China

The Significance of Chinese History

The world is in the midst of an historic change of immense proportions. It is being transformed as the so-called developing world, now led by China, catches up with and overtakes the developed West.

If the world was dominated by Europe since the Age of Discovery which really got going in the 16^th century, and the twentieth century has been dominated by America, the future is going to be dominated by China, (and India will most likely not be far behind too) and notions of how things should be done will no longer be dominated by Western thinking. History has shown us that economic dominance tends to beget cultural and military dominance. Now the power and influence of the West is not going to evaporate, and the future is not pre-ordained but Martin Jacques (and I’ll be referring a lot to Jacques), in his book ‘When China Rules The World’, looks ahead to a period of ‘contested modernity’ in which the West’s model for society and government is not the only successful model out there, and this will be an entirely new ball game.

Indeed, I think we are already in the midst of it – I have the second edition of Jacques’ book which was published in 2012). History seems to move faster and faster.

Look at the facts:

The developing world constitutes the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. China alone comprises almost one-fifth of it. To underline this, China is divided into twenty-three provinces plus five autonomous regions. Of these the four largest have a population larger than any European country, including Germany, a further six have more or less the same population as Britain (or France, or Italy), and if the populations of the three largest provinces are combined, they would almost equal that of America.

By 2010 the developing world was already responsible for almost 50 per cent of the world’s manufacturing output. And today, seven of China’s provinces each have a greater GDP than the Russian Federation. An indicator of who is going to be the senior partner in that relationship. Also, by 2010 the developing world’s share of total foreign currency reserves stood at 66 per cent.

In the developing world, China is clearly the key player. Trade between Africa and China, driven by China’s insatiable need for commodities, increased tenfold in the first decade of the 21^st century. Chinese companies have been encouraged to invest in Africa and Chinese state aid to African countries has risen dramatically. China is now South Africa’s largest trading partner, its biggest export market, and this is the most developed economy on the African continent. And compared with Europe’s historic relations with Africa, China’s influence has been solely positive. In Brasil, a potentially massive player in the future, exports to China, again driven by China’s need for commodities, rose eighteen-fold in the same decade, and today accounts for more than 30% of its total exports (almost 3 times more than America) and more than 20% of its imports; and Chinese companies’ investment in Brasil tripled in 2021 when China was already comfortably the biggest investor in Brasil.  More of all this shortly.

In China’s own backyard, the most important economic region in the world today, it is an increasingly significant factor in trade between the countries: between 1980 and 2002, China’s share of East Asian exports increased from 6% to 25%, China’s share of regional imports increased in the same period from 8% to 21%. Even Japan now exports more goods to China, 25% of its total, than it does to America. And all this has only accelerated in the new century. China is also investing in East Asian economies, notably the extractive industries and infrastructure projects, at an increasing rate. So much so that today, China is pivotal to the economic well-being of the region. This is already having a political effect, and though there are significant causes of tension, notably Taiwan and the disputes concerning sovereignty over the Spratly and Paracel Islands and the South China Sea generally, on the whole China is seen as a good neighbour, and as American influence in the region is weakening, China’s is increasing.

Two world wars and its withdrawal from empire, part willing, part enforced, has left Europe in a much weaker position. Even with the growth and development of the European Union, Europe is no longer a significant world player in East Asia and where Europe once so dominated. Europe may not yet know it, and certainly won’t admit to it, but it needs China much more than China needs it (China’s greatest need being commodities). Take Germany, Europe’s powerhouse, as an example. America is still Germany’s most important single export market (though China is not far behind). This is underlined by the fact that Volkswagen sells more cars in China than it does in Germany. But what’s more, it imports twice as much from China than it does from America. Whereas the sovereign debt crisis faced by Spain, Portugal and Greece, almost leading to the collapse of the Euro, has led to China purchasing their debts in the form of state bonds: 7.5 billion in the case of Spain, 5 billion in the case of Portugal, whereas in Greece, China bought bonds in return for a thirty-five year lease on Piraeus harbour plus a deal to finance the purchase of Chinese-built ships. Europe is in hoc to China.

But if Europe is in hoc to China, so too is America. The credit crunch in America which started in the summer of 2007 led to the meltdown of America’s financial system: Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns declared bankruptcy, and Goldman Sachs was in deep trouble too, all three bulwarks of the American financial system. The system only survived as a result of a state bail-out on the part of the American government, a renouncement of its Reaganite principles of laissez-faire, but also as a result of China, again buying foreign debt. America’s national debt, at $9 trillion is by any measurement, huge. At the same time, Chinese financial institutions now own significant stakes in Standard Bank, Morgan Stanley and Blackstone. Whereas America has net debts of trillions of dollars, China has total net foreign assets of trillions of dollars. The fact that America is today so massively in debt, and China is such a huge creditor across the globe, and significantly so in America, represents a profound change in the balance of economic power in the world today.

All of this comes together in what is by far the world’s most ambitious economic project: China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a modern Silk Road Economic Belt and a Maritime Silk Road. It was launched by President Xi Jinping in 2013 and it is huge, linking China with central Asia, the Middle East and Europe, and much more besides with branches in the Pacific region, Africa and in South and Central America. The aim is to have the project completed by mid-century.

China is helping to build a vast network of road and rail links as well as energy pipelines, the development of power grids, developing a 5G network provided by China’s telecommunications giant, Huawei; developing hundreds of special economic zones in the process as well as streamlining border crossings. There is a sea version too with China investing in developing ports around the Indian Ocean, for example Hambantota in Sri Lanka, in Southeast Asia and East Africa, and even in Europe too where Italy is a partner.

The scale is staggering: to date 147 countries accounting for 40% of global GDP, are either already involved in the project or else have expressed an interest in getting involved. And those countries not signed up to it are going to be affected one way or another too.

Now, I said I would come back to Africa and Brasil. In Africa, China is now the largest exporter to the continent, accounting for 17.5 percent of Africa’s imports. By mid-2017, more than 10,000 Chinese-owned companies were operating in Africa. China’s two main overseas development banks invested $23 billion in infrastructure projects in Africa between 2007 and 2020 – $8 billion more than the other top eight lenders combined (including the World Bank, African Development Bank and the United States International Development Finance Corporation as well as European development banks). Examples of Chinese-led projects would include the highspeed railway in Kenya between Nairobi and Mombasa or the major gas pipeline and railways in Nigeria.

As for Central and South America, whereas in 2000, the Chinese market accounted for less than 2% of Latin America’s exports, over the next eight years, trade grew at an average annual rate of 31%, reaching a value of $450 billion in 2021. China is now South America’s biggest trading partner. Twenty Latin American countries have so far signed on to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Brasil’s President Lula has recently spent 5 days in a visit to China; he spent 2 days in America. And former President Dilma has just taken over as head of the New Development Bank in Shanghai, the BRICS bank (the supposed economies of tomorrow: Brasil, Russia, India, China + South Africa).

There are a number of reasons behind China’s initiative. It will be an outlet for Chinese investment: the roads, bridges, tunnels, the pipelines, the ports and airports that are being built. It will also stimulate China’s central and eastern provinces which have lagged behind the advances made all along its coastal provinces. It is intended that it will make China the focal point for international trade which will lead to China usurping America as the world’s leading economic power. China’s currency, the renminbi, would replace the dollar as the currency of world trade. And in making other countries dependent on Chinese loans and Chinese trade, it will lead to political power too. To use the Hambantota Port Development as an example again, the Sri Lankan government got into debt it couldn’t afford leaving it obliged to hand over the port to the Chinese on a 99-year lease (just like the lease the British had on Hong Kong). And it is not only America that will lose out, Russia will be a big loser too as its influence in the “Stan’s” – Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan – weakens. Incidentally, another “Stan”, Pakistan, is a major partner in the initiative. The China Pakistan Economic Corridor has reduced the distance between China and the Middle East from 12,900 kilometers by insecure sea lanes to a shorter and more secure distance of 3,000 kilometers by land.

It is the modern version of the Silk Road which forged trade links from China into central Asia and on to Europe, with branches south into today’s Pakistan and India. Chinese silk (hence the Silk Road), jade and spices went west; gold, glass and horses went east. To give some idea of how long China has been a “player” in world trade, the Silk Road trade route was at its height during the Tang Dynasty or, in European terms, during the Roman and Byzantine Empires. So, globalisation is nothing new! Nor, incidentally, is the spread of disease: it was along the Silk Roads that the Black Death, much more lethal than Covid, spread to Europe from China and central Asia in the middle of the fourteenth century.

What is a little more sinister is the fact that history has shown us over and over again that the wealthiest countries pack the greatest military clout, and China is no different. China’s military spending rose by more than 80% in real terms between 2009 and 2018, far outstripping spending by anyone else. Xi Jinping’s aim is to have a “world-class” military force —in other words, America-beating – by mid-century (tying military power to economic power and the Belt and Road initiative). China has become more diplomatically assertive and has shown an increased willingness to back up its claims over disputed territory with demonstrations of its military power. Look at its recent reactions to diplomatic meetings between the Taiwanese and the Americans. Neighbouring countries, and America have been watching closely.

In 2022 the American Department of Defence issued a report on military and security developments involving the People’s Republic of China which highlighted China’s armaments programme, China’s ‘determined pursuit to amass and expand its national power to transform — at least — aspects of the international system to make it more favourable to the PRC’s political system and its national interests.’ And that ‘We’ve seen more coercive and aggressive actions in the Indo-Pacific region…’ and that ‘Xi Jinping and the PRC leadership are determined that the armed forces should take a more active role in advancing the PRC’s foreign policy goals globally.’ By the way, if you’re wondering about these references to the PRC, the formal name for China is the People’s Republic of China. And indeed, the PRCs military is pursuing overseas bases and logistics facilities that would enable it’s forces to project its military power at much greater distances from China itself.

And how does China’s military power compare? The PLA: China’s army is still called the People’s Liberation Army, the name of Mao’s guerrilla force, has now grown into the world’s largest fighting force, with more than two million active personnel (America can call on around 1.5 million).Bottom of Form China is also armed with increasingly high-tech weapons such as the DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missile, which is thought can strike any corner of the globe. It is also developing hypersonic weapons. The PLA’s Navy (PLAN) is now thought to be the largest navy in the world, and its submarines have the capability to launch nuclear-armed missiles. The air force (PLAAF) has also grown into the largest in the Asia-Pacific region and the third largest in the world, with more than 2,500 aircraft and roughly 2,000 combat aircraft, according to an annual report by the American Office of Secretary of Defence. This includes a fleet of stealth fighter jets.

I think we can continue to sleep safely in our beds at night but I do think we should wake up to the fact that just as the nineteenth century could be labelled the European century (if not the British century), and the twentieth century could be labelled the American century, the 21^st century is likely to be known as China’s century: it is the future dominant power and that future is getting closer and closer. So, we should get to know about China. The good news, as I hinted at the beginning of this episode, is that its history, its culture is fascinating. 

Understanding Chinese Culture

With this episode I’m going to give you a few insights to China – its history and its culture. I think it’s important because I think the world is going to change radically in the not-too distant future. The Western perception of how things should be done – free markets, democratic norms, the rule of law, human rights – are going to be challenged by different civilisations, notably China’s. China is described by Martin Jacques as ‘the bearer and driver of the new world.’ Its significance in the twenty-first century is going to grow and grow, and so it’s culture and its history, and the two are closely entwined, is only going to be increasingly significant too.

The Chinese have a high regard for their race, the ‘Han Chinese,’ for their culture and for their history. They see their civilization, which they claim spans five thousand years, as superior to others. China sees itself as always being at the centre of the world and they refer to themselves as the ‘Middle Kingdom’. If you consider other countries with large populations, America is a relatively new nation and is an ethnic melting pot with profound cultural differences; India, Indonesia and Brasil, potential big-players in the future, are similarly new nations and are also made up of significantly different races and cultures. China, however, sees itself as homogenous (minorities account for only 9% of the total population, though this still adds up to 105 million people), boasting a longevity no other nation can come near to matching and, over the last three thousand years, showing great unity. Though Chinese self-confidence has experienced periods of grave doubt, notably in the ‘century of humiliation’ when Europeans and the Japanese subjected it to imperial servitude between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, it has survived largely intact. The Chinese believe their rightful place is as the world`s leading power and every leader over the last century has regarded it to be his historic task to overcome that ‘century of humiliation’ and restore China to its rightful position in the world order: at the top.

As Martin Jacques spells out in the most prophetic sentence in all 636 pages of his book, ‘When China Rules The World’ that ‘Understanding China will be one of the great challenges of the twenty-first century.’

Things will change. Take, for example, the international system: the United Nations, the World Bank, The International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, etc. It is largely the creation of the Western powers after WW2, created out of their perception of what the world needed, and still needs. China will most likely think differently! Another factor to consider: whereas the current international system is the creation of the so-called developed world, essentially an American design supported by Western Europe, and so the creation of very wealthy nations (even if Europe was on its knees after WW2), China is, at one and the same time, a developed nation and a developing nation. That is to say its economy is huge, it is generating tremendous wealth, whilst at the same time a very high percentage of its people are still “walking behind the water buffalo”, rural living in poverty. This too will give China a very different perspective on the world and its most pressing needs. And the rest of the developing world will look on China very differently to the way in which they look on the West.

Early in his book, Martin Jacques identifies four key themes, each rooted in Chinese history, that marks China and its history as different to the West:

• The Chinese view their history, and China lives in and with its past like no other nation, as not that of a nation-state but of a civilisation: its history, the dynasties, its very way of being, the teachings of Confucius, the place held by the family and ancestral worship, relationships and customs, its belief in the state, the paternalistic role of government, the central place given to unity, and above all, its sense of superiority. Jacques looks at China not as a nation-state but as a civilisation-state that has only recently become a nation-state. He regards it as no less than ‘the basic building block for an understanding of the country …’

• China is easily the oldest continuously existing polity in the world, certainly dating back to 221BC. As the Roman Empire was imploding, China was expanding. And as Europe remained permanently splintered into different nations, China has welded itself into a single entity, a civilization-state. This has not only brought about a country that should be seen on a continental scale, but it has also brought about a huge country yet with a considerable degree of unity.

• Stemming from these first two points, even though China was originally composed of a multiplicity of races, as a result of thousands of years of history, Chinese civilisation has absorbed, assimilated, and melded other races, leading to a strong common identity and sense of unity. So that today, ninety-two percent of China is made up of Han Chinese who consider themselves to be one race. There is another dimension to China’s sense of itself, brought about by more recent events. As European powers, America and Japan exerted themselves on China in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a nationalist reaction against the imperialist foreigners developed, and the term ‘Han Chinese’ took on extra significance.

• Still linked to the first point, China’s relationship with its south-east Asian neighbours was, for thousands of years, up to the point of European and Japanese imperialism, based on what has come to be known as a ‘tributary system’. This involved the acknowledgement of China’s supremacy, both in terms of power and culture, and the payment of tributes in return for China’s benevolence and protection. But China had no imperialist ambitions.

Later in his book, Jacques returns to the point about unity, adding another key distinction, essential to understanding Chinese history as well as China today:

China attaches a greater importance to unity than anything else, and we can see this in three very important ways:

1. The fundamental priority attached to unity by both people and state.

2. The central role expected of the state in ensuring the maintenance of unity.

3. The powerful sense of a common Chinese identity underpinning the popular commitment to unity.

Now you might be thinking about the plight of the poor Uyghur but the point I’m making here is that all of this sets China apart from the history of Europe with its inter-state rivalry manifesting itself in a long catalogue of wars of which WW1 and WW2 might have been the most bloody but were by no means the first and haven’t been the last. There is, in Europe, the central concept of national sovereignty, and with that, the tension between the state and the individual, giving rise to the notion of both human rights and civil rights.

The state in the West is regarded with extreme caution as a man-made construction, always under scrutiny, something whose power should be defined, limited and constrained. However, it is essential to understand that in China and South-East Asia generally, rising from Confucian teaching, the state is seen as natural, organic, and integral to the well-being of society as a whole, and not subject to the constraints placed on it in the West. Rulers were required to govern in accordance with the teachings of Confucius and were expected to set the highest moral standards. Consequently, the state is seen as the source of moral behaviour and order, and is accorded huge authority and legitimacy, far greater than is the case in the West. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that the state is accorded a reverence and respect more or less unknown in the West.

The state is seen as an extension of the family, and family, including the extended family, the clan, is at the centre of everything in South-East Asia. They take on social responsibilities like building schools. Sometimes a whole village could consist of just the one clan. And there are two key characteristics to family in Confucian thinking: the duty of offspring to respect the authority of the father, which is seen as sacrosanct, not negotiable as it is in the West, as well as the father’s responsibility to take care of his family; and deference to one’s ancestors through the ritual of ancestral worship (based on a belief that one’s ancestors spirits are permanently present), thus ensuring continuity and lineage, as well as the humble nature adopted by the living. The clans would build ancestral halls which would house the spirit tablets of ancestors to which offerings would be made on the anniversary of the death of important clan ancestors or else at funerals or weddings.

Thus, whereas in the West individual autonomy and identity is the essential principle from which the political culture is founded, in South-East Asia it is group identity, especially family, that provides meaning and purpose, security and well-being. Consequently, whereas government in the West is seen as essentially utilitarian, protecting individual freedoms, in South-East Asia it has a much stronger paternalistic role, its overall aim a harmonious and balanced society, and the people have been happy to be dependent on it.

The family plays a critically important socialising role in Confucian societies good parenting is seen as essential in ensuring correct attitudes, values and self-discipline. It is through the family that children learn that they belong to a greater whole, more important than themselves as individuals. They learn that everything has its place, including themselves, and that this includes their roles and responsibilities in wider society. Christian guilt, directing and constraining human behaviour, is not a familiar concept in Confucian culture: shame and ‘loss of face’ is what controls behaviour.

It was normal for marriages to be arranged by families, sometimes even before a child had been born. Daughters would normally marry outside of the family group (and could also be “married” off as a concubine). Sons would remain, sharing the father’s home when they married. The ideal family in Confucian tradition consisted of five generations under the one roof. That is why the traditional family home was built to accommodate an extended family with a number of courtyards around which accommodation was built for different generations. At the death of the father, his property would be divided amongst his sons. In the wealthier families, the bride would bring a dowry with her, though this tradition would be reversed in poorer families where it was common for a bride-price to be paid in compensation for the loss of the daughter. The gap in status between daughter and son could hardly be wider. The daughter was so insignificant that she might not even be given a proper name but referred to by number, and it was true that daughters could be killed by their parents; whereas the son ensured the family line continued and there could be no greater betrayal of one’s ancestors than not to continue the family lineage. It was very much a patriarchal society and a woman’s life could be made miserable.^[12]

Women, of course, also suffered from the thousand-year-old Chinese tradition of foot-binding. Jung Chang, in Wild Swans, a history of her family covering three generations, describes the binding of her grandmother’s feet at just two years of age. Involving crushing the foot’s arch, breaking the bones and years of ‘relentless, excruciating pain’, indeed pain that would last the rest of her life.

An interesting footnote to this consideration of the family (and really, no pun is intended) is that, as late as 1949, there were fewer than 500 surnames in China; and according to some estimates, 100 surnames account for 85% of Chinese citizens. For example, there are 92 million Wang’s, 91 million Li’s and 86 million Zhang’s.

I would add that education is also seen as an essential complement to the family. The teacher is accorded the same respect as a parent and the school curriculum leans heavily on the past, the teachers seen as bearing the wisdom of Chinese civilization.

The Chinese and their history

If China is to become a dominant player, if not the dominant player, in the 21^st century and beyond, then it is important that the rest of the world reaches an understanding of just what it is we are dealing with. We see the world very much from the perspective we have been taught: the British perspective, the European perspective, the American perspective. Our textbooks, radio, television, newspapers, the internet, all reflect the Western perspective. And this is dominated by our culture, our literature, the cinema, even our music, and our values and our histories, many of them, though not all, shared. Well, China’s culture, its values and its history is very different, and so too is their view of the world we share.

I talked last week about how, until its self-confidence was shattered in the ‘century of humiliation,’ China had always seen itself as at the centre of the world, the Middle Kingdom, by the sheer brilliance of its civilization, the ‘land under Heaven.’ It constituted a higher form of civilization, superior in every respect, and consequently any expansion was justified as a civilizing mission. And that expansion was made easier by a shared written language, helping create cohesion, though wildly varying dialects, of course, also prevailed.

And I talked about the strong association, and loyalty, to family and clan. This also shows itself in the strong sense of patriotism in the countries of South-East Asia. And though, as I’ve mentioned, Chinese self-confidence was affected by the ‘century of humiliation,’ the strong self-belief of the Chinese also gives the Chinese a strong sense of racial superiority that looks upon foreigners as ‘barbarians’ (immediate neighbours were referred to as ‘inner barbarians’, those from more distant parts, and certainly those who arrived by sea, were seen as ‘outer barbarians’) or else ‘devils’, or ‘the Other’. Given the size of China, it seems remarkable that 91% of its population today is said to be made up of ‘Han Chinese’ with only 9% of its people described as ‘minorities.’ In fact, the ‘Han Chinese’ are a myth, but such is the power of the idea that it is largely accepted. It has been a feature that permeates the Confucian, Republican and, though Mao himself rejected the idea, the Communist traditions alike. The commonly held belief is that all Chinese are descended from the Yellow Emperor who was born in 2704BC and ruled a kingdom based on the Yellow River that is regarded as the cradle of Chinese civilization. Hence the Chinese commonly proudly refer to a civilization that is 5,000 years old.

Confucianism gave China an ideology of government superior to anything else, and a bureaucracy devoted to the idea of service. All of which was imbued not just in the minds of the governing class but of the people in general. Hence the depth of shock to the Chinese psyche as the ‘century of humiliation’ unfolded: ‘a prolonged crisis of doubt, uncertainty and humiliation,’ which began ‘a long and agonised search for a new sense of identity….’^[14] It was this that resulted in the invention, in the midst of the ‘century of humiliation,’ of the ‘Han Chinese,’ by the pen of the nationalist writer, Zhang Taiyan. It was deliberately used to distance the Chinese from any association with the failing Manchu-Qing dynasty. This marks the beginnings of a popular Chinese nationalism, defined not only by its devotion to Chinese culture but also by its hatred of the foreigner, be he Manchu, Japanese, European or American.

The fact that the state is willingly given a central role in ensuring the unity of its people stands in contrast to the Western celebration of (but also tension resulting from) diversity. It has meant that power throughout Chinese history, including today if we regard the Chinese Communist Party and the state to be one and the same thing, has emanated overwhelmingly from the state (though we should not ignore entirely the significance of wealth and class.

This central role willingly handed to the Chinese state has also meant that it has not faced so many concerted attempts to limit its power from rival sources such as a landed aristocratic elite, or new wealth in the form of an urban bourgeoisie or institutions such as a church or the army. There is not the notion of a balance of power between executive, legislature and judiciary, and certainly not civil society in Chinese political culture. The Chinese aristocratic elite had succumbed to the authority of the emperor by the mid-tenth century. Chinese social structures – scholars, landowners, peasants, merchants, tradesmen and workers – were purely functional and did not become rival sources of power, at least until the end of the Qing dynasty. The result is that “politics” has operated in a much more restricted arena in China, essentially seen as the province of the government alone. Indeed, the masses were only brought into play by Mao, notably in the Cultural Revolution, and then with a specific purpose and under Mao’s control.

It is important to stress that the power of the state rested primarily on shared values based on Confucian principles. The military was not a key factor in maintaining control until the early twentieth century, instead imperial China went to great lengths to inculcate the Chinese with a sense of shared values, particularly so during the Ming and Qing dynasties. The Confucian classics – the Analects of Confucious, the Great learning, the Doctrine of the Mean, and Mencius (a record of conversations of Confucious’ great disciple) – featured prominently in school education as well as in preparation for the imperial exams for the civil service. Lectures on Confucian principles were also promoted for the common people. The state did, however, control the population in other ways, notably through registration and constant surveillance. The clans – the huge extended kinship groups with very formal membership and great authority, was also an important means of ensuring social control. Clan rules proscribed acceptable social behaviour. Expulsion from the clan resulted in social ostracism. Family and clan, as we have seen, have always very important institutions in Chinese society.

Long before it was the case in Europe, there was also an acceptance on the part of the Chinese imperial dynasties that good governance was a duty (linked to the Confucian tradition with its stress on moral responsibility) and, what is more, although the Mandate of Heaven proclaimed their right to rule, it didn’t wrest on any divine right to rule. Indeed, it had been accepted since the Zhou dynasty that it could be revoked if they didn’t honour their moral duty as rulers. So, for example, low taxes were seen as a moral duty so that the peasantry could prosper, harmony ensue, though also so that rebellion would be avoided. So, too, would the state intervene in order to regulate essential food supplies as well as food prices. The state also took responsibility for major infrastructural projects such as the Grand Canal, completed at the beginning of the seventh century and added to later. A succession of bad harvests or a series of natural disasters such as earthquakes or floods, adversely affecting the people’s prosperity, could lead to the Mandate of Heaven being withdrawn, as happened in the Taiping Uprising against the Qing dynasty in the mid-nineteenth century.

There is a final, and very important point, to consider with regard to China, its place in the world today and how its people see their own history. As you have seen, China, traditionally, is very much in touch with its past: ancestral history, Confucianism, the legacy of tradition (and superstition), thousands of years in the making, the history of the dynasties and lessons to be learnt from it. The Chinese have an intimacy with their history not shared in the West. As Jacques writes,

‘There are no other people in the world who are so connected to their past and for whom the past – not so much the recent past but the long-ago past – is so relevant and meaningful as the Chinese…. China has experienced huge turmoil, invasion and rupture, but somehow the lines of continuity have remained resilient, persistent and ultimately predominant, superimposing themselves for the most part in the Chinese mind over the interruptions and breaks. The Chinese live in and through their history, however distant it might be, to a degree which is quite different from other societies’

This may change now that China has urbanised – in 1950 just 13% of people in China lived in cities. By 2010, this had grown to 45% and is now 65% but throughout this process, China remains psychologically, a rural society, urbanisation is a very recent, and unsettling, phenomenon. The great majority of those over forty will have worked on the land, and this has a great impact on how they see the world.^[17]

What’s more, this cosy history of unity, of shared values and of benevolent government must not be allowed to mask a parallel history of disunity. China has conquered territory and it has suppressed minorities.

As in the manner that Europe has tended to interpret its colonisation of Africa as the “white man’s burden,” a civilizing necessity, so the Chinese like to look at their history as one of unifying a great civilization rather than looking at it as a history of conquest. That may be so but as China pushed its frontiers northwards and westwards, into territories with little in common with the Han Chinese, considerable brutality was used.

A significant feature of Chinese expansionism has been the resettlement of enormous numbers of people, still a feature today with Han Chinese migrating in large numbers into Mongolia (once they were allowed to), Xinjiang and Tibet. In the south, the history is more murky. But over a period of some three thousand years, whole populations were moved (a key element in government policy), races intermixed, some vanishing altogether as substantial kingdoms were destroyed, or else subjected to a process of absorption and assimilation. As a result, this land-based empire, built out of conquest, absolutely, but also absorption and incorporation and over thousands of years, does not regard itself as an empire, except at its edges where the population accounts for only 6% (though their lands constitute 64% of China’s land mass).

China has also been conquered itself throughout its long history. Indeed, it was the Manchu invasion that established the last dynasty: the Qin dynasty. China also experienced the influence of Budhhism spreading from India in the first century AD and the spread of Islam which first reached China during the Tang dynasty (618-907). And most recently, the ‘century of humiliation’.

Nevertheless, the story of occupations and outside religious influence only serve to show the underlying strength of Chinese culture and its resilience and continuity as they were all, sooner or later, Sinified. It has also served to reinforce on the Chinese that unity is sacrosanct, with stability not far behind.

And let me come back to one last point, even if I do so ever so quickly – if China has a parallel history, it also has a parallel present, for China is both developed and developing. Urban China is modernising at a rate faster than anything the world has experienced, past and future both appear to be living side-by-side in the present. But much of rural China remains desperately backward and desperately poor.

So, there you have my overview of China, its history and its culture; the reasons for the way China sees the world.

The Century of Humiliation

This episode will look at China’s century of humiliation which was in fact a long century, lasting 110 years. For it began with the First Opium War with Britain which began in 1839. And it didn’t end until the end of WW2 and the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

It was a century in which China and the Chinese people suffered at the hands of imperial powers, mostly from Europe and Japan, but a little bit from America too. It was a century in which China was forced to accept what it referred to as “unequal treaties”, treaties that benefited the imperial powers but not China, but it was also a century in which the Chinese people suffered appallingly at the hands of imperialists. I will begin with one example of this, looking at the shocking way in which the British treated the Chinese, move onto look at those “unequal treaties” and what they meant for China, and end with a shocking atrocity at the hands of the Japanese. In doing so, I think it will help you understand how China might see the world now that it is a major economic and military power. As I said in an earlier episode, every Chinese leader over the last century has regarded it to be his historic task to overcome that ‘century of humiliation’ and restore China to its rightful position in the world order: at the top.

The East India Company, which had been founded in London in 1600 to make trade easier in India, the Indian Ocean region in general and South-East Asia, became involved in the growth of the opium poppy in India and after processing, the drug would be shipped to China (all trade at this time went through the port of Guangzhou or Canton). By the 1790s some 4,000 chests of opium were being shipped to China each year but in 1796 the Chinese made the trade illegal.

However, the trade continued illegally (over 18,000 chests a year were imported between 1822 and 1830). With a trade imbalance of 3:1 in favour of Chinese exports (mostly tea), Britain needed the revenue opium brought. The sale of opium in China brought considerable profits for both Britain and India. The fact that it brought addiction and misery to Chinese users, did not matter when compared with the principal of ‘free trade’ and with the profits that accrued from the trade.

The whole affair prompted fierce debate in both Britain and China, and Britain had been eager for some time to reach a trade agreement with China, and an agreement over the opium trade in particular.

In Britain the free traders won the day. They argued that as well as profits accruing directly from the trade with China, it created a market for British goods as well as for Indian products, which in turn enabled India to afford British goods, whilst there was also the matter of employment in every matter linked to British shipping. Meanwhile, in China there were those who called for the legalisation of the opium trade as the best means to regulate it whilst others called for its prohibition, for obvious reasons, to be tightened. The emperor sided with the prohibitionists. All trade was suspended and foreigners confined to their trading posts until the British Superintendent of Trade, who was sympathetic to the Chinese cause, ordered all opium chests to be handed over to the Chinese who promptly destroyed them. However, the British government, sensitive to any charge of neglecting to protect British commerce, sent an expeditionary force in order to force the Chinese government to compensate Britain for the opium losses, but also to abolish the monopoly of traders that the Chinese had licensed (known as the Cohong) and to cede an island base from where the British could trade. British force won the day and in the process, we should note, Chinese tombs were desecrated and Chinese women raped. China’s ‘century of humiliation’ had begun.

The Treaty of Nanjing, signed on board a British ship at the end of August, 1842, gave Britain everything it wanted. The Cohong was abolished, five ports would be opened to British trade – Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai – and British traders would be allowed to reside in them (Shanghai would soon have 100,000 foreigners living there) and would benefit from special concessions, i.e. the right to build consulates, warehouses and merchant houses, and, in the designated area, British laws and customs took precedence (a principle known as “extra-territoriality”), a fixed tariff would be agreed later, the island of Xianggang (better known in the West as Hong Kong) was ceded to Britain and China was required to pay an indemnity of $21,000,000 to cover the cost of the war and the opium that had been destroyed. The opium trade, of course, continued.

But this was just the prelude to China being prised open by European powers and America (with Japan, the first East Asian country to modernise, involved too). They chose not to opt for formal imperial control (China was too far away and besides, there was no need). Instead, they forced China to agree to a series of individual treaties, the “unequal treaties” and the so-called treaty ports: informal empire which gave the same benefits with less cost and less hassle. These treaties had four common characteristics: ‘the opening of treaty ports to foreign trade and to foreigners; the fixing of tariffs; extraterritoriality which removed foreigners from Chinese judicial processes; and what became known as the ‘most-favoured-nation clause’ which guaranteed that any future treaty that had improved conditions, no matter who it was concluded with, would be applied to all earlier treaties.

There was a Second Opium War and the Boxer Uprising, both of which went much the same way as the First Opium War. And China lost its influence over Vietnam to the French and Korea to the Japanese. The Sino-Japanese War of 1894 was the most humiliating defeat as the rapidly industrialising and increasingly aggressive, Japanese had previously been regarded as inferior to the Chinese.

The impact of the Western powers cannot be ignored. Undoubtedly, they drove a gigantic wedge into Chinese sovereignty, once so proudly asserted. And though there may have been positive economic effects, Western investment, the introduction of Western technology, machinery and railways, for example, and also Western methods, the negative effects had the greater impact on China. There was the loss of money. First, the drain on silver to pay for opium. This was followed by the losses resulting from the unequal treaties, the imperialists control on duties, for example, meant that there was a huge imbalance between what accrued from exports and the costs of imports. Then there were the huge indemnities that accompanied some of treaties. The indemnities required loans to pay them, and the loans came at high rates of interest. There was also the repression of Chinese industries from porcelain to silk, to textiles (affected more than any other industry), to tea and to iron. They were not destroyed, but they were held back.

The impact of the imperialist powers on the Chinese economy and on Chinese dignity unsurprisingly contributed to a growing sense of nationalism amongst some Chinese. This led to what could be regarded, though only in hindsight, as something of a nationalist debate as to how to respond to the ‘foreign barbarian’. Defend the Confucian way or adopt at least some of the Western ways. This dilemma was seen in the ‘self-strengthening’ movement with Westernising reformers meeting opposition from conservatives. But resentment against the ‘foreign barbarian’, a part of Chinese culture for centuries was now developing into an ‘anti-foreigner nationalism’ and also resentment against the Manchu or Qing dynasty (remember the Mandate of Heaven) as the foreigner was appeased in unequal treaty after unequal treaty. What defeat in the Sino-Japanese War did was to expose the flaws in both the conservative stance of preserving the Confucian way and resisting everything foreign, and the reformists ‘self-strengthening’ movement with its ‘Chinese learning as the base, Western studies for use’, in other words, adopt Western ways in order to better the foreigner. In their eyes, the world had come to the “middle kingdom” and could no longer be ignored. It would eventually lead to the fall of the Qing dynasty. But I will stay with the century of humiliation though my focus will turn to Japan.

At the outbreak of WW1, Japan occupied the German concessions in China and then presented China with twenty-one demands. They required China to accept Japan’s claims to the German concessions and a strengthening of Japan’s position in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, notably an extension of its control of the South Manchurian Railway. Also, that China’s largest coal and steel works, situated in the British sphere of influence, should become a joint Sino-Japanese venture, that China should not cede any other harbour to another power, and that China should employ Japanese political, military and financial advisers, should agree to joint Japanese-Chinese policing in some areas, and that it should agree to buy arms from Japan and establish a joint Sino-Japanese arsenal in China. All but the last set of demands were accepted, and the last was only resisted because American and British pressure on Japan prevailed.

But it wouldn’t be enough and in 1931, the Japanese invaded Manchuria, a huge Chinese province, on the pretext that Chinese nationalists had sabotaged a small section of the South Manchurian Railway. In fact, the act had been committed by the Japanese military. Manchuria was occupied and renamed Manchukuo and Pu Yi, China’s last emperor was made Manchukuo’s puppet emperor.

The Japanese were clearly not content with Manchuria and they extended their control. Manchukuo was extended to the Great Wall and they attempted to set up other puppet governments in order to end the clashes with the Chinese Nationalists, the Guomindang, suppress anti-Japanese outbursts and further Japanese economic interests. It worked to some extent but it was never likely to work entirely: China was being subjected to a brutal occupation. Over 5 million people lost their homes and tens of thousands died as villages were burned and the populations herded into ‘strategic hamlets’ where they could be better controlled. Many were worked to death in mines under Japanese guards from which everything was exported to Japan. From mid-1939, the Japanese announced that all rice would be for the Japanese and a few chosen collaborators only, the rest of the population would have to make do with whatever else could be bought. Some girls were shipped to Japan to be married off and by 1942 schoolchildren (Japanese children included, though they would be allocated much easier jobs) were conscripted to do labour. Full scale war had broken out between the Nationalists and Mao’s Communists in 1937 and Japan entered WW2 after Pearl Harbour at the end of 1941. But matters were complicated as the Nationalists were also fighting Mao’s Communists, which would only help the Japanese.

But I’m going to end this look at the century of humiliation with one of the worst atrocities of WW2. It took place in 1937 in Nanjing and what came to be known as the rape of Nanjing. For the Japanese exacted a merciless purge of the city’s civilian population. I’m going to be brutal but nothing here is an exaggeration of what took place. And we need to know. I passionately believe that. The Chinese estimate that, in addition to soldiers, the number of civilians massacred were between 200,000 and 300,000 and at least 20,000 women, of all ages, were gang-raped. Others were carted off to become ‘comfort women’ for the Japanese troops. Mass killings took place as men were lined up in front of machine guns, other prisoners were forced to kneel in rows and were beheaded one by one by officers using their samurai swords, others were tied to trees to become the victims of bayonet practice, wounded soldiers were bayoneted were they lay, some were set alight after having petrol poured on them. Where does the root of such brutality lie? How can we explain it? Well, we can go back to their school days where, from the very beginning they were taught that the Chinese were not worthy of the ‘divine race’ of the Japanese, indeed they were ‘below pigs’. And having been taught this in schools, it was reinforced by the military.

The infamous Nanjing Massacre, has left bitter memories amongst the Chinese which colours their attitudes towards the Japanese and so their relations with Japan to this day. As Martin Jacques writes, ‘the Nanjing Massacre defines the nature and indentity of the Japanese as far as the Chinese are concerned and therefore in large measure their attitude towards Japan…. It remains an open wound …’

What the ‘century of humiliation’ means to China today

I really like a phrase I came across in preparing this episode. It comes from  in an article produced by the European Foundation for South Asian Studies called Assessing the ‘Century of Humiliation’. It says how ‘Contextualising history means contextualising behaviour’. To put it the other way round, to understand a country’s behaviour today, we have to look at it in the context of its history. For its historical experiences play a major part in how it sees the world today.

But I’ll begin with the government’s relations with its own people for the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy is still firmly rooted in the fact that it was under Mao and the CCP that China was able to shake off the ‘century of humiliation’. As a past member of the Politburo was quoted as saying: ‘the establishment of new China [i.e. communist China] … put an end to the situation in which old China was split up, the nation was subject to humiliation, and the people experienced untold sufferings.’

And we have to acknowledge that the ‘century of humiliation’ goes far beyond serving an ideological explanation for the CCPs continued rule, it goes right to the very consciousness of the Chinese people. They, after all, experienced it and it is ingrained in their consciousness and how they see the world and China’s place in it. Of course, it is carefully nurtured by the CCP but it would be there anyway.

However a consequence of this legitimacy is that it legitimises one-party rule, another is that it legitimises the intolerant treatment of alternative cultures such as that of the Uyghur. China must not be seen as weak ever again.

But it also led China to see foreign relations in a Western system as a competitive relationship in which nations compete with nations and that the well-being of a nation is inextricably tied to its ability to compete. And China is competing in an international arena created by America and the West after WW2 when the likes of the UN, the WTO and the World Bank, and the IMF were set up. Thus, China has taken opportunities to set up alternative institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New Development Bank in Shanghai, the BRICS bank. It also explains China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and it also legitimises an assertive Chinese foreign policy. Again, China must not be seen as weak. So, China is setting out to assert its dominance in its own backyard, South-East Asia. It sees itself as the rightful leader of the developing world as, with its own experiences during the ‘century of humiliation’, it is the only great power to know where the developing world is coming from, and where they want to be. And China expects to play a full part in global politics, as is its right as a global power.

There is, however, a debate as to how China should react. One view is that the ‘century of humiliation’ is firmly in the past and should be seen as such. The Beijing Olympics of 2008 is seen as the most visible proof of that. Consequently, China should move to take its place in the international system on equal terms with the likes of America and Europe. Indeed, they need China more than China needs them. So, China should play its part with confidence, take a central role and take on more responsibilities, but also take the opportunity to reshape the international system from “within” so to speak, injecting Chinese values.

A second perspective takes this a step further, suggesting that the international system would be open to change and an injection of Chinese values. This view sees China as having a role to play that, as the developing world is rapidly catching up, is actually needed: a non-competitive, non-conflictual model of international relations. In 1997, China announced a ‘New Security Concept’ calling for ‘dialogue, cooperation, mutual trust, mutual benefit, equality, and coordination.’ This is the view of a confident China offering a superior way to conduct international relations.

However, another view is that China cannot trust the West nor the established international order (which, as we have noted, was the West’s creation). In the past, in the ‘century of humiliation’, the West seized on China’s weakness to gain every advantage it could, and will only seek to use the existing international system to minimise China’s growing status in every way possible. Thus, they would fight tooth and nail to keep the existing system. So, China should have as little to do with the existing system as possible, build alliances and an alternative system outside of it, and build its military capability, though also its diplomatic influence, in order to enable it to stand up for itself.

In reality, I think we can see elements from all three perspectives in current Chinese policies but I think an important point to make is that the fact that there is something of a debate about international relations in China should be seen as encouraging. It gives the West an opportunity to work with China rather than working against it.

But if we see something positive in this debate, we also have to consider the position of Taiwan for the People’s Republic of China sees the continued existence of Taiwan as the least remnant of the ‘century of humiliation’ and it has to be returned to China, or else taken back by China, before the century can be truly seen as being in the past.

Now, we can still criticise Chinese policy and Chinese actions, indeed when assertive foreign policy becomes aggressive, or when human rights are abused, we should criticise Chinese policy, but we should understand China first. For example, to understand China’s position re Taiwan, we should not see it as an act of imperialism, rather as China reclaiming lost territory. Whilst to understand China’s actions in Tibet, we need to understand that for China unity is sacrosanct, with stability not far behind. Whilst China’s determination to assert control over the South China Sea needs to be seen in the light of the ‘unequal treaties’ and atrocities inflicted on its people, the worst example, but by no means the only one, being the rape of Nanjing. That’s why we have looked at these things in previous episodes.

China is already a major player in the world today and is going to be more so in the future: the American century is ending, the Chinese century is coming! But whereas the West views this scenario in the same way as the great historian Thucydides, saw things: ‘It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable’, he famously wrote – the Thucydides trap – it need not be that way. In 2015, President Xi Jinping declared: ‘There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides trap in the world.’ And there isn’t – not if there is understanding. But in his speech during the Chinese Communist Party’s centenary celebration in 2021, Xi Jinping also warned that foreign powers which dared to dream about bullying China would ‘have their heads cracked and bleeding.’ So, there needs to be understanding.

The Long March

Having looked at China before the Chinese Communist Party came to power, I want to take a few episodes to look at the man who dominated Chinese history from the end of the ‘century of humiliation’ to his death in 1976. The man whose body still sits in a mausoleum in the middle of Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing: Mao. A great leader out of power, I think so, anyway, but an awful leader in power. And I will try to show you why I came to this conclusion.

The Communists won the civil war against all the odds. The Nationalists were always in a better position: the natural beneficiaries from the nationalist reaction to the ‘century of humiliation’, assuming power when the Qing dynasty collapsed, therefore benefiting from the resources of the state and, as the civil war reached its climax, from American support. Yet they lost, and a key reason for their loss, and for the communists taking over China, was Mao.

The communists had been forced to set up a soviet in Jiangxi, a remote part of southern China, in 1929, and there they stayed until forced out by Nationalist forces towards the end of 1934. Mao had been the leader at Jiangxi until the Party’s leadership were forced to move there in the summer of 1931 when Shanghai became unsafe and, after clashes with the Party leadership, at the end of 1932, Mao was politically isolated. But it was on Mao’s advice that towards the end of 1934 they set off for another remote region, Yan’an, this time in the north of China. And it was during the march and the time spent in Yan’an that Mao first reasserted his leadership over the communists, then cemented it.

The Long March is the stuff of legend. One day Hollywood may make the movie, and it would be difficult to exaggerate its epic proportions. It would take a year before Yan’an was reached. The distance covered was a staggering 6,000 miles (10,000 kilometres), crossing 11 provinces, 18 mountain ranges and 24 major rivers. To this one could add the weather that had to be contended with: wind, rain, hail, snow and scorching heat.

To give just one example of what they faced, they had to cross the Great Snowy Mountains with peaks reaching almost 5,000 metres (16,000 feet). The surviving troops regarded it as the hardest part of the entire march with freezing temperatures men who sat down to rest or to relieve themselves froze to death. Mao recalled how, in climbing one peak, ‘It rained, then snowed, and the fierce wind whipped our bodies … Hundreds of our men died there… All along the route we kept reaching down to pull men to their feet only to find that they had already died.’

There was the lack of food and inadequate clothing to contend with. Illness too. And we also need to add the constant harassment by Goumindang (Nationalist) forces and the armies of Chinese warlords and you will, I trust, appreciate that survival was itself a major achievement.

All of which led Edgar Snow, the American journalist who spent time with Mao in Yan’an in the middle of 1936, to claim it as ‘an Odyssey unequalled in modern times.’

However, it was also something of a myth. Like Dunkirk for the British, disastrous defeat was turned into glorious victory. The Communists had abandoned the local population at Jiangxi who had supported them which meant leaving them defenceless against the brutal reprisals inflicted by the Guomindang armies. Such was the frenzy of their retribution that it was said not a tree was left standing in the area that didn’t have a victim’s body hanging from it. It was a heavy political defeat for the Communists. And of the 80,000 who had set out (including only 35 women), fewer than 5,000 survived to reach Yan’an. Women and children had to be left behind, amongst them two of Mao’s children, left with sympathetic peasant families but never seen again. Mao also lost a brother who was also left behind to fight a rearguard action against the closing Guomindang troops. The Guomindang, on the other hand, now enjoyed more control than any other single authority since the fall of the Qing dynasty. Chiang Kai-shek was recognised as China’s legitimate leader by most foreign powers, including the Soviet Union.

However, myths are important to nations, and as Maurice Meisner makes clear in his book, Mao’s China and After, the Long March was profoundly important. It had both tremendous positive psychological and political significance for the Communists. The psychological effect was deep and would continue to have a profound effect on events right up to Mao’s death. To begin with, the experience of the march reinforced Mao’s personal faith that proper will, spirit and consciousness could conquer all obstacles; that the Communists ideas and ideals would overcome all. He was very wrong as you will see, but that’s for another episode. Virtues of unending struggle, heroic sacrifice, self-denial, diligence, courage and unselfishness were values espoused not by Mao alone but carried and conveyed by all the veterans of the Long March. They had been essential to their survival and to the survival of the revolution, and they would lie at the heart of what later came to be celebrated as “the Yan’an spirit.” Mao himself regarded the march and the example of the communists as ‘a manifesto … a seeding machine…. It has sown many seeds in 11 provinces, which will sprout, grow leaves, blossom into flowers, bear fruit and yield a crop in the future.’

For those who survived the ordeal, as well as for those who were inspired by it, the experience gave rise to a sense of hope and a deepened sense of mission. The significance is not lost on Meisner: ‘More than any other event in the history of Chinese Communism, it was the Long March – and the legendary tales to which it gave rise – that provided this essential feeling of hope, the confidence that determined people could prevail under even the most desperate conditions. And more than any other individual, it was Mao Zedong who radiated and inspired this faith in the future.’

At the same time, the deaths of so many comrades lent a sacred character to the revolutionary mission. There was now an unbreakable commitment to carry on the revolutionary struggle. Whilst for Mao, the experience undoubtedly contributed enormously to the perception of himself as a man of destiny. In all of this, the revolution took on a sense of mission, a sense of historical destiny.

The other thing that came out of Jiangxi, the Long March and Yan’an (where the communists would stay until 1947) was their decision to fight the Japanese. Mao had seen the advantage in fighting the Japanese whilst at Jiangxi. Given Chiang Kai-shek’s reluctance to do so, it gave the Communists an opportunity to lead an anti-Japanese front, uniting all classes in a patriotic fight against the invader. But it was whilst on the Long March that he first got a sense that the mood in the country was beginning to baulk against Chiang’s policy of appeasement.

In the summer of 1935, the Japanese had forced the Guomindang government to withdraw troops from Beijing and Tianjin; to remove provincial officials considered hostile to Japan; and to declare a ‘goodwill mandate’ expressly forbidding public expressions of anti-Japanese sentiment. It was yet another humiliation for the Chinese to accept and they resented Chiang’s willingness to comply. After a year of bitter retreat in which survival was their only thought, Mao could see that their new base at Yan’an, in the north of China, could be an anti-Japanese base. The Party had regained its purpose.

Mao had ensured that the Communists were in a position, if only just, to fight the Japanese and the Nationalists, and to mobilize Chinese nationalist sentiments for both patriotic and revolutionary ends. At Yan’an Mao worked to unite the Party with the peasantry. He introduced the principle of ‘virtuous example’ so that the peasantry, and eventually the whole nation, might learn from Communist good practice. He wrote a code of conduct for the Red Army:

• Replace all doors when you leave a house.

• Roll up and return the straw matting on which you sleep.

• Be courteous and help out when you can.

• Return all borrowed articles.

• Replace all damaged articles.

• Be honest in all transactions with the peasants.

• Pay for all articles purchased.

• Be sanitary, and especially establish latrines at a distance from people’s houses.

• Don’t take liberties with women.

• Don’t kill prisoners of war

This, again, built on the practice introduced at Jiangxi and applied during the Long March. Mao was very clear that the Red Army must accept a political role as well as its obvious military function. So, the Red Army was the CCP’s main propaganda weapon, showing the peasantry how life could be so much better under Communist rule. This was a remarkable change for a country that for centuries had experienced the brutality of armies, whether they be those of emperors, imperial powers, warlords or, indeed, the Guomindang. The Japanese Rape of Nanjing in 1937, for example, stood in stark contrast.

In contrast, the Guomindang couldn’t help itself and fought the Communists as much as the Japanese, and their engagement of the foreign invader lacked any sense of a national crusade.

The successful completion of the Long March was testimony not only to the validity of the Communists mission, but also the policies and wisdom of their leader, Mao Zedong. Indeed, the cult of Mao was born out of the Long March.

The myth of the Long March, the Yan’an spirit, this was what gave Mao almost god-like status. The Party was more than the individual, so much more. To contemplate breaking with that code was something few could live with, for it was to break with everything that had defined them. And as Michael Lynch concludes, ‘Mao was a beneficiary of such unquestioning party loyalty [one could say, the beneficiary]. Once he had become the undisputed leader of the CCP, he was regarded by members not simply as a political figure but as the embodiment of revolutionary truth.’ John S. Service, a member of an American mission at the end of WW2, contrasted what he saw at Yan’an with what he had seen at Chongqing, the Guomindang’s capital. He contrasted the veneration of Mao with the disrespectful way Chiang was viewed. Morale was high and there was no sense of war weariness, no sense of defeatism. There were ‘no beggars, no signs of desperate poverty’. The sense was, he recorded, that ‘we have come into a different country and are meeting a different people’. This  was the legacy of Yan’an and it owed everything to Mao.

The Great Leap Forward

I said last week that I feel Mao was a great leader out of power, but an awful leader in power. Last week we looked at him out of power, this week I’m going to take a look at the first of two disasters that were the end product of Mao policies. This first, the Great Leap Forward, was ideological and economic in nature but its cost was measured in human terms: millions of human lives.

In a developing economy, agriculture is critical to industrialisation. It needs to be efficient (which in agricultural economies it never was), efficient enough to export products, in order to pay for industrialisation (which is a very expensive undertaking). Also, agriculture needed to be more efficient in order to feed a growing portion of the population who, in the process of industrialising, would no longer be involved in producing food. There was also the matter of raw materials which agriculture provided industry with. This varied in different parts of the world but things such as wool, cotton or silk, for example. And also, with the majority of the population engaged in agriculture, this was the key market for manufactured goods before a country was in a position to export manufactured products to other countries. So, an agricultural revolution is nearly always an essential prerequisite for industrialisation.

But China was still in pretty much the same position in 1950 as it had been in 1750 when Chinese agriculture reached a tipping point – it no longer kept up with the needs of population growth. China`s best land, lying between the Yellow and Yangtse rivers, was overused and so was losing its fertility. Farms were also very small scale and so was inefficient. Something like a million elite landowners owned somewhere between 17 to 25 acres of land, but for the rest it was between 2 and barely 5 acres. By comparison most British farms today fall somewhere between 50 and 250 acres.

Like Russia, the Chinese economy under the communists was to be planned by the state. But in the First Five Year Plan, which ran from 1953 to 1957 Mao had turned both orthodox economic planning and Marxist economic planning on its head by focussing on industry before agriculture. A powerful state-owned industry, he argued, was the prerequisite for the collectivisation of agriculture which, in turn, was the prerequisite for socialism.

State investment in agriculture was negligible. Heavy industry that was the priority with the vast majority of state capital going to industrial investment: steel, coal, metallurgy, chemicals and machinery; and infrastructure like electricity and railways. Barely 11% of investment went to light industry, i.e. consumer goods. It was expected that the development of a consumer industry as well as the technological modernisation of agriculture would follow in the wake of heavy industry’s development.

Still, the First Five Year Plan had been a reasonable success, but it did leave problems: how to advance industrialisation in the consumer goods industries, how to create a more efficient agricultural industry (the biggest challenge of all), and how to pay for it. And as in all industrial revolutions, the city had already begun to suck in the rural population, hoping for work. China’s urban population had almost doubled from 57 million in 1949 to a billion by 1957.

Social problems existed too, notably what came to be known as the “three great differences”: between workers and peasants, between mental and manual work, and between town and countryside. The growing gap between town and countryside was the biggest issue for Mao, not just because the standard of living was better in towns (better but let’s not get carried away), but because better educational opportunities and better health care existed there too. The first plan had also been reliant on Russian support which came at a cost, and Mao wanted to rid China of its dependence on the Soviet Union. So, the second Five Year Plan was going to be really important for the People’s Republic.

This brings it to Mao’s second Five-Year Plan: his Great Leap Forward which planned to shift the emphasis from capital-intensive to labour-intensive industries, from heavy industry to agriculture and consumer industries. It was referred to as ‘walking on two legs’, industry and agriculture developing side-by-side, heavy industry and light industry developing side-by-side too.

‘Walking on two legs’ was to provide the answer. Light industry would provide inexpensive consumer goods for the peasantry, this would motivate the peasants to increase agricultural production, which, in turn, would stimulate the further development of light industry and would also finance heavy industry. The key to success, for Mao, was that the vast labour supply had to be made into an advantage, not a problem. It would be done by using labour-intensive methods in agriculture and light industry which would not require capital investment, so that investment could continue to be mostly directed towards heavy industry. This meant that light industry would be located in the countryside where it had the additional advantages of using local resources and of being able to utilise “slack” seasons when agriculture wasn’t so labour-intensive.

Mao was absolutely convinced this would be achieved by collective effort, an effort of national will, more than by technology and science. Looking back, Mao reflected on what the revolution in China had already achieved, pointing out that at key points, for example surviving the Long March and victory in the civil war, success had been the result of a stronger will over superior numbers and resources: ‘first and foremost, things are determined by people’s hearts and minds’, he said. ‘It has always been like that in history.’  And looking forward he was convinced that the Chinese way or the Maoist way: Mao’s belief in the masses, and their ideas, will, and actions, would bring continued success. What is more, in this great mass endeavour, people will find fulfilment far and above any material rewards they might gain. China, he told the Central Committee in October, 1957, would achieve the highest crop yields in the world and he boasted that China would surpass Britain in steel production in fifteen years and that it would also surpass Britain in cement, coal, chemical fertiliser and machine tools.

But Mao was creating a paradox: ‘China was to modernise without using modern methods. Not technology, but the physical exertion of the people …’ Mao’s optimism was lifted by the apparent success of a nationwide irrigation scheme that, in just four months, a hundred million peasants had hand dug ditches and reservoirs to enable twenty million acres to be irrigated. It was, indeed, an incredible achievement but it didn’t compare to what would follow.

So, industrialisation and a more efficient agricultural sector was to be achieved by ‘the pioneering peasants’. Mao’s faith in the peasantry, oppressed for centuries, untarnished by bourgeois ideas, was near-total, and he also had near-total faith in China’s youth. Practically, the answer lay in large communes, using the old market towns as their base. The communes would provide the structure, combining agriculture with industry and combining both with commerce. Mao was going to close the gap between city and countryside by bringing industry to rural China. They would also be responsible for such social services as education, health care and even self-defence.

So, the five hundred million peasants, still coming to terms with the massive changes in their lives as the communists first gave them land, then put them into cooperatives, still owning their own land but helping each other in working it, now faced a much bigger upheaval. For communes would not only change the face of the Chinese countryside, it would take away land ownership and change the very basis of their lives: the family. And the People’s Republic of China was not yet ten years old!

Out of approximately 750,000 cooperatives or collectives, 24,000 communes were formed. The commune, in which families from separate villages were brought together, became the basic institution of rural society. As we have noted, they were not merely organisation geared to produce things, crops or goods, they were social organisations, political organisations, military organisations. They were self-sufficient, more or less autonomous states within a state. They combined agriculture and industry, they did away with private plots, they did away with local markets, they formed their own militias. They combined production with education, by providing nurseries and creches, they were liberating women (so that they could do labour). They were the living vision of the communist society.

But they were artificial creations, impersonal, more communist than socialist. They changed life in the countryside more than anything else preceding them. Whatever private plots and livestock remained, pigs, chickens and the like, were subsumed into the commune, in nearly every case without compensation. Even such possessions as family cooking pots had to be handed over, literally for the “communal pot” for everyone would now eat in the mess hall. The mess halls replaced the traditional domestic kitchen, kindergartens were set up for the very young, and ‘Happiness Homes’ for the elderly: ‘the socialisation of household work’, all of which freed women for work in the fields. The bourgeois notion of the family was discouraged (though not destroyed).

Work was hard. Peasants were marched off to work, in step, to the sound of military music blaring from the loudspeakers. Officially everyone was only allotted six hours sleep every two days! However, peasants would leave their lanterns lit in the fields, with guards posted should a check be made, so that they could sleep. And if this was extreme, working from sunrise to sun set was the norm.

Road-building, bridges, canals, reservoirs, more irrigation schemes and dams, and most famously, steel production (much more of which later), were all undertaken by communal labour with minimal machinery involved.

The successes should not be lost from amidst the debris. Relying on local populations and local resources, and using primitive technologies, agricultural tools were manufactured and repaired, small chemical plants produced fertilisers and insecticides, crop-processing industries were developed, small power generators were produced; whilst local coal-mining operations and small oil refineries even benefited the national economy. And they largely resolved the problem of unemployment-underemployment.

There was a concerted effort in the communes to establish education in the mindset of the peasantry with a large number of primary schools opening as well as evening schools and “half-work and half-study” programmes focused on literacy and technology, even “red and expert” universities.

And it was ideologically in-tune with the Revolution. It was socialist-communist in nature, and this was a socialist-communist revolution being played out. It also sought to address China’s most pressing problems, notably an under-used massive population. Small-scale, labour-intensive industries would go a long way to addressing two of the “three great differences”: between workers and peasants and between town and countryside. And the third “great difference”, between mental and manual work, was being addressed by the concerted effort to establish education in the mindset of the peasantry.

However, the mainstay of the whole movement, and how it was to be judged, was steel and grain production, and in a disastrous manner, the two became entwined. And that’s what we’ll look at next week. It will be crazy and it will be tragic.

The Great Leap Forward: Farce and Famine

I said last week that our look at China’s Great Leap Forward would be both crazy and tragic and I call this episode ‘Farce and Famine’. You’ll soon see why.

Nowhere was the need for technology and science more graphically portrayed than in steel production. For it quickly became clear that China’s steel plants couldn’t meet the lofty targets set by Mao. But ‘China was to modernise without using modern methods. Not technology, but the physical exertion of the people …’ We quoted Mao saying so in the last episode. In what must have been an act of desperation, Zhou Enlai, who had been put in charge of meeting the steel targets, proposed that the “backyard furnaces”, traditionally used in the countryside to make the most very basic farm tools, be radically increased and that they produce steel on an industrial-scale. The countryside literally lit up with them. ‘Every hill, every field glowed with the light of the home-made ovens turning out steel in places where not a thimbleful of metal had ever been produced before’. The words of Sidney Rittenberg, an American journalist who lived in China from 1944 to 1979, and who was very close to the CCP’s leadership, including Mao. Another eye-witness, Roderick MacFarquar, a visiting academic, described a village scene: ‘People carried baskets of ore, people stoked, people goaded buffalo carts, people tipped cauldrons of white-hot metal, people stood on rickety ladders and peered into furnaces, people wheeled barrows of crude steel.’

By October, 1958 almost half of all steel made in China was coming from backyard furnaces, and at the height of the Great Leap some ninety million people, close to a quarter of the active population, were involved, abandoning whatever they usually did. This commitment had a knock-on effect for, with so many peasants diverted to the production of steel, there was no one left to harvest the grain. To make good the shortfall, schools were closed and teachers, students and any other non-essential workers, shop workers, for example, were redeployed into the fields.

Though noble in the manner in which enthusiasm tried to defy logic; it was logic that prevailed. The only steel of value – surprise, surprise – came from large foundries. The steel produced in the backyard furnaces, melted as it was from pots and pans and anything else that could be found, proved to be useless. It was collected, taken to secret dumps, never to be used. Still, Mao declared that 9 million tons of acceptable quality steel had been produced (by conventional means), below the target (and later, revised down to 8 million tons) but was still considered to be a great achievement. And he set fantastical new targets – 20 million tons in 1959 and 60 million tons by 1962.

As for in the paddy fields, the scientific methods used – close planting combined with deep ploughing – had supposedly produced phenomenal yields on experimental plots; up to 200 tons an acre, or so it had been reported, when one ton per acre had been the average yield, even in a good year. Consequently, the Politburo were predicting ever more wild increases, up to several thousand per cent, until even Mao doubted the figures. Still, he predicted a harvest of 430 million tons, twice the previous best harvest.

So that, despite the failure of the ‘backyard furnaces’ campaign (which was quietly dropped), at the end of 1958 when the Central Committee met at Wuhan, Mao felt able to declare the first year of the Great Leap a great success: ‘During this year, there have been so many good things. Trails have been blazed. Many things have been realised, about which we did not even dare to dream before.’ However, the majority of the Party leadership took a more cautious stance. The meeting reaffirmed the majority’s belief that communes should be seen as socialist in nature, not communist; and it called for a slower pace to bring in communism. Practically, it called for the restoration of individual ownership of such personal property as houses, furniture, family plots, tools and small domestic animals.

Meanwhile peasant morale was very poor. The work was regimented rather than communal, and hard, very hard and exhausting. The rewards were small; very, very small. Defence Minister Peng Dehuai, having returned home to Xiangtan in Hunan province, spoke of seeing the misery of the people and the wreckage left by the “backyard furnaces” campaign: ‘Happiness Homes with the elderly living in wretched conditions, lumps of useless pig-iron left to rust in the fields, trees cut down and houses stripped of their wood to feed the furnaces.’ Peng was also aware that the harvest had fallen far short of Mao’s targets and that the People’s Liberation Army were transporting what grain they could to relieve the worst famine-hit areas, and he would be aware of the growing unease amongst the troops, mostly peasants, as they received news from home of growing hunger. Peng would pay a price for his criticism. He was viciously and repeatedly attacked during the Cultural Revolution. In a “struggle session” he was paraded in chains wearing a large paper dunce cap and with a wooden board hung from his neck on which his “crimes” were written, before thousands of jeering Red Guards. At another “struggle meeting”, this time in front of 40,000 PLA soldiers, he was again led in chains and forced to kneel for several hours while listening to soldiers repeatedly denouncing him for his “crimes.” In prison he was tortured and beaten so badly that he suffered broken ribs and internal organs were damaged. He would eventually die in prison.

However, there was no getting away from the fact that the communes had been badly run and food shortages were beginning to take effect. First in the cities as basics such as rice, vegetables and cooking oil were all in short supply. Then, as efforts were made to feed the cities, supplies in the countryside suffered. The 1958 harvest had in fact fallen far short of Mao’s 430 million tons, far short of the government’s official estimate of 375 million tons, short too of its revised estimate of 260 million tons. The final figure, only released after Mao’s death, was 200 million tons. Still, an exceptionally good harvest, but the trouble was that the inflated estimates had led to rice being exported and, quite simply, to too much of it being ate, and so supplies quickly ran out.

The following harvest of 1959 (which was affected by bad weather: floods and drought at opposite ends of the country) was the worst for several years. However, though there were mitigating factors, the resulting famine was made worse, much worse, by a denial that Mao’s revolution could possibly fail. It was announced that the yield had been 270 million tons when, again after Mao had died, it was revealed to have been only 170 million. The 1960 harvest was again affected by bad weather – drought affecting more than a hundred million acres (a third of total cultivated land) followed by floods affecting another fifty million acres. Only 143 million tons was harvested. Both floods and drought made the transportation of grain impossible too.

Still famine did not officially exist. Wherever Mao visited an area, crops were moved from fields he would not be shown in order to give the appearance of abundance in the fields he did see. Photographs showing record harvests appeared in the newspapers too. In what came to be called the “wind of exaggeration”, crop figures continued to be grossly inflated, no local official would dare reveal the truth. That would run the risk of being labelled a ‘Rightist’, and that must be avoided at all costs – you’ll see why when we look at the Cultural Revolution.

With reality denied, the state cancelled the import of grain and sharply increased exports. This meant sharply increasing the quotas of grain the peasants were required to sell to government stores at minimal prices. So that, as agricultural output fell, state procurement rose. And if local officials were too fearful to tell the truth about the harvests, they were just as fearful about revealing the rapidly worsening plight of the peasantry. So that not only were relief supplies not sent into the worst-affected areas, but grain continued to be exported out of China, even from provinces that were at the epicentre of the unfolding tragedy. Anhui province, for example, where it is estimated that 8 million people died. Hoarders continued to be blamed for any problems that did exist. Arrests were made, in total ten million were sent to the laogai, the labour camps, where ironically many found themselves making aluminium kitchen utensils to replace the iron ones smelted down in the backyard furnaces. But tragically, the irony of all ironies, was that they were frequently starved to death.

The stark truth was that the reality of just what was resulting from the Great Leap Forward was always very different to what was being proclaimed. Mao, who rose to power in large part as a result of his understanding of the peasantry, had tried to defy centuries of tradition in the countryside. The peasants were used to subsistence farming, growing enough food for their family; more in the case of the rich peasants, but they were not used to growing for a market. Even where surpluses of significance were achieved, the weak transport system meant that the grain could not easily be transported. No consideration had been given to how the communes should be integrated into a national economy. They were simply given targets and left to run themselves.

Also, having rejected the role of all experts but particularly Soviet Union experts, Mao convinced himself that such a thing as “socialist science” existed and he put total faith in the “science” of the Soviet Union’s leading agronomist, Trofim Lysenko, who claimed to have discovered ways to grow “super-crops”, yielding sixteen times normal yields. In fact, Lysenko’s claims were without any base and had contributed to the famines in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. He had only got away with things because he was protected by Stalin.

The most ludicrous, and most tragic, application of Lysenko’s pseudo science has to be “sparrowcide”, the attack on sparrows across the Chinese countryside. The birds were blamed for eating the stored crops and the campaign used the masses in the most simplistic way. Peasants would go out into the fields, armed with pots and pans, banging them and screaming at the top of their voices (the children must have thought it great fun). The idea being that the birds, too frightened to land anywhere, would die of exhaustion. It worked, and there were very few birds left to eat the stored crops. The problem was that there were also very few birds left to eat the insects and pests that were responsible for the loss of much more of the stored crops than the birds had ever been.  

The result of such policies – the lack of incentive on the part of the peasantry, the “backyard furnaces” that took much-needed labour away from the fields, “sparrowcide”, being the examples we have looked at – plus bad weather meant that famine revisited China on a scale greater than ever before. Mao did no more than acknowledge that there were pockets of hunger, and these he blamed on mistakes by local officials, grain hoarding, and the weather.

The famine, which lasted from 1958 to 1962 was of such depth and lasted so long, that it could only have been a result of policies, not just weather. The number of deaths is staggering. One historian, Michael Lynch, puts the number at fifty million people in total. Philip Short feels the figure is probably lower, somewhere between 20-30 million. Maurice Meisner settles on a figure of 30 million. The provinces of central China bore the brunt of the horror. There was cannibalism with peasants eating each others’ children so that they weren’t forced to eat their own. Wives were also sold by their husbands – one less mouth to feed – and were grateful for it because it meant they could survive.

There were repeated times when I would remind students that, at its heart, history is always about people; their hopes, their dreams, their troubles. This is one of them: as many as fifty million deaths as a result of policies, and the refusal to admit that those policies were failing. Many millions of lives would have been saved if the problem had been acknowledged, and help asked for.

So, that’s the Great Leap Forward, a leap into a chasm more like. And just a decade later, Mao was to inflict another human tragedy on the Chinese people with the Cultural Revolution. And that’s what we’ll look at next week.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, to give its full grand title, lasted from early 1966 to Mao’s death in 1976, though its fiery phase ended in 1969.

But what was the Cultural Revolution?

The answer is not straightforward. From Maurice Meisner we get:

• ‘… his [Mao’s] final revolutionary drama, stimulating a cataclysmic upheaval …’

• ‘… his last desperate attempt to revive a revolution that he believed was dying.’

• ‘… the greatest tragedy of his [Mao’s] long revolutionary career’

But I think two central themes can be clearly seen in the different explanations that have been put forward for Mao’s decision to trigger the Cultural Revolution. It was a straight forward fight to hold onto political power and control of the Party on the part of Mao after the disaster of the Great Leap Forward. Or else, it was an ideological clash: radical Maoism, his notion of permanent revolution (that things have to be periodically shaken up lest a ruling class establish itself and complacency set in) and his wish to do nothing less than to remould the souls of the people, versus the more cautious pragmatism of such leading communists (and rivals) as Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping.

It was incredibly complex. With the Cultural Revolution, Mao claimed to be leading a great democratic movement by presenting himself as the embodiment of the collective popular will. It was, then, a democratic uprising against the bureaucracy which he had been fighting to destroy since the Great Leap Forward, yet it was also against the Chinese Communist Party which Mao, himself, headed. It was the climax of Maoism, the climax of revolution according to Mao’s undying faith in the masses. It attacked the “four olds”: old thoughts, old culture, old customs, old habits. From this perspective, the Cultural Revolution set out to destroy the past, and create a clean sheet on which to write the future. But two other themes, consistent in Maoism as it developed, and that feature in the Cultural Revolution, are its anti-intellectualism and its anti-urban bias. It used the Chinese youth as its front-line troops and “revolutionary successors”. And workers, the proletariat, were also activated.

There were important characteristics:

The cult of Mao, seen in a swim in the Yangtse, the little Red Book, the passion of the Red Guards and great rallies.

The use of youth, which was always more controlled than was apparent, and the brutalization of youth.

The use of violence: breaking the individual in “self-criticism” and “struggle” sessions, the use of terror, beatings and murders, the cleansing of class ranks.                               

And cultural vandalism.

Whilst in its fiery phase, lasting four absolutely crazy years, distinct stages can be detected:

A preliminary stage, a period of maneuvering as a result of Mao’s growing insecurity following the catastrophic failures of the GLF

The attack on the education system in which Deng and Liu try to intervene and stop the attack, and Zhou Enlai tried to act as a peace maker.

The period when Mao asserted control though he played little direct part. And in which Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, also grew in influence.

The most chaotic period in which victimisers became victims with factional in-fighting. Anarchy was widespread as the Cultural Revolution was clearly out of control.

Finally, the reactionary period with anarchy so prevalent that the PLA, the army,  had to step in and take control. The Red Guard were directed to the countryside.

The Cultural Revolution still stands amongst the greatest man-made upheavals in history. And it left a mark that dominated the political consciousness of Chinese, leaders and the masses, for decades afterwards, indeed it still has a lasting effect today.

So, we begin with the first, maneuvering stage.

Mao had been badly weakened by the failures of the GLF and even more so by the steady economic recovery after he had stepped back from the “front line” as he called it. But Mao was very uneasy about the weakening of the revolution, the clear signs of “capitalist tendencies”: markets and market forces in the countryside; a technocratic intelligentsia, resulting inequalities, including wage differentials in industry where piece rate work and bonus payments mitigated against the notion of collective class solidarity, and in the countryside, the return of individual family plots, rural markets, even rich peasants in the countryside weakened the commune. The “three great differences”:  between workers and peasants, between mental and manual work, and between town and countryside had reappeared and was again, growing.

The gap between the city and the countryside was growing most of all. One of the central principles of the Great Leap Forward, the industrialisation of the countryside, had been abandoned. And as peasants gravitated to the cities from nearby communes in search of work, they were put on temporary contracts, subject to dismissal at any point. Without security, they were on the lowest wages, they also suffered from minimal rights to social welfare. What is more the price of products that would aid agriculture, such things as chemical fertilisers and agricultural machinery, and basic necessities such as salt, kerosene, matches or cloth, were kept artificially high, benefiting the urban economy but adding to the burden of the rural economy. As for such things as bicycles or radios, few in the countryside could afford them. Education and health care was advancing much more rapidly in the cities too.

In a nutshell, China had been on an ideological rollercoaster ride: the years of consolidation followed by the First Five Year Plan had created a socialist China but one with clear capitalist tendencies nevertheless; this had been rectified to some extent by the Great Leap Forward. Now, however, in the wake of the Great Famine, a result of the Great Leap, the revolution was once again threatened by “capitalist tendencies”, created by the Party and the policies it had been pursuing.

The Party had abolished private property but had created new privileged classes: the rich peasants, the technocrats, the better paid workers, but most ominously, the Party bureaucracy, the Party cadres in village and town, many of whom were corrupt, but even if they weren’t, they oversaw the whole process. They didn’t simply allow it to happen, they enabled it to happen, they “made” it happen. And Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, in Mao’s eyes, were the chief culprits.

The Party leadership had become focused on social order, administrative efficiency, technological advances, economic growth. The people focused on order, security and their standard of living. So much so that the ideological goal, the transition from socialism to communism, the collective over the individual had been lost. ‘Increase production and so increase income’ had become the order of the day, and the goals, “the four good things”: watches, radios, bicycles, and sewing machines. In a sense, Mao was setting out to destroy what the revolution had created, so that he could save it. The revolutionary ideal had been lost. Mao wanted to restore that ideal. He wanted to refocus on the spirit of egalitarianism. What had happened in the Soviet Union, where the Party had become corrupted in its exercise of power, must not be allowed to happen in the People’s Republic. He also wanted to reignite the spirit of a peasant-based society.

Mao had reached the conclusion that the Party couldn’t be relied upon to ensure the revolution carries on so, one of his responses was a movement to train revolutionary successors which was begun in the spring of 1964. In all revolutionary, single-party, totalitarian-minded states (call them what you like) be they of the right or of the left in political nature, youth are seen as the bearers of the flame, the one’s most likely to carry the torch into the distant future. Less corrupted by the traditions of the past, or the influences of the present; if they can be properly directed, they can be relied on more than their elders. Hence Mao’s rather loose remark, ‘We must liberate the little devils. We need more monkeys to disrupt the palace.’

By the end of 1964 Mao was picking fights with Liu, Zhou and Deng, accusing them in so many words of lusting after power or abusing power. He talked of a capitalist class emerging in the Party, even of ‘leaders taking the capitalist road’ and of a new struggle ‘to rectify the power holders within the Party taking the capitalist road’. The ‘Four Clean-ups’ were given more generic descriptors: clean politics, clean economics, clean organisation, and clean ideology. This meant everything, and everyone, could be sucked in. Mao was set on destroying the Party so as to rebuild it in his own image. And nobody would get in his way.

The next stage, which would last throughout 1965 and into the following year, would centre first on Beijing University and Beijing schools. Students were urged students to ‘go into battle’. This was the spark that would ignite a flame that would burn like wildfire across China for the next four years and more. It was the “spontaneous” mass movement from below. Somewhere in all the excitement students began to refer to themselves as the Red Guard. In this way a movement that was to number more than ten million, militarised with their own uniform (including arm band and the ubiquitous ‘little red book’), began its life.

The cult of Mao reached new heights. The People’s Daily took up the cause: ‘Chairman Mao is the red sun in our hearts. Mao Zedung Thought is the source of our life … Whosoever dares to oppose him shall be hunted down and obliterated.’ So, by the middle of 1966 the Cultural Revolution had taken hold.

In a sign of what was to come, the president of Beijing University, along with others, was forced to kneel, wearing a dunce’s hat, punched and kicked, his clothes torn, bound with ropes and paraded through the streets.

Mao now made a decisive move to assert control.

On July 16^th Mao swam in the Yangtse River. The message behind the propaganda stunt was that, at 72, he was still physically fit; fit enough to lead the Party and the revolution. It was broadcast, loud and clear, in newspapers and newsreels across China. Three days later, Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, went to Beijing University and declared, ‘Whoever does not join us in rebellion, let him stand aside! Those who want revolution, stand with us.’ A week after that, a mass rally at the university was told to ‘overcome all obstacles, liberate their thinking and carry out a thoroughgoing revolution.

In August, Mao convened an enlarged meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee at which he declared, ‘There are “monsters and demons” among people present here’. The next day, he rounded on ‘certain leading comrades’ who had formed a bourgeois headquarters within the Party and had ‘encircled and suppressed revolutionaries, and stifled opinions different from their own … glorifying capitalism and denigrating the proletariat.’

The Central Committee unanimously accepted, though only after heated debate, a resolution which Mao had overseen known as the ‘Sixteen Points’ or ‘Sixteen Articles’. It was Mao’s blueprint for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. ‘Trust the masses, rely on them, and respect their initiative, cast out fear and don’t be afraid of disturbances’, was Mao’s rallying call. The Cultural Revolution was ‘a great revolution that touches people to their very souls.’ The resolution set out the Cultural Revolution’s main aims: to oust ‘those within the Party who are now in authority and taking the capitalist road’. As well as to destroy the four olds, ‘’the old ideas, culture, customs and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds, and endeavour to stage a comeback.’ One way or another, Mao was going to have his “class struggle”, and the agent of this struggle was to be the Red Guard. His pragmatist rivals for power would survive but would face a very tough time.

By this point Red Guard groups had been organised in universities and schools all over China, and they were taking their revolution onto the streets of cities and towns all over the country. With slogans like “It is Justified to Rebel” and “Destruction Before Construction”, they were very quickly numbered in their millions. On August 18^th, 1966, a million Red Guards crowded into Tiananmen Square. In an act of sheer theatre, they had marched into the square at midnight, singing revolutionary songs, carrying portraits of their beloved Chairman and waving banners. Mao appeared god-like on top of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the entrance to the Forbidden City, just as the sun rose. There were speeches praising Mao, their ‘great leader’, ‘great helmsman’, ‘great commander’, ‘great teacher’; ‘remoulding the souls of the people’. Then a girl student pinned a Red Guard arm band on Mao making him their “Supreme Commander”. The young crowd went wild in an emotional outburst the like China had never seen.

Life in China was about to get crazy, really crazy.

The Cultural Revolution spirals out of control

This week we are continuing our examination of Mao in power by looking at what must be the most chaotic, crazy period in any country’s history as the Cultural Revolution spiralled out of control.

Although the ‘Sixteen Points’ that were Mao’s blueprint for the Cultural Revolution had said that those in error should be given a chance to mend their ways, and that reasoning should be deployed, it also declared that revolution was an ‘act of violence’ and this is what the young Red Guard heard loudest, and violence soon followed. Cultural figures and social leaders such as teachers were humiliated, sometimes beaten to death, sometimes driven to suicide. They were forced to kowtow, given “yin-yang” haircuts (one half of the head shaven) and placards hung round their necks. Reasons became increasingly flimsy and the beatings and killings were often sadistic, even perverse. In one example, teachers were ordered to sit on explosives which they were forced to light themselves. In another example, teachers were buried alive. “Reactionary families” were also targeted, and men, women, young and old, children, even babies, were beaten to death. Nothing was done to stop the violence.

Old culture was destroyed too. Jiang Qing was put in charge of “socialising” culture in July, 1966, and she set about doing so with enthusiasm and a lot of energy. Ironically, the symbol of Jiang’s crusade was Mao’s favourite art form: classical Chinese opera. Traditional performances were banned. Only some half-dozen operas were accepted, specially commissioned to show the triumph of peasants over evil landlords, or workers over capitalists. They were regarded as extremely dull. Museums, libraries and art galleries were attacked, and private homes too, between a quarter and a third of homes in Beijing were subjected to searches by the Red Guards. Books and works of art were destroyed, Buddhist and Daoist relics too. Antiques, calligraphy (a great art form in China), paintings, porcelain, musical instruments as well as things like foreign currency, gold, silver and jewellery were all taken or else destroyed on the spot. But more than anything else, the target was books.

Ancient sites were also attacked: temples, city gates, monasteries and mosques too. The Forbidden City, however, was protected. Those wearing Western-style clothes or hairstyles were attacked. Streets were renamed and portraits of Mao appeared everywhere. Perhaps the best illustration of the ludracacy of what was going on was that, for a short time (short – for obvious reasons) traffic lights were changed so that red signalled “Go”.

The cult of Mao hit its greatest heights. Before starting work, workers would bow three times to a portrait of Mao, quietly asking guidance for the day ahead. The process would be repeated at the end of the days’ work, with workers reporting on what they had done. Red Guards advised their victims to pray to Mao for forgiveness. “Long live Chairman Mao” became a greeting. The ‘little red book’ was said to have the power to work miracles, curing the deaf and blind, for example. It was even said to have raised a man from the dead!

But as the fanaticism drove itself to new heights, it wasn’t long before the Red Guards turned on themselves and victimisers become victims.

As had happened before, indeed at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, those from “sounder” backgrounds, one of the ‘five kinds of red’ whose parents were workers, peasants, members of the PLA, revolutionary cadres and revolutionary martyrs (those most disadvantaged by the new Party elite), turned on those who were from the new establishment and the five black categories: the landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements and Rightists. Commitment to the cause had to be beyond suspicion. Rival groups clashed too.

Red Guards were allowed to ally with workers in factories and with peasants in communes. This meant, of course, that they would challenge the Party leaders in those factories and communes.

It was rapidly tumbling into anarchy. And the reason was that power had been handed to the Red Guards.

How and why was the violence allowed to happen? The Security Minister ordered the police to give the Red Guards free rein. ‘If the masses hate bad people so much that we cannot stop them’, he said, ‘then let us not insist. The people’s police should stand on the side of the Red Guards … provide them with information, especially about the five black categories.’ The “five black categories” were later enlarged to seven, to include spies and traitors; and then to nine, to include capitalists and “stinking intellectuals”. Mao saw the violence as inevitable. Violence was a necessary, even desirable, feature of revolution. Violence served an important purpose, the beatings and the executions were a visible symbol of the overthrow of the old order, and it committed the young Red Guards to Mao’s cause. Besides, it also united the youth with Mao’s own experiences as a younger man and a revolutionary, something they both sought.

So, the Red Guards, far from being reined in, were encouraged. The PLA, the army, was ordered to assist them, they were given free rail passes, free travel on buses, the use of trucks, they were provided with food and lodging, all so that they could more easily spread the revolution. It was also announced in October, 1966 that schools would remain closed until the end of the academic year. The eighth and last of the great rallies in Tiananmen Square, all attended by Mao, was held at the end of November, by which time twelve million Red Guards had seen their leader.

Concerned to ease the fears of veteran cadres, Mao admitted that he had not foreseen the turmoil the Cultural Revolution had caused, and assured them that neither he, nor the Red Guards wanted to overthrow them. Yet veterans continued to be targeted, even Zhu De, “father of the Red Army, it’s one-time Commander-in-Chief, and now eighty years old, was denounced as ‘an old swine’. And Mao ordered the moves against Liu and Deng to be intensified. So, the Red Guard intensified their public calls for their removal from office with rallies and wall poster campaigns. In a personal interview with Mao, Liu asked to be allowed to retire from the “front line” and see out his days on a commune as a humble peasant. Instead, Mao had his special telephone line linking him to other members of the Politburo cut, thus completely isolating him politically.

Still, by the end of 1966 even members of the Central Cultural Revolution Group, Mao loyalists, felt that the Red Guards had served their purpose, those ‘taking the capitalist road’ had been exposed, and now the Red Guards needed to be reined in before China plunged into total anarchy. There had been clashes with both workers and peasants as they defended the existing order where it worked for them. They railed against the “arrogance of youth” too. But it was more the lack of discipline, the level of violence and the level of disruption that was a concern. However, what had so easily been started could not so easily be stopped. Indeed, as 1967 began, the Cultural Revolution had spun into a new phase, with the focus on the provinces; the target, local, provincial and regional Party organisations. And this new phase began in Shanghai.

Shanghai, in 1967, was the biggest city in China with a population of eleven million. It was also the most industrialised. Shanghai was where the Chinese Communist Party had been founded in 1921. And it was to the Shanghai Party that Mao turned in the early 1960s to plot his Cultural Revolution. But it now turned on the local Party.

What began the revolt against the local Party, in Shanghai – and across China –  was the existence of “black files” that the police, and Party, held on countless citizens. These could be dusted off and used against an individual at any time. Encouraged by a directive from Beijing in October, 1966, that they be burned in public, the call for them to be destroyed, and raids by Red Guards to have them destroyed, was a central feature of the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai at the end of 1966.

But more radical, and more serious, was the push made by workers and a variety of radical groups to replace the Party’s committee as the legitimate government of Shanghai.

This is what Mao had envisaged in calling for the Cultural Revolution, the ‘Sixteen Points’ had referred to it as a new struggle ‘to rectify the power holders within the Party taking the capitalist road’. ‘Trust the masses’, he had said, ‘rely on them, and respect their initiative, cast out fear and don’t be afraid of disturbances’.

However, instructions coming from Beijing called on the workers to prioritise production and complete their eight-hour working day before participating in the Cultural Revolution. When the Shanghai Party Committee refused the Shanghai Workers demands, a group of the more radical workers seized a train bound for Beijing with the intent of taking their demands to Mao himself. The train was halted and put under siege for three days. Workers lay on the tracks, blocking all trains for thirty hours. Chen Boda, supposedly the leader of the Central Cultural Revolution Group, called on the workers to go back to work, saying that ‘joining the Revolution is only secondary’ and calling the whole affair ‘a serious matter to disobey Party instructions.’ Mao was now positioning himself against his own Cultural Revolution Group. And he would win.

The authority of the Shanghai Party Committee disintegrated. But the various radical groups couldn’t work together either and there were groups supporting the status quo too. Shanghai had become literally ungovernable. There were strikes, marches and demonstrations, and violence erupted as tens of thousands of supporters of the rival factions fought street battles. Factory production ground to a halt, the port and rail services were at a standstill and the municipal services collapsed. And remember, this was China’s largest and most industrialised city at the time.

It was the Central Cultural Revolution Group who eventually restored order, forming a Shanghai People’s Commune in February, 1967. Mao applauded their achievement, hailing it as a ‘seizure of power from below’.

We are now at the beginning of 1967 and it was time to reassert central control, and the instrument to be used was the PLA.

Seizing back control

We left things last week at the beginning of 1967 with the Cultural Revolution out of control and turning on the Chinese Communist Party itself. Even Mao now thought that “trusting the masses” had gone too far, and he also cast doubts on the usefulness of the new city communes. He could see that there was still a need for experienced Party cadres, for the Party to give its leadership. The “suggestion” was made that the Shanghai Commune become a “revolutionary committee”, and after just nineteen days as a commune it was renamed, the Revolutionary Committee of the Municipality of Shanghai. A move that was to be copied, eventually, all over China. But it was much more than a change of name.

The Red Guard had done its job, now it was the turn of the new order and the revolutionary committee had roughly a 50:30:20 membership between the PLA, Red Guard and workers’ organisations and veteran cadres. But as I said at the end of last week’s episode, it was the PLA that Mao would turn to in order to both redirect the Cultural Revolution and to restore order. Philip Short offers alternative explanations to Mao’s stance: Either the Cultural Revolution in questioning the Party at every level of its leadership had done what Mao had wanted it to do. It had shaken up a Party that had become too comfortable in power. Or, Mao had looked into the abyss and had taken fright and now rejected popular democracy. But what was very clear was that Mao was back in control. The “right to rebel” was only a right for so far, or so long, as Mao said it was.

It may seem particularly puzzling that Mao used the most conservative institution in any country, the army to oversee continued revolutionary change though at the same time maintaining order. But Mao had always seen the PLA as the most important revolutionary tool. We have seen this on the Long March and at Yan’an and throughout the civil war. So, it was now. But as you will see, it would not be easy.

The PLA now turned on out-of-control Red Guards and other extreme radicals in places as far apart as the town of Shihezi in Xinjiang in the very north east, in Sichuan, in Qinghai bordering Tibet, in Wuhan in Hubei, in the centre of China, and, in the south, in Hunan and Fujian provinces. Thousands of radical Red Guards were arrested, killed or wounded. Yet adding to the chaos, at the same time, in Shenyang, Nanjing, and Fuzhou, all eastern cities but running the length of China, there were serious incidents in which PLA recruits set themselves against their commanders. And radicals were still murdering ‘capitalist-roaders’.

Indeed, much of China was still in open rebellion, to describe it as civil war wouldn’t be an exaggeration. Red Guards and workers all over China were uniting to topple provincial Party committees. For example, the Party leader in Anhui (one of the worst affected provinces in the famine that followed the Great Leap Forward) was publicly humiliated, driven through the centre of Beijing on the back of a truck. Party leaders from Shanxi province, central China, and Yunnan province in the very south, committed suicide. One government minister was beaten to death.

In February, 1967, tension was clearly at a peak. Known as the ‘February Adverse Current’, Party veterans vented their anger. Ye Jianying, a veteran marshal and made a Politburo member in 1966, demanded to know at a joint meeting of the Politburo and Central Cultural Revolution Group whether the Party and the PLA were needed any longer. Vice-Premier Tan Zhenlin, who had been with Mao since the beginning, lost his temper: ‘Masses this and masses that!’, he cried. And he was enraged at the news that forty-year veterans had had their homes raided and been parted from their families. Not for the first time, Mao threatened another civil war (as if it wasn’t happening anyway). In reality, however, he shared his critics fears regarding the Party, the PLA and too, veteran cadres.

He declared the Red Guard’s mantra, ‘doubt everything and overthrow everything’, was in fact reactionary. The most radical of the Red Guards, the students, were brought back from the countryside. Schools were scheduled to reopen in March and students were encouraged to return to them.

Still chaos reigned and in September 1967, it was ordered that the Red Guards and radical workers’ groups should be brought into line. Red Guards would no longer be free to travel the country fermenting unrest. Students were ordered to return to their schools and colleges. Attacks on the army and government, even verbal attacks, were to end. Arms seizures were specifically forbidden. The announcement was made by Jiang Qing who took the opportunity to distance herself from her previous calls to rebel. There were public executions of organisers of violence and on National Day, October 1^st, Mao stood alongside the old generals who had been prominent in the ‘February Adverse Current’.

What had finally influenced Mao were the attacks on foreign embassies. In the worst such incident, in August, the British Embassy which was burnt to the ground. It helped Mao see the need for the order that the PLA provided.

But if we go back to April, 1967, we return to the original aim of the Cultural Revolution: the preservation of Mao’s power, and we see that Mao hadn’t finished with Liu and to a lesser extent, Deng. Red Guards raided Liu’s home again. An anti-Liu media barrage continued in the press and then, in July, crowds besieged Liu’s compound with Maoist slogans blazing out from loud speakers day and night; the anti-Liu campaign was reaching its climax. By the middle of July there were several hundred thousand in the streets outside Liu’s compound. Mao had ordered that Liu should not be dragged out of his compound but inside Red Guards subjected him and his wife to ‘accusation meetings’, subjecting them to physical abuse, bowed at the waist for two hours in the first meeting and forced to adopt the ‘aeroplane’ position, the classic Red Guards torture, in the second. Liu was punched and kicked too. Deng and his wife suffered similar treatment. Deng’s son was thrown out of a window, leaving him permanently paralysed.

In August Liu wrote to Mao resigning his position. He never received a reply. He was first separated from his family. His wife was imprisoned, his children sent to work as peasants. Liu himself was placed in solitary confinement in his home whilst evidence to justify his formal purge was gathered.The net rapidly widened to include anyone supposedly linked to Liu (and Deng), who were now charged with instigating most of the violence conducted by Red Guards and with the ultimate aim of overthrowing Mao and seizing control themselves. In reality, the purge targeted any group or any individual the Maoists wanted to target. In the spring of 1968, a complementary campaign was begun, ‘the cleansing of class ranks’, the ‘five black categories’ of landlords, rich peasants, reactionaries, bad elements and Rightists (the last three groups seen as ’newly emerged counter-revolutionaries’). It accounted for almost another two million suspects. Tens of thousands were beaten to death or else committed suicide; those who survived ended up in the labour camps. Such was the scale of these parallel campaigns that only the PLA could organise and conduct them. Indeed, Maurice Meisner maintains that, contrary to popular belief, the PLA were responsible for more deaths than the Red Guard.

To give just a few examples of what China underwent, in Hebei province, near Beijing, 84,000 people were arrested, of whom 2,955 were tortured to death, executed, or else committed suicide. In Yunnan 14,000 Party cadres were executed, and in Inner Mongolia in the very north a staggering 350,000 people were arrested, 80,000 of whom were beaten so badly that they were permanently maimed, and 16,000 died; all in an effort to purge just one man – the Party leader of the province. Over the next four years a total of ten million people would be suspected of plotting against Mao, and more than three million would be detained.

Meanwhile, in the summer of 1968 virtual civil war still raged in provinces at opposite ends of China. In Guangxi, for example, heavy weaponry, stolen from shipments bound for Vietnam, was used and parts of Nanning, the provincial capital, had been reduced to rubble. Here the reprisals against the more radical Red Guards – massacres and mass executions – were on a frightening scale. In the neighbouring province of Guangdong, fighting was so intense that the PLA imposed a dawn-to-dusk curfew in its provincial capital, Guangzhou.

In July, 1968, the PLA was given the additional responsibility of restoring order in schools and universities, and workers propaganda teams were sent in to prepare the ground for classes to presume after two years of disruption. Overall, going back to school, proved a very helpful move. It was further helped by the compulsory rustication programme which over two years had sent millions of young people ‘to go up to the mountains and down to the villages’ to live and work with the peasants. In reality, many of them ended up on PLA-run farms which were strategically built in the border regions. In addition, several million cadres and intellectuals were also sent out amongst the peasantry to run schools. So that both the most fanatical supporters of the Cultural Revolution and those who questioned it’s worth found themselves amongst the peasantry. Mao saw both programmes as another way of closing the gap between city and countryside (as well as solving a problem, of course: what to do with an army of youth who had been told that to rebel was good). The peasants saw the whole thing as another unwanted, unwelcome burden.

The PLA played the critical role in restoring order across society. As well as physically separating the warring factions and going into the schools and universities, and too their involvement in the rustication programmes, they were responsible for much else as well. The ‘cleansing of class ranks’ in the cadre schools, for example, and the military work teams that were sent into factories, newspaper offices and every government department. But above all was their dominant position in the provincial governments of China. As we have noted, the revolutionary committees were roughly a 50:30:20 split between the PLA, Red Guard and workers’ organisations and veteran cadres. Most were headed by military commanders or else PLA political commissars. In the provincial governments their presence was even stronger, almost three-quarters of positions were taken up by the PLA.

Mao came out of it all very well and the cult of Mao only grew stronger. It began to look akin to a “church of Mao”. His writings printed and distributed more than ever; statues, portraits and busts too. Throughout the country exhibition halls were built to chronicle his life and celebrate his deeds. School children began the day chanting, ‘May Chairman Mao live ten thousand times ten thousand years’. As the Red Guards had done in their heady days, pilgrimages were organised to public “sacred shrines”. And even in homes there was often something akin to a shrine dedicated to Mao.

Meanwhile, in October, 1968 the Central Committee met to finally deal with Liu Shaoqi. Such had been the depth of the recent purges, however, (two-thirds of its original membership had gone), that Mao had to circumvent party regulations to make it quorate. Liu was removed from all his official posts and was expelled from the Party. He was not only charged with following a ‘capitalist road’ but of being a traitor since the 1920’s, a spy first for the Guomindang, and later for the Americans. No less than 28,000 people had been interrogated to reach this exceedingly nonsensical conclusion but nevertheless it was reached and Liu was labelled a ‘renegade, traitor, and scab… [and] a lackey of imperialism, modern revisionism and the Goumindang reactionaries’. So that was that. Liu would die in November, 1969 of pneumonia, having been denied proper medical treatment.

As for Deng Xiaoping, under house arrest he was no longer a threat to Mao (though little did Mao know, he would be to Maoism). He was eventually sent, along with his wife, to an army barracks in Jiangxi where he worked part-time in a tractor-repair plant. However, he was not expelled from the Party. And he would, in 1973, be welcomed back by Mao, made First Deputy Premier, essentially Mao’s successor. Only to again fall foul of Mao in 1976 when he was stripped of all his posts though again, not his Party membership. But Deng was the great survivor, Mao died in 1976 and at the end of 1978, Deng took power and began to unravel Maoism. Another story maybe for another time!

But before all that. the Party held its Ninth Congress in April, 1969 (the first since 1958). The Cultural Revolution was described as a movement for ‘Party consolidation’, a resolution was passed to rebuild the Party, ‘Mao Zedong Thought’ was acknowledged as the sole authority for correct revolutionary action, class struggle would continue, and priority was to be given to agricultural development. So, everything seemed to back to where it was before 1966. Only for Mao to comment after the congress had concluded that after a few years another Cultural Revolution would most likely be needed! Really!

Consequences of the Great Proletarian Revolution

It is so important to step back and take stock of the impact of the Cultural Revolution, as well as to try and make sense of it. And China itself had to do this. With Mao’s death in 1976 and Deng Xiaoping effectively in control by the end of 1978, soon to be made ‘paramount leader’ (what a survivor!), China needed to put the whole affair in the rear-view mirror and move on. But it had some explaining to do before it could do that!

There was the legacy, or perhaps it would be better to say, the ghost, of Mao to be dealt with. For Mao still dominated the political psyche of the Party and the country. His huge portrait still hung in Tiananmen Square (it still does today), indeed his mausoleum was now the central focal point of the square. He was the great national hero. As Deng himself said, he had ‘built a country’, enabling China, after the century of humiliation’ to ‘stand up in the world’. Deng knew that a positive Mao legacy had to be carefully balanced with the political need to distance the Party from Mao’s “mistakes” before his policies could be abandoned, which was Deng’s intent. So, the ghost had to be laid to rest, but gently.

Deng, indeed, moved carefully but resolutely. Those branded as Rightists during the Cultural Revolution were rehabilitated and brought back into the Party and the state bureaucracy, even Liu Shaoqi was posthumously rehabilitated, Peng Dehuai too. These posthumous rehabilitations could not have happened without a tacit criticism of Mao. But criticism had to go further. The Cultural Revolution was described by the CCP as a ‘catastrophe responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic.’ Mao ‘initiated and led’ the movement, making “Leftist” errors, though ‘the evil ideological and political influences of centuries of feudal autocracy’ was seen as the root of the problem. An official stamp was given when the highly respected PLA Marshal, Ye Jianying, delivered a speech commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic on October 1^st, 1979. Ye blamed the disaster of the Great leap Forward on ‘Leftist errors’ that had violated ‘objective economic laws’. He also condemned the Cultural Revolution, blaming it on those who had followed an ‘ultra-Left’ line, naming Lin Biao and the Gang of Four – Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, along with Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan (all members of the Central Cultural Revolution Group), and Wang Hongwen  (who organised the Shanghai Commune) – scapegoats were needed, but implying that others were also responsible, including Mao.

The cult of personality that was such a dominant feature of Mao’s rule was also criticised, in much the same way as the cult of Stalin had been during the period of de-Stalinisation in the Soviet Union. Its remedy was claimed to be found in ‘collective leadership’ and ‘inner party democracy’, although Deng, in fact, held as much personal power as Mao had done. Mao Zedong Thought was given a makeover too, becoming the collective wisdom of the Party rather than just Mao, and Mao’s more radical “thoughts” were quietly dropped. Official histories of the revolution and the CCP now recognised the contribution of those who had, under Mao, been “brushed out” of events.

Lin Biao, as Defence Minister, had been head of the PLA during the Cultural Revolution and was the one responsible for taking the cult of Mao to a whole new level (he was also named Mao’s designated successor), only to be brought crashing down, literally. In 1971 he was charged with plotting against Mao and, in an attempt to escape his fate, he fled only for the plane taking him and family members to the Soviet Union to crash over Mongolia. In the desperate rush to flee, the plane hadn’t taken on its full load of fuel.

As for the Gang of Four, they would meet their fate some years later. The trial of the Gang of Four plus Chen Boda, the supposed leader of the Central Cultural Revolution Group began in November 1980 and lasted two months. And it was televised. The charges included political errors but also criminal offences: the illegal arrest, torture and general persecution of 700,000 people and the deaths of 34,000, plots to overthrow the government, and even to assassinate Mao. Proceedings were dictated behind the scenes by the Politburo.

The site of the Gang, manacled and placed in an iron cage, and the nightly news broadcasts that gave details of the torture of the victims of the Cultural Revolution served a number of purposes, all of them important to Deng’s regime. For Deng and other old cadres it was an act of political revenge. For the intellectuals who had suffered badly during the Cultural Revolution there was deep satisfaction in seeing their torturers getting their come-uppance. For all the surviving victims of the Cultural Revolution it was something of an emotional catharsis, a letting go. For Deng it also justified the continuing purge of Leftists, the ‘followers of the Gang of Four’. But above all else, the trial served to raise the question of Mao’s role, Mao’s responsibility, for what unfolded in the Cultural Revolution. Jiang Qing, the only one of the four to fight her charges, served this last purpose very nicely. At one point she declared that she was only doing Mao’s bidding, ‘I was Chairman Mao’s dog’, she said, ‘Whomever he told me to bite, I bit’.

Surprise, surprise. Chen Boda and the Gang were found guilty of both political errors and criminal offences. Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao were sentenced to death (later commuted to life in prison, the others all received long prison sentences), though Chen Boda was soon paroled due to ill health. Jiang Qing was eventually released in 1991, again for medical reasons, Hang Chunqiao too in 1998. Yao Wenyuan was released in 1996 and Wang Hongwen died in 1992 in hospital though still serving his sentence.

The ‘Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China’ was the Party’s assessment of Mao’s contribution to the revolution. It was issued on June 27^th, 1981. Some 4,000 Party leaders as well as theoreticians were involved in its writing which took fifteen months and almost endless drafts, all overseen by Deng. It presented a balanced account. Mao was highly praised for his leadership of the revolution throughout many years of struggle, and too for his ‘brilliant successes’ – economic, social and political – in the early years of the People’s Republic. This was a genuine recognition of what Mao had achieved, of what would most likely not have been achieved without Mao.

But he was condemned for the “mistakes” made: For the economic and social disasters of the Great Leap Forward. Blamed, too, for party democracy to be usurped by the cult of Mao. And above all, he was held responsible for instigating the Cultural Revolution, condemned as a decade-long catastrophe ‘responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic’. Mao had allowed his utopianism to override the objective laws of Marxism-Leninism. The overall conclusion, that Mao’s ‘contributions to the Chinese Revolution far outweigh his mistakes’ was a political necessity; but ultimately the Resolution was as damning of Mao as Khrushchev’s Secret Speech had been of Stalin.

So, the Party would continue to make use of Mao’s legacy as a unifying force, a revolutionary, nationalist and moderniser. His writings continued to be quoted, at least the right selections, his image continued to be officially portrayed, but he was no longer seen as a demigod, and his mistakes, now seen as ‘comprehensive in magnitude’.

But the Party itself cannot be let off the hook by history. Though Red Guards and workers had been encouraged to rebel, and rebel violently, direction from above alone doesn’t adequately explain why such a level of violence had been unleashed. Maurice Meisner considers this, arguing ‘The opposition was by no means confined to a few radical extremists, for the whole history of the Cultural Revolution clearly reveals that workers, students, and peasants harboured bitter resentments against Party cadres in general, and not simply against the mere “handful” officially termed ‘anti-socialist rightists.’ Without that widespread popular resentment against bureaucratic privilege, it would be difficult to explain why millions responded to the Maoist call to rebel.’

And, despite Mao’s best intentions, a self-serving party bureaucracy had developed, and had survived. It begs the question, therefore, just what had been achieved out of the chaos? Party committees were re-established in all provinces, effectively emasculating the provincial revolutionary committees. And other than those who had crossed the line, Mao saw to it that those who had been purged during the Cultural Revolution, leaders and the many lower Party officials who had been ousted, returned to the fold, and to similar positions in the Party. So, little had changed in that respect.

The Party reinvented itself and re-established its authoritarian control over the people. This meant that one of the most cherished aims of the Cultural Revolution, handing real political power to the masses, had been cast aside. It was a huge retreat. The Party’s leading cadres, at all levels, continued to benefit from a situation in which they had become the new elite with material rewards, enjoying privileges and, in the process, exploiting others. There were twenty-four ranks with pay scales far above the average of peasant or worker. There were also perks like free meals and “expenses” not enjoyed by peasants or workers. And for those higher up the ranks, there were bigger perks like better housing, access to special shops, and so more goods, access to Party holiday resorts, chauffeur-driven cars, even servants. The only difference between them and the old elite is that their position was based on political power alone, the old elite from property that begat political power.

But we must also consider the human price that had been paid, and indeed, the price was staggeringly high. The Cultural Revolution wrecked the lives of not only its targets but many of the Red Guards themselves as it turned on itself and as we have seen victimisers became victims. So, any analysis of the Cultural Revolution must include that human price: lives lost, bodies maimed, careers ruined. The cost in lives can only be estimated, nobody took count. As we have seen, the official indictment of the Gang of Four when they were brought to trial in 1980 was that they were responsible for 34,000 deaths between 1966 and 1976. But this is way short of the true figure. A widely accepted national figure puts the total deaths at 400,000.

But the price paid by the Chinese people must be measured by more than deaths, final though that is. For countless numbers were left maimed or else psychologically scarred. The historian, Michael Lynch, quotes from both sides of the divide: a former Red Guard, Lo Yiren, who reflecting honestly, commented ‘We became beasts. There was not a human being left in China. We were worse than beasts. At least beasts do not slaughter their own kind.’ And Harry Wu, a dissident who spent nineteen years as a political prisoner in Mao’s laogai, said, ‘Everybody in China has suffered, or knows somebody who suffered…. You could call it a class war, but it was worse. It was Chinese savaging Chinese.’

And as we have seen, the Cultural Revolution spread its net ever wider. There was the ‘cleansing of class ranks’, the factional battles, ‘struggle sessions’ with their beatings, the investigations that relied mostly on torture, children who denounced their parents, children who suffered because of their parent’s alleged political sins or else their social origins. Those numbered in their millions who were sent to prison or labour camps, or else internally exiled in remote areas. The human cost can hardly be exaggerated. But a number of misconceptions need to be put right. The greatest number of deaths were not found amongst Rightists but amongst Mao’s fiercest supporters, the Red Guards and workers’ organisations; and they died at the hands of the PLA, the ‘peerless people’s army’.

It should also be noted that the Cultural Revolution was essentially an urban phenomenon and its main actors-victims were students, urban workers, party cadres and intellectuals. The countryside was mostly quiet and agricultural production was not affected, growing at a rate of 2% per year.

The Party did call on poor peasants to undertake their own class struggle and for all peasants to fight against the ‘four olds, but in the countryside food production was always the priority and Red Guards were actually prohibited from entering villages until it was almost all over. Indeed, many villages were unaware that the Cultural Revolution was taking place! When it spread belatedly into the countryside, just as it was on the wane in the cities, in 1968-9, it had none of the intensity that the cities had experienced. What happened also varied enormously from region to region and village to village. Some villages split into similar factions as those in the cities, but often any divisions were on the old landlord, rich peasant, poor peasant basis, or else based on clan ties. The one common phenomenon was the intensification of the cult of Mao with communal ‘rooms of loyalty’ built in many villages and “shrines” dedicated to Mao in family homes.

What of China’s youth that had provided Mao with his eager foot soldiers, the Red Guards? Schools and universities – teachers, professors, many of whom had been brutally treated, at the very least humiliated, and the students themselves – were scarred and cowered by the experience of the Cultural Revolution. Universities were affected most. By the mid-1970’s they were still only enrolling a third of the students that had been enrolling before the Cultural Revolution. They were lifeless places, without any sign of intellectual spark. The Red Guards themselves, as already noted, had been sent to the countryside to learn from the peasants. Between 1966 and 1976 another seventeen million of China’s urban youth would follow them. Few enjoyed the experience. They regarded themselves as “the lost generation”.

Other than in dealing with its own, Liu and Deng and those accused of following the Liu-Deng line, the Cultural Revolution was at its most brutal in dealing with ‘the stinking ninth category’, Mao’s delicate term for intellectuals. Not only did they stick out like the proverbial “sore thumb”, the most obviously bourgeois group, living a relatively privileged life, but they were utterly vulnerable, small in numbers and with no organisation that could protect them. Attacked by the Red Guards for being what they were, they were also attacked by Party cadres desperate to deflect attention away from themselves. Their fate, after being bullied and beaten, was to be arrested, jailed, or else sent to labour camps, or at best, sent to work with the peasants. No wonder they enjoyed the trial of the Gang of Four.

Culture itself had, of course, been another victim. China really was a desert when it came to culture in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. Writers didn’t write, artists didn’t paint, actors and musicians didn’t perform. There were few new films. Anything produced before 1966, books, art, music, operas, plays, films were no longer available. Libraries, book shops, art galleries were closed or else stripped of anything that was unacceptable (which was most things). You could, however, still read the thoughts of Chairman Mao!

The question that always bugs me though is “Why?” No matter what authoritarian regime we look at (and there have been a frightening number), the question is always: Why did people allow it to happen? Considerations include the state’s near-monopoly of power – the police, the courts, the army – and the power of the state to control the media, direct propaganda, develop a cult of personality, and inflict terror, carefully targeting its victims (and by the way, note that terror is applied not on the victims of abuse, they are tortured, but terror is applied on the rest of the population who fear they might be next).