China

by John Keay

  Neither population control nor rural employment was enough to counteract the drift to the cities. There, as controls were lifted and investment encouraged, entrepreneurial activity ran riot. The impetus came from the Special Enterprise Zones. Investment, mostly in foreign joint-ventures producing for export, was attracted by a raft of incentives and preferences plus the availablity of a disciplined, low-cost and limitless labour pool. The model proved so successful that the three initial zones were quickly replicated, vastly extended to include whole regions, and then so copied by provincial administrations as to become almost universal. Capitalism was back, red in tooth and claw. Fortunes were made and brazenly flaunted; earnings rose; so did the skyline; and so did labour exploitation, environmental pollution, land appropriations, nepotism, crime and a whole culture of corruption. ‘To get rich is no sin,’ argued Deng; pauperism tarnished socialism, prosperity vindicated it. But it was the people in general – and especially their Republic – that must benefit, not just individual tycoons. This meant wholesale restructuring of all the organs of the state including the loss-making state industries, the over-manned PLA and militias, the faction-ridden administrations, the costly public services and the corruption-riddled Party.

  It was a massive undertaking and not without its setbacks. But GNP rose by about 8 per cent per annum through the 1980s, then soared into double digits. Sectoral imbalances, urban migration and the effects of inflation still troubled the leadership; a 1983 agreement with Britain about the rendition of Hong Kong in 1997 mollified it. The wider world, while profiting handsomely from commercial access, focused on what it saw as China’s democratic deficit. Post-Mao, a more collective and consensual form of leadership had been adopted. Deng himself was never either chairman or premier; high office circulated more freely, and the demoted no longer disappeared. But within the high command this neither ended personal and ideological rifts nor ensured any popular accountability. Western observers, on doubtful evidence, predicted that a liberalised economy must in time induce a liberalised society. Even Deng talked of ‘democracy’. But it was as a pot of gold at the end of the market-socialist rainbow. Elections, other than at the lowest village level where party cadres could influence them, would have to wait; strength and prosperity came first.

  Not everyone agreed. The ‘Fifth Modernisation’, that is ‘democracy’, was first touted by the polemicist Wei Jingsheng in 1979. He was promptly imprisoned and the ‘Democracy Wall’, where he and others pasted their posters, was closed down. In the mid-1980s more specific demands for the redress of various grievances and greater tolerance of dissent resurfaced among students. This time some official sympathy was forthcoming, most notably from Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang. But in 1986, as the protests threatened to get out of control, the students were dispersed and Hu forced to resign his office. He remained in the Politburo, a focus for liberal sentiments and for restraint in handling them, until his sudden death in April 1989.

  Events then closely mirrored those of the Qingming Incident of 1976, though on a very different scale. Student mourners poured into Tiananmen Square in the thousands, then from all over the country in the millions. Sympathy for the deceased Hu translated itself into censure of the regime and demands for a whole gamut of Western liberal reforms. Beijing’s citizens seemed to support the protesters, the local authorities seemed ambivalent, the Politburo undecided. For six weeks the world looked on in amazement. As an alfresco spectacle, Tiananmen Square would defer only to the Berlin Wall later in the same year. The protesters in their jeans and T-shirts looked much like students anywhere; their music was familiar, their tactics standard, their cause universal. When a hundred or so went on hunger strike, amazement turned to admiration; then admiration turned to horror as the talks broke down and the tanks moved in.

  The students had taken their cue from the May 3 protests of 1919 and the Qingming Incident of 1976. But the leadership was more mindful of 1966 and the start of the Cultural Revolution. Then, too, radical youth had descended on the capital en masse, denounced the Party and its leadership, elected its own leaders and challenged the whole power structure. A repeat of the chaos that had ensued then would now derail the modernisation process, discredit the Party, endanger the government and plunge the country back into chaos. Although the Politburo remained divided, Deng secured sufficient support for the necessary crackdown from the old guard of the Party and the PLA. Crudely but literally, it was to be business as usual. Embalmed nearby in his mausoleum, Mao was having the last laugh. The Cultural Revolution had finally borne fruit; ‘bourgeois liberalisation’ had been halted in its tracks; the fear of radical mayhem had succeeded where mayhem itself had failed.

  In the 1960s the Western world had lost no sleep over the excesses of the Cultural Revolution; China was a global irrelevance; such things were to be expected of Marxist-Leninist fundamentalists in the Third World. But in the 1990s, with China a major trading partner and emerging world power, the televised defiance and the ruthless repression of a popular movement for democratic rights could hardly be ignored. The US responded with economic sanctions and a suspension of weapons sales and high-level contacts; a few other Western countries followed suit; and Hong Kong, counting down the days till its 1997 handover, witnessed such large demonstrations of sympathy that its last British governor was emboldened to introduce some belated democracy of his own. But as Beijing had calculated, most of this was window-dressing. No nation broke off diplomatic relations, no multi-national corporation withdrew, and there was no renegotiation of Hong Kong’s future. For the world too, it was business as usual. Within a matter of months normal relations with the US resumed, as did the rate of inward investment; in fact in 1991–93 it rose by a staggering 500 per cent. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought a Sino-Russian rapprochement; but neither that, nor the bombing of China’s Belgrade embassy, the downing of a US spy-plane, the on-going frictions in Tibet and Xinjiang, and the occasional outcries over human rights (especially in connection with the Falun Gong) were allowed to disrupt the passage of goods and the penetration of capital. In 1997–98 Presidents Jiang Zemin and Bill Clinton exchanged visits that were rich in talk of ‘strategic partnership’ and ‘complementary economies’. Three years later China was admitted to the World Trade Organization [it is “Organization” on its website] and Beijing was awarded the 2008 Olympics. The leadership greeted both as international recognition of China’s coming of age and vindication of its insistence on ‘stability’. The global podium had a new contender.

  Attracting foreign investment and technology had been a high priority ever since the 1970s; but as with the nineteenth-century swing in trade from tea to opium, the tide had now turned. Such had been the growth of China’s economy, such the competiveness of its exports, and such the restraints on domestic spending that surpluses now swamped deficits while outward investment powered ahead of inward. Globalisation had come at just the right moment. Deregulated, and supercharged by the new communications technology, the movement of goods and capital accelerated just when China had most to shift. The main beneficiaries were foreign consumers and foreign currency reserves, principally US Treasury bonds; and as of old, this largesse encouraged a dependency among the beneficiaries that in Chinese minds blurred the distinction between trade and tribute. Similar sentiments could be detected in China’s dash to secure reliable sources of energy and raw materials, principally in Africa and Central Asia. The concept of ‘All under Heaven’, now expanded and integrated to an extent unforeseen even by Clinton and Jiang Zemin, had acquired new substance. The ‘Middle Kingdom’ was closer to the middle, more pivotal and powerful, than at any time in its history.

  NOTES

  Abbreviations

  CHAC: Cambridge History of Ancient China

  CHC: Cambridge History of China

  CHEIA: Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia

  EPIGRAPHS

  1 Confucius, The Analects, p.3.

  2 Sima Qian, Shiji, quoted by Keightley i
n Ropp, Heritage of China, p.54.

  INTRODUCTION

  1 Waldron, The Great Wall, passim.

  2 Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies, pp.143–58.

  3 See, for instance, Pulleyblank, The Background to the Rebellion of An Lu-Shan, pp.33, 128–9.

  4 Jung Chang and Halliday, Mao, pp.135–73.

  5 Spence, The Search for Modern China, pp.602–3.

  6 See Twitchett, The Writing of Official History, pp.17ff.

  7 Zurcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China, p.280.

  8 Hunan Museum, The Han Tombs of Mawangdui, Hunan People’s Publishing House, Changsha, 1978, pp.1–3; Chen Jianming (ed.), The Exhibition of Mawangdui Han Tombs, Hunan Provincial Museum, n.d., p.2.

  9 For the etymologies of all provincial toponyms see Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual, p.137.

  10 Fitzgerald, The Empress Wu, p.v.

  CHAPTER 1: RITES TO WRITING, PRE-C. 1050 BC

  1 Huainanzi, 3:1a, in de Bary and Bloom, Sources of Chinese Tradition, 1, p.347.

  2 Kwang-chih Chang, ‘China on the eve of the Historical Period’, in CHAC, p.66.

  3 Li Ling and Constance A. Cook, ‘Translation of the Chu silk manuscript’, in Cook and Major, Defining Chu, pp.171–3.

  4 Kwang-chih Chang, ‘China on the eve of the Historical Period’, in CHAC, pp.66–7.

  5 Pron. ‘Shia’; Wade-Giles (W-G) ‘Hsia’.

  6 Pron. ‘Joe’; W-G ‘Chou’.

  7 Robert Bagley, ‘Shang Archaeology’, in CHAC, p.125.

  8 Ibid., p.137.

  9 Ibid., p.165.

  10 Ibid., p.197.

  11 Chang, Early Chinese Civilisation, p.57.

  12 ‘Exploring Chinese history’ at www.ibiblio.org.

  13 Mallory and Mair, The Tarim Mummies, p.8

  14 A. P. Okladnikov, ‘Inner Asia at the dawn of history’, in CHEIA, p.79.

  15 H. G. Creel, ‘Dragon bones’, Asia, 35, p. 182, cited in Keightley, Sources of Shang History, pp.140-1.

  16 Keightley, Sources of Shang History, p.21.

  17 Ibid., pp.154-5

  18 William G. Boltz, ‘Language and writing’, in CHAC, p.88.

  19 Oracle bone translations from de Bary and Bloom, Sources of Chinese Tradition, pp.7–19.

  20 Keightley, The Ancestral Landscape, p.119.

  21 Ibid., p.101.

  22 Keightley, Sources of Shang History, pp.55ff.

  23 David N. Keightley, ‘The Shang’, in CHAC, p.256.

  CHAPTER 2: SAGES AND HEROES, c. 1050 BC– c. 250 BC

  1 Fairbank and Goldman, China: A New History.

  2 Quoted in Waley, Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China, p.35.

  3 Creel, The Origins of Statecraft in China, vol. 1, pp.83, 93.

  4 Edward L. Shaughnessy, ‘Western Zhou history’, in CHAC, pp.310–11.

  5 Shangshu zhengyi, 13, 24a, quoted in Shaughnessy, CHAC, p.314.

  6 Confucius, The Analects, vii, 5, in D. C. Lau translation.

  7 Watson, The Tso-chuan, p.xvi.

  8 Shangshu zhengyi, 18, 16a, quoted in Shaughnessy, CHAC, p.318.

  9 Quoted in Shaughnessy, CHAC, p.337.

  10 Quoted in Ebrey, China: A Political, Cultural and Social History, pp.174–5.

  11 Jessica Rawson, ‘Western Zhou archaeology’, in CHAC, p.388.

  12 Ibid., p.449.

  13 Quoted in Shaughnessy, CHAC, p.149.

  14 Hui, War and State Formation in Ancient China.

  15 E.g. Frank A. Kierman, ‘Phases and modes of combat in Early China’, in Chinese Ways in Warfare, ed. Kierman and Fairbank, pp.52–3.

  16 Watson, The Tso-chuan, p.62.

  17 Ban Gu, The History of the Former Han, vol. 2, p.130.

  18 See Michael Loewe, ‘Introduction’ to CHC, vol. 1, p.22.

  19 Cho-yun Hsu, ‘The Spring and Autumn period’, in CHAC, pp.571–2.

  20 Confucius, The Analects, ix, 2, trans. D. C. Lau, p.77.

  21 Ibid., xi, 4, adapted from Lau trans., p.11, and de Bary and Bloom, Sources of Chinese Tradition, p.47.

  22 Confucius, The Analects, vii, 20, trans. Lau, p.61.

  23 Ibid., vii, 1, p.57.

  24 David Shepherd Nivison, ‘The classical philosophical writings’, in CHAC, p.761.

  25 Hubei Provincial Museum, The High Appreciation of the Cultural Relics of the Zeng Hou Yi Tomb, Fine Arts Publishing, Hubei, 1995, p.22.

  26 Charles Tilly, ‘Reflections on the history of European state-making’, in The Formation of the National States in Western Europe, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1975, p.73.

  27 Sima Qian in Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, p.23.

  28 Quoted in Hansen, The Open Empire, p.90.

  29 Mark Edward Lewis, ‘Warring States political history’, in CHAC, pp.604, 622.

  30 Sima Qian in Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, p.32.

  CHAPTER 3: THE FIRST EMPIRE, C. 250–210 BC

  1 Sage, Ancient Sichuan and the Unification of China, p.197.

  2 Ibid., p.119.

  3 Ibid., p.149.

  4 Cook and Major, Defining Chu, passim.

  5 Sima Qian in Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, pp.35–6.

  6 Ibid., p.42.

  7 Ibid., pp.42–3.

  8 Ibid., p.163.

  9 Ibid., p.164.

  10 Jia Yi, quoted in ibid., pp.80–82.

  11 Ibid., p.87.

  12 Jenner, The Tyranny of History, pp.22–3.

  13 Derk Bodde, ‘The state and empire of Ch’in’, in CHC, vol. 1, p.52.

  14 Bodde, China’s First Unifier.

  15 Han Feizi, ch. 49, trans. Burton Watson, quoted in de Bary and Bloom, Sources of Chinese Tradition, vol. 1, pp.199–203.

  16 Sima Qian in Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, pp.184–5.

  17 E.g. Bodde, ‘The state and empire of Ch’in’, pp.69–71.

  18 Sima Qian in Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, p.185.

  19 Bodde, ‘The state and empire of Ch’in’, p.71.

  20 Henry Yule and A. D. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words etc., 2nd edn, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1985, pp.196–8.

  21 Measure for Measure, Act 2, scene 1.

  22 Bodde, China’s First Unifier, p.118.

  23 Sima Qian in Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, p.213.

  24 Ibid., pp.207–8.

  25 Waldron, The Great Wall of China, pp.18–21.

  26 De Crespigny, Northern Frontier, pp.455–7; Lovell, The Great Wall, pp.15–16.

  27 Sima Qian in Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, p.63.

  CHAPTER 4: HAN ASCENDANT, 210–141 BC

  1 Sima Qian in Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, p.189.

  2 Hardy, Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo, pp.49–50.

  3 Sima Qian in Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, pp.192–3.

  4 Ibid., p.204.

  5 Ibid., pp.204–5.

  6 Sima Qian in Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, vol. 1, ‘The early years of the Han Dynasty 209 BC–141 BC’, pp.19–22.

  7 Ibid., pp.30–33.

  8 Ibid., p.46.

  9 Sage, Ancient Sichuan, p.160.

  10 Sima Qian in Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, vol. 1, pp.70–71.

  11 A catty being 16 taels, approximately half a kilogram (1lb 4oz).

  12 Ibid., pp.72–3.

  13 Ibid., pp.294–5.

  14 Ibid., p.340.

  15 Ibid., p.106.

  16 Gao Zhixi in Hunan Museum, The Han Tombs of Mawangdui, Hunan People’s Publishing House, Changsha, 1978, p.6.

  17 Sima Qian in Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, vol. 2, ‘The age of Emperor Wu, 140– c. 100 BC’, pp.239–42.

  18 Ibid., p.250.

  CHAPTER 5: WITHIN AND BEYOND, 141 BC–AD 1

  1 Compare Michael Loewe, in CHC, vol. 1, Sima Qian in Watson, Records of the Grand Historian and Homer Dubs, in Ban Gu, The History of the Former Han, vol. 2, p.13.

  2 Laozi, Daodejing, quoted in
de Bary and Bloom, Sources of Chinese Tradition, vol. 1, p.61.

  3 Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies, pp.270–72.

  4 Sima Qian in Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, vol. 2, p.173.

  5 Jagchid and Symons, Peace, War and Trade, pp.26–7.

  6 Yu Ying-Shih, ‘Han foreign relations’, in CHC, vol. 1, p.390.

  7 Sima Qian in Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, vol. 2, p.172.

  8 J. K. Fairbank, ‘Introduction; varieties of the Chinese military experience’ in Kierman and Fairbank, Chinese Ways in Warfare, p.11.

  9 Ban Gu, Hanshu, 96B, 2B, in Hulsewe, China in Central Asia, pp.146–7.

  10 Sima Qian in Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, vol. 2, p.274.

  11 Ban Gu, Hanshu, 96B, 3A, in Hulsewe, China in Central Asia, pp.148–9.

  12 Ibid., 61, 12B, in Hulsewe, China in Central Asia, p.234.

  13 Watson, Ssu-ma Ch’ien: Grand Historian of China, p.62.

  14 Ibid., pp.60–70.

  15 Bielenstein, The Bureaucracy of Han Times, p.157.

  16 Ban Gu, The History of the Former Han, vol. 2, p.213.

  17 Summarised in Michael Loewe, Crisis and Conflict in Han China, pp.179–80.

  18 Bielenstein, The Bureaucracy of Han Times, p.19.