China's recent rise has made many uncomfortable with its direction as a world power. The experience called China and its thinking are so very different to that in the West that misunderstanding is so easy, leading to unnecessary fear and unwarranted optimism. If Russia is a riddle in an enigma, China is even more mysterious, with little contact with Western history until lately, different religion & philosophy and even different basis for its language.
While I am not a scholar or an expert in the field, I find most analysis of China's foreign policy ignores the history and culture of this great nation and so I will attempt to explain how China's foreign policy is rooted in its history and its culture. The timeline of the Chinese dynasties here may help put things into historical perspective. Also, by culture, I do not mean the arts, although that is an element, but I mean the way people think and behave in the social sphere.
The article got much longer than I expected and is now part of a five-part series. In the process I all realised that what I really want to do is to share insights into Chinese culture, philosophy and practices, which shaped and are shaped by its history. Many non-Chinese observers view China as a mirror of their own experience but while there is much that the Chinese culture shares with the rest of the world, being part of the human world after all, there is also much that can be very alien to it. And of course, a great deal lies in the middle - same drives expressed in different conditions. So, I hope I can help the Western mind understand China using an examination of its foreign policy as a convenient vehicle. You will need to keep this intention in mind as this series is not intended to be a complete thesis of all the topics it touches on.
The first article in the series is here and the previous article is here.
Is China a threat
I think we may need to explain what the debate is and who is China deemed a threat to. China's rise is often interpreted as a challenge to American sole superpower status. Although it is clear that no empire will last forever and the American empire is no different (at best, it can probably hope for is to be subsumed into a successor global identity based on America's professed values), the debate is whether the United States will be superseded by China. There is also the concurrent question of whether China's Sinitic culture is a threat to the broader Western culture, ala Huntingdon.
Causes of Century of humiliation
I will not add to the extensive bibliography on the Century of humiliation and the use of opium to exploit the Chinese, both subjects written by more competent writers than me but let me just sketch a few highlights to place things within context. The period started with the First Opium War in 1839, and ended with the Communist take-over in 1949. The main stories of national humiliation included the burning of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing during the second Opium War in 1860, entry of foreign armies into Beijing ending the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 and the Rape of Nanking during the Second World War. My focus here is to examine the internal causes of the decline that led to humiliation and the impact of the humiliation that last to today. I will only refer to salient points in history to illustrate my points, and should not be considered as complete descriptions of historical events. While much has been made of Qing decline having started with the Opium Wars, the seeds of the decline were probably economic and sown much earlier. The Qing dynasty reached its zenith in the 18th century with restoration of economic stability. At that point, it still controlled some 20% of the global economy and was strong enough to rebuff British and Dutch entreaties for free trade. This economy stability led a vibrant expansion of domestic trade.
Difficulties in fuelling this economic expansion using imported silver was one of the factors behind the innovations behind the Qing banking system. Qing promissory notes, bankers' drafts and more matured forms of credit oiled more sophisticated transfers of funds demanded by the ever increasingly complex distribution networks. Paper money invented in the Song Dynasty was greatly expanded by Qing merchants rather than the government which continued to rely on metal coinage. That, however, proved insufficient for the growing economy to the point that by late 18th century Spanish silver dollars were circulating in the south as a parallel currency. I would hesitate to draw similarities, though, with say the use of US dollars in failed economies like Venezuela today because, inter alia, physical and economic borders in those days were rather more porous and Spanish dollars were the common currency throughout most of South East Asia as well. Chinese governmental economic policy until then was rather limited to ensuring food security and running state monopolies in some essential commodities. The Qing government did intervene more in the economy while simultaneously liberalising other sectors to make the overall economy more efficient. Still, it would be considered very light touch regulations today and we all know from the 2008 financial crisis that light touch is not a good approach to regulations particularly with banking innovations that governments did not lead or understand.
As merchants got rich, it drew in more talents from a social system which until then looked down on the merchant class as non-producer of economic goods. In particular, it drew in candidates for the civil service entrance examination - both candidates who failed, and those who would otherwise have unhesitatingly entered the public exams system (yes, kids, we can blame the Chinese for yet another of their many inventions: public exams). This and the tilt in the financial, social and political power balance towards the merchant class left subsequent generations of Chinese civil service less capable of meeting challenges in governing an ever more complex China. One consequence of the sea bans and the focus of land-based threats was that China gave up control of the seas to European traders explicitly backed by their ever more self-confident governments back home. Up until then, Chinese foreign trade took place far from their home waters and was more easily controlled by the central government, who at times was even able to aspire to hold a monopoly in international trade during the sea bans. But aggressive European trading expansion brought foreigners onto the shores of China, disorientating the civil service unused to dealing with equality on two fronts: foreigners who considered themselves equal or superior to Chinese in all fields, and local merchants who considered themselves equal to envoys of the emperor.
Oh, and the peace the Qings eventually brought in the late 17th century also proved to be its undoing as the army atrophied. Its role shifted from protection from rebels and invaders to impressing the populace with displays of soldiery and weaponry - Instagrammable rather than effective. Officer commissions became hereditary rather meritocratic to preserve the upper echelons of the officer class for the ruling Manchus. Peace and the banning of guns outside of the military deprived the military of the need to innovate and Qing military technology declined. (Interesting note: Qing artillery development was in part facilitated by the Jesuits) And, in common with the complacent civil service, corruption took over much of the incentive for military service entrance.
So essentially, the China at the start of the Opium Wars was ruled by a slowly weakening civil service, slowly losing control over an economy they did not understand in an increasingly hostile environment their strict Confucianist world view was unable to imagine. In short, Chinese decline was very much in Chinese hands and the Europeans arrived just at the right time to exploit it. The Chinese response to European encroachment consolidated by the unequal treaties were based on tried and tested ancient ways of tying barbarians down in agreements to buy time to ply them with the luxuries of civilisation until they were sufficiently weakened for the Chinese civilisation to strike back. This unfortunately failed as the pace of European technological advancement far outran the pace of Chinese reforms; the distance to European power centres insulated them from Chinese attempts to weaken them and the failure of modernisation in China held back by the reactionary regime living in splendid isolation of the Forbidden City, meant that the old methods did not work.
None of this imply that opium did not play a role. The first imperial ban against opium trading was promulgated more than a century before the First Opium War and that was really before the British, or more accurately the British East India Company, got into the act. The Portuguese were the ones who expanded the sale of opium to China, having previously been imported for medicinal purposes in pre-European days. While the British initially ignore the imperial ban, the real explosion of opium trade took place after the 1833 Charter Act passed by the British Parliament to eliminate all of the British East India Company's monopoly of trade to China, opening the way for anyone to sell opium to China. Thus, by the start of the First Opium War, some one fifth of the silver available in China was used to pay for opium. Opium addiction as a social problem in China was only eradicated under the Communists but the remnant of the opium trade then focused on South East Asia via the Chinese diaspora, and was soon serving American GIs in Vietnam, from where narcotic use spread to the United States. So, if Americans wish to blame someone for their drug culture, they could do well to start with an obscure pre-Victorian British trade law.
The place of the Chinese revolution
The military losses during Century of Humiliation were particularly jarring for a people schooled in the concept of tianxia, especially when the losses were to a cultural colony like Japan in 1895. The Chinese court did what people with big egos do when taken down - deny. The denial did delay the military, economic, social and political modernisation China desperately needed, particularly under the Empress Dowager Cixi, who held sway at the imperial court until the waning years of the dynasty. The nightmare of enduring one humiliation after another ended only with the promulgation of the People's Republic in 1949.
Sun Yat Sen's revolution of 1911 which ended the last dynasty could not have lasted as Chinese history has never been democratic in the Western sense of the world and did not have any democratic institution to sustain it, beyond the education of a small circle of youths and elites. Within a year, the capital came under the rule of that staple of Chinese interregna: the warlord. Yuan Shi Kai declared himself emperor and just as swiftly was deposed, leaving China to descend into a patchwork of warlord domains culminating in the civil war between the communists of Mao Zedong and the nationalists of Chiang Kai Shek, successor to Sun. (note: All Chinese names in this series follow the Eastern name order and I will preserve respect for Chinese names by putting the surname first followed by unhyphenated given names. Spellings of names follow the convention of the country they are from: pinyin spelling for mainland China and traditional spelling elsewhere. Oh, and by the way, the names of emperors mentioned here are not their personal names but the names of their reign.)
Both the Kuomintang and its successor Communist Party grew out of resentment of the humiliation suffered by China, with Kuomintang's genesis as the Revive China Society founded in the 1890s while the 1919 protests at the Treaty of Versailles awarding the formerly German-controlled Shandong province to Japan was the intellectual origin of the Communist Party. With such origin stories, it is no surprise that restorationism is very much in the DNA in China's political elites. Kuomintang in Taiwan have subsequently ditched this but it still took decades of being out of power on the mainland before it reformed itself, seeing itself as Taiwanese rather than Chinese.
Interesting fact for those who argued that the Chinese civil war was a conflict between two competing ideologies: the Chinese Nationalists who fought the Communists were initially sponsored by the Soviets on the grounds that the industrially-based Nationalist movement was the more ideologically-logical next step towards a socialist paradise than the agriculturally-based Communist. The Nationalist Kuomintang party was organised with a Politburo at its apex and appoints political commissars to assert its control over the armed forces, much like in Soviet-style communist parties. Both these features were only done away with this century. It was also decidedly anti-merchant even during the civil war period and its success in Taiwan was very much ironically built on early agricultural reforms in the communist mould. So, the Kuomintang were not ideological opposites of the Communists - indeed, they were ideological kin.
Mao's revolution follows the traditional Chinese polity of distributed centralised autocracy. By distributed centralisation, I mean that like with any other autocrats, the instinct of China's rulers has always been to centralised but because China is so large, there are practical limits to a ruler's ability to assert control all the way down to local government level. Hence the Chinese adage the mountains are high and the emperor is far away. The Xia dynasty did not employ a tributary system out of respect for local autonomy or a belief in the principle of subsidiarity but because of the lack of an effective communication system common in the classical world. Even today, the government in Beijing have problems enforcing its directives onto practically autonomous southern provinces with independent sources of finances from the special economic zones, and therefore patronage. In politics as in life, it is ultimately all about who has money.
Mao's revolution was essentially a nationalistic one with communism as a convenient tool to legitimise its ascension and provide a complete cultural environment to break past loyalties with competing cultural legacies that threatened their legitimacy. It was not ideological beyond the surface, which is why it was easy for the more lasting Deng revolution to don the trappings of capitalism while cherry picking features of the communist system that kept themselves in power. The lip-service nature to ideology enabled Mao to break with the Soviet Union, its ideological partner and hitherto sponsor in 1960 when it became expedient to do so. There was also no position for a chief ideologue like the one Suslov unofficially filled in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as ideological purity in the Chinese Communist Party was a rather much fluid concept, depending on the exigency of the moment and the leadership style of the leader.
Reclaiming its history and historical role
Surprising to many, the autocratic regime in Beijing always ensured it is legitimate in the eyes of the populace. The barrel of the gun does contribute but only in a small way and as a last resort was employed only once in a significant manner during the Tiananmen protest of 1989 (The term 'Tiananmen Incident' properly refers to the 1976 protest triggered by the funeral of Zhou Enlai). Though one could argue that more died by the bullet during the Cultural Revolution, but that was a revolution in itself, not an attempt to quell one. But in many ways, violence at Tiananmen was only the quick fix. The Chinese Communist Party held in-depth studies to conclude that high inflation, corruption and wealth & opportunity inequalities were what emboldened its enemies leading to the protests, not just democracy per se and instituted reforms to redress the grievances, which accelerated economic growth even more. Oh, and of course, the studies found exposure to Western values were also to be blamed, leading to the Great Firewall of China. In many ways, the requirement to rule with the consent of the ruled also apply to Communist China. As a nationalistic revolution, its legitimacy under Mao was reliant on the restoration of national pride not ideological purity. That essentially was the original communist social contract: We give you peace and pride in being Chinese and you let us stay in exclusive power. Mao's revolution succeeded by giving the people a rapid transition out of the interregnum that often accompanied Chinese change of dynasties, though one could argue that the Cultural Revolution was the last throes of that same traumatic interregnum which only ended with the death of Mao in 1976.
Mao did restore Chinese pride by ending foreign intervention in its affairs. Not just politically but also culturally. Much of arts and culture that largely appealed to the landowning class, of which Mao was a proud nemesis, were dismantled. Any remaining talents were redeployed to support the new regime, particularly Mao's cult of personality. Particular venom was reserved for objects of foreign culture, like Western clothing, dance halls, music and all foreign symbols were purged from Chinese daily lives save for icons of Marx, Lenin and Stalin.
On taking over, foreign commercial assets were of course nationalised and foreigners were gradually ejected. Even religions were nationalised, following the practice of the emperors who held tight control over religions. Local religions without international links like Buddhist and Taoist temples were easily brought under state control. By 1954, Protestant churches were merged into a state-controlled church while the Patriotic Catholic Church was set up in 1957 to be independent of any links to the Vatican, with any dissenting clergy expelled.Keeping the memories alive
Victimisation has always been used by the Chinese Communist Party as the basis of its legitimacy whenever its legitimacy was threatened. During the Cultural Revolution it was the victimisation by the bourgeoise still fresh in memory, over which the communist had triumphed. This victor narrative was brought to an end with the crisis of belief in the Communist Party after the Tiananmen incident. In those more economically liberating times, the Communists fell back on the Century of Humiliation victimisation, with the promise of 'national rejuvenation' and all its associated implications of the restoration of past imperial grandeur and regional domination.
The two victimisations are related in that the one led to the other, two faces of the same coin; just a difference in emphasis. During the Mao era, the ruling elite of land-owners & civil servants under the aegis of the emperor oppressed the peasants, while in the post-Tiananmen era, it was foreigners exploiting Chinese. In the process of the shift, the imperial period, especially the Han, Tang and Ming dynasties, was rehabilitated for the grandeur they brought China to which the current regime aspires while the Japanese lost their role in facilitating the communist takeover. Apparently, it is in the records of the Chinese Communist Party that when the Japanese prime minister tried to apologise for invading China in the 30s during talks to normalise diplomatic relations in 1972, Mao was said to have thanked the Japanese instead as the invasion gave pause to the civil war and strengthened the communists while weakening the Kuomintang.
This collective memory was kept alive by indirect references in the official media, much of it in conjunction with implicit contrasts between the morally indefensible practices of the West and the civility of Chinese customs. One example would be the regular citation of European colonialism, in particular the British, whenever China's domestic policy is criticised (on Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong), with the implied narrative that 'at least China never set up colonies to exploit others'. Recent recognition of Kuomintang efforts in the war with Japan was aimed rapprochement towards Taiwanese reunification with the motherland but also had the objective to retaining the narrative of Japanese aggression against a defenceless China in the public consciousness. China is also attempting to claim the role of torchbearer of poor countries trying to develop itself while righting past wrongs of Western 'ecological imperialism'.
There are plenty of opportunities for the populace to be reminded of the humiliations by foreigners, and most of these are state led. Museums and exhibitions are common places to keep the communist narrative alive with institutions such as the Opium War Museum, Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall and the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, The last, not to be confused with the newly reconstructed Summer Palace in Beijing and elsewhere, was preserved in ruins from its burning by British troops in 1860 to provide the suitable backdrop for guided tours that 'discuss' the pain inflicted by barbarous foreigners on a vulnerable China: it is easy to see how the ruins of the Old Summer Palace has become a pilgrimage of sorts for a small but growing band of China restorationists.
The Road to Rejuvenation permanent display in the China National Museum was started in 2011 as the Road to Revival and the introduction in its website will leave you in no doubt of the mindset-forming propaganda of the state-run exhibition: "The Road of Rejuvenation is a permanent exhibition showcasing the explorations made by Chinese people from all walks of life who, after being reduced to a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society since the Opium War of 1840, rose up to overcome their humiliation and misery, and tried in every way possible to rejuvenate the nation."
None of this is to say that the wrongs done to China in the past is justifiable in any way but efforts at restorationism of past glories only served to delay the just peace all of us are entitled to. Victims elsewhere have brought together victor & vanquished, victim & tormentor for annual commemorations of victory & victimhood to emphasise the dangers of seeking glory on the battlefield but not assigning blame to current successors of wrong-doers of the past: think the joint minutes of silence in Normandy and the quiet bells of Hiroshima. China, on the other hand, continue to remember the past losses suffered by a hitherto dominant power as an unblamed victim by uncivilised outsiders, all at the service of legitimising the continuing grip on exclusive power by the ruling elite - this can only store conflicts for the future.
The next article in this series is here.
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