Restless Empire

by Odd Westad

  Most Chinese students who went abroad were, or became, intensely nationalistic. One of them, writing to his fellow students in the United States in 1915, stressed the predicament of being a Chinese born in their generation:

  Most of us were born somewhere around the year 1894. Have you not been taught what a year 1894 was for China? It was the year of the Chino-Japanese war over the question of Korea. . . . All these humiliations of our country happened when we were just raising our first baby cries. Do you not realize that you were born in the time when your country was perishing? . . . Having realized that we are the people of a perishing nation, we instinctively want to know what we shall do to save China.17

  The number of students born in the decade around 1894 who went abroad and came back to try to save China is very large. Among the top Communist leaders, Cai Hesen (born 1895), Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi (both 1898), Li Lisan (1899), Wang Ming and Deng Xiaoping (both 1904) went abroad as students. Among their senior leaders from the first generation, Mao Zedong was in fact the only one who did not go abroad. He had no money and found foreign languages difficult.

  Cai, Zhou, Li, and Deng were among 1,600 students who went to France between 1919 and 1921 as part of the work-study movement. Organized by radical educators in China, it furnished the contacts the students needed to get a job in French factories (which suffered a labor shortage after the war) in order to earn enough money to later enroll at a university. Zhou Enlai arrived in Marseilles in 1920, hoping to study at the University of Edinburgh, but ended up spending three years in Paris working in a Renault machinery plant and, from 1921, organizing for the Communists. Deng Xiaoping was only sixteen when he arrived in France in 1920. For five years he worked in factories around Paris, developing a taste for croissants, playing bridge, and reading. In 1926 he left for Moscow to join the world revolution.

  After the Communists came to power in China, Moscow became the chief destination for Chinese students. The students who went to the Soviet Union in the 1950s were sent by the government and kept under strict political control. They mostly studied science and engineering and had in some cases already been assigned to the institutes or plants they were going to work with in China after graduation. Most felt that their time in the Soviet Union was a happy one. They were funded by Soviet government stipends, making many times more than what their Chinese salaries would be (or what their Soviet fellow-students received). They studied well, but also had time for play and for falling in love, in spite of their CCP minders’ attempts at regimenting their lives. The problems came when the Chinese were about to go home to a much more restrictive society and political atmosphere. The CCP told them that “in regards to love you should restrain yourself, deal with it correctly; it’s not permitted to marry during your time of study.” Thousands of Chinese men had to leave their girlfriends behind and in most cases never saw them again. Maybe for that reason, as much as for the education they received, the Soviet Union influenced the students deeply, well beyond the period of Sino-Soviet alliance. As late as in 2002 a third of the members in the Communist party’s ruling Politburo had studied in the Soviet Union and eastern bloc countries, and much of their approach to life and to politics remained distinctly Soviet.18

  Since 1980, the number of Chinese students abroad has really taken off. During the 1980s the majority went to the United States, where many decided to stay, thereby enriching American academia and knowledge-based industry. Later other countries became popular, too, but the Anglophone countries still dominate in terms of where students want to go. In 2010, of those who intended to study abroad, 43 percent wanted to go to the United States, 19 percent to Britain, and 12 percent to Australia. Language obviously plays a role in the choices, but there are also strong indications that Chinese like the close contact between faculty and students that they get in the best American or British universities. Of those who wanted to go to Britain in 2010, business studies predominated; almost 70 percent wanted a business-related education, preferably at least at master’s level.19 Even after China’s economic boom, which began in the 1990s, the majority would prefer to stay abroad, at least for a while, after graduating. As with those from other emerging economies, the nationalism that Chinese students abroad evince does not prevent them from taking their opportunities wherever they can find them.

  CHINESE ABROAD HAVE HAD an immense influence on China’s political fortunes in the twentieth century. In spite of the often repeated truism that all change in China comes from within, I can think of no other major country for which the diaspora and people in exile have played such a significant role in the reshaping of its fortunes. The opposition against Qing rule found its strength abroad, as did the Guomindang in the 1910s and 1920s. The Communists were not only foreign-inspired but foreign-funded and trained. The market revolutionaries from the 1980s and 1990s were linked to the diaspora. The opposition to the current regime mobilizes outside China, much like the opponents of the Qing did. For Chinese revolutionaries, abroad has always been the initial staging ground for their dreams and hopes.

  Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of the Republic of China, spent more than twenty years abroad, in Hawaii, the United States, Canada, Japan, Europe, and Southeast Asia. He studied abroad, worked abroad, and collected money for the revolution abroad, especially from wealthy Chinese in Hawaii and Singapore. His brother, Sun Mei, became a prosperous rancher in Kula on Maui. Sun Yat-sen married a young woman from a prominent Chinese American family, Song Qingling, who had attended Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia (her sister, Song Meiling, married Chiang Kai-shek). In 1896 Sun was kidnapped by the Chinese embassy in London and after his release (following a campaign by British newspapers) published the sensational book Kidnapped in London!, which made him a household name among Chinese intellectuals. Sun’s revolution was almost entirely foreign made. As we have seen, he almost missed the real revolution in 1911 because he was raising money in Colorado. He reminded his American listeners of foreign involvement in their own revolution and tried to sell bonds that he promised would be redeemed ten-fold after he came to power in China:

  In order to make sure of our success, to facilitate our movement, to avoid unnecessary sacrifice and to prevent misunderstanding and intervention of foreign powers we must appeal to the people of the United States in particular for your sympathy and support, either moral or material, because you are pioneers of western civilization in Japan; because you are a Christian nation; because we intend to model our new government after yours; and above all because you are the champion of liberty and democracy. We hope to find many Lafayettes among you.20

  In the generations after Sun, the Soviet Union became the center for Chinese revolutionaries abroad. Many went there to study, and some became Soviet residents. Chiang Kai-shek’s son Chiang Ching-kuo, who later became the great democratizing president on Taiwan, was one such. Chiang went to Moscow as a student in 1925 and spent twelve years there, working as an engineer in the Urals. Li Lisan, who had studied in France and became general-secretary of the CCP, went to Moscow in 1931 and stayed for fifteen years; he was later tortured to death in Mao’s Cultural Revolution.21 Wang Ming, who had been the Comintern’s favorite and had opposed Mao’s rise within the CCP, had the good sense to stay in Moscow after he went there for medical treatment in 1956; he spent the last twenty years of his life denouncing Mao’s dictatorship.

  As we will see later, the Chinese diaspora played a key role in the transformation of China after 1978. The first country Deng Xiaoping visited after he became China’s paramount leader was Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew, the wily anticommunist leader of the island state, whose ancestors, like Deng’s, were Hakka from Jiangxi province, was uncertain about what to expect. Lee recounts that at their first dinner together, Deng turned to him and congratulated him on having done “a good job in Singapore”:

  I said, “Oh, how’s that?” He said, “I came to Singapore on my way to Marseilles in 1920. It was a lousy place. You have made it a different place.” I said, �
��Thank you. Whatever we can do, you can do better. We are the descendants of the landless peasants of south China. You have the mandarins, the writers, the thinkers and all the bright people. You can do better. . . .” Within weeks, the People’s Daily switched lines, that Singapore is no longer a running dog of the Americans, it’s a very nice city, a garden city, good public housing, very clean place. They changed their line. And he changed to the “open door” policy. After a lifetime as a Communist, at the age of 74, he persuaded his Long March contemporaries to return to a market economy.22

  After the crackdown on prodemocracy protesters in Tian’anmen Square in 1989, China got its fifth generation of revolutionaries abroad. Fang Lizhi, one of China’s leading astrophysicists, became a symbol for the student movement when he published essays calling for the democratization of China. He now lives in exile in the United States. Han Dongfang, a railway worker from Shanxi who led the nascent independent labor movement, lives and organizes in Hong Kong, “in China, but not of it,” as he once said to me. Wang Dan, who as an eighteen-year-old history student at Peking University was the brains behind the democracy protest in 1989, received a PhD from Harvard in 2008, where he went after spending seven years in Chinese prisons. Like their predecessors, they hope to return to China and change it into a better country. Their position often seems hopeless, but then that was the case for the young Sun Yat-sen and the young Deng Xiaoping also.

  Many overseas Chinese, even those who have never set foot in China, hope one day to go to the country of their ancestors. Many Chinese who have gone abroad have returned to China and tried to settle there. Even though the relative numbers have been declining over the past two generations, there is reason to believe that China’s economic upturn will tempt more to go back. The problem is of course that it is not easy to return to a country you think you know but whose reality turns out to be very different from what you imagine. Although many returnees have become successful in China, quite a few have gone there full of optimism and patriotism, only to find that their country spurned their advances and, in some cases, made their and their families’ lives hell.

  The generation that returned in the early twentieth century mostly did well in China, but toward the end of their lives they saw much of what they achieved destroyed by war and revolution. The Guos and the Mas, the sojourners in Australia who came back to found Wing On and Sincere department stores, survived into the 1940s and died under Japanese occupation in Hong Kong. Their businesses on the mainland were confiscated by the Communist government. Rong Yiren, who inherited one of China’s largest textile companies with roots back to the late Qing era, saw his inheritance seized in the 1950s and became a target during the Cultural Revolution—he was beaten and forced to work for eight years as a janitor. In 1978 Deng rescued him and asked him to use his know-how to develop industry and corporations that would make China rich. Rong founded Citic as a state enterprise. His son Rong Zhijian is among the richest people in China.

  But some returning Chinese did not bounce back from persecution. Zheng Nian, who married her husband when they both were students at the London School of Economics in the 1930s, went back to work for Shell in China and stayed on after the 1949 revolution. In the 1960s all they owned was confiscated, her daughter was murdered by the Red Guards, and Zheng herself was imprisoned and tortured for six years on the charge of being a British spy. When she tried to defend herself against the charge of having studied abroad by mentioning LSE’s Fabian socialist background, her jailers laughed in her face: “Lenin denounced the Fabian socialists as reformers,” one of them told her. “They were not true socialists because they did not advocate revolution by violence. Don’t try to ingratiate yourself with us. . . . All the senior staff of foreign firms are spies.”23

  The Western-trained architects who returned to help build new socialist Beijing also suffered in the Cultural Revolution. French-born Hua Lanhong (Leon Hoa), a modernist who had worked with Le Corbusier in the 1930s, went to a China he had never seen to become deputy head of the city planning bureau in Beijing in 1949. Hua oversaw much of the destruction of Ming-dynasty city in the 1950s. He was later purged as a promoter of Westernization, and spent twenty years building outhouses for rural communes when he was not brought out to be publicly humiliated as a representative of “deviant architecture.” Hua was finally able to go back to France in 1977. Ironically, his daughter, the French architect Hua Xinmin, has now emerged as a key defender of what is left of old Beijing after the ravages of the plan her father helped implement in the 1950s.24

  Some returnees were protected by the Communist Party even during the darkest years of the Cultural Revolution. Qian Xuesen, the father of China’s missile program, who had worked in the United States, and the German-trained nuclear physicist Wang Ganchang, who had also served as deputy director of the Soviet Bloc joint nuclear research institute at Dubna, were both spared public humiliation. Qian’s deputy, however, the brilliant German-trained engineer Zhao Jiuzhang, was hounded to commit suicide by the Red Guards in 1968. Even some of the Cultural Revolution activists themselves had foreign background. Brooklyn-born Tang Wensheng (Nancy Tang), a third-generation American, went to China with her parents in the 1950s and became Mao’s English-language interpreter. In the Foreign Ministry she became a leading Cultural Revolutionary. Together with Mao’s niece, Wang Hairong, she helped set the tone for China’s foreign policy in the early 1970s.

  Today’s returnees are less exposed to disaster than their predecessors, though even now they know to keep their options open. Many have American green cards or other forms of permanent residence permits abroad. Even those who have never lived outside China like to have the foreign option. Zong Qinghou, the founder of the leading beverage company in China, Wahaha, and reputedly the richest man in the country, has a green card. But even though some who return from overseas are viewed with suspicion by their countrymen, this is based more on envy than on politics. The half million or so overseas students who have returned home during the past thirty years generally do very well, and some of them have become rich and famous in their home country. The only field in which they are definitely underrepresented is in politics. The Communist party still distrusts those with foreign connections. China’s former president Jiang Zemin received his engineering training at the Stalin Automobile Works and former premier Li Peng studied hydroelectric engineering at the Moscow Power Institute, but today’s Harvard or Oxford MBAs rarely are let close to power in China.25

  CHAPTER 7

  WAR

  THE EIGHT-YEAR WAR with Japan is the founding event of modern China’s international history. The country had not exactly been peaceful during the previous hundred years, but from 1937 to 1945, many Chinese felt that they were fighting an enemy intent on eliminating China from the map. From the 1830s to the 1930s, war against foreigners had been localized and sporadic, but in the resistance against Japanese occupation, war was everywhere. Peasants in the Shaanxi and Fujian countryside were affected by the war as much as city dwellers in Shanghai or Beijing. For the majority of Chinese, their first-ever encounter with a foreigner was in the form of a Japanese officer barking out orders in a language they could not understand. No wonder that China’s initiation into world politics was an unhappy one, and that it created myths and dogmas that have lasted up to today.

  The war with Japan came at a point when the slow development of Chinese nationalism, begun in the late nineteenth century, had reached a peak. Although China’s government, under Chiang Kai-shek, would for strategic reasons have preferred to put off fighting Japan, Chinese public opinion gave it no choice but to fight back as soon as large-scale hostilities began. Forms of Chinese nationalism had been sharply on the rise since the mid-1920s, but it was the Japanese attack in Manchuria in 1931, and Tokyo’s subsequent transformation of the region into a separate state under Japanese tutelage, Manzhouguo, that set Chinese hearts racing for a unified military response to Japan’s aggression.1 In this sense, many of Japan’s pol
icies up to 1937—and indeed after the outbreak of war—were based on a misunderstanding: The Tokyo government feared Chinese nationalism but did not realize that it was its own actions that more than anything else fueled a new sense of self in China. From its very beginning, Chinese nationalism as state policy was aimed at resisting Japan.

  In this second Sino-Japanese war, begun in 1937, two very different images of China came into conflict. One, held by most Japanese, came out of the nineteenth century and saw China as less a state than a geographic region with different power holders: Rival governments, local strongmen, and foreign representatives combined in different ways to keep some semblance of order, while advanced powers, such as Japan, promoted development within China. It was the advent of a nationalist central government, in the form of the Guomindang, with the stated purpose of resisting Japanese policies, that imperiled the image of a quiescent, pragmatic Chinese approach to international affairs. And this resistance came at a time when many Japanese felt that they and their country were under pressure from the Western great powers (including the Soviet Union) and from the global economic crisis, which the Western world had unleashed. The other image of China was one held by increasing numbers of young urban Chinese and their offshoots in the Chinese countryside and abroad: China was the state representing the Chinese nation. Its natural and legitimate borders were those of the Qing empire. Its enemies were foreign countries that would not recognize this China as an equal, and especially Japan, which seemed intent on carving out ever larger chunks of Chinese territory for itself. China, in their view, had to unify to fight Japan.