#79 The Growth and Growth of China
Over the next several blogs, I shall now move into Chinese history and China’s place on the world stage. China is today a serious contender for world power. As I write these words the uncertainty of our futures will depend in part on whether the USA and China can avoid an all-out war. This blog provides a brief overview of China’s history and development as a contender for global power.
The growth and development of China in the 20th and 21st centuries have been some of the most remarkable events of this period. Remarkable because China has moved from a great ancient empire, to the depths of poverty, and back again to compete with the new American empire of our time. Readers of this blog will know that few ancient empires survived the ravages of Western capitalist empires, Russia perhaps being only the other example. The rest were destroyed and are now lost to history.
Chinese development presents to Western audiences one of the major enigmas of this moment of history. On the one hand, we have China’s remarkable growth over the last 50 years with her ability to enrich almost her entire population. On the other hand, is the struggle for world power with the USA which is forced on China whether she wishes it or not. This enigma provides Western audiences with a problem of understanding. The flood of information coming from one side or the other must be understood through the prism of what appears to be a struggle to the death between these two empires. It would appear that the USA is willing to do any activity that will stop China from her path of growth. Our approach in these blogs will be to offer readers a view of China from the vantage point of history. This will hopefully help to clarify the difficulty of understanding China’s development.
Due to the conflict between the USA and China, few people get to grasp China’s longevity and the recent ability to pull herself out of the depths of intense poverty. Not surprisingly, China is now a regular feature of news across all media platforms. In the next few blogs, I offer some background information on Chinese history which is intended to elucidate these contemporary struggles.
A Brief Overview of Chinese History
China has had a centralised society governed over millennia by various dynasties of Emperors. Over the past 500 years, centralised empires in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Europe were destroyed by the marauding powers of Western colonialism. China as a centralised power survived; she reinvented herself. China had developed herself over an extraordinarily long period. Empires like the Ottomans, Russia, or the now-forgotten Holy Roman Empire, lasted for some hundreds of years; but the Chinese empire has lasted over thousands of years.
The need to control the rivers that flowed and overflowed from the Himalayas was at least in part the explanation for the need for central power in China. Controlling the water required engineering skills across a huge region, and that required central authority. Therefore, multiple skills in the use of power and authority have had a long history in China.
Chinese civilization had developed materially in almost every sphere of economic activity before she was defeated and demoralised by the incoming European powers in the 19th century. It is reasonable to argue that China was the richest part of the world before this. The silk route exemplifies a huge and varied long trade over hundreds of miles. China traded silks, porcelains, jewels, spices and many other objects across the World over a very long period. There was no single trade route; there were multiple routes across land and sea that joined central Asia, Russia, Western Europe, and the Islamic world. The routes travelled included the Indian ocean, up through the gulf of Abaca, across central Asia and up into Germany and Russia. Archaeologists have found artifacts a thousand and more years old, in far and distant places, of pottery and precious stones which originated in China. China had an ancient civilization based on a Confucian set of ideas unlike any other.
A Brief Contemporary History of China: From Wealth to Poverty and Back to Wealth
China was invaded by Britain and the Western powers from the 1840s and then throughout the rest of the 19th century. After the first invasion, all the European colonising powers invaded China over the rest of the 19th century: Germany, Italy, France, and then Japan and the USA. Each power that attacked won, and then demanded reparations in silver coin. By the end of the century, the Empire had run out of cash and had no means to restock the empty cash holdings. The Manchu Empire was broken. The invasion by the Western powers brought China to its economic and political knees by the end of the 19th century. If it had not been for the 1914 war, the invading powers would have divided up China, like Africa in 1884. We have evidence of this as, by 1900, maps of a divided China between the invading powers began to circulate in the USA and Europe.
"The Partition of China," The Butte Weekly Miner, March 30, 1899, 10. Retrieved from Wagner, R. (2017). “Dividing up the [Chinese] Melon, guafen 瓜分”: The Fate of a Transcultural Metaphor in the Formation of National Myth. The Journal of Transcultural Studies, 8(1), 9–122. https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.ts.2017.1.23700. CC BY-NC 4.0.
“A Forecast of the Partition of China” Retrieved from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US.
The mainland of China survived due to the 1914 war. The attention of the belligerents was focused on defeating Germany. China survived as a nation-state at this time. Since, parts of China have remained in dispute: Hongkong, Taiwan, and Tibet. Each had its specific history as China struggles to regain itself as a whole[i]. Despite the frequent news over these parts of China, this was small beer compared to a wholesale division which had been distinctly possible in 1900.
Over the following 35 years after 1914, the entire Chinese nation was in deep turmoil. Every part of China faced a multitude of crises. Nationalist politics under the forces of the Kuomintang battled with local warlords. In the 1919 Versailles Treaty, China’s territory was awarded to different European powers. In 1937, Japan invaded. The European powers were so involved with matters in Europe that China was not reinvaded by these powers in this period. These few short words do not do justice to the upheavals faced in China at this time.
Significantly, the Communist Party of China was formed in 1919. This was followed by a great struggle within the party, with local peasants, with the Kuomintang, and the Japanese invaders. The Long March is part of education that the Party put itself through. This is not the place to go into the details on this. However, what was came out of this period was that the Party and Chairman Mao came out of the struggle victorious. This founding story of China is part of every child’s education.
Mao Zedong declares the establishment of the People's Republic of China, 1st October 1949.
The revolutionary forces led by Chairman Mao managed to take power in 1949. By 1949, China's per capita wealth was considered within the lowest 10% of the world’s people, which was the consequence of the previous 100 years since the British invasion. Yet fifty years later, at the turn of the 20th century, China was the contender for world power: a remarkable turnaround, which requires explanation. China had turned from the richest country in the world to its poorest and then back to its richest or nearly richest throughout well under 200 years. This movement is one of the facts of our present world and this warrants serious consideration as we look to understanding the struggle for global power.
The British took 200 years as the first people to transform their economy from an ancient society, feudal in this case, to an urban industrial society. The USA did the same in just over 50 years while they exterminated and marginalised their indigenous population. China managed the same transformation in just 12 years.
The series of key events in China after 1900 and before the revolution goes like the following:
1912 - The fall of the Manchu Dynasty (It was founded in 1644)
China becomes a republic under the Kuomintang (the people’s party). Founded by Sun Yat-sen (died 1925). This was a period of intense turmoil
Chiang Kai-shek managed to take over
1919 - the Treaty of Versailles awarded parts of China to the victors, including Japan
The first Congress of the Chinese Communist Party was held in 1922 in Shanghai.
The Party made a strong alliance with the Kuomintang (it lasted 4 years)
The Long March begins in 1934
Japan invades, 1937
China and Communism
Over the last 30 or 40 years many commentators, academics and politicians on China have been unable to examine China with open eyes. First, China was a socialist country; and more recently it has become the latest contender for world power. Ideology very often takes over from analysis.
China's policy since 1949 claims to be a country that has used the ideas first espoused by Karl Marx in the latter part of the 19th century. The Chinese Communist Party, CCP, has taken the lead and has allowed no other political party to question its ascendency. And worse - from the western nations’ perspective - private property is not understood by the CCP as a sacred principle of the system. Consequently, a large part of the industrial and financial economy - including agricultural land - remains owned by the state. Such principles have always been antagonistic to western nations, and the public information given over to the public too often has been that China was about to collapse.
If we examine China’s growth and development outside of most contemporary Western debates and in terms of the principles I have established in earlier blogs, China's success begins to make more sense. We noted that most of the world’s ancient civilizations collapsed during the wars created by the capitalist powers of Europe, i.e. during the Napoleonic period and the 1914-18 war. All of them - the Ottomans, the Russian, the Austro Hungarian and the Holy Roman Empire - had attempted to buy western weapons of war and had made other changes to defend themselves against what they perceived as the predatory colonising empires. None was able to develop into an industrialising state. None of them had been able to alter the system of political power, except for Japan. All of them held onto the axioms and principles of their preindustrial world. China might have been no different if the Chinese Communist Party had not been successful.
China's Maoist revolution was sufficiently encompassing to be able to throw off the key principles of its past, so adroitly expressed in Anchee Min’s novels, Empress Orchid and The Last Emperor about the Chinese court. Perhaps the significance of the 1949 Chinese revolution was that they created a government that was able to analyse their situation and development and begin to industrialise.
Western commentary has been sustainably antagonistic. For instance, China did not have a democratic system of government, in fact, it had a despotic government. There was no free speech, and her economy did not allow the rights of private property. Then, when the government cracked down on students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and a large number of people died during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Western media has frequently reported on the iniquities of the Chinese government. Books have been written on these individual events. While this is not to dismiss the seriousness of these events, what I am suggesting is that in a better political atmosphere between China and the rest of the world, it might have been possible to assess these crises calmly. Scholars have been forced to take a side, and this alone has made careful analysis difficult. Western visitors to China are always surprised to find that people in the street are willing to support Mao. Readers must make up their own minds. I will return to Mao in the next blog.
There are, however, a few verities, which hopefully can be widely accepted:
1. The Chinese people have benefited from many continuous years of growth of the Chinese economy. More Chinese people have been brought out of poverty as designated by the World Bank statistics than the rest of the world combined.
2. No educated population (the level of education for the whole population has been continuously rising) can develop their economy and resources without debate. That debate may be different in some respects from our own.
3. The Communist Party has played a key role in the development of Chinese society since 1949.
4. A large section of the population remains attached to different religions, which includes Christianity.
5. The leading companies in banking and export have remained in the hands of the state. This has allowed the planners, who deal with global financial crises, to have extra control compared with their Western counterparts.
6. From day one, China began to plan her economic growth. Long-term plans have been the essence of Chinese success.
China in the 21st century poses all Western societies an existential question that is difficult to face. If our way of life is so good, vital, important, call it what you may, can there be a different way of developing an economy and politics that is as good or better than our own?
I Taiwan, the South China Sea and even Xinjiang have in recent days become global areas of sharp dispute between China the USA. China’s view is that she is struggling to regain what was hers before the 1840s, or in the case of Xinjiang to defend it against movements that wish to break away from China. These disputes are all part of the existential struggle between the USA and China that is present as I write. This is the wrong place to try and make sense of these struggles.
Suggested Reading
There is, as you might expect a lot of excellent books on China pre-1949. Try:
Dick Wilson, The Long March 1935: The Epic of Chinese Communism’s Survival, History Book club, 1971.
Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China: The Classic Account of the Birth of Chinese Communism, Grove Press UK, 2018.
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The peoples of Western Europe had risen from one world of relative poverty and had learnt how to take the wealth from the Americas and transfer it to their own countries. This was slavery and latterly until 1920, indentureship. A whole set up of banks, shipping companies, and insurance companies had arisen to make these transfers possible. From the 1750s the European invaders turned their attention to Asia and systematically began the colonisation process anew. At the same time, as they attempted to colonise and extract the wealth of Asia, the colonising countries began the process we now recognise as industrialisation alongside the rapid growth of cities. The surplus resources extracted through colonisation were used to finance the growth of new industries.