China: from the Shang to the Century of Humiliation
(The first part of Chapter 3 in my book, I will provide the bibliography at the end of the final part of the chapter)
“Smash The Four Olds”
(Slogan used during the Cultural Revolution, referring to Old Ideas, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Customs)
“A Chinese Dream”
(Slogan used by Xi Jinping)
“The China Virus”
(Donald Trump September 22nd 2020, speech to the United Nations)
“The China Nightmare”
(Title of a 2020 book by Dan Blumenthal of the American Enterprise Institute)
In this chapter, I will firstly carry out a historical analysis to ascertain the political economy of China, specifically the nature of its state/society complex and the power dynamics within it, and the long-term determinants of the strategic culture of the policy-making elites. I will then utilize these insights to assess current energy-related policies in the context of major power competition. In the final piece of the chapter I will summarize the current characteristics of China with respect to the international community and possible policy paths. China represents a fundamentally different state/society complex to those in Western nations, one that does not allow for a dominant capitalist class. Its continued success towards Xi’s “Chinese Dream”, especially if China escapes the middle-income trap, therefore represents a nightmare to a West still asserting its ideological superiority and claim upon a single universalist conception of modernity. A successful political economic alternative model represents a virus that not only threatens the West at the international level but may also infest the domestic sphere.
3.1. Historical Positioning
3.1.1. Periodic consolidation and collapse, Mongol invasion, Empire, Imperial Zenith (~1600 BC to 1839 AD)
China has been the site of a major civilization, centred on the Yellow River valley, from at least the time of the Shang Dynasty that was established around 1600 BC (the existence of the prior Xia Dynasty from 2070 to 1600 BC is still open to academic debate, although there is evidence of royal palaces and bronze vessels from that period [Trigger 2003, p. 107]). The Shang territorial state at its maximum may have controlled 320,000 km of rich farmland, an area only slightly smaller than modern Germany, with a population of approximately 10 million. It was a centralized monarchy (as was its successor) with access to economic surpluses on the scale required to produce large palaces and support “highly skilled and specialized artisans [that] crafted magnificent luxury goods and symbols of authority” (Trigger 2003, p. 111). The Shang dynasty lasted until 1046 BC, paralleling the existence of the Egyptian New Kingdom, with a population around twice that of Egypt. Its successor, the Zhou dynasty, lasted until 221 BC; a combined period of over thirteen centuries. During the Western Zhou dynasty (1046-771 BC), the Kingdom was ruled in a decentralized fashion, the fengjian enfeoffmental system of fiefdoms, with regional authority vested in hereditary nobles. These regions developed into autonomous states, which over time amassed power on par with the Zhou king. When the King demoted and exiled his queen who was the daughter of one the leaders of the autonomous states, the Marquis of Shen, that leader joined with others regional leaders to sack the capital city and kill the King. A group of the nobles then met and appointed the Marquis’ grandson as the King and moved the capital city east.
The resulting Eastern Zhou period (770-256 BC) was one of much weaker central power, “never again could [the Zhou dynasty’s] economic and military prowess match its ritual prestige … the locus of political gravity shifted irreversibly from the Zhou royal court … toward the courts of powerful regional leaders” (Pines 2020, p. 495-496). The failure to develop a viable multi-state system during the Springs and Autumns period (770-453 BC), which generally paralleled that of the pre-republic Roman Kingdom, left the only option as a war of reunification; the seminal Warring States period from 453 to 221 BC. The population of China during the Warring States period was at least 30 million, and the wars lasted for nearly two and a half centuries. Each of the seven warring states (Qin, Chu, Zhao, Wei, Han, Yan, Qi) developed large economic, social, political and military structures, with complex strategic planning and diplomatic strategies. The enforced competitiveness drove innovation across many areas, especially in military organization and technology, and state administration.
The Warring States period was the age of profound institutional changes. A loose aristocratic polity of the Springs and Autumns period was replaced with a highly centralized territorial state, run by professional bureaucrats, who penetrated the society down to the smallest hamlets. The new state, which was fully able to mobilize its human and material resources, turned into a formidable military machine. Forceful reunification of the entire sub-celestial realm, unthinkable in the Springs and Autumns period, became henceforth possible. (Pines 2020b, p. 614)
Within the Qin state, the political leader Shang Yang implemented reforms that greatly increased its efficiency and effectiveness, facilitating its eventual victory and the establishment of the Qin Dynasty (the first dynasty of Imperial China). The philosophy behind these reforms was that of Chinese Legalism, and the Book of Lord Shang is seen as a foundational text of this school of philosophy. It is a philosophy of centralized autocracy, state efficiency and the use of power that has been likened to the 16th century work of Machiavelli in The Prince. A fundamental belief is the need for a strong central state to maintain political stability and protect against the chaos and destruction of disintegration that periodically enveloped China. A competing philosophy was provided by Confucius (551-479 BC), which emphasized the gaining of the right to rule a hierarchic social structure through elite benevolence, justice, virtue, and morality. Confucianism somewhat aligns to the Mandate of Heaven concept that was first used by the Zhou to legitimize their overthrow of the Shang. Unlike the European Divine Right of Kings the Mandate was not unconditional, but provided a right of rebellion against those seen as ruling unjustly or incompetently. Major natural disasters and droughts could be seen as heaven removing its mandate, legitimizing rebellion. As covered later in this chapter, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has utilized the Mandate of Heaven in the current form of the concept of Performance Legitimacy. The CCP has also utilized a combination of Legalism and Confucianism to represent itself as a strong centralized force that rules in a benevolent fashion. The third major Chinese school of philosophy, Daoism, also originated during this period. This was based on a belief in the need for human harmony with nature, humility in leadership and restrained statecraft. Its belief in limited government has had some contemporary scholars liken Daoism to Libertarianism.
This Warring States period overlapped with the time of Thucydides (460 – 400 BC), whose History of the Peloponnesian Wars has been seen as the first political realist text; that is in the West, as the deep Eurocentrism of Western scholarship tends towards a lack of coverage of texts from other civilizations. The contemporaneous Athenian experiment with democracy provides an ancient basis for the Western philosophy of Liberal Democracy. An important point is that the Peloponnesian Wars involved a population of only about one million over sixty years, while the Warring States period involved thirty times the population and four times the number of years. The applicability of lessons learnt from the Warring States period may thus be seen to be more applicable to the large centralized states of the present as against those from the competing small city-states of the Peloponnesian Wars; as well as other relatively small-scale events of Western history. A core part of the chronicles of the Warring States period is the usage of deceit, strategic withdrawal, alliance building and general statecraft to offset the military advantages of opponents and if possible, win without the need for battle. As Sun Tzu, who lived during the Zhang dynasty, noted: the best general is the one that can win a war without fighting any battles (Gagliardi 2014).
The individual Chinese states could amass armies of at least 100,000, with the larger states possibly amassing armies approaching a million men. The major battle between the Zhao and Qin, the battle of Changping of 262-260 BC, “reportedly involved almost one million combatants … two years of standoff [and] the massacre of over 400,000 prisoners” (Pines 2020a, p. 591). Western warfare did not reach this scale until the beginning of the nineteenth century with Napoleon’s Grand Armee on the eve of the invasion of Russia (1812 AD), a scale not to be repeated until World War 1; famous battles such as Agincourt (1415 AD), Waterloo (1815 AD) and Gettysburg (1863) pale in comparison. The “total war” nature of the societal destruction of the Warring States period could be compared to that of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648 AD), Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and the two World Wars. The level of chaos and destruction of the Warring States period has been seen as a warning of what can happen if the “center does not hold”; a parallel with the later Three Kingdoms period (220-280 AD), Sixteen Kingdoms period (304-439 AD), the Mongol Conquest (1205-1272 AD), and the Century of Humiliation (1839-1949 AD). The Chinese population tended to grow during the peace provided by a strong center, only to significantly decrease during times of internal strife and invasion.
The Warring States period ended with the victory of the Qin and the start of the Imperial Period. This can be seen as marking the end of feudalism in China, with the replacement of the enfeoffmental system of fiefdoms with the bureaucratic prefectural system overseen by a centralized bureaucratic state. The despotic rule of the Qin dynasty led to its quick collapse and underlined the importance of the abilities and proclivities of the Emperor in such a system, together with the education and ethical norms of the bureaucracy. The Han dynasty that replaced the short-lived Qin lasted for over four centuries (206 BC to 220 AD). This was a tortuous transitional period with respect to political-economic thought, “from ‘contention of a hundred schools of thought’ to a ‘grand unification’” (Cheng & Zhang 2019, para. 5) that was a synthesis of aspects of Legalism, Daoism and Confucianism combined with insights from the merchant class. This new orthodoxy displayed guiding principles which emphasized the collective over the individual, benevolence and righteousness outweighing instrumentality, the relative importance of agriculture over manufacturing and commerce, frugality, and reducing inequality. It also became a privileged paradigm of thought that “became a barrier to the development of new economic thought” and “it was not until the late Qing Dynasty [in the late 19th-century] … that the conditions were created for revolutionary changes in the subject area” (Cheng & Zhang 2019, final para.). After being defeated by the Xiongnu nomadic tribes to the north in 200 BC, and forced into a vassal status, it took a century for the Han to reverse roles with the Xiongnu. The dynasty was later undermined by increasingly complex and violent court politics, together with peasant rebellions led by Daoists, as with the Daoist Yellow Turban Rebellion (184-205 AD) and the rebellion of the The Celestial Masters in 184 AD. Following the death of Emperor Ling in 189 AD the palace eunuchs were massacred and the empire became divided between different warlords. At approximately the same time, the Roman Empire was attaining its peak.
The chaos and destruction of the resulting Three Kingdoms (Wei, Shu & Wu) Period was ended with reunification under the Jin dynasty (266-420 AD), but that started to disintegrate within a few decades resulting in extensive internal conflict; including the War of the Eight Princes (291-306) and the Uprising of the Five Barbarians (304-316). Its final denouement was followed by the chaos and extreme political volatility of the period of the Sixteen Kingdoms (304-439), paralleling the fall of the Western Roman Empire in Europe. These kingdoms were slowly consolidated into the Northern and Southern dynasties (386-589), which were then combined to form the short-lived Sui dynasty (581-618). It was during this dynasty that rigorous written entrance exams were established, open to all not just those from noble families, for positions within the state bureaucracy. This greatly improved the quality of the administration and lent it legitimacy as lowborn individuals reached senior positions. Another of the accomplishments of this dynasty was the building of the Grand Canal with up to 5 million laborers; this greatly improved transportation between the northern and southern parts of the Empire.
The economic strain of such large projects together with a series of costly wars helped destabilize the Empire, leading to the establishment of the Tang dynasty (618-907). This dynasty is seen as the heyday of Chinese civilization, with the population increasing to 80 million. It was succeeded by another unstable period, that of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (907-979). Much of China was then reunited under the Song dynasty (960-1279), which coexisted with the smaller Western Xia and Liao dynasties. The latter was overthrown by the Jin dynasty, which then successfully waged war with the Song, taking the northern part of Song territory before stalemate set in. During this period, the Chinese population is estimated to have grown to approximately 90 million, in comparison to a European population that had grown from about 50 million in 1000 to a high of around 75 million (approximately the same size as the Roman Empire at its peak nearly a millennia before). The Song dynasty underwent a commercial, technological (e.g. double cropping of rice, the abacus, paper money, gunpowder, movable type printing) and philosophical revolution that somewhat mirrored the European medieval commercial revolution and the beginning of the Enlightenment. Extensive use was made of market mechanisms and the private ownership of land grew substantially, with a twelfth century economy that was three times the size of Europe. The possibilities for the further development of these revolutionary trends were snuffed out by the Mongols who conquered both the Western Xia and Jin lands in the period 1229-1241, and after a long war defeated the Song in 1279. The destructiveness of the Mongol invasion “was so large that it must have obliterated economic life over wide areas” (Jones quoted in Anievas 2015, p. 71). The Mongol leader Kublai Khan formed the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) to rule China.
The dominance of Mongol and Semu (various Central Asian groups allied with the Mongols) in the higher reaches of the government, together with their cultural and legal special privileges, underlined the colonial nature of the dynasty. There does seem to have been a major level of depopulation during the latter part of this period (up to 50%), as well as a general decline of the state, although some scholars point to the reestablishment of serfdom as removing many people from the official population rolls. In later years the Mongol leaders took less interest in good governance, and this lack of effective government policy when combined with a series of natural disasters undermined the leadership’s legitimacy. In 1351 the Red Turban Revolt turned into a nationwide rebellion, with the Ming coming to dominate the rebel forces after the Battle of Lake Poyang, which reportedly involved 850,000 men. This rebellion saw extensive use of incendiary devices and cannons, including during naval warfare at the Battle of Lake Poyang. The period of Mongol invasion and rule seriously set back the development of Chinese society and it “never regained the dynamism of its past” (Smith quoted in Anievas 2015, p. 71-72). The Mongol invasions of China, Central Asia, the Middle East and Russia were catastrophes for those nations, but may have been indispensable to the rise of Europe through the unification of much of Eurasia that facilitated trade and allowed for the transfer of Chinese technologies and ideas to the lesser-developed Europe (Anievas 2015).
The Ming dynasty was established in 1368 and ended in 1662, a period during which the Chinese population grew to about 160 million; approximately double that of Europe. During both the Ming and the later Qing dynasty land was predominantly privately owned. In parallel to the Ming dynasty, the Ottoman Empire arose in Western Asia, destroyed the Byzantine Empire (also known as the Eastern Roman Empire) and expanded into North Africa and the Balkans. The collapse of the Yuan Dynasty led to the retreat of the Mongols to what later became the state of Mongolia and the autonomous Chinese region of Inner Mongolia. The threat of a new invasion from the north was always present though during the Ming dynasty, and may have been a factor in the scrapping of the imperial navy noted below. It was during the Ming dynasty that the Tribute system was formalized, reflecting much of the philosophy of Confucianism. China was seen as the benevolent head of a hierarchy of states, with the lesser states such as Vietnam and Korea displaying their respect through ostentatiously obsequious displays and actions that generally aligned with China’s interests. After exchanges of gifts and the investiture of the foreign leader by the Chinese, trade relations would be allowed. The lesser states remained independent of China, and were not required to change their economic, social or political structures to align with those of China. Such an approach can be seen with the current Belt and Road Initiative (and many other dimensions of current Chinese foreign policy), with Chinese investment and trading relations not being dependent upon changes to a state’s internal composition. This is very much in contrast to the universalist liberal internationalism of the Western nations, which does not allow for such diversity and has relied heavily upon territorial expansion and forced societal change. Between 1405 and 1433, seven huge ocean-going expeditions were carried out by the Chinese navy, stretching as far as the East African coast. These consisted of hundreds of ships, some of them over 400 feet long and 160 feet wide; the ships used by Columbus to “discover” North America in 1492 were tiny in comparison, as was were those used by Cabral to “discover” Brazil in 1500, and such a scale of fleet would not exist again until World War 1. Due to increasing challenges at home such as the newly reunited Mongols, and court politics between expansionist elements and more frugal Confucian elements, a navy that had consisted of 3,500 vessels was eventually scrapped. At no time during these voyages did the Chinese display a need to conquer and subjugate foreign territory, unlike the future European vessels that would enter the Indian Ocean from 1497 onwards.
From the 16th century onwards European trade increasingly affected China, both through the introduction of new crops (the Columbian Exchange) and increasing demand for Chinese goods. A combination of agricultural collapse stemming from the Little Ice Age, the effects of reduced trade upon a silver-dependent economy and bureaucratic corruption lead to both a weakening of the Ming dynasty and an increase in the unrest amongst bordering tribes. The Jurchen tribes of Manchuria were reunified, at least partially in response to the unwillingness of the Ming state to reduce the levels of tribute as agricultural yields fell. In 1618 the Jurchens (now known as the Later Jin dynasty) declared war on the Ming through the proclamation of the Seven Grievances and won a series of decisive victories including the Battle of Fushun in that year. This was followed in the next year by the destruction of the bulk of the Ming army in the Battle of Sarhu; greatly expanding the territory of the Later Jin. A series of defeats in 1626 and 1627, partially due to the Ming’s use of cannons which lead to the creation of an artillery corps within the Later Jin army. In 1636 the Later Jin adopted the name Man (hence the Manchu) and in 1636 the Great Qing Empire was created in conjunction with the Jin’s Mongol allies; with that empire being significantly extended through victories against the Ming between 1640 and 1642. The creation of the short-lived Shun dynasty (1644-1649) after a peasant rebellion greatly complicated the Ming defence, with Beijing quickly captured by the Shun in May 1644; ending the Ming dynasty. Elements of the Ming army refused to accept the Shun and shifted their allegiance to the Qing and opened the Shanhai Pass of the Great Wall to allow the Qing entry and the defeat of the Shun which was the beginning of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). The war dragged on until 1683 when the remaining elements of the Ming (the Southern Ming 1644-1662 and the Kingdom of Tungning 1661-1683) were finally defeated in the south. The scale and destruction of the war is reflected in the death count of over 25 million people (approximately 1 in 6 of the population). In contrast the European Thirty Years War (1618-1648) that lead to the Peace of Westphalia that is seen as seminal to the establishment of the modern nation-state by some international relations scholars (Westphalian Sovereignty), although this view has been extensively challenged by modern historians, produced between 4 and 8 million deaths. The English Civil War (1642-1651), that was a precursor to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (in reality a Dutch invasion conspiring with the English aristocracy against the English Stuart King), produced an estimated 200,000 deaths.
Although the Manchus made extensive efforts to integrate Han into elite positions and integrated much of Han culture, setting them apart from the Mongols, the Qing dynasty was seen as not being a legitimate heir of the Middle Kingdom by surrounding nations such as Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. Fang (2019) identifies this period as the end of any East Asian cultural community that might have existed, with the latter nations identifying themselves as more legitimate heirs to the civilization of the Middle Kingdom. The Qing dynasty peaked in the late 18th century, at which point there was little variation in per capita wealth and income between Europe, the USA and China (Davis 2001; Bayly 2004).
For many centuries, the high cultures of Asia were held in respect, even awe, in many parts of Europe (Darwin 2007, p. 117). India and China were dominant in manufacturing and many areas of technology. As such, the West interacted with Asian powers sometimes as political equals and, at other times, as supplicants. (Buzan & Lawson 2013, p. 624)
Adam Smith noted the greater sophistication of Chinese markets of the time when compared to European ones (Jacques 2012, p. 30), and “saw China as an exemplar of market-based development, [observing] in 1776 that ‘China is a much richer country than any part of Europe’” (Jacques 2012, p. 93). In 1820 China’s economy accounted for nearly 40% of the global economy and was seven times the size of that of both the United Kingdom (UK) and France (India was three times the size of the latter two). The US economy was less than one twentieth the size of that of China (Maddison 1995, p. 30). The Chinese population was approximately 381 million, more than four times that of France, Britain, Spain, Austria and Prussia combined, 38 times that of the US, and one third of the global population. Its economy had enjoyed centuries of “vigorous economic growth and reasonable prosperity” (Jacques, p. 92).
Without the ability to overcome the biophysical limits of its intensively utilized agricultural sector China was at a disadvantage to a Britain that could access firstly Irish lands (even at the cost of local famine [Thomas 1982]) and then the colonies of North America; the latter including the cheap slave-produced cotton that helped propel the British textile industry. In addition, the UK was able to amass capital from the profits of the slave trade and the naval plundering of Spanish precious metal shipments, and later the massive profits provided by the colonization of India. Britain’s separation by water from its enemies also protected against invasion (unlike the position of China with respect to the Mongols) and it possessed large-scale accessible coal deposits within its small landmass. As Jacques (2012) states, it may have been at least as much these one-off factors than any longer-term immanent socio-economic ones that produced the British industrial revolution that took off in the early nineteenth century. Such a position is supported by the later ability of a very different socio-economic model, that of communist China, to so rapidly and successfully industrialize; rendering liberal capitalism as a specific rather than a universal route to modernity.
For this modernity to take shape though, the shackles of the hegemonic culture and political economy established during the Han dynasty had to be broken to allow for the import of new ideas and a reconceptualization process; one that the Japanese successfully performed after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The Qing dynasty saw itself as the center of global civilization, surrounded by lesser civilizations, or even barbarians. Mirroring today’s universalist liberalism, the only path to being truly civilized was seen as being that of integration into Chinese culture. This arrogance, allied with a lack of inquisitiveness about other civilizations and even basic geography, exposed the Qing to the possibility of a catastrophic denouement at the hands of the Western powers:
After the Kangxi Emperor (1645-1722) banned the spread of Catholicism, the Chinese people suffered a major setback in their geographic knowledge. Worse still, the erroneous view that China was at the center of the world, surrounded by some insignificant barbarian countries, again became a platitude commonly heard of in Chinese society. The Yongzheng Emperor and his son, the Qianlomg Emperor, declared even stricter bans on Catholicism, thus severing all ties with Western civilization, which was making tremendous progress at the time. China, by contrast, became increasingly ill-informed and backward. (Fang 2019, p. 3).
An important difference between China and both the West and the Ottoman Empire was the lack of a parallel religious power structure, there was no equivalent of the Christian and Moslem religious hierarchies; especially that of the Papacy. The Confucianist philosophy has tended to be dominant within China, and it focuses on humanistic social relations rather than relations with a monotheistic god.
3.1.2. Century of Humiliation (1839 to 1949)
Following the peak of the Qing dynasty came the Century of Humiliation from 1839 to 1949 during which China was reduced to a mere supplicant of other powers. The dynasty suffered resounding military defeats by Britain and French during the First and Second Opium Wars of 1839-1842 and 1856-1860 respectively (to force China to legalize the British and Western opium trade that recycled the silver paid for Chinese exports). The latter war included the looting and burning of the huge Old Summer Palace in what is now Beijing in 1860, which is seen as a major crime of the West against China. The weakening of the Qing state and the opening to foreign powers which included protestant missionaries, facilitated the Taiping rebellion (1850-1864) in the south east of the nation, which was in fact a civil war between the Qing and the Taipeng Heavenly Kingdom; lead by a man who was the self-proclaimed brother of Christ and practiced a syncretic form of Christianity. This civil war was won by the Qing at the cost of over 20 million dead, but just as it was reaching its end a Moslem Dungan revolt (1862-1877) broke out in the west which was also defeated but led to the deaths and displacement of tens of millions. Under immense external and internal pressure, the Qing state maintained its domestic power, including the defeat of religious elements that would have significantly undermined Chinese cultural independence; China would be significantly vassalized but not colonized. Even so, “By the turn of the century, China’s sovereignty had been severely curtailed by the growing presence of Britain, France, Japan, Germany, the United States, Belgium and Russia on Chinese territory” (Jacques 2012, p. 102), and China’s economic development had been curtailed. By 1900 the richest parts of Europe had a GDP per capita of over ten times that of China (Bayly 2004), and China’s share of global GDP was less than a third of that of Europe (Davis 2001). The US economy had overtaken that of China by 1890, and by 1930 was nearly three times the size, with the UK and Germany roughly equal in size to China (Cox 2015).
To add insult to injury the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 resulted in huge reparation payments and the loss of the tributary Korea, and at the end of the century there was a scramble by European powers for more and more concessions from the Chinese state. The Boxer rebellion (1899-1901) was against both the presence of foreign powers and the privileges of Christian missionaries and included the killing of about 32,000 Chinese Christians and 200 Western Christian missionaries and priests together with a 55-day siege of the foreign legations in Beijing (then called Peking). It was defeated by a multinational force that invaded northern China, (an eight-nation alliance of Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the UK and USA reflecting the level of foreign influence in China), with the largest contingent from Japan, and the Russian invasion of Manchuria together with Chinese troops that rejected the call to war by the Dowager Empress in other areas of the country. There was extensive looting, together with widespread human rights violations by the Western forces, and huge reparations payments were levied against the Chinese state (paid between 1901 and 1939). From this period on the influence of the Western powers waned, while that of Japan grew. The greatly weakened Qing dynasty finally collapsed and was overthrown in 1911, ending the last imperial dynasty of China.
The new Republic of China with Sun Yat-sen as its first president was highly unstable and included the interregnum of the dictatorship of Yuan Shikai (1912-1916), together with the chaos of the Warlord Era (1916-1928). As Fang notes (2019, p. 48), during the period of chaotic change from 1849 onwards, “especially amidst forced Sino-Western contact, an unprecedentedly great value shift concerning the question of how to view ‘civilization’ occurred in China, reaching a climax with the May Fourth Movement”. As with Japan, this did not result in the replacement of local culture and thought by those of the West, but rather the use of the latter to serve the rejuvenation and extension of the former. Central to this was the New Culture Movement (1915-1921) and the May 4th Movement, the latter started as a protest against the weak response of the Chinese government to the Treaty of Versailles (giving the German concession in Shandong to Japan), which included many of the future leaders of the Chinese communists.
Greater stability came with the establishment of the Kuomintang (KMT) nationalist government under Chang Kai-Shek in 1928, who had been a founder of the Nationalist Party (the forerunner to the KMT) that had been led by Sun Yat-sen. Although the CCP and KMT had been in alliance from 1921, when the former was founded, Chiang Kai-Shek launched a widespread massacre of communists in 1927 that claimed the lives of at least 300,000 (the White Terror) in the first year and was followed by an ongoing campaign to eradicate the communists that only ended when the KMT and CCP allied against the Japanese in 1937. During this period of what was a civil war many millions died, with the final remnants of the communist armies escaping through the Long March (1934-1935) of which only about one in ten participants survived; it was during the March that Mao became the leader of the communists. During 1931 and 1932 the Japanese successfully invaded and occupied Manchuria, which was followed within a few years by the larger Japanese invasion of China (1937-1945). The Rape of Nanjing (1937) is only one example of the scale of destruction and violations of basic human rights during the Japanese invasion and occupation, which claimed the lives of at least 20 million. As soon as the war ended in 1945, a civil war which claimed more millions of lives broke out between the CCP and KMT, lasting until 1949. A significant reason for the KMT losing the war was an intensifying and widespread level of corruption, including among senior officials, that undermined its ability to govern effectively and its legitimacy among the general population. This included the ability of elite members to evade conscription into the army, embezzlement and smuggling within the army by officers that produced a lack of basic supplies for troops, and ill-treatment of conscripted soldiers (Wang 2017). Another important factor was the high inflation of the 1937-1949 period, which was rapidly overcome through the implementation of state trading agencies by the communists (Weber 2021). From 1911 to 1949 China was wracked with civil wars, regional rebellions and war with Japan, producing widespread devastation and at least 30 million deaths.
The period of over a century of extensive subjugation to foreign powers and internal disintegration ended the more than five-century period of national development under the Ming and Qing dynasties, and a nearly four millennia stretch of a Chinese civilization that was dominant in the Asian continent and a major global power. A civilization that had seen itself as the Middle Kingdom sitting above all others was defeated, subjugated and devastated; the only full parallel being that of the Mongol invasion and occupation six centuries earlier (the Manchus took great care to integrate with, rather than dominate, the Han). “China’s plight during this period is illustrated by the fact that in 1820 its per capita GDP was $600, in 1850 it was still $600, by 1870 it had fallen to $530, in 1890 was $540, rising very slightly to $552 in 1913 – still well below its level in 1820, almost a century earlier. By 1950 it had fallen to a mere $439, just over 73 per cent of its 1820 level.” (Jacques 2012, p. 114). This Century of Humiliation remains today in the collective Chinese consciousness, and within the history books, with a latent will to recover the status and pride lost with the demise of the Middle Kingdom; a potent source of nationalist and anti-foreign sentiment, and legitimation for the CCP (Kaufman 2010; Weatherley & Rosen 2013). It also serves as “a source of beliefs about how the world works” (Kaufman 2010, p. 4) for elite policy makers, embedding a deep mistrust of the Western powers and a fear of the chaos and destruction of the period. The horrendous record of Japan during its invasion of China is also well remembered, and a lingering source of anti-Japan sentiment that can rise to the surface; the Rape of Nanjing is still a highly contentious issue between the two countries.
Great summary!
Especially the economic indicators. Thanks.
The shibboleth seems to be to say CPC, as CCP is a sign of Atlantist leanings...