Chinese History Revisited

I fretted over writing the review of this book a few weeks.

Prof. Fairbank was an old China hand, and teacher of modern Chinese history at Harvard until 1977. He was the editor of 6 volumes of The Cambridge History of China. His insights into China are important. Still, the book is somewhat dated and a gloss. Prof. Fairbank does not treat modern Chinese history in depth, or delve into some particular thread of it. Rather, this book is an extended introduction to modern Chinese history; a longer than expected overview of the subsequent 6 volumes. You just have to read the 6 volumes to get the nitty-gritty of it.
 

First, in the order of history, is the question why the Ching dynasty - the Manchus - failed so miserably? This question is made all the more important when we compare 19th century China to Japan. Following Commodore Perry's appearance in Yokohama harbor in 1856, the Tokugawa Shogunate collapsed. The Japanese aristocracy, the samurai, demanded a response to the West in terms Westerners would understand; thus, the Meiji Restoration. The central tenet of the changes in Japan was that Japan should be a world power; an empire, just like Great Britain. To accomplish that, there had to be loyalty to the Emperor who stood for the nation. The restoration of symbolic power to the Emperor overthrew the Shogun, and was actually a coup d'etat by an elite group of military officers. In the short period from 1865 until 1905, Japan became a conservative, constitutional monarchy, started a modern economy, built a modern Army and Navy and defeated China and Russia in border wars. Japan demonstrated that Asians could play the Great Game.

While all of that was going on just across the China Sea, China disintegrated. There was no demand by the upper classes to modernize. The Chinese military was incredibly backward and unable to resist other Empires' grabbing of ⌠spheres of interest.÷ Instead, the Mandarins profited from Western and Japanese incursions into Chinese territory by making themselves middlemen between the Imperial Manchus and the other Imperial agents. The Chinese people were abused and forgotten in the process, so the actual standard of living in China decreased throughout the 19th century.

The Ching government was totally self-interested and lacked any understanding of the modern world. They were more concerned about possible attacks from the North and West than the actual onslaught from the sea. This was the result of their Manchurian heritage, and their persistence in separating themselves from the Han Chinese. What few attempts were made to cope with the situation after 1900 were too little, too late. In the end, in their selfish ignorance, they lost it all.

What Prof King tells us first, without going into the details of the Opium Wars or the Boxer Rebellion, or the other grisly events of the time, is that China collapsed because it lacked the will to live. It was a corpse being picked over by Imperial vultures. Moreover, it did not have an educated class or any other means of coping with the modern world. The prevailing Chinese political and social mythologies were singularly unsuitable to the circumstances in which Chinese of every station found themselves. Thus, when the Manchus were overthrown in 1910, the Chinese were not prepared to govern themselves. The entire period from 1910 to 1949 - the Republic, the Warlords, the Kuomintang, the Communists and the Japanese - was thus the aftermath of the failure of a dynasty.

Which leads to the second important insight: the Communist victory in 1949 established the People's Republic of China (PRC) as a new dynasty. Unlike the old Ching and Ming, Sung and Chin, the PRC did not establish the Mandate of Heaven in a person or family, but the collective Communist Party (CCP). This was the essential adjustment to modernity: the abandonment of the personification of the State in favor of an abstraction. This parallels the evolution of the gods from ancient to modern times from anthropomorphic to ideal entities. Such an adjustment brings the ancient practices of Chinese culture back into focus, and gives their civilization renewed meaning.

The consequences of this second insight are not trivial. For one thing, one must see Mao Zedong in the light of past Emperors, especially dynastic founders. It matters not that Mao's immediate family lost power with the failure of the Great Cultural Revolution. What does matter is that Mao's rule can be best understood as following the pattern of those who have seized the Mandate of Heaven since the beginning. If leadership is no longer personified, but resides in the CCP as symbolic family, it does not change the definition of the PRC as the new dynasty.

To the Professor's book, I add my personal observations: Chinese culture is very old, and Chinese people are very conservative, more so than most Westerners can imagine.

To put matters plainly, it means that nothing at all has changed in China; rather, there has been a restoration. The names have changed, but the ancient traditions are intact. The difference between China and Japan is simply that it took China a hundred years longer to awaken. In the Chinese view of things, that is only a blink during a dream.

What does this mean for Westerners? Now, we're the ones caught up in dreams of our past. China and ourselves are not as we believe.