-owner–tenant or patron–client relationships of former times.

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During the warlord era, local administration deteriorated. Thelanded ruling class, no longer the top elite of the country, no longer in-doctrinated in Confucian ideals of community leadership, became morenarrowly self-seeking. Secret societies like the Red Spears in Shandongor the Society of Brothers and Elders (Ge Lao Hui) in Sichuan becametools of the local families of property, helping to protect them againstboth popular disorder and official exaction. Organized in a network ofbranches, each with its secretariat, treasury, and directorate capable ofmobilizing the clandestine brotherhood, such agencies could help the bigfamily lineages dominate the villages in a rich enclave like the Chengduplain. For a secret society had its executive arm in the person of profes-sional thugs, as well as its income from the protection of illicit activi-ties—gambling houses, brothels, opium dens, or illegal markets wheregovernment taxes were evaded. This darker side was combined with theprotection of respectable rank-and-file members in their daily pursuitsand with clandestine leadership by some of the wealthiest landlords andofficials.

When the Guomindang came to power after 1927, the telephone andtelegraph, motor roads and bus routes linking local areas with the citiesenabled Nanjing and later Chongqing to convey their orders at once tothe smallest hamlet. The regime continued the trend toward bureaucra-tizing the countryside. In place of the magistrates and gentry of imperialtimes, Philip Kuhn (in CHOC 13) has described how the new adminis-trators from Nanjing tried to spread their reforms, and the police orga-nized their anti-Communist security net. Both came further into the localscene than had been the custom under the empire. Where the emperorhad appointed the county magistrate but left him under the provincialauthorities, the central government now developed direct contact withhim. Magistrates were a chief element among the trainees brought to thecapital for indoctrination in Jiang Jieshi’s Central Training Corps. Mean-while, the central government established local administrative organs incharge of military, customs, transportation, or other matters, indepen-dent of the regular structure of county government. The Guomindangalso set up its local cells under central party control, parallel to the of-ficial system. Below the county were new levels of wards, districts andsubdistricts, groups of towns and villages, leading down to the groups ofhouseholds that formed the revived baojia system.

The Guomindang theory was that through this hierarchy of subunitsthe government could train the people during the period of political tu-

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telage to prepare them for local autonomy. In 1939 the Nationalist Gov-ernment issued a new statute to reorganize local government. Familieswere to be grouped more flexibly, on community lines, to form jia andbao. Villages and towns were now to become incorporated legal personsable to operate their own local administrations. Each bao should forman assembly and elect two representatives, who would in turn functionin a village or town assembly to assist the head of the village or towngovernment, who would himself be elected. On paper the law of 1939was put into effect in nearly all the counties in Free (that is, GMD)China. Yet in the same period the military and police authorities domi-nated the scene. There is little record of the election process taking hold.

“Local self-government,” despite its happy resonance in the minds ofWestern advocates of democracy, had its own rather different meaningfor the Chinese common people. The term in reality usually designated amanagerial agency of the local elite, which they used to secure villagers’taxes to support modern improvements. Roadbuilding, setting up mod-ern schools, and paying for police were improvements desired by themodernizing elite, but paying higher taxes to secure them increased thevillagers’ burden faster than it benefited them. There were many peasantprotests against “reform.”

Moreover, local self-government had customarily been based on de-cision making not by an indiscriminate show of hands (one man, onevote) but by consensus, as had been the practice in village leadershipcouncils. Even in the provincial elections of 1909 by a tightly restrictedelectorate, the persons elected were asked to choose the assemblymenfrom among their own number by a process of voting that amountedto securing a consensus. If “democracy” in China’s two-strata societyshould try to function by simple majority rule, it would deny the Neo-Confucian faith that disciplined self-cultivation produces men with su-perior character and worth. Yet, as personal relationships dissipated,this was what modernity seemed to demand.

Looking back on the Nanjing decade, we can see that, ideally, thenew government should have attacked the key problem of agriculturalproduction with programs to improve farm technology. Nanjing earlysought technical aid from the League of Nations for public health work.Many fine blueprints were offered in the 1930s and 1940s for China’seconomic regeneration. Land reclamation, reforestation, water conser-vancy, hydropower, crop and animal breeding, better tools, improvedland use, pest control, crop storage facilities, land redistribution, rent re-duction, light and heavy industrialization, rural industry and cooper-

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atives, cheaper farm credit, mass education, public health, transporta-tion, law and order all had their advocates and their obvious rationale.The first and foremost object of all such efforts was to increase the pro-ductivity of the farmer. This was the crux of China’s problem, but theNationalist Government was unable to get at it. No comprehensive planwas ever devised, much less given effect.

The Nanjing decade was the time for Western aid to China’s vigorouseconomic growth. But Europe was preoccupied with Nazi Germany,while America was absorbed in the Depression and the New Deal.Guomindang China in these years made halting and spotty progressalong many lines, to no particular end. The social anthropologist FeiXiaotong has described the quagmire of old agricultural conditions andpractices as an “economy of scarcity.” This long-established low-levelmanpower economy was perpetuated by the Chinese emphasis upon thevirtue of contentment and limitation of wants. This age-old acceptanceof the institutionalized penury of peasant life, for want of any alterna-tive, was a means by which the individual could fit himself into his kin-ship group, sustain his lot in life, and actually achieve a high degree of“social integration” of himself in the community. Indeed, the narrow ho-rizon, low efficiency, poor diet, and chronic diseases of the Chinese peas-ant, which struck the eye of the modern investigator, were always an in-tegral part of the old society, just as they were part of premodern societyin Europe.

Rural Reconstruction

During the Nanjing decade the lack of large-scale government aid forthe villages was highlighted by a widespread and growing private inter-est in “rural reconstruction.” In several selected areas the problems ofpeasant life were studied and methods were developed for the promo-tion of literacy and improvement of living standards. In some of theseefforts, Christian missionaries had led the way. Best known to Western-ers was the experiment financed partly by the Rockefeller Foundation atDingxian in North China under the leadership of the dynamic ChristianYan Yangchu (James Yen). A model county also was developed by thegovernment near Nanjing, and an interesting pioneer effort was made inShandong by the scholar Liang Shuming, whom Guy Alitto (1979)rightly calls “the last Confucian.” Fundamentally, these reform effortstried to give the peasantry some education for citizenship, some publichealth service, and scientific improvements in crop and animal breeding.

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Most studied has been the Mass Education Movement at Dingxian,led by Yan, which reached the most people and had wide influence. Aftergoing to Yale, Yan during World War I was one of some 40 Chinese stu-dents who worked under the YMCA with the Chinese labor corps inFrance, writing their letters home. A natural-born evangelist, Yan tookon the literacy problem and put out a newspaper. Back in China, he andothers applied the YMCA’s publicity and mobilization methods to liter-acy campaigns. This drew him into the problems of the village—not onlyliteracy but also the modern technologies of public health, agriculturalimprovement, handicrafts, credit and marketing cooperatives, and therecruitment of village elders, landlords, and even local officials to join ina variety of public events and assist in organizing worthy projects. Forexample, as People’s Schools trained teachers, their graduates formedAlumni Associations.

Yan raised funds in America and England to pay a specialist staff,each of whom had to see what could be done by ideas and organizationat little or no expense. The health program, for instance, would recruit afarmer to become the village health worker. After 10 days training, hewould set about recording vital statistics, identifying and reporting themost obvious diseases, and using his first-aid box to give out eye oint-ment, calomel, castor oil, and aspirin. He also vaccinated people anddisinfected their surroundings. Yet as Charles Hayford’s (1990) studymakes plain, the crust of custom was hard to break. Midwives, for in-stance, were customarily unhygienic, sometimes esteeming the curativepotential of cow dung and not willing to be taught differently.

After 1932 Dingxian was part of a national Rural ReconstructionMovement that brought many centers and projects into a common foldnot under government control. In 1933 Dingxian took the final step ofgetting its own nominee appointed local magistrate. The experimentalwork had devised a great many ways to help meet peasant needs, includ-ing rural industries, cooperatives, and honest use of tax money. The localconservatives to whom this seemed too close to communism secured themagistrate’s transfer.

The movement for rural reconstruction discovered very soon that theproblems of economic livelihood were deeply imbedded in social andpolitical institutions. A higher standard of living was a prerequisite forany democratic processes of a Western type. Improvements in livingstandards in turn depended upon social change. For example, the scien-tific reforms attempted at Dingxian needed financial support greater

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than the peasantry could provide, peasant organizations in support oflocal improvements required official permission, the improvement ofcrops raised questions of rent and land tenure, an increase of literacywas likely to make the populace more vocal in the pressing of griev-ances.

In short, any real change in one aspect of the old order on the landimplied fundamental changes in the whole system. The problems of theChinese countryside were so far-reaching and the pressure for change sogreat that reforms seemed likely to set off a chain reaction toward revolt.

The local self-government program of the Nationalist regime wasfrustrated by this same syndrome. It was unable to penetrate the villagelevel except superficially from the top down. Plans and legislation thattried to set up elements of local administration representing the centralgovernment turned out usually to be in competition with the provincialinterests represented by warlord governors and urban chambers of com-merce. The modern reforms and improvements brought to the localscene began with the extension of roads and bus lines supplementing thetelephone and telegraph. Programs and even institutions for geologicalsurvey, crop statistics, agronomic improvement, and maintenance of lo-cal order had to be paid for by the effort to collect greater taxes from thevillages. The Chinese peasantry still felt that they benefited little fromthese modern improvements promoted by the city people and the centralgovernment. The whole idea of organizing the village for its own self-im-provement was foreign to this officialism, with the result that the causeof social revolution, specifically the broadening of land ownership andthe lessening of absentee landlordism, could not be pursued under theNationalist regime. This failure gave the CCP its opportunity in the1930s.

The Rise of Mao Zedong

While the Nationalist Government was struggling to build up its mili-tary power against Japan, the CCP was struggling to survive in the vil-lages. Although the party had some 60,000 members in 1927, JiangJieshi’s white terror soon literally decimated it. Many dispersed into ano-nymity and inaction; the most dedicated took off to hole up in remotefastnesses in the countryside. A dozen or so base areas thus developed,small pockets where Red Army (that is, CCP) troops in small numberssupported rebel political leaders. When Mao joined up with the warlord

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officer Zhu De on the southern Hunan–Jiangxi border, they inauguratedthe major base area but soon moved to the hills of Jiangxi to the north-east, with Ruijin as their capital town. Other base areas were establishedin the Dabie Mountains northeast of Wuhan or around the marshyHong Lake in northern Jiangsu at the old mouth of the Yellow River.

Ideology and organization have of course been the winning combina-tion in most revolutions. Mao Zedong’s organizational principle waslike that of any successful bandit: by force and guile (including a newteaching) to curry favor with the local people. Meanwhile, what ideol-ogy came from the Soviet Union through the Comintern took a consider-able time to find its adaptation to Chinese conditions. For example, theMarxist–Leninist analysis of history gave the key role to the urban prole-tariat, the industrial working class, and its urban leaders of the Commu-nist party, but the CCP got nowhere until it substituted the peasantry forthe proletariat, in effect standing the theory on its head.

After 1927, when Chen Duxiu was expelled for having presided overthe near-demise of the CCP, the leadership in China passed to a succes-sion of young men put forward from Moscow by the Comintern. Theirability to wage a successful revolutionary war was severely handicappedby their having to live as underground fugitives in Shanghai and otherurban centers. Their doctrinal activities contributed words on paper butnever became a public rallying point for mass movement. They still re-ceived directives from Moscow, which they transmitted to the baseareas.

For a time, the Moscow influence was strengthened by the return ofthe famous twenty-eight Bolsheviks who took charge of the CCP in early1931. Their ideas and aims were highly orthodox, not closely suited tothe Chinese scene. They continued to talk about the proletarian revolu-tion and tried to seize cities in the hope of establishing independent prov-inces. This played into the hands of the GMD, and every attempt wasthwarted. There was no “rising tide” of rebellion in China. By 1933 theCentral Committee was obliged to get out of Shanghai and move to thecentral base in Jiangxi, of which Mao Zedong was head. There they out-ranked him but became immersed like him in peasant life and its prob-lems. From this time on the personality and mind of Mao became a cen-tral factor in the CCP revolution.

Mao Zedong excelled his colleagues in achieving a unity of theoryand practice, a major motif in Confucian philosophy. We can see howMao’s ideas developed, after 1923, as he worked in the united front

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under the GMD. For a time he was an alternate member of the GMDCentral Committee at Guangzhou. There he became director of the Peas-ant Movement Training Institute, which provided a five-month educa-tion in the subject. From May to October 1926 Mao directly taught thesixth class, which had 320 students from all the provinces of China. Theinstitute program seems to have stressed an analysis of peasant problemsplus an analysis of class structure in the countryside. On the basis ofMao’s own six months’ experience back in Hunan in 1925 when he or-ganized peasant unions, his articles of 1926 describe the in-built exploi-tation of the peasantry all the way from the working peasant landownerto the landless laborer. Peasants are oppressed, he said, by (1) heavyrents, half or more of the crop, (2) high interest rates, between 36 per-cent and 84 percent a year, (3) heavy local taxes, (4) exploitation of farmlabor, and (5) the landowner’s cooperation with the warlords and cor-rupt officials to exploit the peasantry in every way possible. Behind thiswhole system lay the cooperation of the imperialists, who sought tomaintain order for profitable trade in China.

By this time Mao had thoroughly accepted the Leninist concept of aworld movement against capitalist imperialism on the basis of classstruggle. But, within this generally accepted framework, Mao arguedthat the key to success in China’s revolution must lie, first, in the carefulintellectual analysis of the various classes in the countryside and, second,in using an intensely practical tactic of identifying those classes withwhom to work and those classes to work against in any given stage ofthe revolution. Third, the role of the party worker in the village must beone of a guide and catalyst rather than a know-it-all. He must closely ex-amine the villagers’ needs and complaints, hopes and fears; only thencould he articulate the peasantry’s demands and follow the tactic of unit-ing with the largest possible number to attack the smallest possible targetas a step in the revolutionary process.

Unfortunately, while Mao was thinking these thoughts in 1926 theCCP was absorbed in its united-front tactics. Its members still assumedthat by definition the Nationalist Revolution of the 1920s was a bour-geois revolution, a view which history was to prove quite doubtful. Inthis misguided belief, the CCP followed the advice of the Comintern andcontinued the united front with the GMD at all costs, toning down itsideas of mobilizing the peasantry on the basis of their misery until suchtime as imperialism had been expelled from China by a new nationalgovernment. Giving up the social revolution in the countryside seemed

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to be an unavoidable part of maintaining a united front with the Na-tionalists. “Peasant excesses” were deplored by the CCP because themushrooming of peasant associations in the southern provinces duringthe Northern Expedition had led to savage repression by the landlord–militarist complex still in power. The CCP had no armed forces of itsown, and as a result its peasant movement quickly expired after theGMD–CCP split in mid-1927. Thus the CCP contributed to its owndisaster.

In this period Mao had dutifully gone along with the line transmittedfrom Moscow and had vainly attempted to ride the assumed “high tide”that never rose. He found that the peasantry could be mobilized andeven seize cities but could not fight the Nationalist Army. Mao thereforegot the message that the CCP could survive and prosper only by develop-ing its own armed forces in a territorial base where men and food supplycould be combined for fighting. The “Jiangxi Soviet Republic” becamethe vehicle for this effort from 1931, with Mao as head.

At this time the CCP sought peasant support by land redistribution,dispossessing big landlords if any and giving hope and opportunity tothe poor peasantry in particular. One of the many disputes between Maoand the twenty-eight Bolsheviks was over the treatment of rich peasants.Mao saw them as essential to the local economy and tried to reassurethem, but the Moscow-trained dogmatists saw them as a threat to theproletarian nature of the movement. Tony Saich comments that part ofMao’s effort was to supplant the patron–client relationships that hadfostered social stability (and of course problems) in the villages with anew social order based on close analysis as a preparation for class strug-gle. This was by no means easy to do.

Jiang Jieshi’s campaigns to exterminate the Communist “cancer” inJiangxi obliged the CCP to develop the principles of guerrilla warfare.The first principle was to draw the enemy in along his supply lines untilhis advance units could be surrounded and cut off. The second principlewas never to attack without superior numbers and assurance of success.Eastern Jiangxi with its rugged hills and narrow valleys was ideal forthese tactics. The further Jiang’s spearheads advanced, the more vulnera-ble they became. They were successful only in the fifth campaign in1934, when their German advisers helped devise a system of block-houses on the hillsides along the invasion routes so placed that gunfirefrom one could help defend the next. This string of strongpoints sup-plied by truck could not be dislodged, and Jiang’s armies eventually gotthe upper hand. This made the third principle of guerrilla warfare, that

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the peasantry be mobilized to provide intelligence as well as men andfood, finally ineffective.

The Long March, 1934–1935

In late 1934 the CCP took off on the Long March (see Map 22), whichbegan with perhaps 100,000 people and wound up a year later withsomething like four to eight thousand. The point of the Long March wasto find a new territorial base on the periphery of Nationalist power, notunlike the way in which the Manchus had been on the periphery of theMing empire. The CCP needed an area it could control and organize. IfYunnan province had been available it might have served, but the localwarlords in the provincial regimes had no desire to be taken over by theCCP. Instead, they were gradually taken over by Jiang Jieshi’s pursuingarmies in a clever strategy by which the pursuit of the CCP justifiedbringing central government troops into the outlying provinces.

The Long March has always seemed like a miracle, more docu-mented than Moses leading his Chosen People through the Red Sea. (Sixthousand miles in a year averages out at seventeen miles every singleday.) How did so many troops and party organizers go so far on foot sofast? The answer of course is that only the leaders and a very small pro-portion of the troops did go all the way.

We must visualize the terrain. Southwest China is a checkerboard oflarge and small basins within mountain ranges. The populous plains arewatered by streams from the inhospitable mountains. To cross South-west China the Long March had to get across rivers and through themountains while avoiding the plains and their few motor roads. Mostof the route was therefore up hill and down dale, seldom on the flat.Carrying-poles substituted for wheeled vehicles and two-man litters forrailroad berths. On the Long March the Red Army–CCP high commandrode much of the way asleep on two-man litters, as the column followedthe stone paths over hills and paddy fields. Usually the leaders had beenup most of the night handling the army’s intelligence, logistic, personnel,and strategic problems to prepare for the next day’s march or fighting.

The CCP leaders also preserved themselves by having orderlies,aides, and bodyguards as in conventional armies. Like the Americansagainst the Japanese, they had their secret intelligence sources. Theirradio receiver picked up the simply encoded Nationalist military traffic.They knew more about their enemies than their enemies knew aboutthem.

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22. The Long March

One major issue as the Long March progressed was where it shouldgo next and who should lead it. Before the march left Jiangxi, Mao hadbeen downgraded by the Soviet-trained faction of the twenty-eight Bol-sheviks and their German Communist military adviser sent by the Com-intern. The facile Zhou Enlai outranked Mao in the military command.But no one could break Jiang Jieshi’s stranglehold. The Comintern ide-ologists’ recourse to positional warfare led only to certain defeat. Theflight on the Long March suffered great early losses, especially at rivercrossings. Mao’s unorthodox faith in mobile warfare was finally ac-cepted. On the way west and northwest Mao regained the leadership ofthe CCP in early 1935 and thereafter never relinquished it. Zhou Enlai,his former superior, became his chief supporter from then on.

Marching speed was so crucial that the original many-mile-long bag-gage train with its thousands of porters carrying heavy equipment, files,supplies, and also convalescent medical cases, had to be discarded. Mili-tary personnel at the start were listed as 86,000. Those arriving a yearlater in Shaanxi were only a few thousand, even though many new re-cruits had joined the Red Army along the way. From then on LongMarch veterans were the aristocracy of the Revolution.

The Long March also helped the new Communist leader to emerge.Mao on the March was already distancing himself from his colleagues.Once he was the One Man at the top, he preferred to dwell in separatequarters away from the rest of the leadership. Like an emperor on themake, from then on he could have no equals or even confidants. He wasalready caught in the trammels that beset a unifier of China. If we maylook both forward and back for a moment, Mao Zedong’s rise to powerreminds us of the founding of the Han, the Tang, and the Ming. In eachcase a band of leaders took shape and worked together under one topleader. Once formed, this leadership mobilized the populace in their areato support a military effort and either overthrow tyrants or expel for-eigners from the land, in either case, a popular cause. No dynasticfounder could do the job alone. So once he was in power he had theproblem of dealing with his colleagues in the leadership.

The Role of Zhou Enlai

Another development on the Long March was that Mao found his clos-est working colleague and future prime minister in Zhou Enlai. An at-tractive figure of great talent, Zhou instinctively kept a middle position,trying to hold the organization together while at the same time having

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the good sense never to become a rival for the top post. His forty-eightyears on the CCP Politburo set a world record. Zhou thus became one ofthe great prime ministers of China, devoting himself to the service of theparty and its leader, just as earlier prime ministers had served the em-peror and the imperial house.

This role was part of Zhou’s inheritance. His family came from nearShaoxing in Zhejiang south of Shanghai between Ningbo and Hang-zhou, the remarkable center from which so many confidential advisersand secretaries had emerged to serve high officials in the Qing period.Three of Zhou’s uncles became provincial graduates under the old exam-ination system, and one became a governor. From the age of ten Zhouwent to elementary school in Mukden, Manchuria, and then in 1913 en-tered the Nankai Middle School at Tianjin, where he came under the in-fluence of that extraordinary liberal educator Dr. Zhang Boling. Zhouabsorbed a good deal of education, but he was from the first a studentleader. He spent 1917–1919 in Japan, where he became acquainted withsocialism. When the May Fourth Movement began, Zhou returned toNankai, which was now a university, and threw himself into editing astudent paper. From then on his life was essentially that of an organizerand propagandist, but he moved rapidly to the left, and his revolution-ary stance was confirmed by an experience of several months in jail. Inthe summer of 1920 he went to France.

Several hundred Chinese students were then in France, in addition tothe hundred thousand or so Chinese laborers brought to help the wareffort. Most of the students were on a work-and-study program, butmany devoted themselves primarily to the great question of the salvationof China. Zhou Enlai immediately rose to the top again as the mostimpressive, suave, and diplomatic young leader among them. His spe-cialty was not to be the top figure but to bring competing personalitiesinto working agreement. Thus from the very beginning his role was thatof a leader who kept the leadership together not by domination but bypersuasion. By the time he returned to Guangzhou in 1924 Zhou Enlaiwas a most accomplished practitioner of united-front revolutionary pol-itics.

In Guangzhou he joined the staff of the new Whampoa MilitaryAcademy and became vice director of the political training depart-ment—in other words, a leading commissar and at the same time a sub-ordinate and therefore student of young General Jiang. In March 1927he was in charge in Shanghai when the Communist-led revolt preparedthe way for the Nationalist Army, only to be turned upon by Jiang

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Jieshi’s split. Zhou was a leader again in the uprising at Nanchang in1927 which became the birthdate of the Red Army. Later he cooperatedwith the twenty-eight Bolsheviks and supported a succession of partysecretaries while avoiding the post himself. In Jiangxi he espoused posi-tional warfare until it brought disaster.

The secret of Zhou’s eventual success was that he had the wit to rec-ognize that Moscow’s doctrinaire approach to China was futile and thathe himself lacked the creative capacity to adjust CCP policy to Chineseconditions. Only because he knew his own limitations was he able, hav-ing been Mao’s superior, to become his subordinate at the climacticZunyi Conference early in 1935, when Mao began to take over the CCPleadership in the course of the Long March.

Zhou represented the continuity of a team. With him in France hadbeen Chen Yi and Nie Rongzhen, both of whom would become marshalsof the CCP forces. Later at Beijing, Chen would become foreign ministerand Nie would take charge of nuclear development. Deng Xiaoping hadrun the mimeograph machine for Zhou in Paris. The leadership that sur-vived the Long March was indeed closely knit.

Near the end of the Long March, Mao and his Red Army from theJiangxi base rendezvoused with another part of the Red Army, led by an-other of the founders of the CCP, Zhang Guotao, who had set up a basein the Dabie Mountains northeast of Wuhan but had moved it westwardto north Sichuan in 1933. When they met, Zhang’s troops greatly out-numbered Mao’s. Although they organized their armies in two majorgroups, Mao and his colleagues from Jiangxi, as Benjamin Yang (1990)shows in detail, could not accept Zhang’s rather vague plans and claimto leadership. Learning suddenly that a small CCP army from the DabieMountains had set up a base in northern Shaanxi not far from the GreatWall, Mao and his Jiangxi men decided to make it their goal. ZhangGuotao broke away and later went over to the GMD.

Once arrived in Shaanxi province in the northwest in late 1935, theCCP had little beyond them but desert on the west and the Yellow Riveron the north and east. Shaanxi had been carved up over the eons by theerosion of the loess plateau. The lack of motor roads made it a defensi-ble area, but it was short of food supply and population, and the Na-tionalist suppression campaign might have wiped it out had it not beenfor the Japanese invasion of 1937. In preparation for resistance, thetroops of the northeast (Manchuria), stationed at Xi’an to fight theCommunists, preferred to fight the Japanese invaders of their homeland.In December of 1936 the northeasterners rebelled and captured Jiang

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Jieshi. Before releasing him, they pushed the idea of a Chinese unitedfront instead of Chinese fighting Chinese.

The Second United Front

In 1928 the CCP had reached a low point when its Sixth Congress had tobe held in Moscow. While the Comintern directed its destiny for a timethereafter, by 1935 the Russian-trained element was beginning to be su-perseded by Mao’s followers, less because of any conspiracy than be-cause Mao had discovered the key to power in the Chinese countryside.This lay in his feeling for the mentality, needs, and interests of the com-mon people. The “mass line” which he advocated was genuinely con-cerned to have the revolution guided and supported by the common peo-ple. Imported doctrines must be secondary. The people must be carefullylistened to, the better to recruit, mobilize, and control them.

A comparable bankruptcy of the Comintern directives had occurredin the white areas under GMD control. Repeated attempts to organizelabor unions as an urban proletariat and use strikes to get control of cit-ies never got off the ground. The chief organizer who emerged was an-other man who knew how to pursue what was possible. Liu Shaoqiheaded the Communist effort in the North China cities, where he en-couraged the left-wing literary movement, the use of the arts, and therecruitment of students. By dropping Comintern doctrines about prole-tarian revolution, Liu achieved a parallel indigenization of the CCPmethods.

By the time Liu joined Mao at Yan’an in 1937, the second unitedfront had already taken shape. A united front of all Chinese against Ja-pan became the Moscow line in the summer of 1935 in order to combatthe rise of fascism in Europe and Japanese aggression in the East. Mao,however, came out for a united front in China against the Japanese butexcluding Jiang Jieshi. The key point was that the national revolution tosave China from Japan now took precedence over the social revolutionon the land, but Mao would not give up the latter to concentrate on theformer. Instead, he urged a two-front effort to combat both the Japaneseand Jiang Jieshi by developing Soviet bases in a war of resistance. Toprove its sincerity, the CCP from Yan’an launched an eastern expeditioninto Shanxi province in order to get at the Japanese farther east. Just atthis time in the spring of 1936 a Comintern directive ordered Mao tojoin a united front with Jiang. Zhou Enlai went to Shanghai to negotiatethe terms.

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When the GMD and the CCP finally agreed on a united front alli-ance in April 1937, Mao began to win out against the remaining twenty-eight Bolsheviks in the CCP. Far from combining with the GMD, Maoplanned to carry on the social revolution in Soviet areas as a basis forfighting Japan on the nation’s behalf. If this strategy worked, the sepa-rate armed forces of the CCP would develop their own bases and popu-lar support while also riding the wave of national resistance to the in-vader. The basis for Mao’s national communism was already at hand.

The force of Chinese nationalism had been mobilized in the early1920s with the help of Soviet advisers in two competing party dictator-ships. However, the senior of these, the GMD, had already become thehope and path of advancement for the urban Sino-liberal professionalswho had a Western returned-student or Christian-college background.Thus Nationalist China faced two ways, toward the reformist West inthe cities and toward conservatism on the land. Both philosophies mightbe present in the same family.

Without the devastating Japanese invasion, the Nanjing governmentmight gradually have led the way in China’s modernization. As it turnedout, however, resisting Japan gave Mao and the CCP their chance to es-tablish a new autocratic power in the countryside, excluding the ele-ments of a nascent urban civil society that were still developing under theNationalists. In conditions of wartime, the CCP was building a new typeof Chinese state geared for class warfare. In the twentieth century, Chi-nese revolutionaries were thus preparing to assault and reorder a classstructure that went back at least 3,000 years.

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16China’s War of Resistance

1937–1945

Nationalist Difficulties

Militarist Japan’s attempt to conquer China began by seizing Manchuriain 1931 and became a full-fledged invasion from 1937 to 1945 (see Map23). Japanese historians saw Japan following in the footsteps of theManchu conquerors of 1644, while Tokyo’s modernizers saw Japanshepherding the Chinese people into the modern world. But times hadchanged. Japan’s aggression only strengthened China’s new nationalism.

During the eight years of war, a major part of the Chinese peoplewere in Japanese-occupied territory, mainly the coastal cities and railwaytowns. Another major segment were in the GMD-controlled area, calledFree China. The smallest division of China was the CCP area, with itscapital at Yan’an. Historians are genetic-minded, looking for origins,and China’s future came out of Yan’an. Accordingly, the defeat of theJapanese and then of the Nationalists has been less researched than therise of the CCP. Success is creative and interesting, failure sad and dull.Who wants it? Moreover, Yan’an being smaller, in size and documenta-tion, is easier to encompass than the vastly variegated experience of Oc-cupied China and Free China. These two areas, though larger than thearea under Yan’an, have been less studied.

While the GMD and the CCP were both party dictatorships in form,they were very different political creatures in fact. The GMD had two in-carnations, first in the associates of Sun Yatsen in the 1911 revolution,second in the followers of Jiang Jieshi in the Nanjing government after1927. The GMD’s forced removal in 1938 from Nanjing to Wuhan andthen beyond the Yangzi gorges to Chongqing cut it off from its roots. Itsrevenues from the Maritime Customs and the opium trade to Shanghai

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were knocked out. Its hard-won echelon of modern-trained administra-tors became refugees. From being the central government of China, theNationalist regime was now a fugitive in a mountain-ringed redoubt,obliged to work with reactionary provincial militarists and landlords. InWest China the Chongqing government tried to keep the local warlordsin line and avoid upsetting the social order in the villages.

China’s nascent Sino-liberal educational system suffered a grievousdestruction of plant and facilities. Missionary colleges kept at work un-der the Japanese occupation but in purely Chinese universities many stu-dents and faculties migrated in 1937–1938 up the Yangzi or to thesouthwest. The Southwest Associated University at Kunming was set upby Qinghua (Tsing Hua) University and Beijing University from Beijingand Nankai University from Tianjin. Meanwhile, Yanjing University andother Christian institutions, after the Japanese attacked the United Statesin December 1941, gathered at the site of the West China Union Univer-sity in Chengdu. Whole industrial plants were dismantled and shippedupriver, where the National Resources Commission had already been de-veloping mines and industries. Intellectuals and government administra-tors, with great patriotism, put up with displacement from their homesand learned to live primitively in the interior. Unfortunately, althoughthey were the main body of modern China’s professional people, theirhopes went unrewarded. This was due partly to the ineptitude of theirgovernment.

With admirable fortitude but little foresight, the Nationalist regimemet its problem by short-term expedients that gave it little strength forthe future. The Chongqing government got control of the land tax ingrain as the wherewithal to feed its administration. Its industrial devel-opers had arsenals at work to support the war. The spirit of resistancewas stimulated by the Japanese bombing of Chongqing, but mean-while the spirit of the united front deteriorated. Radical intellectuals inChongqing began to drift northward to Communist Yan’an, except forthose who were already “outside cadres” of the CCP assigned to work asostensible liberals in the GMD area. The secret police of both the partyand the government felt more and more compelled to keep the liberals inline as potential subversives. Strong-arm methods against students, pub-lishers, and other seeming enemies steadily widened the split between theintellectuals and the government that hoped to rely upon them for thefuture.

Jiang Jieshi’s regime was as unimaginatively conservative in Chong-

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qing as in Nanjing. The peasantry were conscripted and taxed but other-wise left alone. Literacy was not especially promoted, nor did public-health services reach many villages. The ruling-class stratum of the oldChina continued to be quite distinct from the masses in the countryside.Sichuan province, except for the irrigated rice bowl around the capital atChengdu, consisted largely of jagged mountains and swift rivers underan unpleasantly humid climate, chilly in the winters and oppressive inthe heat of summer. To the ramshackle lack of the amenities of modernlife was added the all-pervasive fact of inflation. Instead of learning tolive off the countryside as the CCP had to do, the GMD lived off theprinting press. Inflation steadily undermined the morale of the upperclass.

The Nationalist Government during World War II displayed all itsearlier weaknesses. Local warlord power-holders in Sichuan, Yunnan,and Guangxi made Chongqing’s extension of local control very difficult.The governor of Yunnan, where Kunming had become the airbase door-way to Free China, was able to keep Jiang Jieshi’s secret police andtroops largely out of his province until the end of the war in 1945. Na-tionalist police were unable to suppress the student and faculty move-ment for a coalition government and against civil war at the SouthwestAssociated University in Kunming until the end of 1945.

The Nationalists fared little better in dealing with the farming popu-lation. Although inflation at first helped agricultural producers by rais-ing the prices of their crops, this was soon offset by a heavy increase intaxation—a flagrant proliferation of hundreds of kinds of small taxes orfees, mainly instituted by the local government heads to finance their ad-ministration and private needs. As Lloyd Eastman (1984) recounts,“There were, for example, a ‘contribute-straw-sandals-to-recruits’ tax,a ‘comfort-recruits-families’ tax, a ‘train-antiaircraft-cadres’ tax, and a‘provide-fuel-for-garrisoned-troops’ tax.”

To these burdens were added the Nationalist conscription of menand grain. Corvée labor was considered at the beck and call of the army,while the central government also authorized army commanders to liveoff the countryside by enforcing grain requisitions. When famine hit theprovince of Henan in 1942–1943 it meant starvation either for thetroops or for the people. The requisitions continued unabated, and thetroops were soon being attacked by starving peasants. Famine led tohoarding supplies for profit and an immense growth of corruption. Theunfortunate result was that the government received little more in the

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23. The Japanese Invasion of China

way of resources while the petty officials and landlords found out how toprofit in the inflation. By the war’s end, peasant rebellions were incipientin several provinces of Free China.

Meanwhile, both the Nationalist Government at Chongqing and theCCP at Yan’an fought a two-front war, against Japan and against eachother. The war against Japan that had begun outside Beijing on July 7,1937, led to the announcement in August and September of a united-front agreement between the CCP and the GMD. The CCP agreed tostop its armed revolution to change Chinese society and gave up the forc-ible confiscation of landlords’ land, while its Red Army would be placedunder central government command. On its part, the GMD would letthe CCP establish liaison offices in several cities, publish its New ChinaDaily in Chongqing, and be represented in GMD advisory bodies. Fromthis time on, the form of the united front was maintained. The Red Armywas now called the Eighth Route Army, and Zhou Enlai resided inChongqing to represent it. Having spent 1938 at the transitional capitalin Wuhan, he was already the CCP’s foreign minister and representativeto the world press.

The terms of the united-front agreement remained on paper unchal-lenged, but in fact developments undid it. Yan’an refused to have Na-tionalist staff officers in its area. In effect, the Eighth Route Army contin-ued to be an independent force in spite of a small subsidy from theNationalists. Meanwhile, the CCP in building up its base areas main-tained order, encouraged economic production through devices such asmutual-aid teams, and kept on recruiting poor peasant activists, whowould eventually get the upper hand over the rich peasants. Party mem-bership grew from some 40,000 claimed in 1937 to an alleged 1,200,000in 1945, while the armed forces increased from 92,000 in 1937 to per-haps 910,000 in 1945.

Mao’s Sinification of Marxism

To control and direct the widespread organization of the CCP move-ment over the broad stretches of North China required dedicated anddisciplined party members, experienced cadres (activists) in the villages,an attempt at self-sufficiency in each base, and the use of radio telegra-phy to transmit messages. The principle of centralized control over adecentralized situation was exhibited in the government organization.The Central Committee of the party had its departments at Yan’an deal-ing with military affairs, organization, united-front work, enemy-

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occupied areas, labor, women, and the like, a total of twelve categories.Meantime, the territorial organization was divided among half a dozenregional bureaus, such as North China, Northwest China, the CentralPlain. Within these regional bureaus were staff sections correspondingto those under the Central Committee at Yan’an. The principle of “in-tegration” (yiyuanhua) meant that all directives from the capital atYan’an to the specialized staff sections of the regional bureaus must gothrough or at least be fully known to the branch bureau chief, as thelocal coordinator.

Yan’an in World War II became to a few foreign observers a never-never-land full of sunshine and bonhomie. The revolutionary enthusiasmwas infectious, as Edgar Snow and other journalists reported to theworld. The homespun democracy apparent among the CCP leaders wasa startling contrast to Chongqing. American aid never really got toYan’an, and the superficiality of contact allowed the cultivation of a my-thology that captivated liberals abroad.

The secret of Mao’s success at Yan’an was his flexibility at combin-ing short-term and long-term goals. In the short term he espoused in1940 the New Democracy as a united-front doctrine that would em-brace all the Chinese people who would subscribe to CCP leadership.For the long term, he steadily developed the party organization, includ-ing its control over intellectuals. The Yan’an rectification movement of1942–1944 (more fully described below) established the campaign styleof mobilization, including individual isolation, terror, struggle, confes-sion, humiliation, and subservience. Party members would come toknow it well and, in time, so would the public. It was one of Mao’sachievements, with roots both in Leninism–Stalinism and in ImperialConfucianism.

Meantime, the real sinews of power grew up in the CCP mobiliza-tion of the peasantry in North China. The Japanese were excellent tar-gets to mobilize against. Invading China along the rail lines, they tried toseal off the areas in between, but their rail-line blockhouses could notcontrol trade and contact across the lines. In general their invasion culti-vated the ground for the CCP mobilization. Whether the CCP success inthis situation was due to a simple nationalism or to CCP doctrine is es-sentially a nonquestion because the CCP already represented nationalcommunism, not the Comintern, while CCP doctrines grew out of prac-tice in the villages and also enlisted intellectuals in a grand scheme ofworld salvation.

In the governments of the Border Region and Liberated Areas that

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the CCP developed in different parts of North China, the first principlewas party control based on indoctrination of cadres and enforcement ofdiscipline. The indoctrination had to combine Mao’s long-term princi-ples with his tactical flexibility, for the CCP-organized regimes operatedat great distances from Yan’an and very much on their own except forunreliable radio communication.

The second principle was to find out what the peasants wanted andgive it to them: first of all, local peace and order; second, an army offriendly troops who helped in peasant life, harvesting crops when neces-sary and fraternizing with the villagers; third, a recruitment of local ac-tivists who might very well be found at the upper level of the poor peas-antry, people of ability who felt frustrated by circumstance; fourth, aprogram for economic betterment partly through improved crops butmainly through agricultural cooperation in the form of mutual aid, orga-nized transport, and production of consumer goods in cooperatives.

As these efforts went forward, they became the basis for a third prin-ciple: class struggle. This had to be approached in a gingerly fashionbecause North China landlords were hardly more than rich peasants butmight be able to field their own local forces drawn from secret societiesand mercenaries. In the early years the GMD also had its forces in partsof North China and so provided an alternative focus of allegiance. TheCCP dealt with this by setting up the rather persuasive three thirds sys-tem: the Communists would control only one third of the small con-gresses that sanctioned local government, leaving the other two thirdsto the GMD and independents. On this basis, of course, the CCP’s su-perior discipline and dedication let them become leaders on their merits.As their good repute became justified in popular esteem, they could be-gin to prepare for land reform in addition to economic production pro-grams.

Land reform could be pursued only after three ingredients were pres-ent: military control, economic improvement, and recruitment of villageactivists. In the process itself the trick was to mobilize opinion againstlandlord despots, such as they were, and—by denouncing or liquidatingthem—commit the villagers to a revolutionary course. All land-holdingswere evaluated and redistributed on a more equal basis according to cat-egories that gave each individual his status as a rich, middle, or poorpeasant or landless laborer. If this redistribution could be made to stick,village activists could begin to be indoctrinated in the ethos of the party’sleadership. The message was simply that the people could make a betterfuture for themselves if they would organize their efforts in a new unity.

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The leadership of this new unity could be found in the CCP. While the in-dividual could achieve nothing alone, he could contribute by sacrificinghis individual interests to that of the common cause. The principle ofdemocratic centralism was then extolled as a means whereby all couldhave their say and make their input, but once a party decision had beenmade, all would obey it. This would never have gone down in a NewEngland town meeting, but in a North China village, where the alterna-tive was government by landlords and officials from outside the region,it was properly persuasive.

In short, the idea of the “mass line” was here adumbrated: the partymust go among the people to discover their grievances and needs, whichcould then be formulated by the party and explained to the masses astheir own best interest. This from-the-masses to-the-masses concept wasindeed a sort of democracy suited to Chinese tradition, where the upper-class official had governed best when he had the true interests of the localpeople at heart and so governed on their behalf.

In this way the war of resistance against Japan provided the sanctionfor a CCP mobilization of the Chinese masses in the countryside; andthis, once achieved, gave a new power to the CCP based not on the citiesbut on the villages. CCP expansion and base-building across NorthChina and even in the Yangzi region reached a new high point in 1940.

The Japanese had been extending their control by setting up block-houses every one to three miles along the rail lines. They then sent col-umns out from these strongpoints to invade the villages. But the Japa-nese, like the Americans in Vietnam or the Russians later in Afghanistan,faced the problem of how to get control of an alien population in thecountryside where they lived, partly by the use of puppet troops andpartly by their own superior firepower. The Japanese could not be de-feated in normal positional warfare but only by the attrition of their re-sources through guerrilla warfare. To counter this the Japanese spreadtheir network of strongpoints and blockade lines in the effort to starvethe guerrillas by cutting off supplies.

In response to this Japanese pressure, the top commander at the CCPmilitary headquarters, Peng Dehuai, prepared a widespread attackknown as the Hundred Regiments Offensive that began in August 1940.Japanese rail lines were cut repeatedly all over North China and block-houses destroyed. It was the primary CCP offensive of the entire war,planned by General Peng, possibly without much knowledge of it inYan’an. After several weeks this offensive was obviously a great victoryfor the CCP, but then the Japanese retaliated in force and with ven-

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geance. Bringing in more troops, they mounted a “three-all” campaign:“kill all, burn all, loot all.” They stopped trying to discriminate betweenthe ordinary peasantry and the Eighth Route Army but simply destroyedeverything they could reach. Villages, once destroyed, were garrisoned.The number of blockhouses grew to thousands. The result of this rageand destruction was to break up the CCP position across North China,isolate many sectors, and take over control of most of the county seatsthat the CCP had acquired. It was a first-rate disaster, and the CCP didnot launch another such offensive.

Meanwhile, the Communist expansion in the Yangzi region, particu-larly through the New Fourth Army, also aroused retaliation from Na-tionalist forces. Negotiations led to the withdrawal of most of the NewFourth Army from south to north of the Yangzi, but in January 1941 theheadquarters unit of several thousand CCP troops was ambushed by theNationalists and practically destroyed in what was known as the “NewFourth Army incident.” While neither party acknowledged the end ofthe united front, because it was advantageous to both of them in form, itnevertheless had become a fact.

These reverses left Yan’an facing a severe crisis. The GMD and Japa-nese blockades had cut off nearly all trade, inflation was rising rapidly,and the whole regime had to pull back to survive. While Yan’an had gotalong with very modest taxation of the peasant grain crop, by 1941 badweather created shortages and the government began to demand some10 percent of the grain produced. Confiscations from landlords haddried up. The only way out was to go for self-sufficiency, such as by localproduction of consumer goods like cotton cloth. Cultivated land and ir-rigation were greatly increased, the grain yield went up, and livestockwere also increased. In short, the economic crisis was met by a great ef-fort to raise production by all possible means.

Parallel with this economic recovery, the early 1940s at Yan’an sawMao Zedong finally establish his ascendancy over the CCP. Mao’s read-ing of Marxist works had not been extensive until he had some leisuretime at Yan’an after 1936. Soon he was giving lectures on dialecticalmaterialism and producing his essays “On Practice” and “On Contra-diction.” Because he had not yet eliminated the twenty-eight Bolsheviks,his lecturing was designed to show his capacity for intellectual leader-ship, even though the lectures were rather crude. Nevertheless, Maoshowed his originality by his stress on contradictions, which was positedon the “unity of opposites,” an idea with a long Chinese history be-hind it.

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His philosophical aim at Yan’an was not merely to establish a nation-alistic party concerned for the Chinese nation but also to adapt Marxismto Chinese uses. The political imperative was that the party had toachieve disciplined organization, marked by acceptance of the party line,so that party members could be counted on to operate at a distance inconformity with directives. The GMD had suffered from intense faction-alism. The CCP at Yan’an as a smaller organization moved to eradicateit with some success.

Consensus among party activists depended on their being intellectu-ally convinced of the wisdom of the CCP line. The line must invoke theo-retical principles to sanction practical action. This was achieved by thegradual creation of the body of ideas popularly known in the West asMaoism but in Chinese more modestly called Mao Zedong Thought. Itrepresented the sinification of Marxism–Leninism, the application of itsuniversal principles to the specific conditions of China. How Mao builtit up, piece by piece, is therefore an interesting question worth our paus-ing to examine.

Mao Zedong Thought

Both Buddhism and Christianity when they came into China had faced aproblem of terminology, how to pick Chinese characters that would ex-press the new concepts but keep them distinct from old established Chi-nese concepts expressed in the same characters. Japanese socialists hadpioneered in this effort. Long before Mao, the Chinese adaptation ofMarxism had begun at the level of translation of key terms. Marx’s“proletariat,” the key actor in his cosmic drama, was certainly associ-ated in Western thinking with urban life, specifically early nineteenth-century factory workers in the often unspeakable conditions of WesternEuropean industrialization. The translation into Chinese, however, pro-duced the term wuchan jieji, meaning “propertyless class,” in otherwords, the very poor who might be either in the city or the countryside,and of course in China were mainly in the countryside. In effect, the Eu-ropean “proletariat” were automatically to be found in China in thepoor “peasantry” among the farmers and landless laborers. Grantedthat Marxist terminology was used by Chinese Marxists in terms conso-nant with those of Moscow Marxists, there was nevertheless a subtle dif-ference when they spread their doctrine to the Chinese students andcommon people.

The Chinese term used for “feudal,” fengjian, had referred in classic

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Chinese thinking to the fragmentation of sovereignty in the period ofWarring States before the Qin unification in 221 bc. It meant simplydecentralized administration, without reference to the land system or thestatus of the cultivators. However, if feudalism was to be identified inChina with landowner exploitation, as Communists wished to do, thenfeudalism had gone on in China a couple of thousand years. Thus theperiods that Marx defined for European history could not be easily ap-plied to China. If all of Chinese history for 2,000 years after 221 bc hadbeen “feudal,” the term lost meaning or was humiliating. “Proletariat”and “feudal” were only two of the key terms of Marxism, and theyobviously did not fit the Chinese scene without really being bent out ofshape.

Quite aside from this terminological problem in sinification, the eco-nomic foundation of Chinese life, being mainly in the countryside, gavethe Chinese revolution necessarily a rural character more pronouncedthan that in the Soviet Union. The peasantry had to be the chief revolu-tionists. The final factor making for sinification was the overriding senti-ment of Chinese nationalism based on cultural and historical pride,which meant China could not be the tail of someone else’s dog. In effect,the Chinese people could accept only a Chinese Marxism.

In time Chinese historical consciousness would undermine the veri-similitude of Marxism in China. But for Mao’s purposes it could be as-serted that the domination of the landlord class (“feudalism”) wasbacked by the “imperialist” exploiters from abroad, while the rise of aChinese merchant class centered in towns produced a capitalist “na-tional bourgeoisie.” Only its “comprador” wing sold out to the “imperi-alist” exploiters, and the situation might be cured by an establishment ofcentral state authority to complete the tasks of the “bourgeois-demo-cratic revolution.” Later the revolution would reach the final stage of so-cialism. In other words, there was enough fit to enable Marxism to geton with the job of revolution by propagating its new world-historical be-lief system.

Yet sinification was still a two-front enterprise because the CCP hadto maintain its credentials as part of international Marxism–Leninismby using orthodox European lingo. Thus, early on the GMD at Guang-zhou could not be defined as representing simply a bourgeois class tryingto carry through its phase of bourgeois democratic revolution. No, theGMD government, instead of representing the bourgeois capitalist class,had been a multiclass government or “bloc of four classes,” in which theproletariat (CCP) could participate. Mao later argued that “the Chinese

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bourgeoisie and proletariat are new-born and never existed before inChinese history . . . they are twins born of China’s old (feudal) society atonce linked to each other and antagonistic to each other.” On this basisit was appropriate for the proletariat to lead the bourgeois democraticrevolution, a theory which justified the CCP in struggling for power. InChina this made sense, whether or not it would in Europe.

For example, in developing his idea of New Democracy in China,Mao began with the Marxist assumption of a bourgeois democratic rev-olution as the transition from feudalism to capitalism, which would befollowed by another revolution as the transition from capitalism to so-cialism. In Europe the bourgeois democratic revolution was typified bythe French Revolution of the 1790s, while the socialist revolution wasgenerally felt to have succeeded only in Russia in 1917. In other wordsthe crowded history of the nineteenth century had represented a bour-geois democratic phase of social development. What was the equivalentin China?

Chinese Marxists could only conclude that the bourgeois democraticrevolution had been ushered in by the May Fourth Movement in 1919,which could be characterized by Leninists as an achievement of nationalcapitalism. Since the socialist revolution would be achieved by the CCPat some future time, this application of Marxism–Leninism to China re-sulted in China’s having had 2,000 years of feudalism and only 40 yearsof capitalism. By European Marxist standards, China was peculiarly outof shape.

The Rectification Campaign of 1942–1944

Now that he was in power, Mao pushed not only to consolidate his posi-tion but to unify the party and to ensure discipline. The rectificationcampaign of 1942–1944 was limited to party members, who had in-creased in number and lacked the cohesion of the Long March genera-tion. The targets of the campaign were “subjectivism, sectarianism, andparty formalism.” “Subjectivism” targeted dogmatists who could notcombine theory with practice. “Sectarianism” referred to the recent fac-tionalism and the inevitable cleavages between soldiers and civilians,party and nonparty, old and new party members, and so on. “Partyformalism” meant the use of jargon instead of practical problem-solving. Other evils were those of creeping bureaucratism and routin-ization of administration. These could be combatted partly by decen-tralization—transferring officials down to work in villages closer to

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practical problems. Also attacked was the individualism of the many in-tellectuals who had come to Yan’an from the coastal cities.

One principal factor made for friction in the CCP’s relationship withintellectuals. Whereas scholars under the imperial order had been ori-ented toward public service, the writers of the twentieth-century revolu-tion had focused on evils and misdemeanors of government because theyhad grown up as a class divorced from office-holding. The traditional li-terati, in short, had now been split into two groups, those in public ser-vice and those in public criticism. The modern intellectuals were in thetradition of remonstrance, pointing out the inadequacies of the authori-ties. Since that great critic of the GMD, Lu Xun, had died in 1936, hisname could be safely invoked as that of a paragon.

In Yan’an in the early 1940s the control of literature by the new stateauthority of the CCP became a central issue. Sino-liberal patriots of allsorts had joined the revolution, and their commitment to attack the im-perfections of the GMD naturally led them on to criticize the emergingimperfections of the CCP. Lu Xun’s closest followers had continuedunder the CCP to voice their criticisms. When Mao Zedong gave his twolectures on literature and art at Yan’an early in 1942, he laid down thelaw that literature should serve the state, in this case the cause of CCP-led revolution. It should therefore be upbeat in the style of socialist re-alism from the Soviet Union and avoid the kind of revelation of evilsand inadequacies that had been a Communist specialty in the GMDperiod.

The methods whereby Mao’s thought-reform movement was carriedout at Yan’an in 1942–1944 would become very familiar in CCP historyfrom then on. The individual whose thoughts were to be reformed wasfirst investigated and persuaded to describe himself and his life experi-ence to the point where the group could begin to criticize him. In study-group criticism the individual was at once isolated and subjected to therebukes or admonishments of everyone else. This shook his self-con-fidence. As a next step, in public struggle meetings the individual waspublicly accused and humiliated before a large and usually jeering audi-ence representing the community. At this point another factor operated,namely, the dependence of the Chinese individual upon group esteem aswell as the approval of authority.

As the pressure increased and the individual found no escape fromthe denigration of his old self, he was led into writing confessions toanalyze his evil conduct and his desire to change. Pressure was increasedif he was then isolated in jail—subjected to solitary confinement or

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placed in a cell with others and obliged to wear paper handcuffs, whichhe could not break without dire consequences. The consequent oblitera-tion of his personality thus prepared him for the final stage of rebirth andreconciliation. When his confession was finally accepted and the partywelcomed him back into the fold, he might experience a tremendous ela-tion and willingness to accept the party’s guidance. Whether this psycho-logical experience did change personalities is less certain than the factthat it was a highly unpleasant experience to be avoided in the future.One way or the other, the result was conformity to the party line.

Lest we begin to believe in total power and total subjection, we mustgive due weight to the vigor of Chinese personalities. Those who stoodforth as critics were frequently obdurate and essentially uncompromis-ing individuals who felt duty-bound to stick to their principles and criti-cize evils. The widespread use of thought reform by the CCP thus shouldnot necessarily be taken to mean that Chinese intellectuals were naturalslaves. On the contrary, their independence of judgment was hard for theparty to overcome.

Mao’s sinification of Marxism may fruitfully be compared with thefailure of Taiping Christianity. In the 1850s Hong’s claim to be the youn-ger brother of Jesus soon made him anathema to the foreign source of hisvision, the Western missionaries, whom he did not even deal with in hisprofound arrogance. In short order he made himself both a Christianheretic and within China a foreign subversive, achieving the worst ofboth worlds. By contrast, Mao, though eventually anathematized byMoscow, succeeded for some time in cooperating with the Comintern,and when he sinified his Marxism, he masked it in a coating of orthodoxterminology. Both Hong and Mao started out with only a rudimentarygrasp of the foreign doctrine, and both broke free of the domination offoreigners—Hong of the missionaries, Mao of the Comintern. But ofcourse the differences between them far outweigh such similarities.

In 1943 Mao put forward his doctrine of the “mass line.” Like manyof Mao’s intellectual formulations, this was double-ended and ambigu-ous so that it could be applied in either of two ways. While it assertedthe need of consulting the masses and having a mass participation ofsome sort in the government, it also reaffirmed the necessity for centralcontrol and leadership. At any given time either one could be given thegreater emphasis, just as New Democracy had provided a theoreticalbasis for joining with the GMD in a second united front or opposing theGMD as reactionary. Again, one’s class status might be defined by ref-erence to one’s parents and economic livelihood or it could be defined

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by one’s ideas and aspirations. Similarly, the people were enshrined asthe final arbiters and beneficiaries of the revolution, but some personscould be labeled as enemies of the people. This could be done by admin-istrative fiat from above.

It was typical of this line of development that Mao should define con-tradictions as being some of them antagonistic and some of them non-antagonistic, that is, arguable. Thus some contradictions made you anenemy of the people and some did not, depending on how you were per-ceived. All in all, it was a very flexible structure of ideas, as though Marxand Engels had been seduced by Yin and Yang. Once Mao had controlover it, he was truly in a position of leadership. Unity resulted becausethose who held out against Mao were vilified, penalized, jailed, or evenexecuted.

American Support of Coalition Government

In 1943 the Soviets successfully defended Stalingrad, the Western Allieswon North Africa, the U.S. Navy began to get the upper hand in thePacific, and American forces had invaded the Solomon Islands on theirway to Tokyo. The Japanese had to relax their pressure on the NorthChina Liberated Areas and Border Region. For the Communists the warbegan to wind down when the long-planned Japanese Ichigo offensive in1944 rolled down from Henan to the south of the Yangzi, destroyingmuch of the Nationalists’ best armies.

In these circumstances CCP expansion was resumed in the period1943–1945, but its policy was prudent and avoided haste and superfi-ciality. By the time the American Army military observer group, or so-called Dixie Mission, reached Yan’an in mid-1944, the CCP was on anupswing again and preparing for the postwar showdown with the GMD.This resurgent spirit was indicated in the important Seventh Congress ofthe Chinese Communist Party held in Yan’an from late April to mid-June1945. It adopted a new constitution, which gave Mao more centralpower as chairman of the Central Committee and Political Bureau. “TheThought of Mao Zedong” was hailed as the party’s guide.

By this time the United States had willy-nilly become an importantfactor in Chinese politics. To distant outsiders like the Americans, FreeChina represented an outpost of modern civilization struggling to sur-vive in a sea of antique customs and evil forces. There was no longeranything revolutionary about it, but the Americans found this encour-aging and after 1941 adopted Free China as an ally. American ignorance

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and sentimentality reached the point where President Roosevelt picturedthe Nationalist Government moving into the East Asian power vacuumthat would be created by the fall of Japan. A clandestine air force re-cruited from the American military services as mercenaries on leavecame to the rescue of Chongqing even before Pearl Harbor. These FlyingTigers, under a retired American airman, Claire Chennault, soon becamethe 14th Air Force, harassing Japanese communication lines from itsbase in Kunming. The American China missionary movement got be-hind United China Relief. American sympathy and largesse had a newlease on life, and General Joseph Stilwell, commander of the China-Burma-India theater of operations, proved that Chinese conscripts, iftaken to India and properly fed and trained, could make first-class fight-ing men.

As Jiang Jieshi had depended in the clinch on the Shanghai under-world, so now he began to depend on the Christian impulses and logisticsupply of the Americans. Considering that the Hump airlift in the China-Burma-India Theater was the absolute end of the line in American strate-gic considerations and supply, this did not put the Nationalists in astrong position. By the time the U.S. Army got an observer mission intoYan’an in 1944, it was too late to use the Washington–Chongqing alli-ance to prepare the way for a Nationalist victory in the obviously com-ing civil war.

Nevertheless, the Americans tried. The United States Navy, in its ef-fort to keep up with the Army, sent a mission in 1942 to work with theChinese secret police and get in on the ground floor of the anti-Commu-nist crusade. But General Stilwell could not get the Nationalist forcestrained, supplied, and led to fight the Japanese effectively. The Americanidea of using Free China as a base for the struggle against Japan ab-sorbed the Americans’ attention but at the same time distracted themfrom the Chinese Revolution. Like the Soviet program in the 1920s, theAmerican aid program to China led into ultimate disaster. For foreignersto work with the Chinese Revolution has never been easy.

The American involvement was flawed by serious anachronism. Ev-ery American who had seen warlord China and supported a Christiancollege had placed hope in the Nanjing government as a representative ofAmerican ideals. Unity versus warlordism and China’s equality amongnations were appealing motifs. The later generation who saw the risingpower of the Communists up close were only a small group and had no-where near the influence in the United States that had been exerted overgenerations by American missionaries.

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These factors produced mixed counsels in the formation of Ameri-can policy. The foreign service officers and commanders like GeneralStilwell who were on the spot saw the admirable determination andstrength of the Communist movement. In the United States the home-side China constituency, captained by Henry Luce, the China-born pub-lisher of Time and Life, generally retained their image of an earlier daywhen the Nanjing government had seemed the last word in Chineseprogress.

With the end of the united front in 1941, American observers couldsee the split widening between the GMD and the CCP party dictator-ships. State Department policy, however, was a small drop in the bucketcompared with the general American war effort, the logistics of trans-port over the Hump, the modern training and supply of Chinese troopsthat Stilwell effected, and his dealing with Jiang Jieshi as a stiff-neckedclient who felt he was getting the short end of wartime supplies. NoAmericans in Washington really knew much about the North ChinaCommunist area, while they were diplomatically as well as legally com-pelled to support the Nationalist regime as our ally.

Meanwhile, observers on the spot under the American embassy andmilitary headquarters foresaw a post-World War II civil war in China,which held the danger of Soviet takeover of North China. The extent ofMao’s sinification of Marxism or creation of a national communismcould not be adequately appreciated by outsiders, who did not know thegruesome details of Mao’s relations with Stalin. It therefore becameAmerican policy to head off a civil war, and the device thought of was“coalition government.” This in effect would be an extension of theunited front in its ideal and unrealized form, a combination of the armedforces and representation of both parties in a national assembly. Perceiv-ing this American hope, both of the Chinese parties ostensibly adopted“coalition government” as a postwar aim while privately preparing tofight it out.

The abject unrealism of the American policy was well illustrated byPresident Roosevelt’s special emissary, General Patrick J. Hurley fromOklahoma, a flamboyant and simple-minded American, Reaganesqueahead of his time. His clumsy efforts at heading off the civil war by medi-ation were followed by Jiang Jieshi’s taking him over. Hurley counteredthe entire embassy staff by plumping for American support of Jiangcome what may. By the time it came, of course, Hurley was out of thepicture, but his policy was still followed in Washington and led to theAmericans’ being quite properly put out of China.

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After Japan’s surrender in August 1945, Jiang and Mao under Hur-ley’s auspices met in Chongqing and in October agreed upon an ideal setof principles that would gladden any liberal in the world. The GMD andCCP regimes would cooperate in a representative assembly, scramblingtheir armies and meanwhile guaranteeing all civil liberties and goodthings dear to the hearts of men and women everywhere. This make-be-lieve derived from the recognition that neither side could take a standagainst the ideal of peace and cooperation.

The hard facts in the fall of 1945 were far otherwise. As soon as thewar with Japan was ended, the Communist forces moved across NorthChina to compel the Japanese to surrender to them. The Nationalists re-acted by ordering the Japanese to fight off the Communists and recoverfrom them any territories they had gained. Soon there were numerousCommunist–Japanese firefights as the Nationalist Government made useof the ex-imperialist aggressors to fight off the social revolution. Mean-while, both Nationalist and Communist forces were moving into Man-churia (henceforth called the Northeast) in a competition to take overthe area. Typically the Nationalists garrisoned the cities and the Com-munists mobilized the countryside.

The United States government followed the Nationalist example bymoving some 53,000 U.S. Marines into North China to hold Beijing andTianjin against a possible Soviet incursion, while transporting by air andship complete Nationalist armies to Manchurian cities and other parts ofNorth China. The United States thus intervened from the beginning onthe anti-Communist side. Moreover, as part of the Yalta agreement ofFebruary 1945, President Roosevelt had already tried to settle China’sfate by arranging with Stalin for a Chinese–Soviet treaty between theNationalists and the USSR. The terms were that the Soviets would rec-ognize and deal only with the Nationalist Government of China, whilethe Nationalists in turn acknowledged the Russian recovery of their for-mer imperialist rights in the Northeast along the railways. Stalin prom-ised to withdraw Soviet troops within three months from the Japanesesurrender. As it turned out, this would be November 15, 1945, and thusthe CCP would have a three-month period in which to infiltrate theNortheast as best they could in competition with the Nationalists, whowould be transported by the Americans. Since the Nationalists saw thatthe CCP even on foot was beating them into the Northeast, they askedthe Soviets to stay longer, and Soviet troops did not depart until May1946, taking with them much of the industrial equipment that could bemoved from the new Japanese installations in their puppet state. Having

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American backing, Jiang Jieshi fought his way into southern Manchuriaagainst Communist opposition.

Thus the stage was set for the frustration of the mediation effortundertaken by General George C. Marshall on behalf of Washington.As the top commander in World War II, and a devoted but savvy man-ager, Marshall did what could be done in the direction of coalition gov-ernment. A Political Consultative Conference convened in Beijing inJanuary 1946, and arrangements were also discussed for the combin-ing of GMD and CCP forces. The center of the civil war, however, hadnow shifted to the Northeast, which was unfortunately left out of theChongqing agreements. The United States was buying Jiang Jieshi’s ac-quiescence by a big economic loan, and when Marshall returned tolobby in Congress and secure this part of the bargain, he lost control ofthe negotiations. By the time he returned, warfare was being quelled inNorth China by the Executive Headquarters that he had established inBeijing. This headquarters used the device of dispatching American colo-nels with Communist and Nationalist generals to areas of conflict to stopthe fighting. But meanwhile the Northeast was out of control.

Both sides had used the negotiations as a sop to the widespread Chi-nese peace movement, while preparing to fight it out. In a similar fashionthe United States had demanded coalition and reform at Nanjing andYan’an and yet at the same time had continued to supply the National-ists. They were all saying one thing while doing another.

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17The Civil War and theNationalists on Taiwan

Why the Nationalists Failed

When peace broke out in August 1945, the Nationalist armed forceswere at least twice the size of the CCP’s and moreover had the advantageof American equipment and supplies plus the assistance of the U.S. Navyin transporting troops and the U.S. Marines in the Tianjin–Beijing area.The Nationalists held all of China’s major cities and most of its territory.The spirit of the Cold War was emerging in the United States as well asChina, and so American backing would obviously continue. In these cir-cumstances, for Jiang Jieshi and the Nationalists to lose the civil war wasa remarkable achievement. The reasons they lost were both stupidity onthe battlefield and incompetence behind the lines.

In his deployment of forces, Jiang Jieshi continued his out-of-datemasterminding of the civil war. He attached great importance to holdingprovincial capitals once he had seized them. Instead of waging a warfrom the wealthier Yangzi valley in South China against the Communistsin North China, Jiang asserted his unifying power by this symbol of con-trol in capital cities. Since most of them were soon besieged and Jianghad in fact greatly overextended his resources, it is plain that he wasmoved by anachronistic assumptions as to how to control China. Bycommitting his best American-trained troops directly to the Northeastwithout consolidating control of the North China area in between, Jiangwas asking for military disaster.

The Nationalists’ incompetence on the battlefield was matched bytheir mismanagement behind the lines. It began with the economy. Infla-tion was skyrocketing as note issue continued to increase. The takeoverof China’s coastal cities from the Japanese was characterized mainly by

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a corrupt seizure of assets without much attempt to put them to indus-trial use. Consumer goods remained inadequate. As industrial produc-tion ceased in the Free China area, it was taken up in the recovered citiessufficiently to avoid heavy unemployment. Meanwhile, Nationalistswith money made a killing by using their overvalued Nationalist cur-rency to buy up Japanese-occupation currency at its inequitable conver-sion rate. Starvation and profiteering continued apace in many areas ofthe countryside, but the return of Nationalist troops to the provinces lib-erated from the Japanese, if “liberation” could be applied to the situa-tion, only increased the burden of taxation and requisition.

In addition to mishandling the economy, the Nationalist Governmentmishandled its citizenry and immediately alienated the major compo-nents of the Chinese people. It began this process by using the Japaneseand their puppet Chinese troops to fight the Communists after the Japa-nese surrender. This pitting of Chinese forces against Chinese at a timewhen everyone talked and hoped for peace was highly unpopular. Na-tionalist treatment of Chinese collaborators, who had functioned underthe Japanese and looked forward to liberation, was generally to regardthem as enemies not deserving compensation. In a similar fashion thestudents and faculties in reoccupied China were castigated for their col-laboration and subjected to thought reform in Sun Yatsen’s Three Peo-ple’s Principles. This put the blame for being under the Japanese on thestudent class who had survived; it did nothing to mobilize their support.The government continued to tax people while letting the profiteers andself-seeking officials remain untaxed. In effect this represented the worstform of “bureaucratic capitalism,” in which officials feathered theirnests at the expense of the public.

Another policy failure on the part of the Nationalists was theirbrushing aside and suppressing the public peace movement, which waswidespread and sincere and not, as the Nationalists alleged, simply aCommunist conspiracy. The academics wanted a shift from warfare tocivilian development and an end of Nationalist reliance on the UnitedStates to promote civil war. The government repression with violenceagainst the students successfully alienated them just as the foolish eco-nomic policies alienated the urban middle class and industrial cap-italists.

In these ways the Nationalist Government lost public support andseemed to be the instigator of the civil war even more than the Commu-nists. It was evident that the Nationalist Government had become so mil-itarized that it could think only of a military solution to the civil war

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The Civil War and the Nationalists on Taiwan 333

Inflation near the end of World War II. Top: The witty cartoonist Ye Qianyu hasdrawn a ricksha-puller counting the payment from his passenger. Between theknees of the latter is a suitcase for carrying the armfuls of paper money thenessential for the requirements of daily life. Bottom: To stabilize the currency, theNationalists in 1948 instituted the gold yuan, valued at four yuan to one Amer-ican dollar. All the Chinese National Currency (CNC) previously in circulationthroughout the population had to be turned over to the government at an ex-change value of one gold yuan to three million CNC. By 1949 the Central Bankof China was issuing paper money bills of one hundred thousand gold yuan foreveryday use.

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

without regard for its functions as a government to serve the public. Lib-eral Chinese critics of the GMD regime blamed it for allowing the CCPto grow into its position as a more popular regime. Whatever support ofthe GMD still persisted among the moneyed class was destroyed by the“currency reform” of 1948, when all holdings of specie and foreign cur-rencies were forcibly converted into a new “gold yuan,” in terms ofwhich prices would be fixed and the inflation (somehow) would bestopped by decree. But prices soon rose 85,000 times in six months. Themoneyed class had been defrauded once again. The GMD had thrownaway whatever chance it had of governing China. Thus the NationalistGovernment acted out with a vengeance the role attributed in Chinesehistory to the “bad last ruler” of a dynasty. The modern-trained Sino-lib-eral leadership in the Free China area did not go over to communism butrather gave up hope in the GMD.

The CCP’s consolidation of power after 1946 occurred first of allamong the farming populations in the villages of North China. Here theCCP government program shifted back to the land reform that had beengenerally played down since the united front of 1937. Land reformmeant the dispossession and neutralization or destruction of the eco-nomic and social influence of landlords and other local magnates, with acorresponding advancement of the activists among the poor peasantry,who under CCP leadership could dominate the villages. With rich peas-ants thus neutralized or reduced, the Communist leadership could pro-ceed with further reforms. The result of this massive effort was to keepthe villages in support of the Communist armies all across North China.

Nationalist Attack and Communist Counterattack

Ironically, the Nationalist forces pursued a war rather similar to whatthe Japanese had inflicted upon China in their day. By the end of the firstyear of this three-year struggle the Nationalists held all the major citiesand rail lines, and their forces were still far superior in firepower. How-ever, the CCP armies had merely withdrawn, refusing to stand and fightand so avoiding casualties. Thus, in the classic guerrilla strategy, theyhelped the Nationalists to become overextended. They fought only whenthey could bring overpowering force to bear on some small GMD unit.

The Nationalists got control of both Yan’an and of the temporaryCCP capital at Kalgan (Zhangjiakou). The Communist leadership wererefugees, hunted in North Shaanxi by the victorious Nationalist forces.The Nationalists recaptured most of the county seats in the main the-

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aters of North Jiangsu and the Northeast. The destruction of some oftheir base areas and takeover of the countryside in this fashion was un-expected by the CCP. Their North Jiangsu base area was destroyed, andthe common people who had been under their protection were killed orabused by the returning Nationalist landlords.

The battle for the Northeast was commanded for the CCP by Gen-eral Lin Biao, a master of mobile warfare. After his forces had retreatedto northeastern Manchuria beyond the Sungari River, in 1947 Lin stagedhalf a dozen raids across the river to surprise and cut up Nationalistforces. Soon the Nationalist field armies were isolated in their cities.

Research by Steven Levine (1987) explains how the CCP won theNortheast—they mobilized the countryside much as they had in NorthChina. With feverish energy the North China cadres, once infiltratedinto the Northeast, carried through many of the procedures of organiz-ing local production, village indoctrination, land reform, thought reformof new cadres, and recruiting of troops and populace to unite in a patri-otic war. This was a pervasive achievement, applying their skills of socialengineering under forced draft. And it worked. The Chinese of theNortheast, so long frustrated by Japanese occupation, responded to theclaims of nationalism and social revolution by supporting the CCP wareffort.

The Nationalists as usual assisted this process. Having come fromthe South, they were distrustful of Manchurian leadership. The area hadbeen under the warlord Zhang Zuolin and his son and then for fifteenyears under the Japanese. The Nationalists therefore brought in theirown people to head up the regime they were trying to install in theNortheast, while the Communists catered to the local leadership andmobilized it against the intruders from South China. The Nationalistdistrust of the local leadership, together with their carpetbagging andexploitative takeover activities, turned sentiment against them. Nation-alist arrogance, acquisitiveness, and corruption produced disaster. In ef-fect the Nationalist Army suffered from all the difficulties that hadplagued the Japanese: they could not get local intelligence from the pro-Communist populace, they were bogged down by their heavy equip-ment, and their advancing columns moved too slowly to avoid ambushor piecemeal flank attacks. The Nationalist forces were not trained tofraternize with the populace or to fight at night, nor could they moverapidly.

When the CCP began to counterattack in mid-1947, its forces weresoon able not only to dominate Shandong but also to recover the base

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area between the Yellow River and the Yangzi stretching between theBeijing–Hankou Railway on the west and the Beijing–Nanjing on theeast. This gave them a strategic position to menace the whole Yangzi Val-ley. As the strategic balance shifted, the Communists were more ablethan ever to capture the Nationalists’ American equipment and recruittheir surrendered troops into new Communist armies.

On the Nationalist side, Jiang Jieshi refused to evacuate garrisons inmajor cities while there was still an opportunity to do so. The result wasthat his best troops, after being besieged and isolated, surrendered withtheir equipment. By these superior tactics and strategy, the CCP forcesnot only overwhelmed Nationalist defenders but demoralized them aswell. When they finally encircled Beijing in January 1949, the National-ist commander decided to surrender with all his troops and later had atrusted position in the new regime.

When Mao entered Beijing, his troops were riding in Americantrucks led by American-made tanks. The American supply of hardwareto Jiang Jieshi had been accompanied by professional military advice.But Jiang took the one and not the other. The Americans advised him notto get overextended, but he did so. They advised him to use his planesand tanks and not hoard them as symbols of firepower, but he did notsucceed in doing so. They also advised him to let local commandersmake tactical decisions, but the Generalissimo persisted in acting like ageneralissimo and sending down orders to the division level.

The civil war was fought necessarily in the countryside, where CCPmobilization of the populace gave them both intelligence and logisticsuperiority. Thus in 1949 in the climactic battle of the Huai–Hai regionnorth of Nanjing, the Nationalist armored corps, which had been heldin reserve as a final arbiter of warfare, found itself encircled by tanktraps dug by millions of peasants mobilized by party leaders like DengXiaoping.

The Americans, after all their investment in troop training and sup-ply of equipment, were disgusted with the outcome. Fortunately, Gen-eral Marshall had spent a year trying to head off the civil war as a me-diator in Chongqing and Nanjing after the Japanese surrender. He knewthe score, and when he returned to the United States as Secretary of Statein 1947, he succeeded in preventing the Americans from going into asuper-Vietnam to quell the Chinese Revolution. American supplies con-tinued, but the marines sent into North China to protect it against theSoviets were withdrawn. The CCP eventually won the war by using sur-rendered Japanese arms secured through Soviet benevolence in Manchu-

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ria and American-supplied arms captured from Jiang’s armies as theysurrendered. By 1949 nobody could deny that the Chinese CommunistParty under Mao Zedong had conquered China fair and square.

Historians’ appraisals of the GMD record in China have made use ofthe extensive criticism put out both by Sino-liberals and by the CCP pro-pagandists, who were making a play for Sino-liberal support and there-fore quickly denounced all GMD corruption and infringements of hu-man rights. The fact was that the GMD walked on two legs whichunfortunately went in opposite directions, one modernizing and one re-actionary. Thus the GMD’s evils could be publicized in a partly indepen-dent press and by sometimes uncensored foreign journalists while the se-cret police, not having total power, often succeeded only in adding totheir record of dirty work. Although totalitarianism had its activist sup-porters under Jiang Jieshi, they could not dominate the Chinese scene inthe way that CCP totalitarianism, once in power, would be able to do. Asa result, the images of the GMD and the CCP as governments of Chinaderive from very different data bases and are not really comparable. Theextent of the CCP’s executions, for example, were generally unknown tooutsiders at the time.

In retrospect Jiang Jieshi is now given credit for solid diplomaticachievements. In the early 1930s he delayed Japan’s aggression by nego-tiating and giving ground while also getting Nazi Germany’s aid in build-ing up military forces and industries. In 1937–1939 he secured Sovietmilitary aid against Japan. In the 1940s he got Xinjiang away from So-viet influence, while securing American lend-lease supplies and help inpressuring Moscow, as William Kirby reminds us, “into countenancingChina as a ‘great power.’” Jiang Jieshi’s estimation in history will alsorise along with that of the Republic of China on Taiwan.

Taiwan as a Japanese Colony

Among the provinces of China, Taiwan is unique in having been for 50years (1895–1945) under Japanese rule. Manchuria was only 14 years(1931–1945) under Japan’s indirect rule through the puppet state ofManzhouguo (Manchukuo). Moreover, Taiwan was first populated byMalayo-Polynesian aborigines (who totaled 120,000 in 1895). Chinesemigrants came mainly after the late sixteenth century, and Manchu ruleover the island as a prefecture of Fujian province was not established un-til 1685. Not until 1885 did Taiwan become a province with a sparsepopulation of 3 million. Although China’s self-strengthening movement

The Civil War and the Nationalists on Taiwan 337

built up the capital at Taibei, in 1895 Japan—as one of the spoils ofvictory—took over a subtropical area in which modernization hadbarely started.

Because Taiwan was Japan’s first colony just when she was emergingas a modern power, talented Japanese administrators set out to make theisland a model of economic growth. In contrast with European colonialpowers in Southeast Asia, the Japanese had a writing system in commonwith the Taiwan Chinese, as well as Confucian and Buddhist teachingsand a common way of life based on rice culture, civil service, and auto-cratic government. Modern Chinese nationalism, moreover, had not yetdeveloped.

The aborigines had been forced off the broad floodplain on the west-ern side of Taiwan into the spine of the mountains running along theless accessible east coast. Chinese settlers on the western side had devel-oped rice culture under extended lineages dominated by local magnates,among whom rivalry and boundary disputes provoked continual feudsand disorder. Chinese administration had been weak, and the Japanesehad to begin in 1895 by suppressing banditry and installing a policeforce mainly of Taiwanese, recruited and trained for this new work.They became a chief arm of local government—registering all the peo-ple and their possessions, supervising the mutual-responsibility systemamong village households, and enforcing regulations for sanitation andpublic health while collecting taxes and mediating disputes from day today.

The variety of landholdings, including topsoil usage, ownership ofsubsoil, tenants subleasing their rights, and so on, had created an un-wieldy complexity in land use and taxation. The Japanese put through aland survey that mapped the terrain, and in 1904 they bought out thenoncultivating landlords with public bonds that could be invested in ur-ban enterprises. This created a class of owner-cultivators throughout thecountryside and tripled the land tax revenue.

Japan promoted elementary education in Confucianism, science, andJapanese language and fostered farmers’ associations as a channel forimproving agronomic technology. But they avoided creating an intelli-gentsia. Middle schools were not started until 1915 and a university onlyin 1928.

Meanwhile, railroads linked north and south in 1903, and some6,000 miles of roads eventually knit up the countryside. Japanese-ownedsugar mills exporting duty-free cane sugar to Japan became a majorindustry. Scientific agriculture and peaceful growth produced a skilled

338 the republic of china 1912–1949

citizenry, some of whom agitated to participate in politics but were keptsuppressed until Japan’s departure in 1945. On balance, Taiwan’s mod-ernization under Japan was more substantial than in most provinces ofwarlord and Nationalist China. Its brick farmhouses with electric appli-ances were already more advanced than the norm on China’s mainland.

Taiwan as the Republic of China

As in the coastal cities of the mainland, the Nationalist occupation ofTaiwan after 1945 turned out to be a first-class disaster. Instead of being“liberated,” the Taiwan Chinese were treated as enemy collaborators;their goods were seized and the economy despoiled by Nationalist mili-tary and politicians seeking personal loot. In February 1947, when un-armed demonstrators protested the corruption of the Nationalist occu-pation, the military government shot many of them down, sent formainland reinforcements, and then for several days pursued a pogrom ofmurdering Taiwanese citizens. A sober estimate is that 8,000 to 10,000were killed, including much of the potential leadership of the commu-nity. This was a triumph for China’s backwardness, posited on the as-sumption of uninhibited autocracy as the primal law of the Chinese po-litical order: policy opponents are disloyal and should be killed. WhenJiang Jieshi took refuge on the island in 1949, he found a scene of eco-nomic and political collapse. Starting from this low point, the next 40years saw the unfolding of a remarkable success story in the Republic ofChina.

Of the several factors in this success, one of the first was the Sino-lib-eral refugees from the mainland whom Jiang welcomed in his effort tocleanse and revitalize the Nationalist party and government. On Taiwanthe Nationalists sought the socialist-minded state control of heavy in-dustry that the National Resources Commission had been pursuing onthe mainland. Of 31 Nationalist NRC engineers sent in 1942 to betrained in major American industrial firms, the great majority (21)elected to work for the new state on the mainland. Only seven went toTaiwan. The result is instructive. Of the 21 highly trained engineers onthe mainland, none attained ministerial or important executive rank; allsuffered political persecution. Of the seven engineers on Taiwan, threeheaded state-run industries and two became ministers of economic af-fairs, of whom one later headed all economic planning and developmentand the other went on to be premier.

Another effort was in education. Professors like Fu Sinian from Bei-

The Civil War and the Nationalists on Taiwan 339

jing and elsewhere helped build up Taiwan National University in Tai-bei; the research institutes of Academia Sinica resumed their work; andAmerican missionaries set up a major Christian college. When universitygraduates went for advanced training in the United States, only a few re-turned at first, but the proportion returning gradually increased.

After the century of American missionary concern for the Chinesepeople and the traumatic “loss of China” to communism in the 1940s,support for the Republic of China against the People’s Republic of Chinabecame a major issue in Cold War America. American aid and protec-tion helped Taiwan develop. Though driven from the mainland, the Na-tionalist Republic of China on Taiwan held the China seat in the UnitedNations Security Council until 1971, and was recognized by most UNmembers as being “China.” The Korean War (1950–1953), when NorthKorea invaded South Korea, had led to the U.S. Navy’s being assigned topolice the Taiwan Strait and prevent a PRC invasion of Taiwan. In 1954a mutual security treaty between the United States and the Republic ofChina stabilized the region as part of the American policy of “contain-ment” of the People’s Republic. An American aid program continued un-til 1968 and military aid thereafter.

Building on the Japanese elimination of absentee landlords, theSino–American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction funded bythe American Congress in 1948 aided a program to eliminate tenancyaltogether. By buying out the remaining landlords with governmentbonds, the Republic of China created a stable countryside of farmer-owners.

Industry was promoted in the 1950s by transferring to private man-agement the projects that had been confiscated from Japan in 1945. Thefirst aim was to produce consumer goods in light industries as a form ofimport substitution, but in the 1960s the aim shifted to production forexport. Skilled but cheap labor could make consumer electronics. Amer-ican and Japanese investments were welcomed. The Vietnam War alsostimulated the economy. Rural labor flocked to the new cities, yet evenso labor was in short supply. This prompted a shift to capital-intensiveindustries such as steel and petrochemicals, followed in the 1980s bycomputers, automobiles, and military hardware. By 1988 Taiwan’s grossnational product totaled about $95 billion, foreign exchange holdingswere enormous, and per capita GNP was about $4,800, ten times thatof the mainland. This had been accomplished in spite of the Republicof China’s being voted out of the UN in 1971 and Washington’s recog-

340 the republic of china 1912–1949

nition of Beijing in 1979. America–Taiwan relations continued like Ja-pan–Taiwan relations as an extra-diplomatic arrangement.

Taiwan’s prosperity made political development hard to avoid. TheGMD dictatorship claimed still to be the rightful government of allChina, though temporarily confined to Taiwan province and somecoastal islands of Fujian province. Jiang and his central government,having been displaced from Nanjing, ruled in Taibei superior to the gov-ernment of Taiwan province at Taizhong. Taiwanese Chinese hatred forthe 2 million or so occupying “mainlanders” died away only slowly. Butin time Taiwan-born Chinese became a majority both in the party and inthe army. Independent Taiwanese politicians were allowed to be electedmayors of major cities. Minor parties, suppressed at first, were finally al-lowed to compete in elections. After Jiang Jieshi died in 1975, he wassucceeded as head of the party and government by his son Jiang Jingguo.Before the son died in 1988 he lifted martial law (in force for 44 years),permitted travel to the mainland, and liberalized domestic politics. Hissuccessor was a Japan- and America-trained Taiwanese. A degree of plu-ralism had been achieved.

Comparisons of Taiwan and the mainland are vitiated by the factorof size. Any PRC province given Taiwan’s advantageous concentrationof Japanese, American, and other foreign investment, high levels of hy-giene, public education and skills, modern infrastructure of transporta-tion, banking, communications, and the like could be equally successful(Guangdong is the likeliest candidate) except for one geographic fact:Taiwan province as an island was protected successively by British, Japa-nese, and American naval power. It was not invaded after 1947, nor wasit taxed to meet the needs of other provinces. Jiang Jieshi remained incharge and stood for development, not revolution. By contrast, themainland, as we shall see, was kept under central control at all costs,while being revolutionized by mass movements inspired by an activistand demanding ideology. The burden of governing 500 rising to 1,200million people scattered over a subcontinent is greater than that of gov-erning 20 to 30 million people on a not-very-big island. Those who wantto compare Taiwan and the mainland should keep such facts in mind;there is rather little meaningful comparison to make because the facts areso different.

The Civil War and the Nationalists on Taiwan 341

P A R T F O U R

The People’s Republicof China

Fr o m t h e p o i n t of view of the CCP as distinct from theChinese people, the first eight years of the People’s Republic—from October 1949 to late 1957—were a creative period of recon-struction, growth, and innovation. This promising beginning wasfollowed by two periods of disaster and great disorder among thepeople: first the Great Leap Forward of 1958–1960, followed byyears of economic recovery, 1961–1965; and second the CulturalRevolution of 1966 to Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. In this se-quence of phases, the first and third saw economic progress underthe leadership of able CCP organizers and administrators. Thesecond and fourth periods, however, were dominated by MaoZedong.

We begin with the CCP consolidation of political control from1949 to 1953 and then the economic transition to “socialist” (col-lectivized) agriculture and Soviet-style industrialization from 1954to 1957. From 1958 the working populace in agriculture would beorganized in a system of production that would last for twentyyears, until after Mao’s death in 1976. So seriously had the violentexcesses of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution alienated majorsectors of Chinese society that the decade from 1966 to 1976 wasdecried as “ten lost years.”

In the 1970s the universities gradually reopened, and an era ofconsolidation and development under the slogan of the Four Mod-ernizations (in Agriculture, Industry, Science and Technology, andDefense) would begin with Deng Xiaoping’s final assumption ofpower at the end of 1978. The post-Mao era begins a period of

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economic reforms and opening to the outside world that sparkedextraordinary economic growth. In the last two decades of thetwentieth century, China’s economy grew about 9 percent a yearand China was gradually transformed from an agricultural into amodern industrial and service economy on the pattern of its Asianneighbors. The standard of living of the average Chinese quadru-pled. At the same time China’s move to a market economy and in-volvement in international trade evoked changes that also trans-formed its society and culture and weakened the Leninist politicalstructure. Farmers were moving off their farms into towns and cit-ies in search of jobs while workers in state industries were losingtheir jobs and the accompanying social security benefits as indus-tries were privatized and made more efficient.

The disillusionment caused by Mao’s destructive policies plusChina’s exposure to foreign ideas and cultures undermined thehold of Marxism-Leninism-Mao’s Thought and the control of theCCP. Moreover, the move to the market decentralized politicalpower as well as economic power to the local areas and away fromthe center. The party-state still could repress any threat it perceivedto its power, but it was less successful in trying to control the newmiddle class and burgeoning pluralistic culture. In addition, theweaker center allowed the development of competitive elections inthe villages and helped the National People’s Congress, China’shitherto rubber-stamp legislature, develop a degree of autonomy.Yet the weakening of the center hindered its ability to collect taxrevenues from the local areas and maintain the infrastructure ofpublic education, health care, and irrigation networks, built in the1950s, that had nurtured China’s modernization.

While at the end of the twentieth century China appeared to beon its way to fulfilling the dream of China’s reformers since the latenineteenth century to make China “rich and powerful” and recap-ture its traditional greatness, there was a question whether its lead-ers would be able to lead China to its destination without basicchanges in its political structure.

344 the people’s republic of china

18Establishing Control of State

and Countryside

Creating the New State, 1949–1953

Control of the people by government rulers and bureaucrats had beenthe usual basis for peace, order, prosperity, and power in the Chinesestate. Under the Chinese Communist Party, efficient control would be byideological indoctrination and by self-sustaining motivations of fear andhope among the people. Killing need be only enough to keep the motiveof terror always in the background.

Just as the Manchus had established their kingdom in southern Man-churia and co-opted Chinese administrators before they took over Chinain 1644 and later, so the CCP had created a government in North Chinaand the Northeast while in the process of winning the civil war. UnderMao as the now undisputed leader in both theory and strategy, the CCPleadership worked as a team, debating policy issues in the Politburo andadapting central directives to local conditions. Leading field command-ers like Peng Dehuai, Lin Biao, Nie Rongzhen, and Chen Yi had allworked with Mao and Zhou Enlai for many years. Party builders likeLiu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping had been part of the Yan’an organiza-tion. It was a tested and close-knit group.

First of all, the People’s Liberation Army spread over South andSouthwest China as newly liberated areas (see Map 24). Six military ad-ministrative regions divided up the country, and military commissionsadministered them in the initial period until they were abolished in1954. The CCP generally felt that three years would be required for re-habilitation of the economy and mobilization of the people before theycould begin a transformation of society.

Their first decision was to leave the local GMD officials largely in

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place. These retained personnel continued to receive their salaries andperform their functions. After all, they totaled some two million persons,whereas the CCP then had at most three quarters of a million cadres totake over their jobs.

The second move was to bring inflation under control by the con-certed use of several devices: (1) by taking over all the banking system,they gained control of all credit; (2) by setting up nationwide trading as-sociations in each major commodity, they gained control of goods; and(3) by paying personnel in market-basket terms, that is, calculating sala-ries not in money but in basic commodities—so much grain, so much oil,so much cloth, and the like—they reassured the public. By thus makingindividuals’ salaries independent of the inflation and thereby creating astable basis for commerce, the flow of goods and of money was broughtinto balance and inflation was reduced to about 15 percent a year. Thiswas literally the salvation of the salaried class.

Rebuilding the railways and reviving steamship lines presented nogreat logistic problems, but the CCP’s plunge into the Korean War afteronly one year in power seemed at the time like a risky gamble. In Octo-ber 1950 the Chinese “volunteers” surprised and routed the Americansadvancing toward the Yalu River boundary with China. Altogether thePRC sent into Korea more than 2.3 million troops, including about twothirds of its field army, artillery, and airforce and all its tanks. They facedAmerican firepower that by the time of the truce in July 1953 had giventhem enormous casualties. While some aid came from Moscow, the warwas a serious drain of China’s resources. On the other hand, it was use-ful in the reorganization of society. The public campaign to “resistAmerica, aid Korea” provided a wartime sanction, as had the Japanesewar and the civil war earlier, in terms of which the populace could bedrastically organized.

The initial phase of public sentiment in the cities after 1949 was oneof euphoria, based on growing confidence in the CCP. Here was a con-quering army of country boys who were strictly self-disciplined, polite,and helpful, at the opposite pole from the looting and raping warlordtroops and even the departing Nationalists. Here was a dedicated gov-ernment that really cleaned things up—not only the drains and streetsbut also the beggars, prostitutes, and petty criminals, all of whom wererounded up for reconditioning. Here was a new China one could beproud of, one that controlled inflation, abolished foreign privileges,stamped out opium smoking and corruption generally, and brought thecitizenry into a multitude of sociable activities to repair public works,

348 the people’s republic of china

spread literacy, control disease, fraternize with the menial class, andstudy the New Democracy and Mao Zedong Thought. All these activi-ties opened new doors for idealistic and ambitious youth. Only later didthey see that the Promised Land was based on systematic control andmanipulation. Gradually the CCP organization would penetrate the so-ciety, set model roles of conduct, prescribe thought, and suppress indi-vidual deviations.

In similar fashion women were liberated from male and family domi-nation, at least in theory. The new marriage law made wives equal tohusbands and divorce possible. It sounded like a new day for women.Only later was it seen that women’s emancipation had made them full-time salaried workers but mainly in poor-paying jobs. Meanwhile theywere still responsible for the home, with little access to contraceptivesand subject to male abuse as usual. Having few refrigerators, they stillhad to queue up endlessly to buy daily necessities.

Long before the CCP could try to transform the economic and sociallife of the Chinese masses, they faced the problem of creating a new ad-ministration that could be relied on to carry out the revolution. Sincebusinessmen as well as GMD officials had been left in place while newCCP cadres had been infiltrated into the government administration, themost urgent task was to weed out and streamline the government appa-ratus itself. In 1951–52 the Three-Antis Campaign (against corruption,waste, and bureaucratism) was targeted on officials in government, in in-dustry, and in the party. The concurrent Five-Antis Campaign attackedthe capitalist class, who at first had been left in place. Under charges ofbribery, tax evasion, theft of state assets, cheating in labor or materials,and stealing of state economic intelligence, nearly every employer couldbe brought to trial. The aim was to get control of the factories andsqueeze capital out of the capitalists. Many were eliminated in an at-mosphere of terror, and some were left to function as government em-ployees.

Two mechanisms made these movements possible. The first was anew united front, which had been created in 1949 by setting up the Chi-nese People’s Political Consultative Conference as the leading public,though advisory, organ to include both CCP members and non-CCPleaders. The Common Program, which it adopted in 1949, called forgradualism. The government when first set up had a majority of its min-istries headed by non-CCP personnel. This represented a mobilization oftalent that could be gradually supplanted as competent CCP personnelbecame available.

Establishing Control of State and Countryside 349

The other device was the mass campaign, which made use of thestructure of mass organizations. Labor, youth, women, and professionalbodies were all enrolled in these organizations. A nationwide adminis-trative structure in each one could reach its membership when a cam-paign was put on. Thus the early campaigns to eliminate counter-revolutionaries, resist America, and aid Korea, and the Three-Antis andFive-Antis Campaigns, provided an expanding framework for reachingall Chinese who lived in cities. Campaigns not only uncovered andknocked off victims who were of doubtful use or loyalty, they also un-covered activists of ability who could be recruited into the CCP. It had2.7 million members in 1947 and 6.1 million by 1953.

While this gradual and piecemeal, though sporadic and often terrify-ing, process of consolidation was going on in the cities and the moderneconomy, a parallel procedure was the land-reform campaign. This cam-paign to give all villagers their class status, pull down the landlords, andraise up the landless laborer had been largely carried through in theNorth China and Northeast areas under Communist control before1949. But to spread land reform to the larger body of Chinese south ofthe Yangzi was a daunting task. After military pacification, work teamsentered the villages and organized the peasantry to attack and destroylandlords. In this phase, rich peasants might not be attacked but tempo-rarily catered to. But their status shaded off into landlordism above orpoor peasant below. The public trials, mass accusations, and executionscreated an atmosphere of terror. Estimates vary, but apparently somemillions of people were killed.

The next step in 1954 was the establishment of a state constitution,which superseded the Common Program and brought the New Democ-racy phase of China’s development to an unexpectedly rapid end. Theconstitution was based fundamentally on the Soviet constitution estab-lished by Stalin in 1936. The net result was to strengthen the Govern-ment Administrative Council and its fifty-odd ministries. The adminis-tration became the executive arm of the party. Coordination wasprovided by dual membership. Thus Zhou Enlai was both premier and aPolitburo member—number three in the hierarchy, after Mao and Liu.One non-Soviet feature was the establishment of the state chairmanship,held by Mao, an echo of the emperorship of old. The state cult of Maowas already beginning in order to meet the Chinese need for a single au-thority figure.

In contrast with the Soviet Union, the military and public security

350 the people’s republic of china

forces were kept generally under party control. The armies were underthe Military Affairs Commission, headed by Mao, while public securitywas controlled by the party as well as a ministry. In other words, the se-cret police were not permitted to become a separate echelon of govern-ment or an independent kingdom as they did under Stalin, able to terror-ize the rest of the administration as well as the people. Likewise, themilitary had no separate echelon as had happened under Jiang Jieshi,when the Nationalist Military Affairs Commission had developed minis-tries that rivaled those of both the party and the government.

Yet the military by its nature formed a separate establishment. Eventhough many soldiers were party members, the influence of the politicalcommissars who shared command with the officer corps tended to di-minish as professionalism increased with time. The army managed itsown personnel system (nomenklatura) through a MAC department notunder detailed supervision by the Party Central Committee. Nor was theMAC’s political department closely supervised by the Central Commit-tee’s propaganda department. The MAC controlled the several machine-building ministries, its own communications and transport, airfields andports, factories and research institutes, and in fact its own budget, whichwas not reviewed by the State Council.

Thus Chinese unity was preserved, as under Jiang Jieshi, by oneman’s heading the party, government, and army, all three. As AndrewNathan points out, the only people who would challenge Mao directlywould turn out to be his seconds in command of the Military AffairsCommission (Peng Dehuai and Lin Biao). In 1954, however, power re-mained concentrated in the Standing Committee of the Politburo of theCentral Committee of the party.

On the principle of vertical rule, the ministries controlled subordi-nate agencies at the lower levels of government, while horizontal coordi-nation was supposed to be worked out, if at all, at each territorial level.Meanwhile, a series of People’s Congresses on the Soviet model was es-tablished at the level of the province and below. Each congress waselected from a single slate of candidates put forward by the congress im-mediately above. It was responsible more to those above than to thosebelow. This echelon was headed by the National People’s Congress,which met from year to year to hear reports and confirm policies. Non-CCP personnel were still prominent in it, but it had no power except as adiscussion body. Control was mainly exercised by party committees atall levels of government.

Establishing Control of State and Countryside 351

Collectivizing Agriculture

After consolidating the state government, the CCP’s next achievementwas the collectivization of agriculture. In the Soviet Union in the early1930s the city cadres had entered the countryside to attack and destroythe rich peasantry (kulaks), who fought back by destroying livestock, fo-menting opposition, and generally refusing to go along. The Soviet col-lectivization had been immensely destructive. In China, however, theCCP had from early on been a rural organization, close to and depen-dent upon the villages, and it knew how to take gradual steps toward itseventual goal.

The first stage was to get the peasantry into mutual-aid teams, andthe second stage was to set up Agricultural Producers’ Cooperatives, inwhich the farmers not only pooled their land and equipment but got a re-turn in proportion to them. This second step kept the rich peasant com-munity from fighting back because its position was not destroyed but atfirst improved. While this land reform shifted land-holding from thesmall 2.6 percent of landlord households and left the majority (of culti-vating small holders) in place, the situation was not stabilized. Privateownership was simply strengthened by the distribution of landlord landto former tenants and landless laborers. In the early 1950s land couldstill be bought and sold privately, and so a better-off peasant class couldcontinue. This era after the CCP victory would be looked back upon as ahoneymoon period when growth in trade, sideline production, educa-tion, small village mutual-aid teams, and cooperatives all seemed prom-ising. Peasants were very loath to give up their private property, howevermeagre.

But soon came the third stage of cooperativization, which movedfrom the lower level of Agricultural Producers’ Cooperatives to thehigher level, which was truly collective and in which all peasants workedfor wages regardless of their input of property, tools, animals, and land.Mao’s impetuous demand for this further move was debated and re-sisted by many within the CCP. But during the second stage, when landreform had distributed landlord holdings and some villagers had takenviolent communal action in an atmosphere of terror, local activists hadbeen spotted and recruited by the CCP, and their organized zeal gave thethird stage of the collectivization campaign momentum. From 1954 to1956, higher-level collectives spread faster than many expected and be-came nominally complete. A higher-level Agricultural Producers’ Coop-erative (APC) was usually part or all of a village. From 1958 to 1978

352 the people’s republic of china

these units would be called “production teams.” They were the bottomlayer of a three-tiered structure: production teams forming brigades, andbrigades in 1958 forming communes. The PRC had created a rural appa-ratus such as the Nationalist Government had never even envisaged.

Since under the PRC the state penetrated the populace to the level ofthe family, which now became part of an APC or (later) productionteam, this organization of the countryside was far more complete thananything previously attempted in Chinese history. In effect, the farmerno longer owned or rented land or disposed of his own labor or its prod-uct. He found himself labeled with a certain class status and obliged toparticipate in labor, in meetings, and in other collective activities onwhich his livelihood depended. Survival required sycophancy, lies, be-trayals, renunciation of old hopes and loyalties, and other practices ofthe police state.

What lay behind this official success story of collectivization? Afterten years’ research in a village (Wugong) about 120 miles south ofBeijing, a team headed by Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz, MarkSelden, and Kay Ann Johnson (1991) finally secured the trust and docu-mentation of major local actors. They record a long, drawn-out, increas-ingly bitter and in the end devastating struggle to fend off a modern typeof serfdom under party control.

The essential happening was the emergence of a new elite from thepeasant society in the person of the activists (cadres) of the CCP organi-zation. This new peasant leadership was self-selected, as ambitious andenergetic younger people found opportunity to rise in the new powerstructure. Unlike the democratic egalitarianism and plural opportunitiesof the American experience, these new power-holders were adept in thecreation of guanxi (networks or connections), sycophantic ingratiationwith superiors, and authoritarian exploitation of inferiors in the tradi-tional Chinese style. Intensely political in every act, these nouveaux cad-res instinctively sought status, power, and perquisites that set them apartfrom the masses and entrenched them as a new local elite. Mouthing ide-ology, playing up to their patrons, squeezing public funds as the normalspoils of office, they were seldom constrained by a Confucian concernfor the populace nor an educated vision of national needs or the publicgood.

This nominal success in collectivization was hailed as a giant step to-ward economic benefit in the countryside. In fact, however, it was thefinal penetration of the state into the farm household, the politicizationof peasant life in order to control it.

Establishing Control of State and Countryside 353

Collective Agriculture in Practice

During the twenty years from 1958 to 1978 the 75 or 80 percent of thepeople who constituted rural China would become locked in an umbili-cal relationship with the new state. As Jean C. Oi (1989) says, thoughCommunist revolutions may remake the power structure, “they do notalter the basic issue of peasant politics: how the harvest shall be di-vided.” This issue became the constant focus of peasant–state relations.How the CCP secured the grain supply to feed the growing cities andhelp finance industrial expansion is a basic story of the Maoist era.

The structure of agricultural collectivization was capped in 1958 bythe establishment of communes. The sheer size of the operation, far big-ger than most outsiders can imagine, shows a special Chinese capacity.Once the collectivization structure was completed in 1958, the individ-ual farmer found himself under six levels of administration—at the topwas the province, followed by the prefecture, county, commune, brigade,and production team. Under China’s 2,000 counties were 70,000 com-munes. Each commune was generally comparable in size to an old stan-dard market community. Under these 70,000 communes were 750,000brigades, each of which was roughly the size of a village and had about220 households, almost 1,000 persons. Beneath the brigades were the 5million production teams, each of about 33 households or 145 persons(see Table 6).

Over this entire structure the state now established a grain monop-oly, procuring and distributing the basic food supply of the whole coun-try. It regulated grain prices and told the farmer what and how much toproduce. In historical perspective this was a high point in statecraft—asuperb application of the ancient Chinese art of the state’s organizingand manipulating the peasantry through the use of local officials.

Villagers obtained their own grain rations by showing their certifi-cates of household registration. These specified where they lived. If theytraveled to another region where they did not live, they could not securerations there. Thus, once the free grain markets were closed, farmers or-dinarily could not travel but were fixed upon the land, dependent forfood on the production team in which they worked. The paradox wasthat the revolutionary state, having established its legitimacy by freeingthe peasant from landlordism and other constraints, now had him boxedin as never before. The state had become the ultimate landlord, andmaintaining legitimacy in that role put statecraft to the test.

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It met the challenge by performing a very clever two-stage trick.First, it kept the state agricultural tax at a minimum. At first this tax wasabout 10 percent of the harvest, but gradually it came down to about 4.5percent. No one could claim the peasant was heavily “taxed.” The sec-ond step was to establish a level beyond which the harvest was consid-ered a “surplus” and then ask each production team to contribute grain(mainly rice or wheat) from its “surplus” by selling it to the state at thestate’s low fixed price. What team could give the most to ChairmanMao? The peasant, if sufficiently simple-minded, as few were, could feelhimself a benefactor, not a serf!

Specifically, the harvest was divided as follows: First the agriculturaltax, the state’s share, had to be paid. Second, the “three retained funds”were set aside: for next year’s seed, for animal fodder, and for grainrations, the peasant’s share, which was distributed to him by the collec-tive owner of the grain, his production team. The peasant ration waspartly a basic ration per person and partly work-point grain (usuallypaid in cash) for labor performed. (The proportion between per capitarations and work-point rations was usually 7 to 3.) Work points were

Establishing Control of State and Countryside 355

Table 6. Rural administrative units and average characteristics, 1974 and 1986

Collectivized agriculture, 1974 Household agriculture, 1986

Commune (gongshe) (70,000) Township (xiang/zhen) (71,521)2,033 hectares 1,317 hectares”15 production brigades 12 villages3,346 households 2,737 households14,720 persons 11,886 persons100 production teams

Brigade (shengchan dadui) (750,000) Village (cun) (847,894)133 hectares 111 hectaresa

220 households 231 households980 persons 1,002 persons7 production teams

Team (shengchan xiaodui) (5 million) <Village Small Group33 households (cun xiaozu)>145 persons irregularly organized20 hectares

Sources: Table reprinted from Jean Oi, State and Peasant in Contemporary China: ThePolitical Economy of Village Government (U of California Press, 1989), p. 5.

aThese figures do not include the 20.63 million hectares of land under cultivation bystate farmers.

an incentive to do more work. The total ration of grain allocated to eachperson was set at a subsistence level, but as Jean Oi and others havepointed out, the Chinese definition of subsistence amounted to consid-erably less grain than the international standard set by relief organiza-tions. “Self-sufficient” rations are internationally defined as 1,700 to1,900 calories per day while “surplus” begins at 1,900 to 2,100 caloriesper day. In China these figures were markedly lower, so that “levels con-sidered below subsistence internationally were considered above the sur-plus level in China.”

Having declared the remainder of the harvest “surplus,” Mao’sChina was then prepared to buy a share of the surplus from its produc-ers. The total amount to be so procured by state purchase was set by thehigher levels of the six-tier bureaucracy above the production team.Each level received its allotted figure, down to the commune and brigadecadres who oversaw the final acceptance of the commitment among pro-duction teams.

In this rather grim process, the key player was the team leader, a localvillager who was usually a party member and appointed for a term ofyears. Given authority over his team, he had to compete with other teamleaders in the bargaining and politics that would commit his team to pro-duce and sell part of its “surplus” to the state at the state’s below-marketprice. The team leader was thus the ultimate broker in the grain procure-ment system, mediating between his team-member inferiors and his bri-gade-cadre superiors. This function was as old as China’s history, a mainfocus of rural politics and interpersonal village relations. Quite naturallythe team leader was involved in patron—client relations with othersboth above and below his status level. Here was where his connections(guanxi) came into play. Here was where corruption inevitably occurredand often flourished.

The war between farmers and tax gatherers no doubt antedates thatbetween the sexes. It is at least equally subtle and sophisticated. In histwo-front operations toward his team and toward his superiors, theteam leader could get team cooperation in resisting the state’s procure-ment targets. Falsifying the accounts, even keeping two sets of teambooks, underreporting, padding expenses, delivering grain after dark tokeep it unrecorded, holding back quantities of grain by leaving the fieldsungleaned, the better to feed the animals, keeping new fields hiddenfrom the brigade inspectors—a hundred ruses to deceive brigade cadresmight be combined with positive efforts to maintain cordial relationswith them and even set up some psychological debts through feasts,

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gifts, and favors. Tales of a team’s outwitting the brigade cadres, how-ever, have the pathetic quality of prisoners’ legends of successful jail-breaks. They were rare exceptions to the cadres’ systematic exploitationof the farmers.

The team leader also had a panoply of methods that he used to getmore work out of his team members. But a high level of incentive amongthe farmers was hard to maintain. After Mao’s death in 1976 it wouldbecome plain that the state’s strategy of putting the farmer in a box thebetter to squeeze grain out of him had not been very effective. After 1978when the farmer was given greater opportunity to benefit from his ownlabor, he produced a great deal more. Until that new day, however, he re-mained under party–state control.

Beginning Industrialization

The Communist victory in 1949 had stimulated migration from the vil-lages back to the cities. China’s urban population grew rapidly fromabout 57 million in 1949 to almost 100 million in 1957. By 1960 itwould be 131 million. Continued migration from rural areas kept cityunemployment high until both rural and industrial workers could bebrought under institutional control. Industrial labor, China’s “proletar-iat,” had been elusive in the Republican era because unskilled workerswere recruited from the countryside by labor contractors who cooper-ated with factory managers in opposing labor unions. In 1949 threefifths of the labor force in manufacturing were still self-employed crafts-men. By 1957 most of them had been absorbed into urban handicraft co-operatives; meanwhile, the labor force had doubled and more than halfof it worked in factories.

The Stalinist model of industrialization through emphasis first onheavy industry at the expense of agriculture was ill-suited to the Chinesecase because of the great preponderance of the countryside in the econ-omy. Nevertheless, early industrial targets were achieved and the “leapforward” mentality had already appeared in the effort to socialize in-dustry.

State monopoly of industry was helped by the fact that the Nation-alists’ National Resources Commission (NRC) had already taken con-trol of two thirds of China’s industrial investment. In 1949 the NRC’stop personnel and their 200,000 employees stayed on the mainland.They wanted to build a state-controlled economy along Soviet lines, andthey opposed the American preference for a mixed state-and-private de-

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velopment. NRC engineers led the industrial drive in the People’s Repub-lic until the Great Leap Forward of 1958 began to put them out of ac-tion—a process completed by the Cultural Revolution after 1966.

Instead of moving over the space of several years to a combination ofcapitalist and state management of industry, the CCP followed the ex-ample of collectivization that they had already established in agriculture.Quickly the collectivization campaign took over industrial managementin name, although in practice the capitalist element had to be left to func-tion. The fact was that the CCP cadres across the land knew much moreabout agriculture than about industry. Their patriotism and personalambition led them to set high goals for their industrial projects and to re-port them overfulfilled, without regard for sound and gradual develop-ment. Thus the activism of government and party personnel in industrybecame unrealistic.

After inflation began to come under control, the tax base was broad-ened and government revenues rose from 6.5 billion yuan in 1950 to13.3 billion in 1951. The continuing deficit was financed about 40 per-cent through bond issues. The bonds were not in currency units but incommodity-equivalent units. They could be bank deposits. Where theNationalist Government revenue had been somewhere around 5 to 7percent of gross domestic product, the PRC tax share of economic out-put was estimated at 24 percent in 1952 and 30 percent by 1957.

The process of combining private capitalist industry with state indus-try made use of discriminatory tax and credit policies, with the resultthat the private sector, which amounted to more than half in 1949, wasreduced to less than a fifth. Local handicrafts, however, remained largelyprivate.

The First Five-Year Plan of the period 1953–1957 was felt to be onthe whole a great success. National income grew at an average rate of8.9 percent. Agricultural output was said to have expanded about 3.8percent as against a population growth of about 2.4 percent. In other de-veloping countries economic growth averaged about 2.5 percent. Indiawas under 2 percent during the 1950s. The PRC statistics, on paper,were impressive. According to them, the proportion of primary-schoolchildren enrolled in school jumped from 25 to 50 percent. In general, itwas said that urban wages rose by almost a third and peasant incomeabout a fifth.

The PRC record in industrial investment was almost like that in theSoviet Union during the forced industrialization begun in the USSR in1928, even though for China per capita national income in 1950 was

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only about one half to one quarter that of the Soviet Union in 1928. Inadopting the Soviet model for rapid industrialization—favoring heavyindustry at the expense of agriculture—the CCP was misled by the factthat in the USSR the ratio of population to resources was much more fa-vorable and industrialization was far more advanced before the revolu-tion. About half the PRC’s total industrial investment was given to 156Soviet-aided projects that were large-scale and capital-intensive. Of the156 Soviet plants, nearly all were in heavy industry and located in inlandcenters like Wuhan and Baotou in the north so as to get away from de-pendence on Shanghai and Tianjin on the coast.

The dependence on Soviet aid came at a high price. While the PRCwas investing some 25 billion yuan in the First Five-Year Plan, the Sovietcontribution was not in the form of grants but only of loans, at the rateof about 60 million yuan a year, all to be repaid. While some 10,000 So-viet specialists came to China and 28,000 Chinese got training in theUSSR, these Soviet credits totaled only about 4 percent of China’s totalinvestment in industry. To be sure, Soviet technology was more advancedthan China’s, and on the whole the Soviet relationship proved of crucialvalue.

All these factors led the planners of the Second Five-Year Plan in1956 to some very sensible conclusions. They agreed that heavy industryshould receive more but that progress in the countryside would be essen-tial to long-term progress in the cities. The planners also felt that large-scale plants would be less effective than smaller-scale ones in the interior.Small local plants, though less advanced in technology, could use laborand materials on the spot, reduce transportation costs, and begin the in-dustrialization of the countryside. Meanwhile, the planners wanted to beless dependent on Soviet aid. A final incentive arose from the fact thatcollectivization of agriculture had not noticeably increased productionof grain and other farm products. It seemed that the growth of the enor-mous state bureaucracy had reached a point of impeding economicgrowth, and there was a strong sentiment in favor of less centraliza-tion. However, the Second Five-Year Plan discussed in 1956 was neverworked out to the point of publication because it was superseded in thespring of 1958 by the Great Leap Forward.

Education and the Intellectuals

How could the revolution succeed if intellectuals were still followingthe Confucian model of censorial remonstrance and students were still

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learning classical and liberal stuff in the schools? Mao had not had muchof a liberal education, but he knew what he wanted—intellectuals whowould support the regime, and education that would reach and remoldthe peasant masses. Since this was one area where he eventually met de-feat, let us pause to look back over China’s educational experience.

Under the empire, men of letters had come to be almost universallyexamination candidates and therefore generally classicists and conserva-tives. Most of the great achievements of Chinese literature had comewithin this framework of acceptance of the social order and central au-thority. No monastic sanctuaries, no clash of sectarian faiths, no divisionbetween church and state were allowed, as in Europe, to spawn diversity.Scholarship remained largely in official channels, and the great protago-nists of schools of thought like Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming had had of-ficial careers.

In modern times two things resulted from this tradition. First, Chi-nese scholars of the nineteenth century were slow to embrace foreignideas and begin the process of reform. Second, when the old order didcollapse, the spirit of nationalism was so strong that both reformers andcounter-revolutionaries among the intellectuals were mainly devoted to“saving China.” They were still oriented toward the state.

This orientation had its contradictions, because the role of thescholar-official had always been a dual one—not only to carry out theimperial administration but also to advise the ruler about it and in timeof need to remonstrate with him as to policy. The idea that scholarsknew what to do and had an obligation to offer their advice becameenshrined, for example, in the doctrine of the unity of knowledge andaction—that scholarly knowledge should eventuate in action and actionshould influence knowledge. When scholars of the New Culture Move-ment after 1912 urged the divorce of scholarship from politics, theywere being truly revolutionary. But after 1931, under Japanese attack,even they made their contribution as official advisers and administra-tors. The great critic of China’s decay, Lu Xun, took action to found theLeague of Left-Wing Writers. His encouragement of criticism and pub-lication had been oriented toward the improvement of the social orderand the better exercise of state power, not at all a withdrawal frompolitics.

Once the Communist Party was in power after 1949, its need forcareful thought greatly increased. In theory the transition from revolu-tionary war to administering a new government required that militantactivity shift to the pursuit of revolutionary goals through persuasive

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means rather than violence. In the second half of the twentieth century,building a modern state would require the intellectual resources not onlyof engineering and economics but also of the social sciences, history, andliterature. This kind of modern learning was now highly valued in themature societies of postindustrial civilization, whereas Mao and theCCP felt that their most urgent problem in China was to reestablish thestrong central power of a unified state and remake its values and socialstructure according to the new principles of Marxism–Leninism–MaoZedong Thought. For this purpose they must first establish their controlover the thoughts and behavior of the Chinese people. The Communists’tragedy was that they could seldom get beyond the primary imperativeof maintaining control.

In the early 1950s the professors of the educational establishmentunderwent thought reform by the hundreds. Each one was required toexpose his former subservience to capitalist imperialism, his profoundsense of guilt at having so betrayed the Chinese people, and his gratitudeto Chairman Mao for now having led him to a new view. Sons of promi-nent fathers had to denounce them as reactionaries. Each confession, bythe time it was accepted for publication, offered a sometimes ingeniousrationale as to why the culprit besmirched with the evils of the old ordercould no longer be a model for youth to emulate. In this way the profes-sors suffered a disastrous humiliation and neatly destroyed their publicimage.

Intellectuals in the early 1950s were only one target of thought re-form, which grew to major proportions. In nationwide campaigns, cer-tain evils of conduct were targeted in the abstract and then found in indi-viduals who were then victimized in a regular procedure. Each campaignwas nationally organized and promoted by activists in each locality, whowere often instructed to find a certain quota of victims. Public strugglemeetings and humiliation were conducted on a massive scale, with thou-sands of participants in the audience who were set a warning example ofwhat not to be and do.

The next problem for educational reform was how to produce stu-dents devoted to the party line. Since intellectuals were in large partteachers, the whole educational system became an area for revolution-ary remaking. Among China’s three distinct eras of modern educationalpolicy, the first—the old classical education, lasting until 1905—hadtrained generalists to be like Oxford and Cambridge graduates—broad-gauge administrators, not technical specialists. In the second era, untilthe 1940s, the Western liberal arts and sciences were used to produce a

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modernized elite. The common people were reached only in a prelimi-nary way. In the third era, after 1949, the masses, Mao hoped, couldfinally become a major focus of educational policy. The expansion of pri-mary school education and of simple public health measures were two ofthe PRC’s major achievements. On the foundation of elementary schoolsMao hoped to use the Soviet system to produce ideologically sound tech-nocrats. But the actual system still faced in two directions: to give a mod-ern education and technical skills to the masses, and to train up a broad-gauge elite able to take the place of the old Confucian literati-adminis-trators. But given the PRC’s limited resources, how could it achieve bothgoals simultaneously?

After 1949 the CCP began a vigorous imitation of the Soviet modelof education. This model stressed the specialized training of scientificpersonnel in practical subjects, especially the natural sciences. Accord-ingly, the CCP dismantled the liberal arts programs inherited from theChristian colleges and national universities. Instead, it created 20 newpolytechnic colleges and 26 new engineering institutes. Out of some 200institutions of higher education, only 13 were designed as comprehen-sive universities that included both arts and sciences. This reorganizationin the early years of the People’s Republic had the effect of shifting themajority of students into technical subjects, rather than the liberal artscurriculum, which had previously produced graduates, especially in poli-tics and economics, with political ideas but few skills. The main shift, inother words, had been from a program that produced broad-gaugedpeople for top government jobs to a more practical one that producedtechnicians; the CCP could through its own channels find administra-tors. This may be seen as an attempt to cut the linkage between liberaleducation and public policy.

The Soviet example also led to the regularizing of teaching plans, ma-terials, and textbooks, so that training programs in all specialties wereprescribed from the center. A Soviet-type Ministry of Higher Educationwas set up in November 1952. A large translation program secured Chi-nese editions of Soviet specialized textbooks, which accounted for athird or more of books published. The teaching of English as a secondlanguage gave way to the teaching of Russian. Grading and oral-exami-nation procedures followed Soviet practice. The field of genetics, in par-ticular, was terrorized and stultified by imposition of the unscientificideas of the Soviet charlatan P. Lysenko.

Inheritances from the Nationalist period and from the CCP BorderRegion were combined with Soviet influences into an educational system

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that had many unresolved problems. For example, the highly trainedWestern-returned students, who were now professors, had to be recondi-tioned to carry on under communism. Although professors had beenprime candidates for thought reform in the 1950s, the fact remained thatthe teaching staffs on the whole had not adopted communist methodsand viewpoints. They were more democratic socialists than totalitariancommunists.

Despite their experience of thought reform and many conscious ef-forts to imbibe the new principles of the revolution, the faculty memberswere up against the problem of standards in their fields. The CCP as-pired to create intellectuals out of workers and peasants without delay,but professors found that the best students still came from families witheducational backgrounds and that workers and peasants with only a fewyears of schooling were simply not capable of university work. The re-gime could encourage the activity of people’s schools (minban) at thevillage level, but it proved impossible to make those schools a pipelineinto modern education at higher levels. Because popular education wasguided by uneducated party members, it had little chance of achievingthe levels of the university.

Most of all the Chinese system of higher education remained quitelimited in quantity. A nation of 400 million people had produced an-nually before 1949 only some 185,000 college graduates; and as thepopulation rapidly increased after that date, the proportion of highlyeducated personnel did not improve. College graduates comprised some-where around 1 percent of the population. How could one hope to cre-ate a modern country with that proportion of trained personnel? As the1950s wore on, the goal of a people’s school in every village had to begiven up. The excess number of middle school graduates competing forcollege entrance could not be usefully increased lest it create a frustratedclass of intellectuals without jobs adequate to their self-esteem.

China still suffered, in short, from the inherited division between themuscle-worker masses and the brain-worker ruling class. Middle schoolgraduates felt it was demeaning not to be in white-collar jobs. In 1956only about a third of all undergraduate students in universities were ofworker-peasant origin. The revolution in education had begun but wasfar from complete or successful. Combined with the economic inadequa-cies of the Soviet model of development, this set the stage for a newphase of revolutionary effort to secure the more active support of intel-lectuals.

Mao began with the premise that the intellectuals’ work was essen-

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tial to the revolution. “We can’t get along without them.” In early 1956his position was that just as farmers were amalgamating with industrialworkers, so that they were both becoming party members, the same pro-cess should apply to the intellectuals. As people doing labor, the farmers,industrial workers, and scholars were all members of the same proletar-iat. Class struggle was dying away. This was the view of Deng Xiaoping,one of Mao’s most loyal followers, who was general secretary of theCCP. Evidence indicates that Mao in early 1956 felt that the intellectu-als, while undoubtedly expert, were also Red in their outlook.

At this time the CCP leaders were divided between two views of theintellectuals’ value to the party. Some had seen the CCP grow in influ-ence through the united-front strategy that had sought patriotic com-mon ground with nonparty intellectuals, with many of whom they hadcollaborated and some of whom had eventually joined the party. Theintellectuals were relatively few, but they had been essential to the CCP’ssuccess in reaching the public through writing and in setting up technicalfacilities, public services, and administration. CCP leaders like Mao,Zhou, and Deng felt that nonparty intellectual talent should continueto be persuaded to collaborate and their needs should be catered to,whereas hard-line organizers like Liu Shaoqi and the mayor of Beijing,Peng Zhen, were intent on party unity and orthodoxy at all costs.

In intellectual–educational circles this issue was raised in the Hun-dred Flowers Campaign of 1956–57, so named for the phrase, “Let ahundred flowers bloom together, let the hundred schools of thoughtcontend.” As part of a general improvement in their working conditions(more access to foreign publications, more free time and scope for initia-tive), intellectuals were urged from May 1956 to voice criticisms of theparty cadres who had been lording it over them. Mao estimated thatamong a total of at most 5 million intellectuals—that is, middle school(high school) graduates and above—not more than 3 percent were bythis time hostile to Marxism. So the Hundred Flowers criticism of theparty’s bureaucratic style and methods would be constructive, repre-senting a “nonantagonistic contradiction” among the people, arguablewithin a context of complete loyalty to the communist system.

China’s intellectuals well knew that if you stick your neck out youmay lose your head. For a year they said nothing. But then in May 1957they began to criticize the CCP regime in rapidly escalating terms—itsbasic premises, working style, doctrines, and practices suddenly cameunder severe attack. Within five weeks the Hundred Flowers Campaignwas closed down.

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The Anti-Rightist Campaign, 1957–1958

Once the Hundred Flowers movement in mid-1957 showed the consid-erable disenchantment of the intellectuals with the CCP regime, Maothen shifted to the principle of class struggle against recalcitrant intellec-tuals by making them the targets of an Anti-Rightist Campaign fromJune 1957. A rectification campaign among party members was be-ing mounted at this time because so many CCP bureaucrats had be-come slack and self-seeking. Some were developing ties with unreliableintellectuals, while the intellectuals were refusing to become Redin their hearts. The two wayward groups could therefore be targeted to-gether.

Chinese emperors had occasionally opened the path for words ofcriticism (yanlu), but they often got more than they expected. In 1957Mao and his colleagues were appalled and disillusioned by the outburstof criticism, and they quickly retaliated by making intellectuals, as wellas some CCP members, targets of the Anti-Rightist Campaign; some-where between 300,000 and 700,000 skilled people were removed fromtheir jobs and given the devastating title of “rightist,” an enemy of thepeople. The effect was to decapitate the People’s Republic, inactivatingthe very persons in shortest supply. As general secretary of the CCP,Deng Xiaoping took an active part in the Anti-Rightist Campaign.

Up to 1957 two categories of administrators had been leaders in thePRC. One was the patriotic noncommunist liberals who had stayed inChina or even come back from abroad to do their bit. The other was the“outside cadres,” party members who had been assigned by the CCPbefore 1949 to make professional careers in Free China. These two cat-egories of people possessed much of the experience, view of the world,and talent needed to set up the new regime. It is not surprising that theoutside cadres asked by the CCP to work as ostensible liberal individu-als in GMD China should develop a few liberal sentiments of their own.Their ideal of the revolution was to emancipate people, not controlthem. Such idealists would suffer only after the revolution succeeded. Inthe tens of thousands of Anti-Rightist cases taken from these two groupsof leaders, we see the revolution beginning to devour the revolution-aries.

In the cities, much as in the countryside, by 1957 a new crowd werecoming into power, arising from worker or peasant ranks, not well ed-ucated, ignorant of the outside world, and suffused with both xenopho-bia and anti-intellectualism. One way to try to understand this grim

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story is to see it as a manifestation of struggle between newcomers on themake—“fundamentalists,” as Edward Friedman calls them—and theremnants of the modernized ruling elite, whom the newcomers intendedto destroy or displace despite the highly skilled service the elite had ren-dered to the new state. This new group coming into power in the CCPwere contemptuous of learning but vengeful and capable of cruel and fa-natic destruction now that they had a chance, with only a minimal graspof China’s problems of modernization and how to meet them.

The rise of this new ruling class element revealed the CCP leader-ship’s profound ignorance of modern needs. Both state-building and eco-nomic development require trained minds. Casting aside so large a partof China’s intellectual elite in favor of “fundamentalists” was stupid anddisastrous. In structural terms it destroyed the customary balance be-tween power and learning. For example, in the seventeenth century theKangxi Emperor had clearly seen how wu and wen must work togetherin the governing of China. One may hypothesize that Mao and his col-leagues subsequently committed error after error that trained and expe-rienced intellectuals, if used as staff members and collaborators, couldhave saved them from. The year 1957 was the first of China’s “twentylost years”—lost in the sense that patriotic talent was stultified and notallowed to help the nation’s development. The phrase “ten lost years”later used to characterize Mao’s Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976was only a continuation of what began in 1957.

Once the intellectuals had been shown by the Hundred Flowersfiasco to be of dubious loyalty, Mao moved to the idea that a new gener-ation of intellectuals should be trained up verily committed to the partybecause they were of good proletarian-class background. In the contra-diction between merit and class status, he saw it necessary to emphasizethe latter. He warned the intellectuals that they were simply teachers em-ployed by the proletariat and laboring people to teach their children.They should not venture to have their own ideas separate from those ofthe party.

In atavistic terms, China’s rulers had expected from their followers adegree of unquestioning loyalty of the same priority as filiality towardparents. To say that Mao had lost face by his trust in the Redness of in-tellectuals hardly begins to describe his motivation. From 1957 on he re-mained vindictively opposed to them, regarding them with disdain asmere word users and, with some fear, as people he could not control.This reaction led him to many wild statements: that the intellectuals

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were the most ignorant of the people, that all great intellectual achieve-ments had been made by relatively uneducated youth, that worship oftechnology was a fetish. In this way he was thrown back upon the sourcefrom which he had emerged, namely, the Chinese common people as thefount of wisdom and hope of the future.

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19The Great Leap Forward

1958–1960

Background Factors

In 1958–1960 some 20 to 30 million people lost their lives through mal-nutrition and famine because of the policies imposed upon them by theChinese Communist Party. Measured by the statistics showing an in-crease of mortality, this was one of the greatest of human disasters.Though directly due to Chairman Mao, the Great Leap Forward also ex-pressed the ardor of many millions of rural people. What went wrong?

In the Great Leap Forward (GLF), we can see several factors at workwithout being able as yet to assign them their ultimate influence. We be-gin by noting certain residual aspects of the Chinese inheritance—first,that the state authorities had unquestioned control over the populace inthe villages. The bifurcation of society into rulers and ruled, the manag-ers and the producers, could now be used by the CCP leaders more inten-sively than ever before. With the persuasive methods they had developedat Yan’an, once they had set up a Stalinist command economy they couldreally order the peasantry around.

All central orders, however, had to be applied by local authorities.Part of China’s inheritance was that their state of morale, their loyaltyto the center, would be a key determinant of the results achieved. CCPactivists had now in a general way succeeded to the local leadershipposition of the lower gentry of imperial times. They could reassert theold practices of officialism, oriented upward toward seeking their superi-ors’ approval rather than downward to serve the people. When moralewas high, local authorities might zealously compete to report how wellthey had carried out the center’s orders. In addition to overoptimistic

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false reporting, they might coerce the populace to get results. When thecollectivization of agriculture in 1955–56 had gone much faster thanforeseen, it was later disclosed that many Agricultural Producers’ Coop-eratives had in fact been inaugurated too quickly and were not reallyable to function as claimed.

Underlying this situation was another inherited factor, the docility ofthe Chinese peasantry, who were remarkably inured to following the dic-tates of authority because it represented the peace and order on whichtheir livelihood depended. The vision of the leadership could be im-parted to the populace because in the early 1950s the CCP and the Chi-nese people generally still felt united in the common cause of building upChina. The people trusted Chairman Mao. This at once opened the doorto utopianism and illusion because the party cadres, drawn increasinglyfrom the upper ranks of the peasantry, were fervently ready to go along,follow the leader, and bring the masses with them. Thus local obedienceto the party, plus the personal cult of Mao Zedong, could create masshysteria, during which people worked around the clock and abandonedestablished ways.

The impetus for the GLF came from the CCP’s shocking recognitionin late 1957 that the Stalinist model of industrial growth was not suitedto Chinese conditions. China’s population in 1950 was four times as bigas that of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, while the Chinese standard ofliving was only half as high. In spite of universal collectivization, farmproduction had not noticeably increased. From 1952 to 1957 the ruralpopulation had increased by about 9 percent while the city populationhad grown about 30 percent, but the government grain collection hadhardly improved at all, and meanwhile China had to begin repaying So-viet loans out of agricultural products. The Soviet model of taxing agri-culture to build industry faced a dead end. Moreover, urbanization, hav-ing outstripped industrialization, produced urban unemployment, whichwas added to the underemployment in the populous countryside. TheFirst Five-Year Plan had got results as expected, but to go ahead withmore of the same, the Second Five-Year Plan, would invite disaster.

The economist’s remedy for this problem, instead of the GLF, wouldhave been to slow down the rate of investment in heavy industry, whichat first had reached 48 percent, and direct some of it to light industry,which could produce consumer goods. The availability of consumergoods in turn would provide a material incentive for the peasants’ pro-ductive activity. By this approach the central government ministrieswould also play a greater role, and expertise would take precedence over

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zealotry. The effect would be to carry through an agricultural revolution,which has preceded industrialization in most cases of successful eco-nomic development.

This slow approach did not suit Mao Zedong’s frame of mind, andhe persuaded his colleagues that the countryside could be made over andagricultural production could be increased by a massive organization ofrural labor power. The incentive would be the same revolutionary deter-mination that had brought the CCP leadership to success. Economic bet-terment could be promised, but the material incentives for the individ-ual’s work would be reduced, while ideological ardor and self-sacrificewould take their place. This strategy made a very big and uncertain as-sumption about peasant psychology.

It was just the sort of thing guerrilla warriors could put together.They had learned how to mount campaigns and mobilize the populace toattain specific social objectives, much like capturing positions in war-fare—indeed, military terminology was commonly used. The whole ap-paratus of campaign mechanisms was now to be directed to an economictransformation, the simultaneous development of agriculture and indus-try. This was a strategy of dualism—or, as Mao said, “Walking on twolegs.” Mass mobilization would make use of rural labor never beforefully employed: first, to use labor intensively to step up irrigation, floodcontrol works and land reclamation; second, to raise agricultural pro-ductivity per unit of land by using more hands to plant, weed, and culti-vate; and third, to expand small-scale industry locally with materials andequipment at hand in order to produce consumer goods and equipmentfor agriculture. Meanwhile, the modern industrial economy would pro-duce exports to trade for capital goods from abroad or for investment infurther plant construction.

Because economists, like other intellectuals, had suffered down-grading in the Anti-Rightist movement, the enthusiasts for the mass lineenvisioned the unleashing of productive energies simply through massmobilization. For this purpose there was a general decentralization ofeconomic management in late 1957. Many enterprises and even mone-tary controls were decentralized down to the local level. The central sta-tistical bureau was broken up and localized together with functions ofeconomic planning. This was the context in which the overambitioustargets of the Great Leap were formulated in each locality, not by econo-mists but by cadres inspired by emulation who were contemptuous ofexperts but intensely loyal to the cause.

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The result in 1958 was a mighty paroxysm of round-the-clock labor.The face of the country was changed with new roads, factories, cities,dikes, dams, lakes, afforestation, and cultivation, for which the 650 mil-lion Chinese had been mobilized in nationwide efforts of unparalleledintensity and magnitude. The feat most publicized abroad was the cam-paign begun in July 1958 to produce steel from small “backyard” ironsmelters without special guidance or equipment. Some 30,000 to 50,000smelting furnaces were reported set up by the end of July, 190,000 in Au-gust, 700,000 by the end of September, and a million in October; 100million people were engaged in this “battle for steel.” Unfortunately, theproduct of all this effort proved largely unusable, though many peoplehad indeed confronted the practical problems of metallurgy. Thus theGreat Leap brought small-scale industry into the countryside, applyingtechnology and mobilizing manpower as never before, but the immedi-ate results were chaotic and uneconomic.

The state statistical bureau claimed that in 1958 production of foodcrops and cotton had nearly doubled in one year, and on this basis theCentral Committee set ambitious targets for 1959 to increase again by50 percent. The leadership became a captive of its own claims.

In late 1958 companies and whole regiments of farmers with theirhoes and carrying-baskets marched into the fields in military formationwith drums and flags to make war upon recalcitrant nature. It is truethat manpower applied to dike-building and irrigation channels, to-gether with the damming up of water and water power and the furtherreclamation of land, did get results. The Chinese countryside is still dot-ted with the lakes and water channels constructed by back-breaking la-bor in 1958–59. One has only to walk through a quarter-mile tunnelbuilt of hand-hewn stone under the surface of a new field (as a means ofdraining off the water that might otherwise erode the land) to realizewhat a massive application of muscle power was achieved in the GLF.But all this did not add very much in improved skills, available re-sources, and capital equipment that could have increased productivityper person.

It was the logic of decentralized mobilization that led to the creationof people’s communes, under which the benefits of modernization inhealth care, education, large-scale production, and the amenities of lifewere supposed to be distributed equally through their concentration ofpower and overall planning. Seldom has the willful pursuit of an idealled to such devastating results.

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The Disaster of 1959–1960

Where 1958 had been a good crop year, 1959 had less helpful weather.The farmers marching about to win the revolution on the land had beenunable to harvest all the crops, yet the statistics sent in from the prov-inces and their localities added up to an enormous increase in produc-tion, more than a doubling of output. The result was that governmentrequisitions continued high even while production was actually drop-ping. This led to a first-class manmade famine.

In early 1959 there was a retreat from the GLF program, but the re-treat was halted when questions were raised about the GLF’s results. InJuly 1959 the CCP leaders held a climactic meeting at Lushan, a moun-tain retreat in the Lower Yangzi. One of the top army commanders atYan’an and in Korea, who was one of the ten marshals of the People’sLiberation Army and currently defense minister, Peng Dehuai (who hadbeen with Mao for thirty years, since the very beginning in Hunan), triedto report to Mao the actual deterioration of peasant life, but Mao took itas a personal attack and had Peng thrown out of power.

In retaliation the GLF proponents and Mao as their leader persistedin continuing the GLF program. After the Lushan meeting another Anti-Rightist Campaign was mounted against critics of the GLF strategy. Thisin turn fired up a renewal of the GLF in 1959, with an exacerbation ofthe disastrous consequences. The greatest crime of this period was thatrequisitions of grain from the villages were increased and collected justat a time when the villagers had had trouble getting their harvests inbecause of the diversion of labor power to public works and also be-cause of poor weather. The net result was to leave the populace in someareas with only half or even one fifth of their usual subsistence grainsupply.

The zealotry of the rural GLF managers continued to oppose thetechnical economic views of the urban central ministries and administra-tors. This prolongation of the GLF led to another fall in production bothin heavy industry and in light-industry consumer goods. The famine ofthe 1870s in North China, when no rain fell for three years, had beenbeyond the reach of railways; corpses had dotted the roadsides. In1959–60 China was better organized, and famine areas full of starvedcorpses were not seen. But malnutrition due to thin rations made mil-lions more susceptible to disease. The higher-than-usual mortality didnot become known until the statistics were worked out. Not until 1960was it finally realized that many peasants were starving and the whole

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economy had been thrown into a shambles. China had slid into an eco-nomic morass, and Chairman Mao had been shown to have feet of clay.He even had to admit that he knew almost nothing of economics. TheGLF had played itself out as a Mao-made catastrophe.

Along with economic disaster had come an ominous political turn.Until this time the top CCP leadership in the Politburo had held discus-sions every few weeks or months in various parts of the country in orderto thrash out their policy decisions. The merit of this system had alwaysbeen that alternatives were vigorously put forward, but after a decisionhad been made everybody went along. Now, however, for the first timeMao had transformed the policy argument put forward by MarshalPeng into an illegitimate personal attack on himself. For the momentMao won the day, but it was a Pyrrhic victory that opened the door tofactionalism rather than honest policy discussion. Mao’s headstrong de-nunciation of Peng destroyed the unity of the CCP leadership. Initiallynearly everyone had gone along with the GLF strategy, but its failuredemonstrated Mao’s fallibility and destroyed the solidarity among theleaders.

One of the bones of contention between Mao and Marshal Peng layalso in the latter’s desire to make the People’s Liberation Army moretechnically competent, like the Red Army of the USSR. Mao, on the con-trary, had been developing the idea of using nuclear bombs as a counter-part to guerrilla warfare, without building up the professional army onRussian lines.

By concentrating solely on Chairman Mao as the leader we wouldfail to convey the national mood of fervent self-sacrifice and freneticactivity that characterized the Great Leap Forward. Peasants workedaround the clock to break their own work records, cadres in charge lo-cally kept on reporting totally unrealistic production figures, and Mao’scolleagues such as the economist Chen Yun and Premier Zhou Enlaifound no way to stop the fever.

The extent of the disaster was hidden from outside observers by thefact that city populations continued to receive rations from the country-side, and industrial construction continued to expand. But eventually thehard facts could not be avoided. All the marching about with drums andcymbals, carrying flags, and attacking targets, plus the utopian idea ofcommon mess halls for production units and the addition of women tothe labor force outside the family farms, was leading the Chinese over acliff. Several years of saner economic policies in the early 1960s wouldbe necessary to get back to the levels of livelihood of 1957.

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Decentralization was one of the several puzzling motifs in the GLF.Local cadres, restive under central orders, welcomed the opportunity tomanage the masses in the new projects without interference from thecentral government. The GLF greatly enhanced the importance of theparty as leader of the society. The political result was to give opportunityto the ideologically zealous organizer of mass enthusiasm, the revivalisttype rather than the trained expert. The GLF strategy of using mass mo-bilization to achieve economic development made it difficult for the cen-ter to rein in the local activists and get back to an orderly program ofcentral direction, such as economic management requires.

And yet, looming behind the many factors at play in the GLF wasthe personality and ego of Chairman Mao. He had spent all his life sincethe 1920s organizing by word and deed a rebellion against the estab-lished order. After 1949 he continued to target established groups withinChinese society. Eventually he would break with the Soviet Union as anestablishment gone astray. The principal motif of the Maoist style of re-bellion was mobilization of the masses and suppression of the intellectu-als who formerly had helped to manage them. In this respect Mao wasstill a rebel against the Confucianism denounced in the May FourthMovement.

Revival: Seizing Control of Industrial Labor

After the Great Leap Forward, leaders like Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiao-ping secured competent factual reports on communes, industry, science,handicrafts, finance, commerce, literature, and art as bases for practicalrehabilitation programs, especially for getting control of the industrialeconomy. During the GLF, rural migration to the cities had pushed theurban population up to 130 million by 1960. Plant construction andorders for raw materials shot upward out of control. In 1960–1964retrenchment led to plant closings and a 50 percent drop in employ-ment. This was met by the systematic shipment of many millions ofunemployed out of the cities to the countryside, with a net reduction ofcity population by 14 million. A program of complete household regis-tration, rationing of grain and other daily necessities, and householdchecks established control over urban residents. Illegal migration wasstopped, and urban youths were relocated to rural areas as a regularpractice.

As part of this control system, status distinctions developed within

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city labor. The great bulk of industrial output came from large, capital-intensive state enterprises that became the workplaces (danwei) of askilled and privileged labor force. By the 1980s these permanent workersin state industry would total 27 million and be, in Andrew Walder’s(1986) phrase, the only “labor force to participate fully in the welfarestate.” They had fringe benefits such as housing and subsidized meals,wage supplements, government subsidies, lifetime pensions, and welfareand state insurance arrangements. This well-paid two fifths of the laborforce working in some 85,000 enterprises produced three quarters ofChina’s industrial output. Another two fifths of the labor force were asecondary class of workers in urban and rural collective enterprises whoproduced a third as much output. These smaller and more numerous ur-ban collective enterprises employed craftsmen, women, and youths onless favorable terms than the state enterprises. A still lower category wasthat of “temporary workers” who performed rather menial muscle-power tasks on contract in construction and transport.

To the privileged worker in a state enterprise, his workplace distrib-uted housing, ration coupons, subsidized food, and staple goods. It alsoarranged social services, medical care, recreation, and political life. Yetafter receiving all these benefits, workers still had to spend more thanhalf of their salaries on food. As a result, the state worker was fully de-pendent on his workplace, which could discipline him in all the ways aConfucian-minded family used to do. A worker might hope that his sonwould succeed to his job. Promotion in grade might be due to senioritymore readily than to increase of skill. Dissidence or even criticism, on theother hand, might lead to expulsion.

In the early 1960s, in short, no labor movement existed to worry theregime, while in state enterprises the extent of the workers’ dependenceon their workplaces kept them usually well under control. The essentiallabor force in heavy industry and other state enterprises in this way wasbrought into subservience to the state and party as a counterpart to thepeasantry’s subservience in agriculture.

Meanwhile, economic planners like Chen Yun called for a revival ofmotivation in agriculture by permitting cultivation of private plots againand selling in local markets, generally fostering the ideal of “individualresponsibility.” This appeal to material concerns roused Mao to call in-stead for a renewed ideological effort through class struggle. The lineswere being drawn for what became known as the “two-line struggle”between Liu, Deng, and others on the side of expert management and

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Mao and his supporters on the side of a romantic, rural-based mobiliza-tion as the way to meet China’s deepening problems.

Party Rectification and Education

In Mao’s two-line struggle with Liu as state chairman and Deng as gen-eral secretary of the party, both sides had to agree that the party hadsuffered badly in its prestige among the people, that corruption had in-creased, and morale was low. They differed whether to conduct rectifi-cation by a new mass movement at the lower levels of the countryside orto keep it within the CCP organization. Mao first tried in 1963 to lead arectification among the party cadres in the countryside, which he calledthe Socialist Education Campaign. This would have enabled Mao to cre-ate a network of temporary organs in a campaign style, and so the So-cialist Education Campaign in 1963 became a battleground between thetwo approaches. The party organization held back, with the result thatin 1964 the CCP mounted another mass campaign, called the FourCleanups, for class struggle to rectify the village cadres. In practice, thenew committee chairmen, secretaries, accountants, warehousemen, andothers of the village managerial level had soon begun to lord it over thepeasantry from whom they had so recently emerged. They indulged insmall peculations, played favorites, did less manual labor, and in generalasserted their authority by giving arbitrary orders and making a betterlife for themselves. The Four Cleanups Campaign therefore targeted cad-res whose attitudes (not class origin) had made them exploiters.

To combat these evils the CCP used the device of sending work teamsof outside cadres to rectify the conduct of local cadres. The procedurewas reminiscent of the original land-reform measures against landlords,local bullies, and small-time despots. Work-team members settled in thevillage for some weeks, cultivated relations with the poor who had griev-ances, compiled charges and evidence against the local cadres, and thenused endless interrogations, physical exhaustion, and forced confessionsas a basis for struggle meetings. These were in the same style as strugglemeetings against intellectuals and bureaucrats. They became the chiefform of the peasant’s participation in political life, manipulated by theCCP on a vast scale. Instead of merely watching an execution in the oldstyle as passive observers, they now became vociferous accusers of vic-tims targeted by the authorities.

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Disillusioned by the party officials’ reluctance to go along with hisapproach to rectification through a mass campaign, by 1965 Mao beganto look outside the party to find a means for its rectification.

Meanwhile Mao’s desire to liberate China’s peasants and througheducation make them knowledgeable citizens—an ideal that Westernliberal reformers could readily accept—had also been frustrated. Edu-cation had always been a major concern of the people. The GLF hadfaced a double problem—how to bring education to the common manthrough new institutions while continuing to train the necessary elite inthe established system of middle schools and universities. The new effortnow centered on the creation of work–study schools like the “people’sschools” (minban) used in the Yan’an period. Thousands of middleschools, it was claimed, were established on a work–study basis, whilethe regular curriculum was reduced from twelve years, as in the Ameri-can system, to ten years, as in the Soviet. To reach the common man itwas also essential to simplify the content of education; textbooks wereconsequently rewritten. The bottleneck was in personnel adequatelytrained in special subjects. They were simply unavailable. The makeshiftof hailing peasants as “scientists” and bringing them into teaching posi-tions proved to be ineffective. There was no getting around the fact thatthe work–study schools were inferior to the regular schools.

This palpable fact gave the work–study schools a bad reputation asinferior channels for advancement. Peasant families realized quickly thattheir children could advance into the upper class only through the regu-lar school system. Rather than have their children enter a work–studyprogram that could lead only to the status of an educated peasant, manypeasant families preferred to keep their children at home to work on thefarm.

Educators in the regular system, when it was watered down to ac-commodate relatively untrained worker-peasant students, resorted to aspecial device in the effort to maintain standards and produce a trainedelite. This device, which had been used at Yan’an, was the keypointschool, where the best students, teaching staff, and equipment could beconcentrated. Since a national examination system was again function-ing, the percentage of graduates who passed it and moved on from sen-ior middle school into universities became the measure of a school’s ex-cellence. In the pecking order thus established, the keypoint schoolswere at the top and the work–study schools at the bottom. Moreover,work–study schools had the largest proportion of worker-peasant chil-

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dren, while the children of political activists or “revolutionary cadres” inthe official structure were dominant in the middle schools. However, thewinners at the top level in the keypoint schools were likely to be the chil-dren of old intellectuals, whose family tradition had given them a headstart in education.

Considered as a social program, the educational reforms and innova-tions of the GLF period directly attacked the old split between upperclass and commoner. Mao’s dictum, “Never forget class struggle,” putthe children of intellectuals at a disadvantage. As a consequence, stu-dents with a “bad” class background were often penalized or even ex-cluded from the system. Nevertheless, a competition was set up for en-trance to college on the basis of examination grades much the same as inearlier times. The result was that by the mid-1960s China’s new educa-tional system was bifurcated into two tracks, and the upper track still ledinto the elite. It had not been possible to change China’s class structurethrough education.

On the contrary, the emergence of elites left a majority out-classedand dissatisfied. When entrance to higher education was restricted in the1960s for reasons of cost to the state and fear of oversupply of gradu-ates, greater numbers of young people remained unemployed in the cit-ies. In the labor force a similar restiveness arose because of higher wagesand more secure jobs afforded skilled workers, while the majority of la-borers were plainly expendable. Tensions were growing in major areasof Chinese society as well as within the CCP.

The Sino–Soviet Split

Looking back to 1960, we may now see clearly that the Chinese and theRussians were heading for a split-up. The fact was that American con-tact with China across the Pacific had been much more extensive andlong-lived than the Russian influence from across Siberia and Mongolia.There had been no Russian Orthodox Christian colleges educating Chi-nese youth. English, not Russian, was the second language of the Chi-nese upper class. In contrast, the Chinese link with Russia had comethrough the Communist movement and the few thousands of Chinesethat it sent to Moscow. This influence did not begin until the 1920s, andas the Chinese and Russian Communists got to know each other betterthey did not necessarily become greater friends. The CCP leadershipcould not forget that Stalin had supported the wrong strategy in the

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1920s, and as late as 1945 he had made a treaty with Nationalist Chinato serve Russian national interests in Manchuria. In short, the Sino–Rus-sian linkup was tenuous and could dissolve as soon as the CCP began todevelop its own style of national communism. One solvent would be thefact that, when China again recognized the need for outside aid in eco-nomic development, the United States and its allies could supply muchmore than the Soviet Union.

The Chinese–Russian split developed in the late 1950s in a series ofstages. For the fortieth anniversary of the USSR, Chairman Mao madehis second trip to Moscow, in the winter of 1957. He said fulsome thingsabout Soviet supremacy in international communism and even went fur-ther than the Russians would have liked in claiming prematurely that theSoviet’s orbiting of the first satellite, Sputnik, had just shown that “theeast wind was prevailing over the west wind” and the days of capitalisticimperialism were numbered. At this time various Sino–Soviet agree-ments for technical exchange, including assistance in making nuclearbombs, were worked out and China continued to have the help of some10,000 Soviet experts in its industrial development.

The relationship began to come apart when Nikita Khrushchev be-came an outspoken critic of the Great Leap Forward. On his two visitsto Beijing, in 1958 and 1959, he and Mao did not get along. The Rus-sian leader thought the Chinese leader was a romantic deviationistwhose judgment could not be trusted. Khrushchev was incensed atMao’s claim during the GLF that through its commune system Chinawould reach communism sooner than the USSR. Khrushchev was alsooutraged that in 1958, when Mao was planning to bombard QuemoyIsland, garrisoned by Nationalist troops, just outside the port of Xia-men, Mao had told him nothing about it on the grounds that it was apurely domestic matter. This rationalization overlooked the fact that theUnited States was allied with Taiwan, as was the People’s Republic withthe USSR, and so this move in a so-called civil war might trigger a super-power—and therefore nuclear—confrontation. Khrushchev was just inthe Camp David phase of working out a modus vivendi with PresidentEisenhower. In the Taiwan Straits crisis in 1958 over possible hostilitiesbetween the PRC and the United States, the Soviets refused to backup China and then reneged on the promise to give China an atomicweapon. This falling-out reached the point in mid-1960 where Khrush-chev suddenly withdrew all Soviet technicians from China, along withtheir blueprints. The CCP was soon sending ideological blasts against

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Soviet revisionism to the Communist party of the Soviet Union and beingpaid back in kind. By 1963 this altercation between the two parties wasbeing made public to the world. The falling-out was all the more bitterbecause as sectarians the CCP and CPSU had once shared a commonfaith, and now each saw the other as traducing it.

The Great Leap Forward as a Social Movement

The collectivization of agriculture in China had been made possible byyears of determined and wholehearted activity on the part of the localcadres who managed the process. These many millions of people, bothmen and women, were political activists and managers, including bothparty members and candidates, ambitious to carry through the revolu-tion and at the same time rise in the world with it. They had emergedfrom the rural masses by their own responsiveness to the opportunitiesof the revolution. In terms of social structure, they corresponded in ageneral way to the lower gentry of late imperial and early Republicantimes—who had been the followers of patrons higher up, managers ofbursaries and the affairs of absentee landlords, local officials, heads ofgangs and peasant associations, military men, and others in a position totax, conscript, organize, and tyrannize over the farming population. Atthe end of the imperial order, this lower gentry had become petty localdespots on their own, no longer tied in with the upper gentry, who werethen in the cities and towns.

The whole process of land reform under the CCP had been one inwhich party cadres supplanted the old remnants of the lower gentry. Invitality they represented a new regime, but in structural terms they pene-trated much further into village life, backed by the authority of the party.Where the lower gentry had arisen locally with some degree of spontane-ity and autonomy, the CCP cadres achieved their dominance by repre-senting higher authority.

Once they had been called into being and had found their way up-ward in society through the collectivization of agriculture, this new stra-tum of activists in the countryside needed things to do and were ready togo further. The Great Leap Forward was hard to rein in because once theactivists got started reorganizing the villages, they tended to keep on go-ing. “Liberation” in effect had produced a new class who wanted to keepon liberating.

By the late 1950s and early 1960s China was a nation of young peo-ple, uprooted from the past and avidly in competition to gain prefer-

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ment. One may imagine other motives, not necessarily selfish or materi-alistic. The elimination of the old constraints on peasant life, the spreadof literacy and organization, the doctrines of equality and opportunityfor all inspired many peasant youth to join a noble cause and sacrificefor it.

In the perspective of Chinese history the GLF also appears as an up-dated form of the enormous public works built in earlier times. Re-building the Great Wall in the Ming, like the constructing of theChengdu airfields for American B-29 bombers in World War II, wasdone by labor conscripted from the countryside. Typically a village head-man would be ordered to provide so many bodies at the work site over acertain length of time, say ten days. The villagers would bring their foodsupply and erect mat sheds to sleep in. They worked as a group and afterfulfilling their stint would march home again. There were many varia-tions in such labor-service arrangements, but they all added up to tre-mendous feats of earth-moving in baskets balanced on shoulder-polesand of rock-cutting to provide masonry. The GLF’s achievements inbuilding dams, dikes, and irrigation channels was the latest version of anancient practice that had, for example, erected prehistoric capitals atAnyang and Zhengzhou with walls of earth so well tamped (beatendown within a movable frame) that they are still identifiable today. Tocommand such labor power was the ruler’s prerogative. Mao’s use of itwas quite natural.

Even in the erroneous directions given by minor authorities, such asto cultivate the soil too deep (so salts rose to the surface) or interplantone crop with another (making harvest difficult), we can see a harkingback to statecraft theorists of the imperial upper class telling farmershow to farm.

Nor was the reorganization of peasant life under brigades and com-munes entirely a Maoist invention. The GLF merits comparison, espe-cially in its invasion of the rural scene, with earlier agrarian reforms,such as those of the Northern Wei, Song, and early Ming. We still havemuch to learn about modern China from her long history.

After some economic recovery in the early 1960s, the next phase ofthe revolution saw China turn inward again. To be sure, in the 1962Sino–Indian boundary dispute, after long provocation the People’s Lib-eration Army had scored a quick and spectacular military victory. Butas the Sino–Soviet dispute became more vitriolic, Chinese efforts to or-ganize the underdeveloped Third World countries of Africa and Asiaagainst the USSR met frustration. Zhou Enlai’s touring Africa got no-

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where. Meanwhile, as the United States intervened massively in Vietnamin 1965, it promised not to invade North Vietnam on the ground and soto avoid a Korean-type Sino–American conflict. Frustrated in foreign re-lations, Mao could feel the times propitious for another great effort toremake the Chinese people.

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20The Cultural Revolution

1966–1976

Underpinnings

Mao’s last decade—from 1966 until his death in 1976—saw a domesticpolitical struggle that convulsed China, constantly amazed the outsideworld, and achieved appalling destruction. It was a fitting finale toChina’s twenty lost years begun in 1957 with the Anti-Rightist Cam-paign that dispensed with so many intellectuals. So pervasive was thecataclysm, directly involving something like 100 million people, that itsfull history is still far from known or written.

Americans trying to understand the Cultural Revolution have to be-gin by crossing the gap separating the Chinese and American politicalcultures. Suppose the president in Washington urged high school stu-dents all over the United States to put on armbands, accost, upbraid, andharass citizens on the streets and in their homes and finally take over cityhall, local business firms, government services, and institutions. The highschool students, if they tried it, would be rounded up by nightfall. In theUnited States the semiautonomous sectors of a civil society—the profes-sions, business, labor, the church, the media, and so on—cannot easilybe dragooned.

In looking at the Cultural Revolution (CR) in China, we are there-fore obliged to imagine a society that can be run by a Great Leader and aparty dictatorship simply because the citizenry are passive in politics andobedient to authority. They have no human rights because they havebeen taught that the assertion of human rights (such as due process oflaw) would be selfish and antisocial and therefore ignoble. It would alsobe severely punished. The problem begins on the ground in the family

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life of the Chinese village, where the Confucian teaching of social orderthrough dutiful self-subordination has left its mark even today.

One starting point in understanding the CR is to recognize that MaoZedong had now acquired some of the prerogatives of an emperor. Whyhe should practically destroy the party he had built up and so endangerthe whole revolution is a complex question calling for several lines ofanalysis.

Initially Mao’s aversion to city bureaucratism had expressed his faiththat the countryside must be the chief beneficiary of China’s revolution.His long rural experience had made him well aware of the impedimentsto the good life among Chinese peasants. However, the ideal of their“liberation,” once Mao was in power, gave way to the obvious need touse them to build up China under CCP leadership and control.

As this effort continued, however, Mao became concerned about theseemingly inevitable buildup of the institutions of the central govern-ment and its many levels of officials and cadres who seemed to be takingthe place of the local elite of imperial times. He feared a revival of theruling-class domination of the villagers. Given the modern necessity forexpert management, and the irrepressible tendency toward personalprivilege and corruption among China’s new ruling class, it would behard to prove him wrong.

A more immediate cause of Mao’s concern in the early 1960s wasthe CCP establishment’s widespread and persistent denigration of hisrecord and policies. In a state based upon the ideals of harmony andunity, leaders of factions could not attack one another directly and byname lest they seem to be spoilers and troublemakers. The ancient re-course of Chinese leaders had therefore been to use the penumbra ofestablishment intellectuals who formed the outer and vocal fringe oftheir factions. While the Sino-liberal remnants among the intellectualshad generally been purged as rightists, their places as editors, writers,journalists, and organization men of the intelligentsia had been taken bya somewhat younger generation who were inheritors of the intellectuals’tradition. Allied with political leaders, these intraparty intellectuals ex-pressed their attitudes in editorials, essays, commentaries, plays, andother literary productions. In the early 1960s a group of gifted intel-lectuals representing the CCP establishment used the indirect methodsof Aesopian language, allusions, and historical examples to sustain adrumfire of criticism of the errors of the Great Leap Forward and ofMao’s mass-mobilization tactics in general. Some went further and ques-tioned Mao’s 1942 dictum that all literature should directly serve the

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revolution. The critical opinion was generated mainly in Beijing, wherePeng Zhen was the top man heading the Beijing Party Committee.

Finally, Mao’s fear that the popular revolution was going astray inChina was increased by the spectacle of the USSR. He resented theheavy-handed ways of Nikita Khrushchev. In the USSR Mao saw “revi-sionism” at work, that is, a falling away from egalitarian concern for thepeople and their collective organization and instead the growth of a newruling class of specially privileged, urban-centered, and technically edu-cated people who were kept in line, like the populace in general, by thepowerful secret police. Given the West’s general appraisal of the Sovietparty dictatorship, Mao’s distrust can hardly be faulted. In any case hispersonal motive was to regain control of the CCP by bringing his ownlike-minded followers into power.

One result of Mao’s attack on Marshal Peng was that he was suc-ceeded as defense minister by Marshal Lin Biao, a brilliant tactician,who now rose to power and pushed the politicization of the army. Linpulled together the “little red book” of quotations of Chairman Mao aspart of his indoctrination program and proved ready to take Mao’s sidein the developing controversy. Soon he had abolished insignia amongarmy officers and revived the political commissar system, thus down-grading the professional military that Marshal Peng had represented. Acampaign was pushed to “learn from the People’s Liberation Army(PLA),” as though its military politicization could be a model for thewhole society. This broke with the precedent in the CCP that militarismmust be kept subordinate.

The Cultural Revolution lasted nominally three years, from early1966 to April 1969, but many point out that its type of activities reallycontinued for a whole decade to 1976. We begin with Mao himself.

Mao’s Aims and Resources

An outsider’s understanding of Mao requires a feat of imagination, firstto recognize the nature of his supremacy. Mao had two careers, one asrebel leader, one as an updated emperor. He had gained the power ofthe latter but evidently retained the self-image of the former. Becauseauthority in China came from the top down, as was recognized even inthe mass line, once the CCP had taken power its leader became sacro-sanct, above all the rest of mankind, not only the object of a cult ofveneration but also the acknowledged superior of everyone in the orga-nization. So much of the CCP had been put together by Mao that it

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could be regarded as his creation, and if he wanted to reform it, thatwas his privilege. Only if we regard him as a monarch in succession toscores of emperors can we imagine why the leadership of the CCP,trained to be loyal, went along with his piecemeal assault on and de-struction of them.

This unique position in people’s minds made it possible for Mao,who was also entranced with himself, to regard the emergence of elites asa failure of the revolution, the cure for which must be a revival of egali-tarianism, even though this could be attempted only because Mao was sounequal himself. This benevolent despotism was just the opposite of thepolitics familiar to the Atlantic community, where the chief power-holder is normally the chief object of criticism. In other words, Mao wasin such a unique position of acknowledged power that he could do prac-tically anything he wanted to.

But what did Mao think he was doing? Perhaps it can be summed upas an effort to make “democratic centralism” more democratic and lesscentralist. He saw the new bureaucracy following the ancient pattern ofautocratic government from the top down. This would leave the peasantmasses where they had always been, at the bottom of society, being ex-ploited by a new elite. To combat this tendency Mao wanted to use themass-line approach by which the party should elicit and respond to peas-ant concerns. This new downward-oriented style of government couldbe aided by decentralization of administration. Local decisions shouldnot all depend on Beijing bureaucrats. The aim of government should bethe welfare and indoctrination of the local peasant masses, not merelythe old shibboleth of the self-strengthening movement, a “wealthy stateand strong army.”

This flatly denied one of the basic tenets of the Chinese political tra-dition, namely that the masses must be governed by a carefully trainedand loyal elite of ministers and subordinate officials, of army officerswith commanding rank, and of party organizers with special preroga-tives. “Revisionism” Mao defined as an abandonment of the goals of therevolution and acceptance of the evils of special status and special accu-mulation of worldly goods, which could be called a restoration of cap-italism.

In promoting and manipulating this social convulsion, Mao stagedan instinctive attack on the establishment, even though he had helpedset it in place. His rationale centered upon his analysis of class struggle,which he felt still continued under socialism. A struggle against “revi-

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sionism” in China was suggested by the example of the Soviet Union,where he felt the ideal of socialist government had been subverted by acorrupt bureaucratism.

Mao also seems to have had in mind the idea that student youthcould be mobilized to attack the evils in the establishment and purgeChina of revisionism. It would be a form of the manipulated mass move-ment, which his experience told him was the engine of social change. Tobe sure, by arousing and giving a lead to urban young people, Maoflouted all the principles of party rectification within party ranks. In ef-fect, he declared war on the leaders who had come with him fromYan’an. By manipulating the situation to get the Central Committee’sand other directives approved as he wanted, Mao had the party leadershog-tied by use of their own tradition of disciplined obedience to partycommands. This included at certain key points his securing the supportof Zhou Enlai, who was performing his usual function of trying to ame-liorate the injustices and impracticalities in Mao’s attempt to purge hisparty colleagues. In effect the CCP leadership, intensely loyal to theparty, could not foresee what was going to hit them.

To be sure, as the situation got increasingly out of control and intoviolence, Mao made various efforts to rein it in, but seldom successfully.The Cultural Revolution, like the Hundred Flowers Campaign and theGreat Leap Forward, turned out to be something he had not envisioned.Allowing for many variations, the purge rate among party officials wassomewhere around 60 percent. It has been estimated that 400,000 peo-ple died as a result of maltreatment. In their eventual trial in 1977, theGang of Four, consisting of Mao’s wife Jiang Qing and three of her col-leagues in the Central Cultural Revolution Group, were charged withhaving framed and persecuted more than 700,000 people, of whomsome 35,000 were persecuted to death. Many more were physically andmentally crippled, and a great number committed suicide.

Role of the People’s Liberation Army

Mao’s ability to instigate the Cultural Revolution rested first on the sup-port of the armed forces. There had been a long competition within thePeople’s Liberation Army between military professionalism and ideolog-ical politics. Looking way back, we can note how the Red Army of theUSSR had worked out the party–army relationship by putting “politicsin command,” that is, military professionals should be subordinate to

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political commissars. Gradually, however, military professionalismgained the upper hand in the USSR, along with the growth of the Sovietgeneral staff.

A comparable progression had occurred in China. The WhampoaMilitary Academy under Jiang Jieshi at Guangzhou had created a partyarmy to spearhead the Northern Expedition, but after the split in 1927Jiang built up professional forces with no reliance on the masses’ help forguerrilla warfare or “people’s war.” Meanwhile, the CCP in the boon-docks had to fall back on the ancient Chinese peasant-bandit tech-niques—small-unit mobility, deception, and union with the rural popu-lace within a given region. Even in Jiangxi, however, the control group ofabout a dozen CCP commanders showed a firm belief in professional-ism. Several had studied warfare in Moscow, and the rest had absorbedSoviet ideas. The main holdout against them all was Mao Zedong, whobelieved fervently—then as always—in mobilizing the rural masses in“total war.”

In sum, the CCP from the start had had a trained and sophisticatedgroup of central commanders who were intent on the specialization, or-ganization, and discipline of a truly professional army. They held politi-cal or military posts as required. During the CCP’s rise to power some ofthem headed field armies, of which there were eventually five. Each ofthese armies had some local roots, some continuity of command, andcertain shared experience, all of which might have led to regionalism andrivalries. But the central leadership (Mao, Zhou, Peng Dehuai, and oth-ers) carefully transferred personnel to avoid factionalism. The politicalleaders, having been commanders themselves, knew how to preserveunity.

By the 1960s, while the PLA was essentially defensive concerningforeign powers, it played a basic role within the country as a support ofthe political establishment. There were about 38 “main-force” troopunits or “armies,” which were deployed around the country in elevenmilitary regions. These main-line forces might be contrasted with theregional forces, which were divided among 28 provincial military dis-tricts. The regional forces were less well armed and were trained onlyfor local defense work (including, for example, the mobilization of thePeople’s Militia and production-construction corps, who numbered inthe tens of millions as part-time soldiers). They were widely dispersed insmall commands over the landscape and not trained to be unified fieldarmies. One is reminded of the Late Imperial system under the Qing, in

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which the Lüying or “Army of the Green Standard” served as a constab-ulary dispersed in small units to maintain local order while the banner-men formed the striking forces.

Just as military control resided in the emperor, so in the People’sRepublic the commander-in-chief was the chairman of the CCP, whousually had a concurrent appointment as chairman of the Military Af-fairs Commission. Under the MAC were three basic command structuresto control the military, to command the CCP political apparatus withinthe military, and to handle administrative and logistic functions. An-other echo of the imperial system was the arrangement for troops togrow their own crops and have their own small-scale local industries inorder to make them, to some degree, self-supporting, similar to the an-cient tuntian system of semi-self-sufficient frontier outposts.

Because the party penetrated the army at all levels, many of the mili-tary being party members, the regional armies of the PLA in provincialcommands took their orders from the local party secretaries and otherparty authorities. The first party secretary of a province usually servedconcurrently as the first political commissar of the military district. Thispolitical–military web of control handled conscriptions from the mil-lions of applicants each year, the PLA having become a principal channelfor upward mobility from the countryside.

Thus the regional PLA interpenetrated local government and publicsecurity services and under Lin Biao became both Red and expert. Thisprovided Mao’s power base. The armies of the professional main-forcetroops were at first not involved.

How the Cultural Revolution Unfolded

From late 1965 to the summer of 1966, tensions rose between Mao’sgroup and the CCP establishment. To his support from the repoliticizedPLA under Lin Biao Mao added, through his wife Jiang Qing, a groupof radical Shanghai intellectuals who later would form his Central Cul-tural Revolution Group. They formed a rather nondescript team. LinBiao, though a very able field commander, was a thin and rather quirky,certainly uncharismatic, individual, who was always seen with his capon (he was bald). No doubt Lin was a gifted infighter and crafty like afox, but where Mao’s being overweight simply added to his magnifi-cence (in the Chinese style, where being thin is not prized), Lin appearedsmall and unimpressive. Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, though not very suc-

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cessful as a movie actress before she went to Yan’an and captivated thechairman, proved herself a competent politician. She wanted to takeover the cultural establishment in order to make radical reforms underthe guise of getting back to first principles. She got into power partly byjoining Lin Biao as head of his Cultural Department for the PLA. Shealso teamed up with the radical intellectuals from Shanghai, which be-came the cultural power base for attack on Beijing.

As a final move in cementing Mao’s combination of forces, LuoRuiqing, a principal officer of the PLA who disagreed with Marshal LinBiao, was seized late in 1965, accused, interrogated, and dismissed fromall his posts in April 1966. The effect was to suppress dissidence in thearmy. Among the intellectuals, a comparable attack was launched on thevice-mayor of Beijing, Wu Han, for having published at Mao’s sugges-tion a play in which an ancient emperor was rebuked for having wrong-fully dismissed an official. Mao was said to be convinced that this was anattack on himself for having dismissed Marshal Peng Dehuai at Lushanin 1959. The top party official in Beijing, Peng Zhen (no relation to themarshal), naturally saw the attack on his vice-mayor as an attack onhimself. A Beijing investigation cleared the man of evil intent, but Maothen engineered a Shanghai forum at which Peng Zhen was scathinglydenounced, and in April 1966 he was removed from power by the cen-tral authorities. This incident showed everyone which way the wind wasblowing.

In these preliminary moves Mao knocked off certain officials whowere unresponsive to his programs and secured the acquiescence of theparty establishment as represented by Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, and DengXiaoping. They were all accustomed to going along with the great man.They did not know that they were being led up a mountain and into avolcano. The Politburo now established a Central Cultural RevolutionGroup that would report directly to its Standing Committee. It waspacked with Mao’s supporters. Meanwhile, reorganization of variousdepartments infiltrated Mao’s supporters into key positions.

The attack on revisionism and on unnamed members of the partywho were “taking the capitalist road” was then heightened during asubphase known as the Fifty Days, from June to August 1966. In thisperiod radical students were mobilized to attack university authorities inwall posters, but Mao stayed in seclusion in central China, leaving hisdeputy and chief of state, Liu Shaoqi, the urban organizer of the CCP,in charge of Beijing. Always the party builder, Liu could hardly give

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precedence to mass organizations. He tried to quell the agitation by dis-patching work teams to scrutinize the lower levels of the party in majorinstitutions, both universities and factories. Something like 400 teamswith about 25 persons each, which would total 10,000 in all, were dis-patched to work within the party organization. This thwarted Mao’s ef-fort to work through mass organizations.

As the radical and conservative sides became more embittered, ZhouEnlai performed his usual function of trying to bring them together. Aslate as February 1967 Zhou presided over a meeting between the CentralCR Group of radicals on the one hand and an array of conservative mili-tary and State Council leaders that included three marshals of the mili-tary and five vice premiers on the other. This meeting, later castigated bythe radicals as the “February adverse current,” represented a recurrenttheme of opposition to the worst tendencies in the CR.

In the second phase of the Cultural Revolution, from August 1966 toJanuary 1967, Chairman Mao was a great showman. The dutiful LiuShaoqi, already doomed for destruction, was orchestrating the antire-visionist movement among the party faithful. In July 1966 the Chinesepublic was electrified to learn that Mao had come north, pausing on theway to swim across the Yangzi. Since rural Chinese generally could notswim, and few adventurers had ever tried the Yangzi, this was like thenews that Queen Elizabeth II had swum the Channel. He was obviouslya paragon of athleticism, capable of superhuman feats. (Photos showinghis head on top of the water suggest Mao did not use a crawl, sidestroke,backstroke, or breaststroke, but swam instead in his own fashion, stand-ing upright in—not on—the water. He was clocked at an unusually fastspeed.)

At Shanghai Mao pulled together in August 1966 the so-called Elev-enth Plenum, actually a rump session of the Central Committee packedwith his supporters. It demoted Liu Shaoqi from number 2 to number 8in the CCP hierarchy and promoted General Lin to number 2, whichmade him Mao’s putative successor. The plenum also put forward Mao’sgeneral vision of the movement against revisionism, which was intendedto achieve a drastic change in the mental outlook of the whole Chinesepeople. Spiritual regeneration, as he put it, was to take precedence overeconomic development. The principle of class struggle was to be appliedto all intellectuals, bureaucrats, and party members in order to weed out“those in authority taking the capitalist road.” As yet nobody knew ex-actly who these evil people were.

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By these maneuvers Mao got nominal legality for stirring up a massmovement against revisionism in the party establishment. This soontook the form of the Red Guard movement.

The Red Guards

Mao’s mass movement in the Cultural Revolution consisted primarily ofteenage student youth, a very different kettle of fish from the peasantmasses who had been activated in the agricultural collectivization of themid-1950s or in the Great Leap Forward of 1958–1960. The CulturalRevolution at first did not greatly affect the peasantry except in com-munes near cities. As an essentially urban movement, the CR featuredthe Red Guards from mid-1966 until they were abolished in mid-1968.These inexperienced youth, trying to “learn revolution by making revo-lution,” were immensely destructive.

The factionalism of the Red Guards, which would lead to open war-fare between organized groups in the cities, came from the fact that inthe educational system of the 1960s, as we have seen, two types of stu-dents vied for top standing and entrance to university from middleschool. One group was composed of children from intellectual families,who had a head start in their education at home and were capable of do-ing high academic work. They gained merit on examinations that couldnot be denied. The other group was composed of children of the new rul-ing class of party members, officials, and cadres, whose class back-ground was considered revolutionary and first-rate. They were a risinggeneration and would have the inside track for official employment.Their level of scholarship, however, was not as high as that of the chil-dren of intellectuals, even though the class status of the latter was de-clared to be very low. This difference in class background would helpproduce the animus in Red Guard factional fights.

Mao energized the radical students by putting out such slogans as“Bombard the headquarters” and “Learn revolution by making revolu-tion.” Youthful support was mobilized in six massive rallies between Au-gust 18 and November 26, 1966, at Beijing. To these rallies, which wereorganized by the PLA and the Cultural Revolution Group, some 10 mil-lion youths volunteering as Red Guards from all over China were trans-ported free on the railways and housed in Beijing. They waved aloft thelittle red book of Quotations from Chairman Mao which General Linhad compiled for indoctrinating his troops. Classes were meanwhile sus-pended and the universities soon closed down.

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Whatever may have been Mao’s romantic intention, the Red Guardsturned to destructive activities that became a brutal reign of terror,breaking into homes of the better-off and the intellectuals and officials,destroying books and manuscripts, humiliating, beating, and even kill-ing the occupants, and claiming all the time to be supporting the revolu-tionary attack on the “Four Olds”—old ideas, old culture, old customs,old habits. These student youths, boys and girls both, age nine to eigh-teen, roamed through the streets wearing their red armbands, accostingand dealing their kind of moral justice to people with any touch offoreignism or intellectualism.

By late 1966 Mao’s Central Cultural Revolution Group manipulat-ing the situation escalated the depredations of the Red Guards frommere attacks on all persons alleged to have a “bourgeois” taint to aheightened phase of “dragging out” party and government officials forinterrogation and punishment. They soon settled on the former chief ofstate Liu and the secretary-general of the party Deng as the number 1traitors “following the capitalist road.” They and many thousands ofothers were denounced, detained, and publicly humiliated. By mobiliz-ing a mass attack of urban youth on the central establishment of stateand party, Mao and his followers were able to achieve a chaos that theyevidently hoped would be a salutary revolution. Confronted with theloosely organized Red Guards in the summer of 1966, the CCP leaderswho were under attack fought back by fighting fire with fire and fieldingtheir own Red Guards. The party establishment was strongly structuredand not easy to break down, but it was a forlorn hope. Mao had the le-vers of power and finally emerged as clearly bent on the destruction andrebuilding of the party.

The Seizure of Power

The third phase of the Cultural Revolution began with the movement for“seizure of power” in January of 1967. Seizures were authorized fromBeijing and carried out by Red Guards and others all over China’s cities.Officials were ousted from their offices, their files examined and oftendestroyed, and their places taken by young people without previous ex-perience in administration or leadership. Already these young peoplewere breaking into factions, which began to fight one another.

During all this time the People’s Liberation Army was kept on thesidelines and so let the destruction go forward. In January 1967, how-ever, Mao directed the army to help the antirevisionist revolution

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against the conservative counterrevolutionaries. The situation had gotout of Mao’s control, the PLA remained the only unified force in the so-ciety, and it now increasingly had to take power in the local scene. Al-though thus far only the regional forces, not the main-force units, hadbeen concerned with the CR, they were so intertwined with the CCP lo-cal organization that it proved difficult for them to join in the revolution-ary committees that were expected to create new provincial govern-ments. The regional forces of the PLA became a weak reed to lean upon.They were supposed to maintain order and protect public servicesthrough “military control committees.” But, when the regional militarygarrisons and districts in the provinces were ordered to support the leftagainst the right, they found it impossible to get control over the situa-tion. Only in four provinces did the setting up of revolutionary commit-tees proceed effectively.

One result was an attempt by the Central Cultural Revolution Groupto purge the PLA of recalcitrant officers in the provinces. Even so, theWuhan incident of July 1967 showed how ineffective the regional forceshad become as a tool of the Cultural Revolution: an independent divi-sion of the Wuhan garrison command helped to kidnap two members ofthe Cultural Revolution Group of the Central Committee from Beijing.Beijing had to bring in main-force units to control the situation and setup the revolutionary committees.

After Mao ordered the Red Guards to take on the job of dragging outthe “capitalist roaders” in the army, the situation soon became violent.China was falling into civil war, in which Red Guard factions battled oneanother and the regional military joined in and took sides. While the at-tack on the regional forces’ commanders slacked off after September1967, the spread of factionalism was contagious, and friction developedbetween regional and main-force units. Beijing dealt with this crisis byordering the PLA to stop supporting either side and undergo politicaltraining. However, by 1968 factional rivalry was becoming evident evenwithin the main-force units. If this developed further, Mao’s last cardwould have been played and he would have lost control of the situationcompletely.

Under these pressures Mao, in July 1968, finally disbanded the RedGuards, who he said had failed in their mission, and ordered the PLA tocarry through the formation of revolutionary committees in all the prov-inces. The dispersal of the Red Guards led to their being sent down inlarge numbers to the countryside, casting them from the heights of po-litical importance to the depths. The activists who now took the place

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of the Red Guards were called Revolutionary Rebels, and their depreda-tions were equally cruel and fearsome. At the same time, main-forceunits were moved about, while the disbandment of the mass organiza-tions relieved the pressure on them to take one side or another. The finalresult was that the revolutionary committees were dominated by mili-tary men. Most of the party first secretaries were PLA officers. PremierZhou was quoted as saying that the 2 million or so of the regional forcesof the PLA had suffered “hundreds of thousands” of casualties.

In the fourth phase of the CR from July 1968 to April 1969, whenMao attempted to put a new state together, the leadership consisted oftwo fifths or more of military men, two fifths of new or old party and of-ficial functionaries, with only a slight representation of mass organiza-tions. Military dominance in 1969 was ensured by the low quality ofparty and government officials brought into power, who generally couldnot compare in ability with their predecessors.

The climax of the Cultural Revolution was reached at the NinthParty Congress in April 1969. Lin Biao gave the political report. Thenew party constitution, adopted to supplant that of 1956, stressedMao’s Thought and class struggle. Party membership was limited byclass origin. The new constitution was much briefer than the old and leftparty organization obscure, but General Lin Biao as vice chairman toChairman Mao was stated to be “Comrade Mao Zedong’s close com-rade-in-arms and successor.” Of the 1,500 delegates, two thirds ap-peared in military uniforms, while in the new Central Committee 45 per-cent were military (in 1956 it had been 19 percent). On the other hand,the representation of the masses and mass organizations did not includemany radical student youth. Two thirds of them were from provincialpositions. The great majority were newcomers to the Central Commit-tee, yet their average age was about sixty. The Central Committee wasnot only more military but less educated and less prepared to deal withforeign affairs.

Foreign Affairs

China’s foreign relations during the Cultural Revolution suffered fromthe same mindless zealotry as did its domestic politics, for the animus ofthe time was not only against things old but also against things foreign.Anti-intellectualism was accompanied by xenophobia. In 1965, whenZhou Enlai as China’s ambassador of good will went on extended toursin Africa and Asia, the Chinese policy of extending its aid programs,

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such as building the Tan-Zam Railway in Africa, became intermixedwith revolutionary zeal and espionage. The Chinese attempt to set up aConference of Third World Countries in Algiers, excluding the SovietUnion, was a fiasco. Meanwhile, the Communist Party of Indonesiastaged an attempted coup and was quite thoroughly destroyed by the In-donesian government. Such failures set the stage for China to pull in itshorns during the Cultural Revolution.

Nevertheless, the rampaging style of Red Guard attacks damaged thePRC’s foreign relations, especially after the Red Guards took over theForeign Ministry in June 1967. Their squads systematically destroyedrecords and thoroughly disrupted the continuity of foreign relations.The foreign minister Chen Yi was forced to make self-criticism severaltimes before thousands of jeering students, with Zhou Enlai presiding.What foreign policy could be pursued had to be done through Zhou’soffice.

As the Red Guard spirit of making revolution on all fronts spreadinto foreign relations, Chinese embassies abroad became centers of revo-lutionary proselytism and nondiplomatic incitement of local Commu-nists. From September 1966 to August 1967 this subjective and emo-tional approach to foreign contact led to the breaking off of relationswith several countries, the recall of all but one of the PRC’s ambassadorsabroad, and a decline in foreign trade. As part of China’s domestic disor-der, Red Guard mobs invaded the Soviet and British embassies and infact burned the British Embassy to the ground, as well as the IndonesianEmbassy later on. Enormous denunciatory mass meetings were a poorsubstitute for diplomatic relations.

The Cultural Revolution wound up with a significant shift in thePRC’s relations with the United States and the Soviet Union. As theAmerican ground and air war escalated in Vietnam after 1965, both theUnited States and China took measures to avoid a direct confronta-tion. As noted earlier, the American crusaders stopped short of fightingChina again. They explicitly promised that their planes would try toavoid penetrating Chinese air space. The threat of war with the Ameri-cans, who were making war so close to China’s borders, was dampeddown, and Mao concluded he could proceed with his domestic revolu-tion.

The PRC’s relations with the Soviet Union went in the opposite di-rection. The split, begun in 1960 and continued in polemics and ex-changes of denunciations between the two parties, steadily intensifiedthe Soviet–Chinese hostility. Incidents began to occur along the 4,000-

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mile border, and Soviet forces were built up accordingly. When the So-viet Red Army took over Czechoslovakia in August 1968, the Brezhnevdoctrine was soon propounded—that where a Communist regime hadbeen established, it could not be allowed to be subverted. To the Chi-nese, this sounded rather aggressive. Red Guard attacks in mid-1967provoked a crisis in Hong Kong, but this tapered off after the PLA tookpower and curbed the Red Guards in 1968. Revolutionary activitythrough the Chinese embassies in Burma and Cambodia led to violent in-cidents and a breaking off of relations. Beijing’s revolutionary policy ledto a clash with Indian patrols on the Sikkim–Tibet border. This time theIndians were better prepared, and a week’s fighting ensued with no out-come. When North Korea went over wholeheartedly to collaborationwith the Soviet Union, Chinese–North Korean relations worsened.

The Cultural Revolution’s truculence toward the outside world cameto a head on March 2, 1969, when the Chinese sent an ambush forceonto a disputed island in the Wusuli River, the main tributary of theAmur on China’s northeast boundary. The Chinese in their white uni-forms overwhelmed the Soviet border patrols. Soviet retaliation was vig-orous, not only at that site but in the following year or two at manypoints along the Sino–Soviet border where incidents erupted, and theChinese were thus put under pressure. By the end of 1969, as relationswith the Soviet Union worsened, they began to improve with the UnitedStates.

In the United States the initial impression of the Cultural Revolutionhad reflected its propaganda. It was seen as Mao’s effort to preserveegalitarian populist values and avoid bureaucratism and statism in thecourse of China’s economic development. However, as news of the RedGuard excesses and the maltreatment of intellectuals gradually cameout, the movement seemed more like a totalitarian fanaticism under dic-tatorial leadership. The Nixon–Kissinger policy of seeking normal rela-tions with the PRC had to go slow, even though led by a right-wingRepublican.

Decentralization and the Third Front

Though the Cultural Revolution was officially ended in April 1969,many forms of its terrorism continued. During 1970–71 the militarysecurity personnel were particularly ruthless in searching for formermembers of a perhaps fictitious “May 16 Group.” Innocent people weretortured into confessing membership and naming others. Several thou-

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sand were executed, although it is still uncertain whether any “May 16Group” ever really existed as charged.

In the 1970s, moreover, the CR spread its coercion into the country-side, where, for example, peasants were required to abandon all sidelineoccupations such as raising pigs, chickens, and ducks in order to “cut offthe tail of capitalism.” For many peasants this meant starvation.

Carl Riskin (in Joseph et al., 1991) has analyzed Mao’s economicprogram as seeking a mid-course between the two poles of a marketeconomy and Soviet-type centralization. For one thing, China’s sheersize argued against central ministries trying to manage local develop-ment all over the country. Mao wanted central control but not centralmanagement. He hoped the communes could provide some of the latter.The effort was too involved for us to pursue here in detail. In the endboth policy squabbles and practical difficulties produced only, as Riskinsays, a “crippled hybrid.”

The spectacular politics of the CR at first monopolized foreign atten-tion, but newly published statistics now show that during seven years ofthe American aggression in Vietnam, from 1964 to 1971, Mao led amassive investment in military–industrial development of the remoteinland provinces of China’s Northwest and Southwest. Fearful of the de-signs of both the Soviets and the Americans, he wanted to create self-suf-ficient bases for defense in mountainous areas difficult of access. In viewof the contemporary growth of airpower, this “Third Front” strategywas surely out of date; yet under Mao the CCP blindly poured theirscarce resources into it.

At vast expense they built new rail lines through the mountains tolink new machine-building and armaments factories, iron mines, steelmills, and hydro-power dams. Typically the new factories were dis-persed away from population centers. Barry Naughton (in Joseph et al.,1991) finds that this highly wasteful program put half the nation’s capi-tal investment into the Third Front’s ten provinces, although in 1965they had produced only 19 percent of the nation’s industrial output.Economically unsound from the start (as the economists cashiered asrightists in 1957–58 could have shown), this gargantuan CR effort wasso inadequately planned, so difficult to achieve, and so basically inef-ficient in its operations that a considerable part of it could never be fin-ished and had to be abandoned. In 1972 some 150 Third Front projectsout of 1,600 were suspended, but because they had become vested inter-ests, only 81 could actually be canceled.

Along with this Third Front strategic program went a widespread

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decentralization of industrial management. Local governments weregiven autonomy to set up small-scale rural industries outside of centralplanning. In 1965 there had been under the control of central ministriesa total of 10,533 nonmilitary enterprises that produced 47 percent ofstate-run industrial output. By 1971 these had been reduced to 142 fac-tories that produced only 8 percent of the output.

China’s rural industrialization had begun in the Song or earlier whenvillage households used their woman- and child-power to augment farmincome by handicrafts to make such products as tea, silk, cotton textiles,bricks, baskets, and the like. In the factory age, small-scale rural indus-tries, as Christine Wong (in Joseph et al., 1991) says, were a “central pil-lar of Mao’s development strategy.” By 1979 nearly 800,000 enterprisesplus almost 90,000 small hydroelectric stations employed 24 millionworkers and produced 15 percent of China’s industrial output. This in-cluded all the farm tools and most small and medium farm machinery,over half the chemical fertilizer, two thirds of the cement, and 45 percentof the coal.

If these achievements had all come from local funding, as propagan-dists alleged, they would indeed be a model. But recent statistical studiesnow indicate that state funding was very extensive. “Self-reliance” wasa myth. Compared with large-scale plants such as those for fertilizer, thelocal small-scale plants were inefficient and costly. Many had beenstarted too hastily and grown too big for local supplies. The incentivesystem was faulty because losses could be charged to the state whileprofits were retained locally. Cost-accounting procedures were alsofaulty—for example, new plants could be built in excess of need withfunds derived from alleged production “losses.” This was acceptable be-cause no one was interested in profitability. Instead of the desired localself-reliance based on local resources and local initiative, the rural indus-try program “fell prey to a variety of Maoist excesses” (Wong, in Josephet al., 1991). Too many CCP managers became irresponsible aggrandiz-ers at the expense of the state.

By the early 1970s China thus had three sectors requiring invest-ment—the continuing uncompleted Third Front projects, the provincialand local governments’ decentralized and often inefficient small-scaleprojects, and a new sector of imported foreign technology includingwhole plants that required port expansion and infrastructure on the eastcoast. All this economic growth in the CR period was too much for theCCP to handle. By Mao’s death in 1976, says Naughton, China’s lead-ers, still divided between the Gang of Four and its opponents, had really

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lost control over the economy. At the same time, however, China’s eco-nomic and population growth had continued unabated. Heavy invest-ment had led industrial growth to average 13.5 percent nationally be-tween 1969 and 1976, while population grew from 725 million in 1965to about 919 million in 1975. Meanwhile, rural productivity and livingstandards had stagnated. The result was that the chief beneficiaries of in-dustrial decentralization seem to have been the new class of CCP cadresand managers who now constituted a new local elite, not at all whatMao seems to have wanted.

The Succession Struggle

Under way from 1969 there had been a power struggle to secure theparty’s number 2 spot, which would give the holder a presumption ofsuccession to Chairman Mao in due time. At the formal conclusion ofthe Cultural Revolution in 1969, General Lin Biao had brought his mili-tary people into increasing prominence in both party and government,and his own position as number 2 seemed secure.

But from 1969 to 1971, Lin’s leading position began to deteriorate.For one thing, Mao wanted to reduce the role of the military in the polit-ical system. Consequently an attack on Lin was orchestrated by Mao,who had no further use for him, and apparently it was supervised asusual by Zhou as premier. The attack was pursued on many frontsthrough the arcane and Aesopian use of words and symbols that are aspecialty of Chinese politics. For example, when an anti-Lin man wasput in the Central Military Headquarters under Lin, he was ostenta-tiously accompanied by Premier Zhou and two leading generals of theold guard. Instead of Mao and Lin appearing side by side in widely dis-seminated photographs, Lin now appeared in the background. Again, aone-time aide of Mao, who had developed close relations with Lin, wasaccused and in the usual fashion required to give self-criticism. All thesewere signs and symbols by which the ultimate power-holder showedwhich way the wind was blowing. In short, General Lin had been ofgreat use, but his usefulness had passed, while Zhou Enlai in the number3 post continued to work closely with Mao, especially on foreign rela-tions and the rehabilitation of the government.

A final trick of Chairman Mao was to travel around, talk to regionalmilitary commanders, and criticize Lin. As this news was relayed to Linby the bamboo telegraph, he realized that his days were numbered, andhe became involved in a conspiratorial effort masterminded by his son,

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who was in the central command. The alleged aim was to assassinateMao and by a military coup take power in his place, as the only alterna-tive to personal disaster. Lin’s son made extensive preparations secretly,but someone evidently kept Mao and Zhou informed. In desperation Linand his wife tried to get away by air, but their plane met destruction onSeptember 13, 1971, far out in Mongolia as it evidently headed for So-viet territory.

In totalitarian fashion this top news of the day was unreported in theofficial press for more than a year, when a full story was finally releasedwith documents and circumstantial evidence. Exactly what happened toLin is still a mystery.

After the long buildup of Lin Biao’s public image as the leader closestto Mao, his sudden treachery finally bankrupted the people’s trust inMao. The old man had either been a fool to trust him or was a knavenow lying about him.

The Cultural Revolution in Retrospect

Statistics used in a short summary do not convey the experience of rev-olution—neither the heady though transient exhilaration of Red Guardsin power nor the bitter suffering of their victims. A “literature of thewounded” soon began to report individuals’ disasters—the scholarwhose manuscript of an unpublished lifework is burned before his eyes,the husband who tries in vain to save the class status of his children bydivorcing his wife, who has been labeled a rightist, the famous novelistwho is simply beaten to death, the old school principal who is set tocleaning the latrines.

Since urine and feces (or, in nonliterary parlance, shit) form an essen-tial Chinese fertilizer, it was much easier in China than it would be in theUnited States to give the upper class some experience of the life of themasses. For intellectuals to clean latrines was not simply a matter of amop and detergent in a tiled lavatory, even a smelly public one. On thecontrary, while cities of a rapidly developing China have both modernand early-modern plumbing, their outskirts as well as the vast country-side have retained the old gravity system. The custom, so admired byecologists, was to collect the daily accumulation, almost as regular as theaction of the tides, for mixture with other organic matter to develop itthrough composting to fertilize the fields. In fact, one noteworthy sightin any Chinese rural scene is the field latrine, where men and women onopposite sides of the central wall take care to deposit both liquids and

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solids during the day. The cleaning of latrines was therefore not simply ahygienic task to get rid of unwanted matter but a fundamental supplyquestion, to conserve a resource. When 10 million or so Red Guards, af-ter they got out of hand in 1968, were “sent down to the countryside,”they also handled night soil, though they found black pig shit a richerproduct.

Yet such labor was far less devastating than the public humiliationin “struggle meetings.” Targets might be required to stand on a plat-form, heads bowed respectfully to the masses, while acknowledging andrepeating their ideological crimes. Typically they had to “airplane,”stretching their arms out behind them like the wings of a jet. In the audi-ence, tears of sympathy might be in a friend’s eyes, but from his mouthwould come only curses and derisive jeering, especially if the victim afteran hour or two fell over from muscular collapse. In the 1920s and 1930sLu Xun’s stories had been especially bitter at the Chinese sadistic laugh-ter over the misery of others. Now Mao’s revolution organized it on amassive public scale. Some preferred suicide.

Estimates of the victims of the Cultural Revolution now hoveraround a million, of whom a considerable number did not survive. ToChinese, so sensitive to peer-group esteem, to be beaten and humiliatedin public before a jeering crowd, including colleagues and old friends,was like having one’s skin taken off. Generally the victim felt guilty, asanyone may under attack, but especially because they had felt such loy-alty and had so venerated Mao and the party. When the charges againstthem seemed overblown, their experience became meaningless, espe-cially when they so often saw their erstwhile torturers by a sudden shiftof line become the tortured. For what cause were they suffering? The sys-tematic cruelty of struggle meetings went along with Chinese audiences’accepting this cruelty and the dictates of higher authority, even whenrepresented only by ignorant teenagers. The CR fed upon this public de-pendence on, and blind obedience to, authority. There was no idea ofmorality’s being under the law.

Andrew Walder (in Joseph et al., 1991) has commented persuasivelythat observers tend to screen out factors of irrationality that make nosense to them and write them off as “excesses.” But as evidence has piledup, the Cultural Revolution is now understood not as a pursuit of ab-stract ideals but as “an unprecedented wave of state-instigated persecu-tion, torture, gang warfare, and mindless violence.” Central to it all wasthe assumption of conspiracy—“hidden enemies and traitors” among

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the intellectuals and within the CCP, a theme “borrowed directly” fromthe Stalinism of show trials and mass liquidations.

This timely image of the CR can be further enlarged if we look backat Imperial Confucianism. In its annals, conspiracy seems to have been aprincipal mode of operation and a primal source of fear. The founder ofthe Ming dynasty, for example, extirpated his prime minister’s conspir-acy of 1380 by executing 40,000 people; the Qing Emperor Qianlongfeared conspiracy in the 1760s, and the Qing Restoration began with aconspiracy in 1861. Sun Yatsen indeed pursued conspiracy most of hislife. It has been a Chinese specialty in the absence of a “loyal opposition”based on a distinction between the state power and its policies as in theWest.

Conspiracy was a continual part of Imperial Confucianism becausethe ruler’s legitimacy was assured only when his proper conduct pro-duced harmony between ruler and ruled. Dissent was disharmonious,and so a dissenter feigned loyalty to protect himself. Sensing this deceit,a ruler easily became suspicious if not actually paranoid. The system hadlittle space for the open expression of opposition because policy waspart of the ruler’s moral conduct and so of his legitimacy. Oppositionmust therefore be secret. It might animate a secret society. It implicitlyaimed at power. There could be no loyal opposition. In this light, for ex-ample, the pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square on June4, 1989, since they wanted changes, seemed to the CCP elders to be theirenemies. Those who expect conspiracy can always find it.

Quite aside from Stalinist fears of conspiracy and its home-growncounterpart, Lynn T. White III (1989) pinpoints three administrativepractices that contributed to the Cultural Revolution’s violence: (1) thepinning of status labels on everyone, which left some families perma-nently disabled, having been labeled as “rightists” or “bad elements”;(2) the subordination of all people to their work units, whose bossescould control all aspects of their lives; and (3) the threatening of allpeople in one or another campaign, where targeted victims showed whatdisaster might befall anyone sooner or later. These were all cheap expe-dients to control people, but they inspired long-lasting suppressed re-sentments that surfaced in CR violence.

Many others have offered illuminating analyses of Maoist politics.My own suggestion is that Chinese political history has been left half-finished by the eminently wen-minded scholars of Confucian govern-ment. Both conspiracy and the violence that usually accompanies it are

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intrinsically wu in nature. The Chinese record often left them in thebackground, and modern historians have not got very far in workingout their story. Political scientists are thus handicapped in adding totheir comparative dimension the equally desirable dimension of histori-cal study of China. This new frontier will no doubt soon be well popu-lated.

Aftermath

In the early 1970s, although the Shanghai element headed by the Gangof Four continued to dominate the media of communication and of cul-ture, they had no way, even though backed by Mao, to take over theadministration of the government and the economy. The administrativeestablishment who were intent on economic development gradually co-agulated under Zhou Enlai, though Mao remained number 1 in theparty. When Zhou, after 1973, became ill with cancer, he moved tomake Deng Xiaoping his successor as premier. Though Deng had beentargeted for destruction by the Cultural Revolution, he was an experi-enced old-timer too well connected, especially with the military, and tooable and dynamic to be cast aside as Liu Shaoqi had been. Just beforethe Fourth National People’s Congress of January 1975 Deng was madevice chairman of the party and a member of the Standing Committee ofthe Politburo at the center of power. The National Congress next madehim the first vice premier, number 3 in the hierarchy behind Mao andZhou, and Deng also became chief of the army. The Congress heardZhou Enlai put forth the call for the Four Modernizations, one of hislast public acts.

After Zhou Enlai died in January 1976, the Gang of Four banned anymourning, but on the annual day for the mourning of the dead in Aprilthey could not prevent a great crowd of hundreds of thousands fromgathering around the Martyrs Memorial in Tiananmen Square to ex-press their veneration of the dead premier. This became the April Fifth(4–5) incident, historically parallel to May Fourth (5–4). Orchestratedby the opposition to the Gang of Four, it represented a pervasive disillu-sionment at the popular level. The demonstration was suppressed, andin the spirit of the Cultural Revolution Deng Xiaoping was for a secondtime removed from power.

But the Gang of Four could not suppress the great Tangshan earth-quake that in July suddenly killed half a million people east of Beijingand forced its residents to move into the streets. Every peasant believed

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in the umbilical relationship between man and nature, and thereforebetween natural disasters and human calamities. After such an over-whelming portent, Mao could only die. He did so on September 9, 1976.He left the succession to his thoroughly unmemorable look-alike, HuaGuofeng, a security chief from Hunan. In October the Gang of Fourwere arrested and held for trial. In the complex maneuvering for power,Deng Xiaoping won out in late 1978.

Among most Chinese—those in the villages—the final effect of theCultural Revolution was disillusionment with socialist government anda renewed reliance on the family. Consider these anomalies: Class status,once ascribed in the 1950s, had been inherited by the succeeding genera-tion and now amounted almost to a caste system. Offspring of the 6 per-cent who had been classified as of the “four bad types” (landlord, richpeasant, counterrevolutionary, and bad element) lived under a perma-nent cloud. Meanwhile, mobility from city to countryside had continuedto be cut off. Peasant life was disesteemed as inferior, uncivilized, and tobe avoided. The “sending down” to the villages of some 14 million ur-ban youth had done little to change this image. The collectivized ruraleconomy had signally failed to produce more, and highhanded but igno-rant cadres had intervened in it destructively.

In the 1960s the cult of Mao had supplanted the local gods and otherfigures of the old peasant religion, but by the mid-1970s the violence ofthe Cultural Revolution and Lin Biao’s fall had tarnished Mao’s image.Public health successes and the Green Revolution in agriculture (chemi-cal fertilizer, insecticides, better crop strains, and so on) had helped todouble the population. Even the great achievements of the revolution inspreading primary school literacy, road transport, and communicationby press and radio had partly backfired by revealing how much fartherChina still had to go. Foreign imperialism was ended but so were foreignstimuli, while the old “feudal” values and corrupt practices remainedstill embedded in Chinese society.

Future historians may conclude that Mao’s role was to try to destroythe age-old bifurcation of China between a small educated ruling stra-tum and the vast mass of common people. We do not yet know how farhe succeeded. The economy was developing, but it was left to his succes-sors to create a new political structure.

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21The Post-Mao Reform Era

Merle Goldman

In the post-Mao era China was transformed from an isolated, poor, ru-ral, and politically turbulent country into a relatively open, stable, ur-banizing, and modernizing nation. With an economy expanding on aver-age by over 9 percent a year in the last two decades of the twentiethcentury and the early years of the twenty-first, China’s was the fastest-growing economy in the world. In fact, with per capita incomes morethan quadrupling since 1978, China’s economy had grown faster thanalmost any other in history.1 By the start of the twenty-first century,China had the second-largest economy in the world, behind only theUnited States in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP).2 Official gov-ernment estimates indicate that China had 250 million people living inpoverty in 1978; the figure had declined to around 30 million by 2005.3

What had happened to cause this transformation? The Chinese Com-munist Party survivors of the Long March, the party elders, particularlyDeng Xiaoping, who returned to power shortly after Mao’s death inSeptember 1976, introduced and shaped the reforms that made this ex-traordinary economic transformation possible. Equally important, theycarried them out with a generally literate, healthy population, made pos-sible by the reforms introduced during the early years of the Communistera, which provided education for the younger generation, delivered ru-dimentary health care, and raised the position of women.

While formally Deng was only the chairman of the Central MilitaryCommission until November 1989, he remained China’s paramountleader virtually until his death in February 1997. His authority derivedfrom his status as a member of the original revolutionary generation andfrom his deep connections with all sectors of the party and the military.

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Unlike Mao, who never left China until after 1949 and then only to go tothe Soviet Union in the early 1950s, Deng had gone abroad in 1920 atage sixteen as a worker-student in France, where he had a job in a Frenchautomobile factory. While there he was recruited into the CommunistParty in 1924 by Zhou Enlai, and subsequently spent about nine monthsin the Soviet Union.

It was not, however, Deng’s more worldly experience that led him toreverse three decades of Maoist policies, but the persecution that he, hisfamily, and the other surviving party elders had suffered during the Cul-tural Revolution that motivated him to move in new directions. Dengand his colleagues officially assumed power at the Third Plenum of theEleventh Central Committee in December 1978. With the support of themilitary, they gradually pushed aside Mao’s anointed successor, HuaGuofeng, a little-known security official from Hunan province. In 1980,Deng’s disciple Hu Yaobang, former head of the Communist YouthLeague and the youngest Long March survivor, took Hua Guofeng’splace as party general secretary. Zhao Ziyang, the reformist party sec-retary of Guangdong and then of Sichuan province, became prime min-ister.

Because the Cultural Revolution had decimated the Chinese Com-munist Party and had caused widespread chaos and destruction, Dengand his colleagues had the support of most of the party’s rank and file intheir efforts to abandon Maoist policies. Most party members rejectednot only Mao’s utopian visions of an egalitarian society and unendingclass struggle, but also the Stalinist model of state control of the econ-omy, collectivization of agriculture, and the emphasis on heavy industrythat China had copied from the Soviet Union during its ten-year alliancein the 1950s. By the late 1970s, as in the rest of the Communist world,this model was producing a faltering economy in China.

Although the 1978 Third Plenum marked the formal inauguration ofthe reform era, the reversal of Mao’s policies began soon after Mao’sdeath in 1976. The return to power of purged party leaders graduallyshifted the party’s emphasis from ideological to pragmatic policies. Thisshift was expressed in the phrase Mao had negatively attributed to DengXiaoping during the Cultural Revolution: “It does not matter whetherthe cat is white or black, so long as it catches mice.” In the late 1970sand early 1980s nationwide ideological campaigns were downgraded infavor of economic development. This change was encapsulated in theslogans “Emancipate the mind,” “Seek truth from facts,” and “Practiceis the sole criterion of truth.”

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Shortly after the Third Plenum, the reforms were launched thatended the economic stagnation of the late Mao years and triggeredChina’s unprecedented economic growth. Deng believed that the Chi-nese Communist Party could hold on to its weakened mandate only byimproving the standard of living for the majority of the population.These reforms began in the countryside, where 80 percent of the popula-tion still lived. Deng was able to win the support of most of the party el-ders for these rural reforms because during the Cultural Revolution theyand/or members of their families had been sent to the countryside, wherethey experienced the harshness and marginal existence of peasant life.Contrary to party propaganda, they discovered that the peasants’ eco-nomic livelihood had not improved considerably since 1949. In addi-tion, by the late 1970s China’s leaders were also becoming increasinglyaware of the economic dynamism of their post-Confucian neighbors inEast Asia—South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan—so as China moved away from the Stalinist model, it turned to the EastAsian model of development. The Deng leadership sought to restore theparty’s mandate by emulating the family farms, market economies, con-sumer goods industries, and involvement in international trade of thesecountries. This East Asian approach to development also built on long-standing trends in China’s own history—periodic land reform, relativelyfree regional markets, a lively service sector, and local government sup-port of grass-roots enterprises.

Thus, as peasants in the poorer provinces began on their own accordafter Mao’s death to take their family plots out of the collectives, Deng,unlike Mao, who had stopped such developments in the wake of theGreat Leap Forward, allowed this decollectivization to continue andspread to other provinces. When the harvests increased on these familyplots, land reform then become official policy. Consequently, in the early1980s the countryside was the most dynamic sector of China’s economy.In contrast to Mao’s rigid ideological policies, Deng’s economic reformsfollowed the pragmatic and flexible approach, as purportedly expressedby Deng, of “feeling for the stones as one crosses the river.”

Deng’s program of reforms, called “socialism with Chinese charac-teristics,” combined the move to a market economy and into the interna-tional arena with maintaining the existing Communist party-state. Thisprogram resonated with China’s late nineteenth-century self-strengthen-ing movement that sought to adopt Western technology and economicmethods (yong) while still maintaining the traditional Confucian stateand values (ti). Likewise, Deng and the party elders in the late 1970s be-

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lieved they could import Western science, technology, and some eco-nomic practices while still maintaining the Communist political system.But just as Western methods had undermined the Chinese state and val-ues at the end of the nineteenth century, so did the market economy un-dermine the Communist party-state at the end of the twentieth.

China’s absorption of Western science, technology, and economicpractices as well as its expanding international trade were accompaniedby an inflow of Western political ideas and values. By the late 1980s thisinflow turned into a tidal wave that poured into China first throughbooks, travel, telephone, films, radio, television, and faxes, and by themid-1990s through e-mail, the Internet, cell phones, advertising, andpopular culture from abroad. In addition, Deng’s deliberate downplay-ing of ideology allowed for more latitude for intellectual, cultural, andindividual expression than at any previous time in modern Chinese his-tory, except possibly during the May Fourth period in the early decadesof the twentieth century.

The forces unleashed by Deng’s opening up and economic reformschallenged not only China’s command economy but also the Communistparty-state and its official values, which had already been battered by theCultural Revolution. Although the economic growth and rising incomesgenerated by the reforms were meant to enhance the party’s authority, inpractice they weakened it. As land reform took off in the countrysideand market reforms moved to the cities by the mid-1980s, the controls ofthe party-state waned further. The reduced role of the party derived bothfrom the unleashed economic forces and from a conscious decision bythe reformers to replace direct government involvement in economic af-fairs with indirect levers, such as the market and more decentralized de-cision making.

Deng and his allies deliberately withdrew the party’s authority frommany other spheres of activity as well. In contrast to the Mao years,when the party held control over virtually all aspects of daily life, nowDeng and his fellow reformers, while retaining a tight rein on politicsand enforcing the “one-child,” policy, loosened the party’s grip on per-sonal, social, and cultural life as well as economic activities. The purposewas to repair the damage caused by the imposition of the all-encompass-ing politicization of everyday life during the Mao era. Even in the politi-cal arena the party’s relationship to society was gradually transformedby the opening to the outside world, the birth of a nascent civil society,and the introduction of limited grass-roots political reforms, such aselections for village heads and village committees in the countryside and

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neighborhood committees in the cities, and a limited tenure of two five-year terms for the position of general secretary of the Chinese Commu-nist Party.

Nevertheless, because the market reforms that sparked China’s eco-nomic dynamism were not accompanied by a regulatory framework orfundamental political reforms of the Communist party-state, they gaverise to rampant corruption, growing social inequalities, regional dispari-ties, and widespread environmental pollution. Furthermore, the influx ofWestern influences challenged the official ideology and values. More-over, unlike during the May Fourth period, when foreign influences wereconfined to Beijing, Shanghai, and the large coastal cities, these influ-ences seeped into the countryside and the hinterland, accelerated by theintroduction of the new communications technologies in the mid-1990s.

Although the Communist party-state could and did suppress any per-ceived political challenges, the leadership’s ability to ensure absoluteobedience to its commands eroded. The official ideology of Marxism-Le-ninism and Mao Zedong Thought continued to be invoked, but few stillbelieved in these ideologies and even fewer acted on them. Chinese soci-ety became diverse and its culture pluralistic. Growing numbers of Chi-nese turned to religion, whether evangelical Protestantism, Roman Ca-tholicism, Daoism, or Buddhism. For the first time since 1949, variousindividuals and groups voiced their own views and pursued their own in-terests rather than echoing the dictates of the party-state. Even thoughthe party could and did swiftly repress any political challenge to its au-thority, the changes in the post-Mao period had the potential for a newChinese revolution.

In comparison to the 1949 revolution, in which it is estimated thatfrom 1 to 2 million landlords lost their lives, the Great Leap Forwardand its aftermath, in which more than 30 million peasants died fromfamine and malnutrition, and the Cultural Revolution, in which half amillion people were killed or committed suicide and an estimated 100million were persecuted, the post-Mao changes were carried out withoutlarge-scale violence.4 With the glaring exceptions of the violent militarycrackdown on demonstrators in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, inwhich it is estimated that anywhere from 800 to 1,300 people lost theirlives and 10,000 to 30,000 participants were imprisoned,5 and the con-tinuing persecution of political dissidents and religious groups that triedto practice their beliefs outside party-approved auspices, the post-Maorevolution was conducted without the large-scale repression and epi-sodic turbulence that characterized China’s experience in the Mao years.

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Forces Unleashed by the Economic Reforms

During the post-Mao era China’s predominantly rural and relativelypoor economy underwent a massive transition from a command to amarket economy and from a predominantly agricultural-based to an in-creasingly urbanized economy. The changes were transformative, but,unlike in the former Soviet Union, where the reforms were carried outrelatively quickly and all at once, China’s reforms were carried out grad-ually and in stages. In further contrast to the experience of the formerSoviet Union, particularly Russia, which initially suffered a sudden de-cline in production, employment, and standard of living, China’s agri-cultural and industrial production increased and the standard of livingfor the majority of the population improved substantially.

China’s greater economic success may be attributed in part to the factthat unlike in Russia, where the Marxist-Leninist system had been inplace for almost seventy years, in China it had existed for a mere thirty.Many Chinese still remembered how to function in the pre-1949 marketand service economies. Moreover, whereas Russia’s economic reformswere imposed from above, several of China’s most important reforms,such as land reform, began from below. Although Deng Xiaoping andhis colleagues advocated change in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolu-tion, they had no blueprint for economic reform. Consequently they re-sponded to what was already happening at the grass roots. They beganby experimenting with various reformist policies that had been brieflytried during the Mao era and were revived spontaneously after Mao’sdeath.

Following the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward, for ex-ample, what was called the “household responsibility system,” a returnto family farms, appeared in a number of localities. When this led to thedismantling of some communes and a return to market forces and mate-rial incentives, Mao brought it to a halt in September 1962. In the after-math of the Cultural Revolution, however, there was again a return tothe household responsibility system, particularly in Anhui province,which was ruled by Deng ally Wan Li, and in Sichuan province, whereZhao Ziyang was party secretary. When productivity in both theseprovinces increased in the early 1980s, Deng and his reform colleaguesmade the household responsibility system national policy for the entirecountry.

Without a leader of Mao’s stature to oppose decollectivization, andwith a leader of Deng’s authority to spearhead it, the communes were

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dismantled relatively quickly as millions of peasants returned to familyfarming. This form of land reform, plus a state-mandated increase in theprice of grain, provided the material incentives for an agricultural boomin the early years of the Deng era. Although the state still demandedcompulsory deliveries of grain and cotton for sale and distribution, it al-lowed households to pursue profitable sideline activities, such as cultiva-tion of fruits and vegetables and production of livestock and fish, to besold in relatively free markets, and to engage in local service industries.Between 1980 and 1986, the gross output of rural society more thandoubled, while the rural population declined.6 This increasing wealth ofthe rural population sparked the growth of a consumer goods industryto absorb the peasants’ new discretionary income and a concomitantmove away from the Stalinist emphasis on military and heavy industry.With the shift to light industry, China soon began selling relatively inex-pensive consumer goods abroad in a pattern similar to that of its EastAsian neighbors. These economic changes made it possible for millionsof peasants to become small-scale entrepreneurs, involved in servicesand light industry as well as farming, and provided them with the poten-tial to improve their living standards.

To a certain degree, the subsequent development of township and vil-lage enterprises in the 1980s resembles the development of the house-hold responsibility system. Although many of these enterprises werestarted during the Great Leap Forward, their growth accelerated in the1980s, and only then did the Deng leadership accept them as nationalpolicy. The township and village enterprises began as repair and agricul-tural tool shops and small light industry factories, but they graduallyexpanded into larger enterprises, producing consumer goods for interna-tional as well as domestic markets. During the Mao period these collec-tive units, mostly in the countryside, represented the unsubsidized partof the public economy that was not guided by the state plan. Therefore,when China began its economic reforms, because this sector was moreflexible and did not have the higher labor costs and larger overhead fromproviding housing, health care, pensions, and education that the state in-dustries did, it was better able to respond to market pressures. In addi-tion, in the post-Mao era the township and village enterprises paid rela-tively lower taxes, were subject to fewer administrative regulations, andwere able to put underutilized labor resources to more productive uses.

A Deng Xiaoping slogan, “To get rich is glorious,” sparked thegrowth of private enterprises (getihu), which initially were family runand small-scale, involved primarily in retail and service trades. When

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these private entrepreneurs sought to expand and become more techno-logically advanced, they usually set themselves up as collective enter-prises because they were better able as “collectives” to obtain help fromlocal governments to secure land, buildings, market opportunities, andaccess to resources and loans. Consequently, rural entrepreneurs formedalliances with local officials to run these collectives.

At the same time that such alliances increased the incomes of non-state entrepreneurs and workers, they also enriched local officials be-cause ultimate control rested in their hands. As a result, they were inher-ently corrupt. In some respects these alliances resembled the late Qingenterprise structure, described as “officials supervise, merchants man-age” (guandu, shangban). Although many of these ventures failed, for aperiod the nonstate collectives were the most dynamic sector of China’sreform economy. In the 1980s the collectives were growing at a rate ofmore than 20 percent per year. As Deng himself noted, this was a devel-opment that had not been anticipated.7 But in the early twenty-first cen-tury, the growth of the collectives slackened as the number of individualand private enterprises was growing at about 37 percent per year.8

In October 1984 at the Third Plenum of the Twelfth Central Com-mittee, Deng’s disciples Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang officially ex-tended the move to the market from the countryside into the urban ar-eas. Although the planned economy continued to play a role in the majorstate-owned enterprises (SOEs), market forces were to guide the urbaneconomy as they were guiding the rural economy. Shortly after the urbanreforms began, there was a new economic surge. In the second half of the1980s, the urban economy pushed ahead of the rural economy in termsof economic growth as the agricultural economy, without new reforms,began to stagnate, even though the township and village enterprises con-tinued to thrive throughout most of the 1980s.

Other economic reforms introduced in the mid-1980s also resembleddevelopments in late nineteenth-century China. The establishment ofSpecial Economic Zones and foreign-joint ventures along China’s south-east coast, the Guangdong delta, and the Yangzi River were reminiscentof the former treaty ports. The major difference, however, was that in thelate twentieth century it was the Chinese government and domestic en-trepreneurs rather than foreigners who controlled the zones and the jointenterprises. To attract foreign investments, the government offered spe-cial tax benefits, relaxed regulations, and presented fewer bureaucraticobstacles than elsewhere in the country; in return, the zones were tobring in new technologies and promote exports. At first the zones sput-

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tered along, but as they continued to be promoted by Deng and his re-form colleagues, they took off in the late 1980s when their East Asianneighbors, particularly Hong Kong and Taiwan, began moving their in-dustries to China to take advantage of lower labor costs. In addition tothe production of labor-intensive, non-durable goods, such as clothingand shoes, by the 1990s Chinese industry had moved to more sophisti-cated durable goods, such as electronics, computers, machinery, andtransport.

Another difference from the treaty ports, which had been dominatedby Western nationals, was that in the 1980s almost 70 percent of the for-eign investments came from overseas Chinese, especially in Hong Kong,Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. Many of their ancestors had left China’scoastal areas centuries earlier in search of better lives. They made theirway first to Southeast Asia and then, starting in the mid-nineteenth-cen-tury, to the Americas, where they prospered as merchants and profes-sionals. Unlike Mao, who had rejected their offers to help China in the1950s, Deng early on encouraged overseas Chinese in Hong Kong, Thai-land, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore to invest in China. By the1990s, Taiwanese businessmen were increasingly interacting with themainland. The capital, entrepreneurial savvy, and management skills ofthe overseas Chinese, plus their family contacts and familiarity with Chi-nese culture, contributed to making China’s southeast coast one of themost dynamic regions in all of Asia. Their enterprises, coupled with theinflux of Western and Japanese firms, accelerated China’s move to themarket, involvement in international trade, and rapid economic mod-ernization, thus further reducing economic control by the party-state.

As these foreign enterprises began to spread elsewhere in the countryand domestic collectives and private enterprises continued to grow, morespace was created for nonstate economic activity. The overall balancebetween plan and market gradually shifted in favor of the market.9 Thisshift was briefly interrupted after the military crackdown on June 4,1989, when the conservative party elders and Maoists who returned topower attempted to reimpose more direct centralized control over theeconomy. But after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and Deng’shighly publicized tour in early 1992, called the “southern journey”(nanxun), aimed at reinvigorating the reforms and staving off a Soviet-style collapse, the economy began to revive. Deng visited the Special Eco-nomic Zone of Shenzhen, between Guangdong and Hong Kong, as wellas Shanghai, to highlight the need to continue the economic reformsand opening to the outside world. Deng’s rejuvenation of the reforms

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further dissolved the central planning framework and phased in moreunified market prices. By the late 1990s China began moving towardgradual privatization of state industry. Despite continuing discrimina-tion in granting bank loans to private entrepreneurs, the private sector,through the pooling of family resources and other means, was faringmuch better than the state-owned sector. Growing at an annual rate of20 percent since the early 1980s, the private sector created more than 60percent of China’s GNP by 2004.10

Another major change in the 1990s was the end of the peasants’ serf-like ties to their villages that had existed during the Mao period. Withgreater labor mobility, it is conservatively estimated that by 2003 over120 million peasants were on the move11 from the countryside intotowns, cities, and particularly to the Special Economic Zones in searchof better lives, not just for themselves but for their families back home,to whom they sent remittances. Although people were able to changetheir jobs in the 1990s, it was still difficult to obtain the permits requiredto reside permanently in the urban areas. By the early twenty-first cen-tury, however, such permits were becoming increasingly less necessary.12

Thus the move to a market economy gradually loosened state controlover people’s personal lives, fostered more autonomous transactionsamong individuals, and provided much more flexibility, opportunity,and choice in one’s economic life. Barry Naughton describes the emer-gence in the 1990s of the “one household, two systems” model: one fam-ily member stays in the state sector in order to get subsidized housing,medical care, pensions, and education benefits, while the spouse entersthe market economy.13

In addition to bringing about improvements in the standard of living,this arrangement led to increases in household savings that flooded intothe banking system, thus funneling funds into the economy for furtherinvestment. Rather than embarking on the privatization of state industryat the start of the reforms as the Russians did, China’s leaders postponedthat process to the late 1990s, in part because the more conservativeparty elders opposed it on ideological grounds and in part because theleaders knew that privatization would result in the dismissal of millionsof redundant workers from state enterprises, possibly provoking wide-spread unrest. Instead, China’s leaders encouraged the expansion ofthe nonstate sector, foreign-joint ventures, Special Economic Zones, andcollective, private, and local enterprises in the expectation that competi-tion would force the state sector to reform itself. As enterprises in thenonstate sector, particularly in the towns, often got their start as subcon-

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tractors to state industries, they quickly became more efficient competi-tors and took business away from the primary contractors. When thecompetitiveness of the nonstate enterprises accelerated, the state indus-tries were increasingly unable to meet the challenge. Profits of state-sec-tor companies fell from 6 percent of GDP in the early 1980s to less than1 percent in 1996.14 This precipitous decline of the state sector in the1990s also led to the near bankruptcy of China’s banks that were or-dered to bail out the state industries.

Consequently, at the Fifteenth Party Congress held in September1997, the party announced the phasing out of most state-owned indus-tries. The state would continue to own key industries—natural resourcesand strategic sectors such as military industries, chemicals, energy, andgrain distribution—but the majority of state industries were to be soldoff through a system of shareholding in which factory managers and em-ployees as well as private investors were to be given the opportunity topurchase shares. Although the system was euphemistically called “publicownership,” in reality it was privatization. In contrast to Russia, whichmoved directly from state industry to privatization, causing many dis-ruption and economic hardships, China did not move to privatize untilafter almost two decades of development of the nonstate sector, whichwas then able to absorb some of the workers from the SOEs and thushelp ease the transition. By late 2002, SOEs accounted for just 15.6 per-cent of industrial output; even if the output from the state shareholdingfirms is included, the figure is only 40.8 percent.15

Despite this advantage, however, China’s reform of state industryhad profound implications for Chinese society and government as wellas for the economy. In 1996–97 state industries employed about two-thirds of the urban industrial labor force.16 Although China’s nonstatesector had room for some of these workers, it had not expanded suf-ficiently to absorb the millions of workers who lost their state jobs, inaddition to the 120 million who were leaving their villages in search ofjobs in the cities, plus the 13 million new workers who came into themarketplace every year. Even before the phasing out of most state-owned industries became official policy in September 1997, workerswere already protesting late payment of salaries, furloughs, and layoffs.With the loss of their jobs in state industries, these workers also lost theirhealth care and pension benefits. Such layoffs hit the rust-belt areas ofthe Northeast (Manchuria) and provinces in the interior, such as Shanxi,Hubei, and Sichuan, especially hard. In 1999 alone, 435 loss-makinglarge and medium state firms, 31,000 small coal mines, and 70 small oil

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refineries were closed down.17 By year’s end 2002, state-owned andshareholding corporations employed 77 million urban workers, downfrom 94.7 million at year’s end 1998, while private enterprises employed20 million urban workers, up from 9.7 million at year’s end 1998.18

Unlike their Russian counterparts, China’s state workers did not pas-sively accept their fate. During the 1990s, the number of officially re-ported protests nearly quadrupled, from 8,700 to 32,000, according toMinistry of Public Security figures.19 For the most part, these protestswere localized and of short duration. The early twenty-first century sawa new phenomenon, however: coordinated workers’ protests in a num-ber of different factories, lasting for more than a few days. In the threemonths from March through May 2002, well-organized joint workers’protests took place in a number of factories in the three Northeast citiesof Liaoyang, Daqing, and Fushun, where thousands of laid-off workersprotested nonpayment of back wages, loss of pensions and health bene-fits, insufficient severance pay, and widespread corruption. Some of theseprotests involved thousands of workers and lasted longer than any previ-ous protests since 1989.20

Yet by the end of May 2002 the party was able to defuse the protests.In contrast to its violent handling of the student protests of 1989, thegovernment arrested the main leaders, who were sentenced to longprison terms, but tried to mollify the demonstrators by providing somemonetary and health care compensation rather than using force againstthem. Furthermore, the government arrested some of the officials whomthe workers accused of corruption. The sheer number of workers andprotests made detention, arrest, or military suppression impractical andwould likely only have provoked further unrest. As the process of privat-ization of state industry accelerated in the early twenty-first century, itwas uncertain if such a strategy would continue to mollify increasingnumbers of laid-off workers, particularly if there were to be a downturnin the economy. The number of protests continued to grow rapidly. InJuly 2005 it was reported by Minister of Public Security Zhou Yongkangthat 3.76 million people took part in 74,000 protests in 2004.21

The decline in state industry had an even greater impact on the Com-munist party-state. Because the central government received 60 percentof its revenue from state-owned enterprises,22 this decline meant that thecentral government lost a substantial share of its revenue. Despite theeconomy’s continuing growth, the central government’s revenue basewas increasingly depleted. At the same time, because provincial and lo-cal governments received less financial support from higher levels than

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previously, they kept a larger proportion of tax revenues for investmentin local projects. Since the moneymaking capacities of the collective andprivate enterprises benefited both local officials and local entrepreneurs,when directives of the central government diverged from local interests,the officials and entrepreneurs joined together to ignore higher direc-tives. In addition to unchecked corruption, this alliance between localofficials and the growing nonstate business community led to increasingeconomic and political decentralization. It was in the interest of bothgroups to disregard central government injunctions against product du-plication, tax overcharges, corruption, and labor exploitation. As a re-sult, the central government’s capacity to wield political authority, letalone economic power, at the local levels was weakened.

Consequently, the development of the nonstate sector not onlyhelped improve the livelihood of the majority of the population but alsoshifted political and economic power to local officials. Vivienne Shue hasdescribed this development as a thinning of power at the center, counter-balanced by a thickening of power at the local levels.23 Deng and his suc-cessors realized that in order to move to the market, it was necessary todecentralize and to reduce the concentration of political and economicpower in the central government; but they did not foresee the extent towhich such economic and political decentralization would result in a de-crease in the flow of taxes to the center, thus diminishing the reach of theparty-state’s authority and fostering an informal federalism. In the shortrun, decentralization helps economic development by allowing more taxrevenue to stay in the local areas to stimulate growth. But in the longrun, as occurred in the late Qing dynasty, it leads to a relative decline ofcentral government revenues and thus decreasing expenditures on edu-cation, health, and infrastructure, eventually undermining economicgrowth, especially in the countryside.

As revenue declined, the government shifted much of the responsibil-ity for investment to the local governments and enterprises. But whilethey were prepared to invest in economic projects, local governmentswere less ready to invest in education and health.24 Central budgetaryrevenues as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) declined from 35percent in 1978 to only 12 percent in 1998, though they recovered to 18percent in 2002. Expenditures show a similar trend. Throughout the1980s, the central government’s expenditures were around 10 percent ofGDP, but slipped to 8.4 percent in 1995. In 2002 they recovered to 21percent.25 Likewise, with the abolition of the communes which had pro-vided the funds for health care, education, and infrastructure develop-ment, particularly public irrigation networks, rural communities could

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no longer finance their own public activities. Evidence indicates that ru-ral health, education, and public works gradually deteriorated in the1990s.

Even though the party loosened its authority over people’s economiclivelihood in the post-Mao era, it increased its authority in the area ofbirth control. Starting with the Great Leap Forward, Mao had encour-aged a large population in the belief that it would make China morepowerful. As a result, post-Mao leaders were faced with a population al-ready one-fifth of the world’s total and growing at a rate of 15 million ayear. In an effort to slow population growth, beginning in the 1980s theparty-state imposed draconian birth control policies mandating onechild per family. By the mid-1990s, the population growth rate was re-duced to about 13 million a year. But the policy provoked much unhap-piness, especially in the countryside, where male heirs are desirable in or-der to continue the family line. Furthermore, because girls marry out ofthe family, families want a son to take care of the parents in their old age,especially with the loss of social security benefits in the post-Mao era. Inaddition, the return to the family farm created an incentive to increasefamily size in order to have more hands to work in the fields. Therefore,during the final years of the twentieth century, peasants in some areaswere allowed to have two children if the first child was a girl or if theypaid a fine for an extra child. Nevertheless, the strict family planningpolicy had produced a huge gender gap by the early twenty-first century.Because of ultrasound examinations and selective abortions, and evenfemale infanticide, the government announced in January 2005 that 119boys were born to every 100 girls, compared with the average world rateof 105 boys to 100 girls. If these trends continue, in a few decades Chinacould have up to 40 million bachelors; the impact of this disparity on so-ciety is hard to predict.26

Whether the regime can keep the population within the set limit of1.3 billion other forces may ultimately contribute to a decline in popula-tion growth. The movement from agriculture to industry and serviceshad already begun to produce broad structural changes in Chinese soci-ety in the 1990s. Because of greater social mobility and migration intothe cities and towns,27 in just two decades the share of China’s workforce engaged in agriculture plummeted from 71 percent to about 50percent. It had taken Japan sixty years to attain a similar transforma-tion.28 As China became increasingly urbanized and household incomesrose substantially, residents spent more money on leisure and consumergoods. By the late 1990s China’s economy was less in transition from so-cialism to capitalism than in transition from a rural society to an urban-

The Post-Mao Reform Era 419

ized society. If these trends continue, it is likely that the economic, social,and cultural pressures of an urbanized society, rather than the party’sbirth control policy, will ultimately bring down China’s huge popula-tion, as has occurred in other urbanized areas of the world.

Whereas the leadership that came to power after the Cultural Revo-lution was relatively united in the move away from Mao’s policies and inintroducing rural reforms, differences emerged within the leadershipover the speed and direction of the economic reforms. Deng encounteredopposition from several of his revolutionary colleagues in the 1980s,particularly Chen Yun, the economic planner, and Deng Liqun, thepropagandist of the Mao era. Yet, despite their resistance to the estab-lishment of the Special Economic Zones and to the expansion of thenonstate sector, Deng continued to push ahead with the economic re-forms and the opening to the outside world. As he bargained, ha-rangued, and persisted in the face of increasing opposition, he waslargely successful in achieving these reforms.

Deng was less consistent, however, in moving ahead with the limitedpolitical reforms that he had first encouraged in the aftermath of the Cul-tural Revolution to ensure that China would never again be convulsedby political disorder.

The Impact of Limited Political Reforms

In the post-Mao era, China is generally contrasted with the former So-viet Union and Eastern Europe as having initiated economic reformswithout introducing political reforms. Such a description, however, isnot altogether accurate. Shortly after they returned to power in late1978, Deng Xiaoping and other party leaders introduced several limitedpolitical reforms that laid the groundwork for potential political change,though the Communist party-state still remained in charge. In the earlyyears of the Deng era, Deng’s reformist disciples Hu Yaobang and ZhaoZiyang, as well as two of the party elders, Peng Zhen and Bo Yibo,moved beyond the economic reforms to implement a series of politicalreforms to prevent the occurrence of another Cultural Revolution. Ini-tially, the more conservative elders did not oppose these reforms, be-cause they too had suffered in the Cultural Revolution and thus sharedsimilar goals. The political reforms were intended to establish norms, toinstitutionalize certain procedures, and to rule through collective deci-sion making in order to move away from the unchecked, ad hoc, and dic-tatorial personal leadership that had caused so much damage during theMao years.

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Even though Deng’s overriding concern was with the economy, he,his disciples, and a few of the party elders played pivotal roles in promot-ing political reforms in the early 1980s. Despite the fact that Dengsought to revive the party’s legitimacy through economic means, heblamed the party’s loss of authority less on economic factors than onMao’s arbitrary and unlimited concentration of personal political power,which ultimately led to the violence and chaos of the Cultural Revolu-tion. Therefore, despite his own paramount political role, Deng es-chewed the highest offices and the personality cult of his predecessor.

Early in the post-Mao era, Deng sought to reestablish the party’s au-thority by reforming the Communist party-state. To that end he and hiscolleagues called for “socialist democracy” and “socialist legality.” Thedefinitions of these terms were vague, however; they clearly did not im-ply a system of checks and balances, as advocated by some Chinese intel-lectuals in the mid-1980s. Nor did they mean toleration of public pro-tests. Deng had allowed the Democracy Wall movement of former RedGuards in late 1978 and early 1979, which publicly called for political aswell as economic changes, to continue for a number of weeks only be-cause the protesters’ demands helped rid the leadership of Mao’s ap-pointed successor Hua Guofeng and the remaining Maoist leaders in theleadership. But once that was accomplished and the demonstrators be-gan to criticize the Communist political system for, as one of the Democ-racy Wall leaders, Wei Jingsheng, publicly stated, turning leaders intodictators, including Deng himself, Deng banned the movement and hadWei and other Democracy Wall leaders imprisoned.29 Nevertheless, de-spite Deng’s treatment of Wei and the other leaders, shortly thereafter heacknowledged the need to reform the Leninist system’s unchecked ex-pansion of political power. As Deng explained in a 1980 speech, the ex-cesses of the Cultural Revolution were the fault not just of the leader butof the party structure that gave the leader so much power: “Even so greata man as Comrade Mao Zedong was influenced to a serious degree bycertain unsound systems and institutions, which resulted in grave mis-fortunes for the party, state and himself.”30

Thus the Deng leadership early on introduced regulations to limit theconcentration of political power in the hands of one or a few individuals.The life tenure of party-state leaders was replaced with fixed terms; theparty general secretary and prime minister were to serve a maximum oftwo five-year terms. In addition, Zhao Ziyang’s report to the ThirteenthParty Congress in October 1987 called for the separation of the overlap-ping functions of party and state; the party was to formulate overallnational goals and priorities, and the government was to make and im-

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plement policies to carry out the party’s goals. Although Deng neverquestioned the overriding role of the party and its leadership, Zhao’s callfor the separation of party and state had the potential to diffuse partypower and gradually shift some of that power to the government admin-istration. The party’s theorists under Hu Yaobang’s leadership sought torevise the Marxist-Leninist ideology to make it more appropriate to thereforms, less dogmatic, and more in accord with the Marxist humanismthat had inspired the reformers in Eastern Europe.

In addition, the formerly rubber-stamp legislature of the Mao period,the National People’s Congress (NPC), asserted a relative degree of inde-pendence in the post-Mao era. Unlike during the Mao era, the NPC nolonger unanimously approved all legislation sent to it by the party lead-ership.31 Deng repeatedly called attention to Article 57 of the ChineseConstitution, which states that the NPC is the “highest organ of the gov-ernment.” During the Deng era, the NPC was headed successively byseveral powerful party leaders who, for a variety of reasons, sought toincrease the NPC’s authority: Peng Zhen, former Beijing party chief;Wan Li, former party secretary of Anhui, where the agricultural reformshad begun; and Qiao Shi, formerly responsible for intelligence affairsand a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo until Septem-ber 1997. Of course, these NPC chairmen sought to strengthen theNPC’s powers in order to enhance their own authority as well, but in theaftermath of the Cultural Revolution they also genuinely believed that itwas necessary to increase the power of the legislature in order to limitthe power of the party leadership, though they rejected a Western-stylesystem of checks and balances. Toward this end they expanded theNPC’s bureaucracy, established a committee system, and put technocratson the NPC Standing Committee.32

While the NPC did not set its own agenda, which was established bythe party leadership, at times it did modify, revise, send back, and on cer-tain issues withhold approval of party programs, and it criticized thegovernment for failure to implement its laws. In the 1990s, votes forparty policies were no longer automatically unanimous. For example, inthe 1992 vote over the controversial issue of the Three Gorges Dam—amassive project to be built on the Yangzi River, which faced oppositionbecause of its potentially destructive impact on the people, environment,and archaeological treasures in the area—one-third of the delegates ei-ther were opposed or abstained. In 1995 about one-third of the delegatesabstained or voted against one of Jiang Zemin’s nominees for vice pre-mier. In 1996, in protest against the leadership’s ineffectiveness in stop-ping the growing lawlessness, 30 percent of the delegates voted against

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or abstained from supporting the report by China’s top prosecutor onlaw enforcement and corruption.33 And in 2003 one-tenth of the NPCdelegates voted against having Jiang Zemin stay on as chair of the stateCentral Military Commission after his retirement as general secretary in2003.34 Jiang finally stepped down from that post in March 2005. Al-though the NPC did not reverse policies, it was able to influence and attimes force a reconsideration of a number of important issues.35

Gradual empowerment of the legislative branches occurred at locallevels as well. Beginning in 1980, representatives to the local people’scongresses in some areas were chosen by direct vote in multicandidateelections rather than by appointment by higher levels. Although all thecandidates had to be vetted by the party, for the first time in the historyof the People’s Republic some local residents were given an opportunityto choose their own representatives. Although this practice came to astop in the urban areas after the fall 1980 elections when political dissi-dents were elected despite the party’s disapproval,36 the practice resumedearly in the twenty-first century.

In the rural areas, however, the process of voting for local leaders be-gan in the late 1980s and accelerated in the 1990s. In the effort to re-build political authority in the countryside, which had begun to erodeduring the Great Leap Forward famine, had shattered in the CulturalRevolution, and had virtually disappeared with the dismantling of thecommunes in the post-Mao era, the party, with the prompting of partyelders Peng Zhen and Bo Yibo, started to experiment with rural localelections. There was a general recognition that in a period of rapid, po-tentially destabilizing change, the right to vote could assuage discontentand provide some legitimate leadership in the countryside. The opportu-nity to elect local leaders was particularly appealing in villages that werelagging economically. Whereas the prosperous province of Guangdong,for example, was one of the last areas to introduce village elections, theslower-developing provinces seized the chance to elect village leaderswho promised to improve the livelihood of their constituents.

In 1987 the Organic Law of the Village Committees made officialwhat was already taking place: the right of villagers to choose their ownvillage heads and village committees in multicandidate elections. Eventhough the candidates had to be approved by officials from the Ministryof Civil Affairs, and the local party committees were in charge of the lo-cal elections, these competitive elections resulted in a further devolutionof power from the center to the localities. In many cases the electionsmiscarried, and in most cases the village party secretary won, but some-times the elections not only allowed villagers to remove abusive, corrupt

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village leaders from office, but also made the local officials more ac-countable to the electorate. At the same time, the village leaders whowere democratically elected were relatively successful in securing com-pliance with state policies, such as the unpopular one-child policy andcollection of the state’s share of grain production, in return for defendingthe villagers against the illegal, predatory exactions by township andcounty higher-ups whom the elected officials no longer depended on fortheir positions.37

There is still debate over the number of villages involved in local elec-tions. In the late 1990s estimates ranged from 10 percent, provided by aknowledgeable high party official; to one-third, an estimate given by anNPC official and the International Republican Institute, which helpedtrain villagers in democratic practices; to 31 to 80 percent of China’s al-most 1 million villages, an estimate provided by the Ministry of Civil Af-fairs.38 Whatever the percentage, however, these competitive electionsmeant that for the first time since China’s 1949 revolution, local popula-tions were empowered to make their own decisions and pursue theirown interests.

Although the grass-roots multicandidate elections generally did notofficially spread beyond the village level, in the late 1990s they were ten-tatively extended to a small number of townships and urban neighbor-hood committees. The first township election occurred in Buyun inSichuan province in December 1998, but this was not because of achange in party policy. Motivated by the removal of the previous town-ship leaders in 1997 on charges of corruption and mismanagement, localofficials, with the assistance of Chinese academics, decided to launch apolitical experiment and organize a multicandidate election for town-ship head, using the secret ballots and transparent vote tabulation meth-ods that were being used in the village elections. Three candidates ran forthe position of township magistrate—a schoolteacher, a village head,and a township party vice chairman. Discussing a broad range of localissues, they campaigned actively in the villages that belonged to thetownship. Ultimately, the party vice chairman was elected by a smallmargin.39 But despite the election of a party official and several othertownship elections that took place in the early twenty-first century, theparty leadership did not give its imprimatur to such activities. Unlike thelocal elections in which the villagers know the people who are runningfor village head and village committee, elections in townships, whichmay include up to ten thousand residents, required political organizing,campaigning, and electioneering—methods that could eventually beused to challenge the party’s authority. Even though there was greater

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space for freedom of speech in the post-Mao era, there was still no roomfor unauthorized political organizing.

Reforms to improve local government in order to reinforce centralstability have been a feature of Chinese government since ancient times.Yet, as seen in the last ten years of its rule (1901–1911), when the Qingintroduced grass-roots political reforms, including participation throughlimited suffrage in local self-government, these efforts fueled dissatisfac-tion with the regime rather than bolstering support for it.40 A similar fatebefell the Guomindang’s local political reforms, which were unable tostem the rise of the Communist movement. Local political reforms donot necessarily buttress an authoritarian regime; as seen in China’s his-tory, they may hasten its downfall.

In fact, the devolution of political power and efforts at grass-roots re-forms at the expense of the weakening central government which domi-nated the local scene in first half of the twentieth century resonates withthe situation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In thelatter case, however, the devolution was due more to economic than topolitical factors. Leaders in the economically stronger coastal provincesin post-Mao China have become important figures at the center as well.Even though some were placed on the Politburo when Jiang Zemin, theformer party boss and mayor of Shanghai, became the head of the partyin the aftermath of the June 4 crackdown on the Tiananmen demonstra-tors and the dismissal of Zhao Ziyang, they were still likely to identifywith local interests.

Another factor diluting the center’s power was the inception of a civilsociety in the People’s Republic.41 In the late 1990s thousands of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were established. Although theyhad to be registered with the Ministry of Civil Affairs under the auspicesof an official agency and were primarily concerned with educational, so-cial, welfare, gender, and environmental issues rather than political is-sues, they began to assume some of the duties of the government, such asproviding education for children of migrant workers and creating AIDSawareness programs. Nevertheless, even though the growing power ofregional leaders and the emergence of NGOs further diluted the center’spower, in the early twenty-first century the center still retained ultimatepower in its continuing capacity to appoint governors and other impor-tant provincial officials42 and to repress any organized group that it per-ceived as a threat to its authority.

In 1985–86 a number of intellectuals and technocrats who had beenrehabilitated by Hu Yaobang and placed in high government, media, andacademic positions called not only for a radical revision of the Marxist-

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Leninist ideology but also for a more Western-style political system ofchecks and balances than in Deng’s “socialist democracy.” But the seniorleaders, particularly the more conservative party elders led by Chen Yun,were not willing to tolerate further political reforms. They worried thatexisting reforms were already undermining their own power and thepower of the party, and they feared the emergence of a Polish Solidarity-like movement or a Czech-style democratic Charter 77 group that couldlead to the overthrow of the party. Therefore, they persuaded Deng toredefine “socialist democracy” to mean improvement in the functioningof the bureaucracy rather than the building of institutions to curb politi-cal power. When student demonstrations erupted in late 1986 at the Uni-versity of Science and Technology in Anhui’s capital, Hefei, and thenspread to the coastal cities and into Tiananmen Square in early January1987, these party elders prevailed upon Deng to stop the protests, dis-miss his disciple Hu Yaobang, who refused to crack down on the demon-strators, and purge several prominent intellectuals whose advocacy ofreforming the ideology and institutions, the party elders charged, hadprovoked the demonstrations. Unlike during the Mao period, however,when such dismissals might lead to ostracism, imprisonment, or worse,Hu Yaobang remained on the Central Committee, even though he lostvirtually all his political power, and the purged intellectuals continued tofunction in their professions, even though they lost their party member-ship. Despite the crackdown, Deng’s treatment of Hu and the intellectualdissidents established a new, more moderate pattern in handling intra-party disputes and intellectual dissent than during the Mao era.

Zhao Ziyang assumed Hu’s position as party general secretary in1987, and Li Peng, an adopted son of Zhou Enlai, took over Zhao’s po-sition as prime minister. Li Peng had been trained in Moscow in the1950s, when China and the former Soviet Union were close allies. Unlikehis predecessors who had risen to their positions through revolutionaryor party activities, Li Peng came from a background that was representa-tive of the new generation of leaders who dominated the central govern-ment in the 1990s. He had risen through the ranks of the technocraticbureaucracy. Although Zhao Ziyang was primarily involved in eco-nomic reforms prior to Hu Yaobang’s dismissal, when he became generalsecretary he turned increasingly to political reforms. In addition to call-ing for the potentially far-reaching reform of separation of party andstate, he also promoted the theory of the “primary stage of socialism”which had been formulated by economists associated with Hu Yaobang.The theory maintained that because China was still at an early stage of

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socialism, it could use capitalist methods to develop its economy. Zhaoalso introduced a civil service examination system as one way to improvethe bureaucracy. Although the examination system represented a returnto Chinese tradition, it was an unprecedented political institution in thePeople’s Republic, where appointment generally had been based on po-litical loyalty rather than on merit.

Another reform, approved by the NPC in 1989 and put into effect inOctober 1990, was the Administrative Litigation Law, which sought tomake the bureaucracy function more fairly, particularly at the local lev-els. This law gave ordinary people the right to bring suit against rapa-cious, arbitrary officials. As a result, for example, villagers could sue lo-cal officials who confiscated their land for industrial and infrastructuraldevelopment. The number of suits grew from about 13,000 in 1990 to51,370 in 1995 and an estimated 100,000 in 1997. In 1995 alone it wasreported that 70,000 citizens filed suits against government agencies andlocal officials.43 With the help of Western legal experts, China also beganto formulate property and business laws to deal with disputes betweenindividuals and the state as well as between individuals. The leadership’sencouragement of such laws and its numerous rectification campaignswere partly directed at cleaning up the spreading corruption that had ac-companied the move to the market.

Neither the laws nor the campaigns, however, were very effective be-cause they were carried out within a system that lacked an independentjudiciary and a regulatory framework. Often the officials assigned toclean up the corruption were the very same officials who were engaged init. As a result, bribery, corruption, and the stripping of assets from thestate sector became widespread, further undermining the legitimacy andauthority of the party-state. Although some corruption may facilitate theworkings of a growing market economy, rampant corruption weakensthe entire political structure. In China the general perception is thatwidespread corruption traditionally has spelled the end of dynasties. Italso spelled the end of Guomindang rule in the first half of the twentiethcentury. Despite the leadership’s rhetoric and campaigns against corrup-tion, the party’s inability to control it continued to erode the power ofthe center.

It was the corruption issue, plus a bout of soaring inflation caused inpart by efforts at price reform in the late 1980s, that transformed a stu-dent-led tribute to Hu Yaobang, who died unexpectedly on April 15,1989, into massive demonstrations that continued for over six weeks un-til Deng Xaioping ordered the military crackdown on the demonstrators

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in Tiananmen Square on June 4. The demonstrations attracted millionsof workers and ordinary citizens in Beijing and spread to virtually everycity throughout the country. While students and elite intellectuals usedHu’s death to demand political reforms, particularly freedom of thepress and freedom of association, workers and others used it to demandan end to the corruption, the inflation, and the dissolution of state enter-prises that had accompanied the economic reforms. The elders and oth-ers in the leadership, however, saw these demonstrations, particularlythe one in Tiananmen Square—the symbol of the official seat of govern-ment—as a threat both to themselves and to the party-state. In the post-Mao era they had thus far been able to suppress student protests andeven intellectual dissent relatively easily with limited campaigns andwithout the use of violence, the mass mobilizations, and the zealousnessthat had characterized Mao’s campaigns. But because the 1989 demon-strations included such a large proportion of China’s urban residents,some in the leadership saw them as a replay of the May Fourth move-ment, which had led to the fall of the Beijing government in 1919. Andas some of the demonstrators became frustrated by the leaders’ lack ofresponse to their demands for reform, they began to call for the over-throw of the leadership. The party elders, recalling the Red Guard ram-pages against them twenty years earlier, feared another Cultural Revolu-tion or an even worse nightmare, a Chinese Solidarity movement.

Consequently, by mid-May Deng had concluded that the demonstra-tions were a fundamental challenge to the party’s power and had to besuppressed with military force. Because Zhao Ziyang refused to go alongwith the imposition of martial law on May 20, he was charged withsplitting the party and dismissed as party general secretary. Until hisdeath in January 2005, he spent the remaining years of his life under aform of house arrest. When the demonstrators remained in TiananmenSquare despite the threat of force, Deng ordered Li Peng to send introops on June 3–4 and soldiers randomly shot their way into the square.In the aftermath, Jiang Zemin was chosen as party general secretary toreplace Zhao Ziyang, because as party secretary of Shanghai Jiang hadsuppressed demonstrators there with relatively little violence, though re-portedly scores of workers had been killed.

While the June 4 military crackdown, the purge of Zhao Ziyang, andthe subsequent persecution and imprisonment of the demonstrationleaders revealed how little the leadership and the political structure hadchanged, the demonstrations that had provoked the crackdown revealedhow much Chinese society had evolved. The loosening of political con-

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trols, opening to the outside world, greater freedom of thought and ex-pression, establishment of NGOs, and priority on improving the stan-dard of living for the majority of the population had led to demands notjust from intellectuals but from workers, entrepreneurs, and ordinary ur-ban residents to be treated as citizens rather than as obedient party com-rades and passive subjects. Moreover, for the first time in the People’sRepublic, ordinary citizens and workers joined forces with students toparticipate in the protests, even though initially the students had notwelcomed their participation. Yet June 4 demonstrated that thoughweakened, the Leninist structure still functioned, and party leaders couldsuppress any direct challenge they saw as a political threat.

Nevertheless, Deng’s death in February 1997 further weakened theparty-state. The procedures and norms that Deng and his disciples hadattempted to introduce were not sufficiently institutionalized to replacethe personal rule that Deng never relinquished. Since Jiang Zemin andhis colleagues had already governed the party-state for almost eightyears prior to Deng’s death, his passing did not leave a vacuum in formalterms. But his death marked the end of a strong leader who was able,through his historic role, military connections, party network, and polit-ical savvy, to implement his reforms. Roderick MacFarquhar, in sum-ming up Deng’s life, concludes that when the history of China’s tortuousroad to modernization is written, Deng will be seen as the man whofinally found the right path, even if he hesitated to follow it all the way.44

Deng left a transformed economic system, a pluralistic society, thebeginnings of grass-roots political change, and a National People’s Con-gress that periodically expressed dissent by voting against or abstainingon party directives, but the weakened Communist party-state remainedintact. Deng recognized the failings of the political system, but he was re-luctant to address them for fear that any change would undermine thepower of the party and the leadership. Similarly, in the early years of thetwenty-first century, neither the third generation of leaders, led by JiangZemin, nor the fourth generation, led by Hu Jintao, whom Deng haddesignated to succeed Jiang, and who came to power in 2002, showedany inclination to address the issue of political reform.

The Post-Deng Leadership

After November 1989 Jiang assumed all powerful positions in the partyand the army, and in 1998 Li Peng was replaced as prime minister by for-mer Shanghai mayor and party secretary Zhu Rongji, who had effec-

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tively contained China’s inflation in the mid-1990s. Yet none of Deng’ssuccessors could ever assume his position as paramount leader. Theysimply had not played his historic role. Their right to rule came onlyfrom Deng’s blessing. Whereas Deng had the personal power to getthings done, Jiang and his Shanghai colleagues, as well as the fourth gen-eration of party leaders led by General Secretary Hu Jintao and PrimeMinister Wen Jiabao, were technocrats. Jiang and his colleagues madetheir way up the political ladder via state industry and the bureaucracy;Hu Jintao and his colleagues made their way to the pinnacle of powerthrough provincial positions. Even though they paid lip service to Marx-ism-Leninism, as technocrats they were not ideologically driven. More-over, as the first cohort of leaders in the People’s Republic who had notparticipated in the revolution, they had less authority to rule than theirpredecessors, and they were more willing to compromise.45 After an ini-tial embrace of the neo-Maoists who came to the fore in the aftermath ofJune 4, Jiang by the mid-1990s was steering a gradual, steady middlecourse between extremes on both the left and the right.

Unlike Deng, Jiang and his colleagues also lacked deep roots in themilitary, whose support was still crucial for holding power in China.Jiang tried to build personal ties to the military by granting promotionsand by more than doubling the military budget. Because Deng had re-duced the size and budget of the military by one-fourth in 1984, units ofthe People’s Liberation Army (PLA) began producing for the marketeconomy to enrich both the military budget and themselves. They re-fashioned the military factories and established a large number of newenterprises that produced goods for the civilian market at home andabroad. Indeed, in the mid-1990s the PLA was perhaps the largest busi-ness conglomerate in China in the post-Mao era. In the late 1990s, how-ever, the military budget was increased so as to create a technologicallyadvanced, well-equipped military power. Concurrently, the military wasordered to cut all its commercial ties. The deaths of a number of militaryelders and the increasing professionalization of the military reduced themilitary’s political role as well. Yet military leaders were still representedat the highest levels of the Communist party-state, as had been the casethroughout the twentieth century, and they remained decisive players inleadership factional struggles. At the start of the twenty-first century, thePLA was still the only organization, with the exception of the party, thathad the potential to play a major political role in China.

Despite the silencing of political dissidents after 1989 and the grow-ing nationalistic rhetoric that gradually replaced the waning Marxist-Le-

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ninist ideology in the 1990s, Jiang did not slow China’s opening to theoutside world. Yet China’s foreign relations were not without troubles.In the aftermath of June 4, human rights violations were the most emo-tionally charged issue between China and the United States. Althoughthe threat of American economic sanctions was diluted in 1994 whenPresident Clinton delinked the issue of human rights from China’s most-favored-nation status, the United States and other Western nations con-tinued to criticize China for its human rights abuses. Specifically, theycondemned the imprisonment of the leaders of the 1989 Tiananmendemonstrations, organizers of independent labor unions, and religiousleaders who conducted services under nonofficial auspices, such as Ro-man Catholics who accepted the authority of the pope and Tibetanmonks and nuns who swore allegiance to the Dalai Lama. China’s lead-ers and intellectual spokespersons adamantly rejected criticisms of theirhuman rights practices. Like the leaders of Malaysia, Singapore, and In-donesia, they charged that such criticisms were an imposition of theWestern view of human rights on countries with different historical tra-ditions. Jiang extolled “Asian” values as superior to Western values be-cause they were based on collective rights rather than the self-centeredindividual rights that were responsible for the moral failings of Westernsocieties.

Nevertheless, by the late 1990s there was much less talk of Asian val-ues and more discussion of rights, by both Chinese officials and ordinarycitizens. In 1997 China signed the UN Covenant on Economic, Socialand Cultural Rights, which was later ratified by the National People’sCongress, with the deletion of the right to form labor unions, and in1998 signed the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The signing ofthese covenants, however, did not limit the party’s power or protect therights of individuals. Nevertheless, the language of rights seeped into thecountry and spread beyond intellectuals. Laid-off workers, overtaxedpeasants, and people whose homes and land were confiscated for devel-opment projects without adequate compensation began using this lan-guage in their protests.

Despite calling for renewed emphasis on the Communist party-state,the Jiang leadership recognized the impossibility of restoring a central-ized controlled economy. Jiang initially tightened political and mediacontrols but not economic controls. In the early years of his leadershiphe had tried to rein in centrifugal tendencies and preserve the inefficientstate-owned enterprises, but at the Fifteenth Party Congress in 1997 heput his own mark on economic policy by launching the major reform of

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state industry by means of bankruptcies, mergers, selling of shares, for-eign-joint ventures, and privatization. Twenty years after China’s initiallaunching of economic reforms, and in the face of mounting social un-rest, labor disruptions by laid-off workers, growing inequalities, andcriticisms from neo-Maoists, the Jiang leadership made official what hadalready been taking place informally: the withdrawal of the state frommost sectors of the economy and the dissolution of the heavily indebted,overstaffed, and obsolete state-owned industries.

Like Deng, however, Jiang did not embark on a bold program of po-litical reform. Even though Jiang adopted Hu Yaobang’s slogan “Eman-cipate the mind” and talked about political reforms at the FifteenthParty Congress in 1997, he was slow to carry them out. Indeed, at thatCongress he forced the retirement of NPC chairman Qiao Shi, who hadactively called for political and legal reforms. In contrast to Jiang, whoemphasized strengthening spiritual civilization, a vague term referring tothe orthodox ideology and Leninist democratic centralism, Qiao hadbeen the one member of the Politburo’s Standing Committee who in themid-1990s consistently stressed the need to build political and legal in-stitutions and to enforce laws fairly. With Qiao gone, the dichotomy be-tween China’s dynamic economy and its obsolete Leninist political struc-ture became even more accentuated. In fact, some of the efforts toseparate the party from the government, begun under Zhao Ziyang,were retracted during Jiang’s leadership.

Thus, the tragedy of June 4 interrupted the gradual political democ-ratization within the existing framework that had seemed possible ear-lier in the 1980s. In the aftermath of the military crackdown, the purgeof Zhao Ziyang and his supporters, and the suppression of relatively in-dependent organizations of intellectuals who were concerned with polit-ical issues, there was a crackdown on independent citizens’ associations,professional groups, and trade unions that had been organized duringthe 1989 demonstrations. The further harsh crackdown on workersseeking to organize their own unions in the mid-1990s and on a coalitionof dissident intellectuals, who had participated in the Democracy Walland the 1989 demonstrations, and disaffected workers attempting toform an opposition political party, the China Democracy Party, in 1998ensured that there would be no alternative to the party. Although officialstatistics of the Ministry of Civil Affairs showed that by the end of 1996,186,666 social organizations were registered nationwide to deal with awide range of social, professional, gender, environmental, and academicquestions, they could expect to survive only as long as they stayed awayfrom political issues.46 Chinese at the beginning of the twenty-first cen-

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tury could change jobs, travel abroad, complain on talk radio about pot-holes in the streets, and vote their village leaders out of office, but theystill could not publicly criticize the party-state and its leaders. Thosewho dared to do so were immediately silenced.

There was also a common apprehension among the population thattoo rapid political change could provoke widespread instability and eco-nomic decline, similar to that which had occurred in the former SovietUnion, and thus had the potential of jeopardizing the recent gains in thestandard of living. Nevertheless, the gradual introduction in the late1980s of such institutions as limited grass-roots political reforms invillages and urban neighborhoods and local legal aid offices moved for-ward. The local equivalents of the NPC continued to assert more auton-omy and allowed for more participation by local communities. Estab-lished procedures, such as the convening of regular party meetings andthe efforts to formulate civil and criminal codes, also continued.

Only a few well-placed intellectuals, however, such as a small num-ber of remaining revolutionary elders, some former participants in theDemocracy Wall and the 1989 demonstrations, and a few freelance intel-lectuals dared publicly express the fear that if political change were tooslow, it could also be destabilizing, because China’s obsolescent and en-feebled central government could not manage China’s new and changingeconomic and social realities.

A Fluid and Fragmenting Society

The post-Mao move to the market, access to new sources of wealth,devolution of power to local levels, openness to the outside world, andrelaxation of controls over daily life caused more far-reaching socialchanges. Like the economic and political changes, the post-Mao socialchanges also resonated with the opening up of public space in the lateQing dynasty47 and the development of an incipient civil society in theearly decades of the twentieth century.48 The reopening of public spacemarked the end of an increasingly statist trend that had begun during theRepublican period (1927–1945), when the Guomindang loosely incor-porated various occupational and social groups into the state structure.This process culminated in the 1950s, when the Communist Party im-posed virtually complete control over all groups and individuals by orga-nizing them into official party-state federations and associations. Duringthe Mao period, Chinese society was relatively homogeneous, egalitar-ian, immobile, and vertically organized.

Yet less than ten years after the launching of the economic reforms,

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Zhao Ziyang, in his report to the Thirteenth Party Congress in October1987, officially recognized the emergence of different social groupingsacross generational, geographic, professional, and economic lines. Heurged the establishment of official channels through which these variousgroups could express their interests in an organized way. In addition tothe official occupational and social federations of the Mao period, theparty set up intermediate organizations made up of these newly emerg-ing interests. In return for a degree of autonomy within demarcatedspheres, such intermediate organizations agreed to accept certain restric-tions and obligations.

The party paid particular attention to co-opting the rising economicforces—the self-employed, collectives, small- and large-scale privatebusinesspeople, and revived clans—into organizations in which theparty played the dominant role.49 These organizations not only were toestablish some control over their constituent members’ activities but alsowere meant to head off any challenge to the political system from anemerging middle class. In 2001 Jiang Zemin coined the concept of the“Three represents,” which was defined as the Communist Party repre-senting the most advanced culture, the most advanced elements, and thebroad masses. This idea was used to justify the incorporation of thenewly rich entrepreneurs into the Communist Party. Because the newrich either came from officialdom or were dependent on officials for theirincreasing wealth, they generally supported the political status quo. Al-though a small number of participants in China’s expanding collectiveand private business community participated in the 1989 demonstra-tions, after the June 4 crackdown most of them showed seemingly littleinterest in political reforms and little desire to change their dependentstatus, primarily because their interests were served by maintaining closerelations with party officials.

Even nongovernmental, or “people’s” (minjian), associations thatwere supposedly self-financing had to register and function under somesort of official supervision. Their degree of autonomy was delineatedand policed by officials. China’s business and professional classes werebecoming richer and more numerous, but by the beginning of thetwenty-first century they had not yet developed into an independent cap-italist or middle class able to assert themselves in their own right. Never-theless, their organizations and associations opened up spaces in societywhere they increasingly expressed the interests of their constituenciesrather than merely the views of their official sponsors.50 Professionalsand academics, including lawyers, doctors, scientists, engineers, and

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economists—some of whom established their own private practices andconsultancies—set up smaller, more flexible associations. In this respectthey resembled the various late nineteenth-century associations thatgradually shifted from expressing official Qing views to expressing theviews of their associations and in time gained greater political influence.

In some areas, the party’s efforts in the 1990s to supervise this emerg-ing intermediary realm were outpaced by informal alliances occurringoutside the party’s purview. A study of Tianjin reveals that while associa-tions of small-scale merchants remained subservient to officials, associa-tions of large-scale entrepreneurs, as they acquired more wealth andgrew less reliant on state resources, increasingly asserted their own inter-ests.51 Other studies of private entrepreneurs in specific localities, such asWenzhou along China’s thriving southeast coastal area, show that theseentrepreneurs were influential in shifting the balance from the public tothe private sector. As new economic alliances developed, individuals andgroups became bolder in asserting their own interests. While some infor-mal alliances of officials and nonstate entrepreneurs engaged in corrup-tion and clientelism, other alliances promoted more constructive causes,such as improving education and social services, thereby furthering theirown interests as well as those of the workers.52 Although the state wasdetermined to suppress alternative political groups, it was more tolerantof nonpolitical groups and associations. As a result, apolitical associa-tions continued to be established and to proliferate in the 1990s and theearly years of the twenty-first century.

Much as in the late Qing dynasty, urban areas became the centers ofnew markets and trading patterns that helped create public space wherenew intellectual, cultural, and social interactions took place. Yet similarto what occurred in the late nineteenth century, the public space in theearly years of the twenty-first century was unable to develop into a full-fledged civil society involved in political discourse, because periodic gov-ernment repression, absence of the rule of law, and widespread corrup-tion prevented the establishment of institutions that could protect andsustain an independent civil society. David Strand has pointed out thateven though individual and group autonomy cannot survive in a totali-tarian society, neither can it thrive without strong institutions and lawsto protect it.53 Unlike in the West, where similar developments led to aclear line between state and society, throughout most of Chinese historyand continuing into the twenty-first century, rather than a clear dichot-omy between state and society there has been a blend of private, public,and state interactions.

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At the same time that post-Mao society became fluid and mobile, italso became “fragmented and fragmenting,” to borrow Gordon White’sterminology.54 A manifestation of the social fragmentation caused by themove to the market was the growing gap between the rich and poor andincreasing social inequalities. Whereas during the Mao period the work-ers in state industries were esteemed and well paid, in the post-Mao erathe workers’ relative status and wages generally declined as state indus-tries increasingly went bankrupt. With salaries frozen, reduced, or sim-ply not paid, their pensions and health care provisions went uncovered,while the salaries of those who worked in nonstate, private, and foreign-joint enterprises increased. The unsettling effects of economic change,plus the loosening of controls, sparked an explosion of collective resis-tance in the form of industrial strikes, slowdowns, and street demonstra-tions which accelerated in the late 1990s; in some provinces, such asSichuan and Hubei, protests turned into large-scale riots.

These economic and social differences were intensified by the acceler-ating geographic disparities between the coastal areas involved in inter-national trade and private enterprise and the poorer inland provincesdominated by inland trade and SOEs. In 2001, the average income incoastal Shanghai was $1,330; in rural inland Guizhou province it was$165.55 In the rural sector, widening income disparities likewise occurredbetween the prospering managers and workers in the collective indus-tries and the farmers who still worked in the fields. There were alsomounting economic and social differences between urban and rural ar-eas as the urban rate of growth increased and quickly surpassed ruralgrowth, which had begun to stagnate in the late 1980s. Expenditures oneducation rose slightly in urban areas, but fell in the rural areas after thedismantling of the communes, which had borne the costs of educationand health care during the Mao era. While educational spending at themost advanced end of the educational spectrum, in the universities andresearch institutes, increased somewhat, it declined at the elementarylevel, particularly in the countryside, further exacerbating the social dis-parities between the rural and urban areas.

Similarly, the move to the market widened the gender gap. Sincedaughters eventually married into their husbands’ families, they mightbe kept home to help with the farming rather than being sent to school.As a result, there was a decline in female literacy in the post-Mao era. In1990, of the 22 percent of Chinese that made up the illiterate popula-tion, 70 percent were female, with a larger percentage of female illiter-ates in the younger generation: 73 percent of those aged fifteen to

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twenty-four compared with 68 percent over forty-five years of age.56

This trend continued to the end of the decade. In 1999 the female illiter-acy rate of 15.8 percent contrasted with only 6.9 percent for males.57

Because of the growing bankruptcy of SOEs and the state-ownedbanks that subsidized them, which until the post-Mao era were the ma-jor source of the party-state’s revenue, and the fact that the center re-ceived a progressively smaller share of provincial and local tax revenues,the party-state had fewer resources with which to deal with these in-tensifying and potentially destabilizing social trends. Nevertheless, thefourth generation of leaders, led by Hu Jintao, committed themselves toclosing the disparities between rural and urban areas by reducing taxeson farmers and subsidizing rural education. Whether these measures willwork in resolving the income gap remains uncertain.

The disparities between the rural and urban sectors were somewhatmitigated by the easing of restrictions on the movement of people offthe farms. Although in the Mao period, peasants were restricted totheir home villages through a system of household registration (hukou),decollectivization, the move to the market, and the growth of the non-state sector and foreign-joint enterprises broke down the immobility ofthe system. By the mid-1990s China’s internal migrants, or “floatingpopulation,” were on the move everywhere. Nonstate and foreign-jointenterprises attracted young women and adult males from poorer areas towork for low wages, which were nevertheless high relative to their earn-ings back home. As migrant workers sent a portion of their wages hometo their families, they helped lessen the inequalities between the areas.Yet the overall effect of the internal migration was to widen the rural-ur-ban gap still further as farming villages came to be populated primarilyby the elderly. The migrant workers, who often were paid late, or some-times not at all, and worked long hours, often in unsafe conditions, in-creasingly protested their treatment with demonstrations and walkouts.Back in the countryside, their overtaxed families expressed their angerby protesting, sometimes violently, at the offices of local officials and taxcollectors.

In addition, China’s migrants increased tensions in the urban com-munities into which they moved. Transient populations in large citiesusually resided with other transients from their own province, county, orvillage. Most led a marginal existence in makeshift housing. Urban resi-dents, resenting the increased pressure on already burdened urban facili-ties such as schools, health care services, and space in general, discrimi-nated against and isolated the encroaching migrants. In her study of

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transient communities, Dorothy Solinger shows that the transients werenot well integrated into the urban areas in which they worked.58 Theirrising expectations, as well as their sense of alienation, sometimes re-sulted in disruptive, criminal acts, threatening stability.

The growing disparities between those at the bottom and those at thetop of the economic ladder are seen in a survey of the financial assets perhousehold in Beijing, reported in the China Daily in 1997.59 The surveyrevealed that the average property value of the richest households was7.85 times that of the poorest. This percentage has continued to grow.Typical top income earners were managers in private and foreign-jointventures; families of the unemployed, retired, and transient were at thebottom. These disparities were strikingly visible in China’s large cities.While migrant workers lived in shacks alongside construction sites, thenewly rich flaunted their wealth with modern condominiums, designerclothes, luxury goods, fancy cars, and trips abroad. In the early twenty-first century it was estimated that 350 million Chinese had cellularphones, the largest number in the world, and a new generation of Chi-nese yuppies were well equipped with pagers and laptop computers. Ru-ral entrepreneurs built three-story houses in the suburban countryside.Rampant and blatant consumerism was engendering a transformation ofvalues from Maoist utopianism, egalitarianism, and collectivism to post-Mao materialism, self-enrichment, and competitiveness. The exposureto Western culture and living standards, as well as the disillusionmentand deprivation caused by the Cultural Revolution, contributed to thisgrowing sense of individual entitlement and rights.

Despite the efforts of Hu Jintao early in the twenty-first century tolessen the inequalities, and despite the continuing economic growth,potentially destabilizing social, economic, and environmental forces un-leashed by the economic reforms and rapid development provoked in-creasing public anger. This anger was expressed in accelerating demon-strations of workers, farmers, pensioners, and ordinary people againstwidespread corruption, official abuses of power, burdensome local taxes,demolition of housing for development of modern infrastructure, layoffsat failing state-owned enterprises, unpaid health care, pensions, andwages, environmental pollution of the air and water caused by unregu-lated industrialization, and confiscation of land without adequate com-pensation. The continuing repression of old and new religious believersand ethnic minorities seeking more autonomy, particularly among theMuslims in China’s northwest and Tibetan Buddhists also evoked morefrequent, confrontational demonstrations in the early years of the

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twenty-first century. A pervasive sense of insecurity about the future waswidespread, as both ordinary people and the leadership feared chaos(luan), that has haunted the Chinese people since time immemorial.

The reforms thus had a contradictory impact. On the one hand, theymade possible upward mobility and improved standards of living, buton the other hand, for those who could not keep up, they fueled a deepsense of dissatisfaction and envy known as “red-eye disease.” The accel-erating societal changes, with little unemployment insurance and the dis-appearance of the social welfare network formerly provided by the com-munes and state industries had a profound psychological impact. Thosewho suffered the most were women and the elderly in the countryside.Female suicide rates soared. Arthur Kleinman estimates that in 1997,China had the highest per capita rate of female suicide in the world.60

The official trade unions and the women’s federation, as well as the newcivil organizations, increasingly tried to address these problems. Theyprovided economic advice and legal education programs to make theirconstituents aware of ways to deal with their distress other than throughprotests or suicide. Such services, however, were still in their infancy. Themagnitude of the problems and the financial resources needed to dealwith them were so great that they could not possibly be handled by theofficial federations or the nonstate sector on their own. At the same time,the weakening party-state of the post-Mao era was less able to providehelp, let alone solutions, for these pressing concerns.

Cultural Pluralism

As the official Marxist-Leninist ideology became bankrupt in the after-math of the Cultural Revolution and increasingly irrelevant to people’slives, some, especially the youth, turned to nationalism, and othersturned to religion. Along with a revival of Buddhism and Daoism, tradi-tional folk religions, and a resurgence of Islam, Christianity rapidlygained new converts in the post-Mao era. Officially there were 200 mil-lion religious adherents, but many millions of others worshipped in un-derground or “house churches,” despite the government’s harsh repres-sion of any worship outside state auspices. Moreover, a national feverfor qigong (breathing and other exercises) and other forms of faith heal-ing also developed in the 1990s. One of these qigong groups, theFalungong, a Buddhist-Daoist meditation association, grew to a re-ported 2.1 million followers in the late 1990s until the governmentharshly suppressed it in the early twenty-first century.61

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In addition to the emergence of numerous religious beliefs, a varietyof ideological views were publicly expressed in the 1990s that further ac-centuated the growing diversity of Chinese society. Groups of intellectu-als inside and outside the official establishment espoused ideas that didnot conform to the party’s thinking. They used journals, books, publicforums, and petitions to argue for economic and political reforms. In the1980s the most vocal intellectuals were predominantly Marxist human-ists and political theorists associated with the intellectual networks of re-formist party leaders Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang; in the 1990s andinto the twenty-first century, the most vocal intellectuals were unaffili-ated with the party leadership. Because of China’s move to the market,many of them became independent or freelance intellectuals. Wide-rang-ing debates, without official direction or ideological constraints, eruptedspontaneously on a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from the rele-vance of the traditional beliefs of Confucianism, Daoism, and legalismto May 4 liberalism, Maoism, and postmodernism.

Even though the People’s Republic was never quite as monolithic asdepicted in the Maoist period, Chinese society in the post-Mao erabecame definably pluralistic in its values, religious beliefs, ideologicalorientation, and ways of living. In addition to these changes, China’s em-brace in the mid-1990s of the new communications technologies facili-tated greater access not only to the outside world and scientific and tech-nological advances, but also to independent discourse and organizationof political activities. By June 2005, China had 100 million Internet us-ers, outnumbering by far its 69.6 million Communist Party members,62

and the figure was predicted to expand to 120 million by the end of theyear.63 Among the Internet users were a small number of “cyber-dissi-dents,” mostly urban, educated youth of the post-1989 generation whoused computers and the Internet to criticize party policies and urge polit-ical reforms.

Well aware of the political implications of the introduction of thenew technologies, which by the early twenty-first century had spreadfrom urban centers along the coast to smaller cities in the interior,64 theparty intensified its efforts to control content it considered “inappropri-ate” with regulations, censorship, filters, blocked sites, and periodic clo-sure of Internet cafés. A study by Harvard Law School’s Berkman Centerfor the Internet and Society reported in December 2002 that major for-eign media outlets were often, though not always, rendered inaccessibleto Internet surfers in China.65 In June 2005 it was ordered that all Chi-nese Web sites and bloggers be registered with the authorities by the end

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of the month or face being closed down.66 Yet, despite these obstacles,some of China’s Internet users were able to get around the governmentblockages because of inconsistent enforcement and through the use ofproxy servers in Hong Kong, the United States, and Europe.

Consequently, the Internet provided access to alternate sources of in-formation and created a virtual public space that challenged governmentpropaganda and control of information. It became a new forum wherepolitically dissident views could be expressed and even at times mobi-lized for political action. An example of the Internet’s impact on politicalissues is revealed in the case of Sun Zhigang, a migrant graphic designerin Guangzhou who was detained and beaten by police on March 17,2003, for not carrying the proper identity papers. He died three dayslater while being held in police custody. His case was picked up by theoutspoken Guangdong newspaper Southern Metropolis News (Nanfangdushi bao), reprinted across the country, and then posted on China’slargest news portal, sina.com, and discussed throughout cyberspace. Theofficial media, including the prime television station CCTV, soon beganto focus on the treatment of migrants and police brutality. Although foryears advocates of legal reforms had called for the end of arbitrary de-tention, it was not until widespread outrage was generated on the Inter-net that the government was pressured to investigate Sun’s death. Threemonths later, in May 2003, the government abolished the system of tak-ing migrants into custody.67

The contradictory impact of the reforms on the economy, polity, andsociety had a similar impact on culture. As China became economicallyinterdependent with the rest of the world in the last two decades of thetwentieth century, it initially looked to the West for cultural and intellec-tual guidance. In the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution and in reac-tion to their persecution during the Mao era, China’s intellectuals and asmall number of reformist leaders in the 1980s turned to the Marxist hu-manist ideas that had been developing in Eastern Europe and thento Western democratic ideas to fill the void. But with the June 4 crack-down, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the disorder accompanyingRussia’s move to democracy, there was an intellectual shift away fromhumanism and liberalism. In the 1990s a small number of older ideo-logues tried to resuscitate Mao’s ideas. A larger contingent, among thema growing number of younger intellectuals, turned to the shared Confu-cian values and patriarchal structure that they claimed had made possi-ble the economic miracle of East Asia’s four little dragons—Taiwan,South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong. At the same time, to counter

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China’s growing intergration with the outside world and its increasinginternal regionalism and diversity, the post-Deng leaders and their intel-lectual spokespersons reemphasized ideological and political unity. Atthe century’s close, they too revived the spirit of nationalism that hadalso been used to buttress national unity in the early decades of thecentury.

Even before the inflow of foreign ideas waned, the more conservativeelders and remaining Maoists in the mid-1980s put pressure on Deng tostem the swelling Western current. They warned that Western “spiritualpollution,” along with the relaxation of internal controls, would leadnot just to ideological pluralism but to political pluralism and to an ero-sion of the party’s monopoly over power and ideology. Although Dengin the 1980s, followed by Jiang Zemin in the 1990s, launched a series ofcampaigns against spiritual pollution in 1983–84, bourgeois liberaliza-tion in early 1987, and “all-out Westernization” and peaceful evolutionin the early 1990s, these efforts did not silence the expression of dissent-ing views because they were not backed up with the threat of violence,mass mobilization, and ideological zeal that had characterized the Maoyears. Furthermore, China’s growing economic and technological inter-national interdependence made it nearly impossible to keep out influ-ences from the West.

As the overwhelming ideological homogeneity of the Mao era gaveway to cultural and intellectual pluralism, China’s large cities attractedartists, intellectuals, writers, entertainers, foreign visitors, students, andpolitical dissidents. The public and political discourse in the 1980s andthe private and popular discourse among an array of diverse groups inthe 1990s ranged widely over a variety of subjects. Even though publicpolitical debate was suppressed in the aftermath of the June 4 crack-down, the continuing retreat of the state from the cultural realm in termsof financial support and growing tolerance of foreign influences sparkedan explosion of artistic experimentation and popular culture in a varietyof mediums.68 So long as the content and style stayed away from politics,the party-state tolerated and at times even encouraged apolitical cultureas a diversion from political engagement.

The ideological and political discourse in the post-Mao era until June4 was relatively free, except during the brief campaigns. In reaction tothe Mao era, the dominant themes of the reform leaders and most of theintellectuals in the 1980s were a repudiation of Mao’s radicalism andutopianism and interest in Marxist humanism and democratic liberal-ism. Even though a number of the more conservative elders relentlessly

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attacked these ideas, they were unable to drown out the prevailing lib-eral tone of the 1980s. A new school of thought emerged in the late1980s, called “neo-authoritarianism,” formulated by a younger groupof intellectuals who were associated with Zhao Ziyang. Attracted to theauthoritarian political model of their ethnic and post-Confucian EastAsian neighbors, the neo-authoritarians called for several decades ofeconomic reform under a strong centralized leader until a large educatedmiddle class could develop to move the country in the direction of de-mocratization. They engaged in spirited debates with the more liberal-leaning older intellectuals. For the first time in the People’s Republic,both sides of a political debate were given relatively equal treatment inprominent intellectual forums, newspapers, and journals. In the after-math of June 4, however, as a number of Maoist ideologues, led by theconservative elder Deng Liqun, returned to power, both the liberal andneo-authoritarian schools were purged or silenced because of their sup-port for Hu Yaobang and/or Zhao Ziyang.

In the early 1990s there was an attempt to revitalize Mao worship,foment class struggle, and re-indoctrinate the population in Marxism-Leninism. “Mao fever” (Mao re) spread to China’s major cities with thereappearance of Mao’s “little red book” and with Mao medallions ubiq-uitously hanging from taxicab rearview mirrors. Although the fever wasrampantly exploited for self-serving commercial ends, it was also fueledby nostalgia for the supposed order and honest officials of the Mao yearsin contrast to the disorder and corruption of the post-Mao era.69 Deng’ssouthern trip to the Shenzhen Special Economic Zones in early 1992provided him with an opportunity not only to revive the economic re-forms but also to attack the “left” as a greater danger than the right.Subsequently, the Mao fever gradually subsided, and beginning in themid-1990s, a more open political atmosphere emboldened some of thepolitically engaged intellectuals of the 1980s once again to call publiclyfor political reform and the release of political prisoners. This politicalspring, however, was short-lived. By late 1998, public political dissentwas once again suppressed.

Despite Deng Xiaoping’s attack on the left, neo-Maoists—in a seriesof public statements and in several theoretical journals under their con-trol—persisted in spreading their Maoist ideological approach, insistingespecially on the continuation of the state-controlled economy. This ap-proach found strong support within the bureaucracy, particularly in theplanning ministries. In contrast to Deng’s nonideological approach, theneo-Maoists continued to stress the struggle between capitalism and so-

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cialism. They warned that the decline of state industries would impover-ish the workers, leading to the victory of capitalism over socialism. Butregardless of the efforts of the neo-Maoists, Jiang Zemin merely paid lipservice to reviving ideology. He stressed building “socialists spiritual civ-ilization,” but this concept had little to do with socialism. Its major em-phasis was on China’s revival as a great civilization.

As the post-Deng leadership’s reform of state industries in the late1990s caused the unemployment of workers in SOEs, a new generationof intellectuals, called the “new left,” trained primarily in the UnitedStates and Europe, denounced China’s participation in a global economycalled for a revival of the collectivist landholding of the Great Leap For-ward and the direct democracy of the Cultural Revolution. At the sametime, the liberal intellectuals called for a system of checks and balancesas means of controlling the rampant corruption and rent-seeking thathad accompanied the economic reforms. Although these various ideo-logical groups contended with one another, most of their ideas also chal-lenged those of the party-state. The Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao leader-ships basically did not interfere with the new left, but they closed downthe neo-Maoist journals and off and on throughout the late 1990s andearly twenty-first century detained or placed under surveillance liberalintellectuals who called for political reforms.

In contrast, the Jiang Zemin leadership was more tolerant of the re-vival of Confucianism. Although those espousing Confucianism camefrom academia rather than from the party and did not refer to Marxism-Leninism in their writings, the leadership found their views more in tunewith their own goals. The Confucianists asserted that modernization didnot mean Westernization. The seeds of modernization, they argued,could be found in Chinese history and Confucian precepts, with theiremphasis on education, moral values, and community. Thus, instead ofseeing China’s deeply embedded traditional culture as an obstacle toits modernization, as preached by the May Fourth intellectuals, theMaoist ideologues, and party reformers and intellectuals in the 1980s,the Confucianists insisted that Confucianism was conducive to modern-ization. Citing the dynamic economies of the Confucian-shaped societiesof their East Asian neighbors, they asserted that a revived Confucianismcould provide the intellectual and cultural underpinnings for China’srapid economic development while helping China avoid the immoralityand individualism of Western capitalism. Although the emphasis onAsian values waned in the late 1990s, particularly after the 1997 Asianfinancial crisis, the revival of Confucianism continued into the twenty-

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first century among small groups of intellectuals. The government evenset up Confucian study centers abroad. The leaders agreed that Confu-cianism was relevant to the present, but they stressed the Confucian au-thoritarian values rather than the Confucian obligation of intellectualsto criticize officials who abuse their power or engage in unfair treatmentof the population.

Another group of intellectuals advocated a neo-conservative ap-proach in the 1990s. Like the Confucian revival, their views developedin reaction to the pro-Western, anti-traditional discourse of the 1980s,when disillusionment with Maoism initially instilled an unquestioningidealism about Western societies and political life. But as intellectualslearned more about the West and came in closer contact with its realities,their idealism waned. In the 1990s a younger generation of intellectualswho had come of age in the post-Mao era, some of whom were close tothe “princeling” children of the party elders, moved to another extreme.Like the neo-authoritarians of the late 1980s, they did not refer to Marx-ism-Leninism, but neither did they endorse a full-scale move to the mar-ket or the development of a middle class that eventually would leadChina toward democracy. Rather, like the neo-Maoists, they decried thepolitical decentralization that had accompanied China’s move to themarket, and called for tighter central controls over the economic regionsand cultural life. In addition, they urged that internal migrants be re-turned to their home villages.

Whereas the neo-Maoists called for a reassertion of the state-owned,centralized economy in ideological terms, the neo-conservatives calledfor its return in practical terms: that is, a strong central state was neces-sary to ensure political control and collection of tax revenues. Without arestrengthening of the party-state, they argued, the party would be un-able to handle the social instabilities triggered by the economic reforms.Unless the erosion of the party-state were stopped, they warned, the tra-ditional Chinese nightmare of chaos (luan) would ensue. The ideas in thepopular book Looking at China through a Third Eye (Disanzhi yanjingkan Zhongguo), published in 1994, was representative of this neo-con-servative view. The book implicitly criticized Deng’s reforms for weaken-ing central control.

With the exception of the liberals, these schools of thought—neo-Maoist, Confucian, new left, and neo-conservative—also increasinglyexpressed the nationalist sentiments generally embraced by younger in-tellectuals and urban youth. China’s economic achievements had awak-ened a sense of national pride among the younger generation. In 1993

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they spontaneously protested against the rejection of China’s bid to hostthe International Olympics in the year 2000, which they blamed on theUnited States. They echoed their leaders’ charge that the United Stateswas attempting to contain China’s rising power. Their indignation wasarticulated in the book China Can Say No (Zhongguo keyi shuo bu) andother books on similar themes that were best-sellers in the mid-1990s.These nationalist sentiments became increasingly vociferous in the earlyyears of the twenty-first century, particularly directed against Japan fornot acknowledging the atrocities it committed against China during theSecond World War.

Nevertheless, like other developments in post-Mao China, national-ist discourse was diverse and contradictory. Initially its stridency waschallenged in articles in the still relatively liberal journal Reading(Dushu) and in The Orient (Dongfang) until the former came under newleft editors in the second half of the 1990s and the later was forced tocease publication in mid-1996. In the late 1990s and again in 2005, theleadership tried to rein in the nationalist fervor lest it turn into xenopho-bia, which could spin out of control. It tried to ban books with national-istic themes for fear that they would irreparably damage foreign rela-tions, in particular, with Japan and the United States. In addition, it triedto stop protesters from demanding reparations from Japan or damagingJapanese enterprises in China so as not to frighten off Japanese investors.

Yet, while the leadership pushed the Chinese people in one direction,the youth and intellectuals pushed them in other directions, the new eco-nomic realities pulled the Chinese people in a completely different direc-tion. Both the leaders and intellectuals condemned the rampant corrup-tion and commercial crassness that had accompanied China’s move tothe market. Although they had different reasons—the leadership’s con-cern was the potential for challenges to its authority because of itsinability to control the corruption, whereas the intellectuals’ concernstemmed from their traditional disdain for “selfish,” materialistic behav-ior and their own increasing impoverishment—both groups beratedtheir countrymen for caring only about making money.

In response, some of the newly rich entrepreneurs tried to redefine“private interests” as part of, rather than in opposition to, the publicgood.70 Moreover, ordinary Chinese increasingly defined the public goodless in terms of public-spiritedness and more in terms of material well-being and consumerism. Unable to act as citizens, they became absorbedin the pursuit of consumer goods. This pursuit further undermined theparty’s efforts to impose its ideological views, whatever their content, on

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the populace. It also undermined the intellectuals’ desire to regain theirstatus as value-setters for society. As China’s economic reforms shiftedthe balance of economic power from the state to the nonstate sector, or-dinary Chinese also contributed to shifting the balance from officials andintellectuals to consumers and audiences as the shapers of China’s cul-tural life.

At the same time, despite the attempts to revitalize ideology, and therising nationalism, the inflow of ideas, values, and culture from the West,Taiwan, and Hong Kong could not be stopped. In fact, when Hong Kongwas returned to China in 1997 after Great Britain’s ninety-nine-yearlease expired, under a formula that Deng Xiaoping coined “one country,two systems,” Hong Kong’s relatively free press had an even more directimpact on China’s population. Because of China’s persistent and acceler-ating move to the market, regional decentralization, social diversifica-tion, and pluralistic culture, efforts to reassert centralized state controlseemed no longer possible, short of another revolution. Equally impor-tant, unlike during the Mao period, when China was indifferent to whatthe rest of the world thought of its actions, China’s post-Mao leadershipsought political and cultural acceptance as well as economic acceptanceby the world community. Because foreigners, including foreign journal-ists, were engaged in a variety of activities in China and were able to ob-serve events there firsthand, the regime’s ability to act ruthlessly to sup-press anyone attracted to Western culture was restrained.

Foreign pressure, however, did not restrain China’s harsh treatmentof political dissidents. Despite the outcry from the outside world, De-mocracy Wall activist Wei Jingsheng, who had been released from prisonin 1993 six months before the conclusion of his fifteen-year sentence aspart of China’s bid to host the 2000 Olympics, was arrested again in1994 when he continued to voice dissent publicly. He was sentenced in1995 to another fourteen years in prison, but was released and exiled tothe United States shortly after Jiang Zemin’s official visit there in Octo-ber 1997. In addition, other released political activists, such as WangDan, co-leader of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations, and Wang Jun-tao, a founder of a 1980s nongovernmental political think tank, both ofwhom continued to call for democratic reforms, were exiled to theUnited States owing in part to the international outcry.

The lively market economy, inflow of foreign ideas, cultural plural-ism, intellectual vitality, and social diversity of late twentieth-centuryChina in some ways seemed a replay of the early decades of the century.In both periods, opening to the outside world, new commercial opportu-

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nities, growing regionalism, a burgeoning middle class, local elite activ-ism, the lack of an overarching ideology, and the weakening of centralcontrol allowed more room for intellectual exploration and individualcreativity. In this respect, the Mao era could be regarded as an interreg-num between two lively cultural scenes in the twentieth century. Thoughnot yet as brilliant or as original as the urban creativity of the MayFourth period, the innovative literary and artistic works, vibrant popu-lar culture, and intellectual receptivity of the 1980s and 1990s had notbeen seen since early in the century. Yet, like their May Fourth predeces-sors, intellectuals in the last two decades of the century discovered thatideological and cultural pluralism, though possibly a precondition, didnot necessarily lead to democracy.

After June 4, intellectuals who stayed out of “forbidden areas” of po-litical discourse and politics continued to enjoy relative freedom in theirpersonal, professional, and intellectual lives. Apolitical cultural and in-tellectual pluralism flourished. While discussion of political issues in theofficial as well as nonofficial media was constrained, by the late 1990sindividuals could privately debate political issues, and journalists hadexpanding space in which to cover cultural activities, intellectual ques-tions, and international news, especially economic information, at timesindirectly touching on political issues. At the same time, the scores of pri-vate publishers and thousands of private booksellers that appeared inthe 1990s provided further channels for disseminating a variety of views.It thus was no longer possible for the party to sustain even its relativelyloose controls over intellectual and cultural life of the 1980s. At the endof the twentieth century, China’s population enjoyed more personal, ar-tistic, academic, cultural, professional, economic, and individual free-dom than at any time during the Mao period.71 But those who venturedinto the political realm, particularly in organizing political groups andactions, continued to be suppressed. When in 1998 veterans of the De-mocracy Wall movement and the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations at-tempted to establish an opposition political party, the China DemocracyParty, they were harshly repressed and their leaders sentenced to longprison terms.

Whereas many of the cultural phenomena in the post-Mao era re-sembled those during the early decades of the twentieth century, by thebeginning of the twenty-first century, China appeared to be moving in adifferent direction owing to a completely different political and techno-logical context. The May Fourth Movement, in reaction to the chaosstemming from the warlord conflicts, Western imperialism, and China’snational weakness, sought to build a more powerful state; the post-Mao

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era, in reaction to Mao’s centralization of state power and politicizationof all areas of life, sought to reduce the state’s power and its reach. Incontrast to the May Fourth intellectuals’ efforts to create an atmosphereconducive to establishing a strong state, the post-Mao intellectuals andreformers sought to loosen the state’s domination over society and theindividual, despite the desire of some “neo-ideologists” to resuscitate thestrong central state.

An even more significant difference from the May Fourth era wasthat in the post-Mao period, access to the outside world was not re-stricted to elites in Shanghai, Beijing, and other large cities along thecoast and riverways. At the dawn of the new century, worldwide infor-mation and popular culture were spreading throughout the entire coun-try. Movies, television, radio, and the new communications technologiesof cell phones and Internet introduced in the mid-1990s reached virtu-ally every Chinese village. Popular culture, though an alternative to theofficial party culture, was tolerated not only because its escapism re-flected the party’s desire for an apolitical public, but also because it ex-pressed the overwhelming desire of the population after June 4 to stayclear of politics. Nevertheless, the spread of international popular cul-ture into virtually the farthermost reaches of China indirectly subvertedthe party because it promoted values that were alien both to mainstreamtraditional Chinese culture and to the Marxist-Leninist emphasis onobedience and conformity. At the same time, the party was unable to cre-ate a new version of the official ideology that could adopt and incorpo-rate the multiple changes that had taken place in China’s society, econ-omy, culture, and values.

The change in the role of the intellectuals, like everything else in thepost-Mao era, was contradictory. On the one hand, intellectuals playedan important role not because of a strong institutional base or enhancedprestige, but because of the state’s weakened authority. Although theywere unable to assume their traditional role of political leadership, in the1980s they helped create an ideological and cultural climate in whichstudents turned to political activism—as evidenced by the spring 1989demonstrations—which, among other things, called for political re-forms. On the other hand, the increasing pluralism and spreading popu-lar culture, particularly in the 1990s, undermined the intellectuals’ posi-tion as cultural and moral standard-bearers of Chinese society. They nolonger played the symbolic role they had held even in the Mao period assupposed leaders of the nation. It was for that very reason that Mao hadpersecuted them so severely and incessantly.

Although the politically engaged intellectuals were suppressed, as the

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economy grew more complex and the nonstate sector expanded, a grow-ing number of intellectuals became less economically dependent on thestate for their livelihood and status. By the end of the century, the posi-tion of the intellectuals was changing from a traditionally dependent andclose relationship with the state to one of increasing autonomy. Someturned to business, others worked as consultants, and still others turnedto popular culture. Regardless of their political views, they became moreand more independent intellectually, if not politically. At century’s endthe singular role of intellectuals in Chinese society was thus undergoinga profound change. As one among a growing number of political, eco-nomic, and cultural actors, they helped produce a more pluralistic soci-ety, but also a society in which their historic and symbolic leadership rolewas less prominent and perhaps even marginalized. Although during theleaderships of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao intellectuals per se no longerplayed a pivotal role in the Chinese polity, technocrats, who had beeneducated in the Soviet Union during the 1950s, came to the fore not onlyin the party, but also in the bureaucracy and institutes that helped shapepublic policy. Also, younger and more Western-oriented returnees fromstudy abroad were filling the ranks of the technocracy in the earlytwenty-first century.

Nevertheless, in the aftermath of June 4, new groups of intellectualswho had been rejected by the establishment because of their past politi-cal activities sought to work outside the party-state system to bringabout political reform. At times they were joined by workers and smallentrepreneurs, marking the unprecedented joining together of differentclasses to bring about political change in post-1949 China. The 1989Tiananmen demonstrations and the effort to establish the China Democ-racy Party were joint class endeavors. Nevertheless, these unprecedentedattempts to bring about political change at the grass-roots level withoutthe party’s permission were harshly suppressed.

By the turn of the century, although the party-state system remainedin place and its corporatist structure still dominated society, becauseof the move to the market, the opening to the outside world, and partic-ularly the new communications technologies, the Communist party-state’s command over its many constituencies had been weakened. WhenChina’s post-Mao leaders launched the economic reforms and the open-ing to the outside world, they certainly could not have realized that thereforms would give rise to an increasingly independent, pluralist societythat they could not fully control. The energy and fluidity generated bythe reforms produced extraordinary economic growth, but the reforms

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also produced a dynamically pluralistic society. The ability of the waningparty-state to accommodate China’s growing diversity of social interestsmay well determine whether China undergoes constructive institutionalchange, stalemate, or chaos in the years ahead.

Thus, the changes in the post-Mao era were just as revolutionary asthose of the Mao era. While built on some of the social changes of theMao era, such as the dramatic increase in literacy, life expectancy closeto that in developed countries, and improvement in the position ofwomen, Deng’s reforms were carried out with more moderation and re-sponsiveness to the needs of the population. They were also accom-plished with relatively little disruption to everyday life and without thechaos and famines that punctuated the first eighty years of the twentiethcentury in China. With the exception of the military crackdown on thestudent demonstrators in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, the lasttwo decades of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century were the longest stretch of domestic and foreign tranquillityin China’s modern history.

Notes

1. China 2020: Development Challenges in the New Century (Washington,D.C.: World Bank, 1997), p. xiii).

2. PPP is a theoretical exchange rate derived from the parity of purchasingpower of one currency in relation to another currency. World DevelopmentReport (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2000).

3. China: Overcoming Rural Poverty (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2001),p. 1; “Chinese Leaders Stress Poverty Reduction,” Xinhua, May 28, 2005.

4. These numbers, from recent scholarship, vary somewhat from those givenearlier by Fairbank. Estimates for the number of deaths of landlords comefrom Frederick C. Teiwes, “The Establishment and Consolidation of theNew Regime, 1949–1957,” in Roderick MacFarquhar, ed., The Politics ofChina: The Eras of Mao and Deng, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1997), p. 36; deaths during the Great Leap Forward from ChenYizi, former advisor to Zhao Ziyang; estimates of Cultural Revolutiondeaths in Roderick MacFarquhar, “The Chinese State in Crisis,” in Mac-Farquhar, The Politics of China, p. 244; for the numbers of those persecutedin the Cultural Revolution, see Hu Yaobang, interview with Yugoslav jour-nalists, Tanjug, June 21, 1980, translated in FBIS Daily Report: China, June23, 1980, p. L1.

5. Asia Watch, Punishment Season: Human Rights in China after Martial Law(New York, March 1990), p. 3.

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6. China Statistical Yearbook, 1990 (Beijing: State Statistical Bureau, 1990),pp. 81, 318.

7. Deng Xiaoping, “We Shall Speed Up Reform” (June 12, 1987), in SelectedWorks of Deng Xiaoping (1982–1992) (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press,1994), p. 236.

8. China Statistical Yearbook, 2004 (Beijing: State Statistical Bureau, 2004),p. 513.

9. Barry Naughton, “China’s Transition in Economic Perspective,” in MerleGoldman and Roderick MacFarquhar, eds., The Paradox of China’s Post-Mao Reforms (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 34.

10. “Private Firms Outperform State Enterprises Says Official,” South ChinaMorning Post, December 18, 2004, p. 6.

11. Their number was growing at 13 million per year. Xinhua Domestic Service,October 6, 2002. See also David W. Chen, “China Readies Super ID Card, aWorry to Some,” New York Times, August 19, 2003, p. 3.

12. As of April 2003 all children born to rural families in Beijing were eligiblefor urban household registration. Other areas were also loosening controlsover the household registration system. In Shenzhen, persons without per-manent residency could register with relatives who lived in the city. Xinhua,April 1, 2003.

13. Naughton, “China’s Transition in Economic Perspective,” pp. 35–36.14. James Harding, “China’s Future Dragons,” Financial Times, August 14,

1997, p. 17.15. China Country Profile, 2004 (London: Economist Intelligence Unit, 2004),

p. 47.16. Harding, “China’s Future Dragons,” p. 17.17. According to Sheng Huaren, head of the State Economic and Trade Com-

mission, China Economic Review (Financial Times Information), March12, 2001.

18. China Country Profile, 2004, p. 58.19. Indira A. R. Lakshmanan, “Coping with Broken Promises,” Boston Globe,

November 2, 2002, p. A1.20. Merle Goldman, From Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights

in Modern China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005),chap. 8; “Paying the Price: Worker Unrest in Northeast China,” HumanRights Watch 14, no. 6 (August 2002): 2.

21. Edward Cody, “China Growing More Wary Amid Rash of Protests,” Wash-ington Post, August 10, 2005, p. A11.

22. “China’s Lost Savings,” Asian Wall Street Journal, March 21–27, 1997,p. 10.

23. Vivienne Shue, The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).

24. Naughton, “China’s Transition in Economic Perspective,” p. 38.

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25. Ibid., p. 36; China Country Profile, 2004, p. 60.26. Jim Yardley, “Fearing Future China Starts to Give Girls Their Due,” New

York Times, January 31, 2005, p. 3.27. Naughton, “China’s Transition in Economic Perspective,” p. 40.28. China 2020, p. 6.29. Wei Jingsheng, “The Fifth Modernization,” in James Seymour, ed., The

Fifth Modernization: China’s Human Rights Movement, 1978–1989 (Stan-fordville, N.Y.: Human Rights Publishing Group, 1980), pp. 47–69.

30. Deng Xiaoping, “On the Reform of the System of Party and State Leader-ship” (August 18, 1980); in Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping (1975–1982)(Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1984), p. 316.

31. Murray Scot Tanner, The Politics of Lawmaking in Post-Mao China: Insti-tutions, Processes, and Democratic Prospects (New York: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1999).

32. Murray Scot Tanner, “The National People’s Congress,” in Goldman andMacFarquhar, The Paradox of China’s Post-Mao Reforms, pp. 114–115.

33. Pei Minxin, “Racing against Time,” in William A. Joseph, ed., ChinaBriefing: The Contradictions of Change (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe,1997), p. 39.

34. Elisabeth Rosenthal, “China Leader Steps Down, But Not Out of the Pic-ture,” New York Times, March 16, 2003, p. 8.

35. The one exception is the reversal of a 1989 law on urban neighborhoodcommittees. NPC assertiveness accompanied passage of the EnterpriseBankruptcy Law (1986), the Central Bank Law (1995), and the EducationLaw (1995). See Pei Minxin, “Racing against Time,” p. 38.

36. Merle Goldman, Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China: Political Reformin the Deng Xiaoping Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1994), p. 79.

37. Kevin J. O’Brien, “Implementing Political Reform in China’s Villages,” Aus-tralian Journal of Chinese Affairs, no. 32 (July 1994): 33–59.

38. Li Lianjing, presentation at the Conference on Elections on Both Sides of theStraits, Fairbank Center, Harvard University, May 8, 1997; Xinhua, March17, 2003, in FBIS-CHI-2003–0317.

39. Li Fan, “Come by the Wind: My Story in Buyun Election,” unpublished ms.,2003.

40. Roger R. Thompson, China’s Local Councils in the Age of ConstitutionalReform, 1898–1911 (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies,Harvard University, 1995).

41. Tony Saich, “Negotiating the State: The Development of Social Organiza-tions in China,” China Quarterly, no. 161 (March 2000): 124–141.

42. Huang Yasheng, Inflation and Investment Controls in China: The PoliticalEconomy of Central-Local Relations during the Reform Era (New York:Cambridge University Press, 1996).

The Post-Mao Reform Era 453

43. Elisabeth Rosenthal, “Day in Court, and Justice, Sometimes, for the Chi-nese,” New York Times, April 27, 1998, p. A1.

44. Roderick MacFarquhar, “Demolition Man,” New York Review of Books,March 27, 1997, p. 17.

45. Joseph Fewsmith, “Reaction, Resurgence, and Succession: Chinese Politicssince Tiananmen,” in MacFarquhar, The Politics of China, p. 525.

46. Saich, “Negotiating the State,” p. 126.47. Mary Backus Rankin, “Some Observations on a Chinese Public Sphere,”

Modern China 19, no. 2 (April 1993): 158–182.48. David Strand’s study of city politics in Beijing describes the expansion of

the public sphere in the 1920s to teahouses, restaurants, and parks, whichbecame places for political discussion. See his Rickshaw Beijing: City Peo-ple and Politics in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press,1989).

49. Jonathan Unger and Anita Chan, “Corporatism in China: A DevelopmentalState in an East Asian Context,” in Barrett L. McCormick and JonathanUnger, eds., China after Socialism (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996),pp. 95–129.

50. Gordon White, Jude Howell, and Shang Xiaoyuan, In Search of Civil Soci-ety (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

51. Christopher Nevitt, “Private Business Associations in China: Evidenceof Civil Society or Local State Power,” China Journal, no. 36 (July 1996):25–43.

52. Kristen Parris, “The Rise of Private Business Interests,” in Goldman andMacFarquhar, The Paradox of China’s Post-Mao Reforms, pp. 275–282.

53. David Strand, “Conclusion: Historical Perspectives,” in Deborah S. Davis etal., eds., Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Auton-omy and Community in Post-Mao China (New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1995), pp. 394–426.

54. White, Howell, and Shang, In Search of Civil Society, p. 213.55. Indira A. Lakshman, “China’s Reforms Turn Costly,” Boston Globe, July

22, 2002, p. A9; Shehui lanpi shu 2002 nian. Zhongguo shehui xingshi:Fenxi yu yuce [Blue Book of Chinese Society, 2002: Analysis and Forecast ofChinese Society] (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2002).

56. Elisabeth Croll, Changing Identities of Chinese Women (London: ZedBooks, 1995), p. 135.

57. China Statistical Yearbook, 2000 (Beijing: China Statistics Press, 2000),p. 103.

58. Dorothy J. Solinger, “China’s Floating Population: Implications for Stateand Society,” in Goldman and MacFarquhar, The Paradox of China’s Post-Mao Reforms, p. 238.

59. Xing Zhigang, “Disparity in Assets Widening,” China Daily, January 8,1997, p. 3.

454 the people’s republic of china

60. Arthur Kleinman and Alex Cohen, “Psychiatry’s Global Challenge,” Scien-tific American (March 1997): 86–89.

61. Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, International ReligiousFreedom Report, 2004 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, 2004),www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2004/35396.htm.

62. Xinhua, January 20, 2005; Xinhuanet, May 23, 2005, based on statistics ofthe Organization Department of the Chinese Communist Party; Xinhua,June 29, 2005.

63. Shi Ting, “Search on for 4,000 Web Police for Beijing,” South China Morn-ing Post, June 17, 2005, p. 9.

64. Guo Liang, Surveying Internet Usage and Impact in Twelve Chinese Cities(Beijing: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 2003).

65. Sam Allis, “Net Sites Blocked by China Go from Expected to Bizarre,”Boston Globe, December 5, 2002, p. D2.

66. Robert Marquand, “China Cracks Down on Web and Expats,” ChristianScience Monitor, June 10, 2005, p. 1.

67. Xiao Qiang, “The Great Leap Online That Is Stirring China,” InternationalHerald Tribune, August 6, 2004, p. 7.

68. Geremie R. Barmé, “CPC and Adcult PRC,” paper presented at the Confer-ence on the Non-economic Impact of China’s Economic Reforms, FairbankCenter, Harvard University, September 1996; Jianying Zha, “China’s PopCulture in the 1990s,” in Joseph, China Briefing, pp. 109–150.

69. Geremie Barmé, Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader(Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), pp. 3–73.

70. Parris, “The Rise of Private Business Interests,” pp. 271–272.71. Tony Saich, “Most Chinese Enjoy More Personal Freedom Than Ever Be-

fore,” International Herald Tribune, February 1–2, 1997, p. 6.

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