From the Ruins of Empire

by Pankaj Mishra

  Huang Zunxian, who had been the Chinese consul-general in San Francisco from 1882 to 1885 and was a fine poet, had written bitterly about the general ill-treatment of Chinese immigrants, and the pain of Chinese forced overseas by poverty.

  Alas! What crimes have our people committed,

  That they suffer this calamity in our nation’s fortunes?

  Five thousand years since the Yellow Emperor,

  Our country today is exceedingly weak.

  …

  Great China and the race of Han

  Have now become a joke to other races.

  We are not as simple as the black slaves,

  Numb and confused wherever they may be.

  Grave, dignified, I arrive with my dragon banners,

  Knock on the customs gate, hesitant, doubtful.

  Even if we emptied the water of four oceans,

  It would be hard to wash this shame clean.74

  Liang felt keenly this ignominy. But he was discouraged to find that Chinese expatriate communities in America, though subject to racial discrimination and abuse, did not support his grand vision of a self-empowering Chinese people at home. In the midst of a democratic country with freedom of speech, the Chinese-Americans preferred clannish ways; they clung to tradition, and produced criminal gangs and mafia dons rather than representative parties and leaders. ‘The Chinese’, he wrote, ‘have a village mentality, not a national mentality … Developed to excess, it is a major obstacle to nation building.’75

  It was no longer possible for Liang to conclude that the Chinese were held back only by their autocratic system from becoming self-aware and nationalistic individuals. ‘Who says America is a nation freely formed by all the people? I see only a few great men who imposed it on them. Since this is true even of Americans who are so used to self-government, others should certainly take warning.’76

  The democracy and freedom that a revolution promised in China could only cause chaos rather than a nation-state capable of standing up to Western power. ‘With countrymen such as these, is it possible to practice the electoral system? … Freedom, constitutionalism, and republicanism, are all terms that mean government by the majority. But the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people are like those in San Francisco.’77 Preparing to leave for Japan in October 1903, Liang wrote:

  No more am I dizzy with vain imaginings; no longer will I tell a tale of pretty dreams. In a word, the Chinese people must for now accept authoritarian rule; they cannot enjoy freedom … those born in the thundering tempests of today, forged and molded by iron and fire – they will be my citizens, twenty or thirty, or fifty years hence. Then we will give them Rousseau to read, and speak to them of Washington.78

  This wasn’t a sudden change of mind on Liang’s part. The success of Meiji Japan, where he lived, had proved that an authoritarian state could be more effective than liberal democratic institutions in building a modern nation. As European countries moved to embrace protectionist economic policies, and built stronger states, many intellectuals in East Asia had begun to change their minds. By the late 1890s, Tokutomi Soh, initially a liberal reformist, believed that individual rights were being discarded by Western nations themselves; he questioned the worth of ‘representative government and party cabinets’.79 It was almost inevitable that Liang would be influenced by the growing intellectual preference among Japanese for the statism embodied by Bismarck’s Germany.

  By now Liang was reading and speaking a great deal about the Japanese theorist Kato Hiroyuki, one of the many Japanese thinkers who believed that only enlightened despotism could bring about progressive change and ensure national survival against the challenge from the West. According to Hiroyuki, a republican system hadn’t worked out even in the countries of its origin. France had suffered much violence after its revolution and still lacked a stable political structure. The United States, despite its British heritage, still discriminated against its ethnic and racial minorities, particularly blacks and Chinese, and Native Americans. It was still a barbarous country, artistically and intellectually; and, with all its love of liberty, it had been compelled to expand the power of the federal government to fit into its international role.

  If greater centralization for the sake of military preparedness was the fate of even such a country as the United States, which had made such a fetish of federalism in the past, what was a country like China to do? As Liang saw it, China wasn’t faced with a choice of political systems. Such were its circumstances – a weak and ineffectual government, and a poorly educated and ethnically diverse population in a large country – that an autocracy was a necessity. A democratic republic would quickly lead to war between the military and the people, between lower and upper classes, one province and another; and revolutions would occur frequently, sapping the strength and dedication to the common good the Chinese nation needed to deal with external threats.

  Besides, as Liang’s justification went on, autocracy was of many kinds. It could be responsive to the needs of the people, devoted to marshalling national strength and providing impartial justice. To be sure, Emperor Guangxu wasn’t the enlightened despot Liang had in mind; nor did any other candidate present himself. But Liang wanted above all to forestall the possibility of a republican revolution, such as the one that Sun Yat-sen agitated for, for in Liang’s view it could only lead to anarchy and chaos, and finally to the creation of a new tyranny. The fundamental change Liang sought – a centralized state that forged the Chinese people into a united citizenry – could only be achieved under a benign autocracy.

  THE TEMPTATIONS OF AUTOCRACY AND REVOLUTION

  Like many other Muslim intellectuals, al-Afghani had flirted with similar notions to Liang’s of a unified resistance to the West, and sought his enlightened despot in Istanbul and Tehran. But this was the first time such arguments had been made by an anti-Qing Chinese thinker; they were to have a long history in the twentieth century and beyond.

  Liang Qichao was soon vindicated in his suspicion of the chaos of republican democracy, not so much by the incapacity of the Chinese people as by the incompetence and intellectual overreaching of his rivals, Sun Yat-sen and his Revolutionary Alliance of republicans. After 1905 Liang had lost the battle for influence over Chinese expatriates to Sun, who gave Chinese nationalism a racial ‘Han’ tinge, turning it into an explicitly anti-Manchu sentiment. Even Phan Boi Chau, Liang’s Vietnamese protege, had begun to spend more time strategizing about Vietnamese and Asian freedom with Sun than with his earliest guru. The most articulate of the anti-Manchuists was the classical scholar Zhang Taiyan, who had been jailed for three years in China for insulting the emperor. The revolutionaries also spoke about socialism, without specifying what they meant by it – nationalization of land or public ownership of industry. Stressing the urgency of Western-style revolution in China, Sun’s journal Min Bao became more widely read than Liang’s periodicals.

  Liang himself flirted briefly with anti-Manchuism. But, like Kang Youwei, he never ceased to be aware of the necessity of a broad anti-imperialist front that included China’s many ethnic minorities. In this he remained within the mainstream of Chinese nationalism (anti-Manchuism itself became redundant after the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911). In his debates with Sun’s revolutionaries, Liang continued to uphold the importance of ‘broad nationalism’, as opposed to what he called ‘narrow nationalism’. He also criticized socialist ideas as inapplicable to China, which did not need the nationalization of land so much as nationalization of capital.

  According to his original view, socialism had its roots in the terrible class inequalities and conflicts created by the laissez-faire policies followed in Western Europe after the Industrial Revolution. China had experienced no such polarization or clashes. What it needed was industrial production through capitalist methods carefully regulated by the state. This was how China could withstand the great power of American economic imperialism and hold its own in the international jungle. A megalomaniacal businessman like Cec
il Rhodes could do whatever he liked in southern Africa because his government backed him. Accordingly, ‘the economic policy I advocate is primarily to encourage and protect capitalists so that they can do their best to engage in external competition. To this policy all other considerations are subordinate.’80 If this meant holding down workers’ wages and rent, so be it. Far from endorsing Adam Smith’s economic liberalism, Liang was arguing that in the age of imperialism, which was driven by the power of state-backed business enterprises, China had to accumulate the same kind of resources so as to hold its own internationally, for nation-states everywhere were acting with a unified will, trying to bring the flow of goods and people as much as possible under their control.

  Setting economic – and moral – priorities that the ‘capitalist’ heirs of Mao Zedong may well have remembered, Liang maintained that ‘Encouragement of capital is the foremost consideration; protection of labor is the second consideration.’81 And his version of capitalism included a strong social welfare component, in which the state regulated private enterprises to prevent class tensions, economic exploitation and social conflict.

  The revolution itself, when it fortuitously came in 1911 and overthrew the Manchu dynasty (and made Sun Yat-sen the first president of the Chinese Republic for all of six weeks), was not, however, the direct result of anything the exiles in Japan said or did. It coalesced through sporadic internal uprisings. And the utter chaos that followed the overthrow of the Manchus confirmed the most pessimistic of Liang’s conclusions about revolution. It also revealed the great distance between the stirring emotional ideal of nationalism – whether embodied by the Chinese people or, more parochially, the Han people – and the political reality of China.

  The republic generated great enthusiasm at first, despite the political skulduggery that led to Sun Yat-sen ceding his office to Yuan Shikai, the old general who had the strongest army behind him. Political parties sprouted overnight to contest the first free elections, scheduled for 1912. Liberated from censorship, newspapers finally came into their own. Those Chinese who lived in cities cut off their queues, embraced Western dress and manners, and flew the newly designed national flag from their homes.

  Liang at first kept his distance from the revolution, and then yielded to Yuan Shikai’s blandishments, becoming his Minister of Justice and then his financial adviser. The unstable Yuan was not quite the enlightened despot Liang may have been looking for. In yet another affirmation that in transitional societies, power lay with men from the barracks, Yuan became president of the Chinese Republic, and then stamped out any lingering trace of opposition to himself. When in China’s first free elections Sun’s Nationalist Party (Guomindang) emerged as the winner, it was allegedly Yuan’s agents who assassinated the prime minister-elect. Yuan then forced Sun into exile, banned the Guomindang and attempted to revive Confucianism as a ruling ideology, a venture in which he was assisted by Kang Youwei.

  Yuan had inherited severe financial problems and a weakened administration from the Qing court. Revolution hadn’t stopped the foreign powers from exacting tariff revenues and salt taxes from China. Yuan added to these debts by taking big loans from foreign banks and governments. In a pattern familiar by now from Egypt, Iran and Turkey, the European and Japanese lenders were soon running Yuan’s economic policy, and foreigners were appointed as officials in the Chinese government. The loan money ran out, and then Yuan was forced to sell railway and mining concessions to his creditors.

  Imperialism also had a fresh new face in China: Japan, which had hugely increased its commercial interests in China in recent years, and signed far-reaching agreements with Britain and France. (It would enter the First World War on the Allied powers’ side.) In line with the country’s role as a budding imperialist, the Japanese authorities had made life harder for some of the foreign pan-Asianists. Phan Boi Chau was expelled after Japan signed a pact with France, agreeing not to host anti-French activists on its soil. British pressure finally led to the closure of Abdurreshid Ibrahim’s paper Islamic Fraternity.

  A generation of Chinese had been educated in Japan by now, and pan-Asianism for many in the country’s elite meant giving assistance to China. Nevertheless, sensing an opportunity in China’s disarray, Japan pressed successfully for more territorial and commercial concessions from China in 1915, including recognition of Japan’s control over Shandong, which it had seized from Germany the previous year. These were Japan’s infamously punitive ‘Twenty-One Demands’ which came printed on stationery tactfully bearing a watermark of dreadnoughts and machine guns. Yuan succumbed, much to the horror of ordinary Chinese. In fact he had little choice, given Chinese indebtedness to Japan. The following year, he tried to declare himself the emperor of China, and to proclaim a new dynasty, before ferocious opposition, including from the military, forced him to back down.

  Yuan died in 1916 before he could further damage his country, and with his death even the semblance of a government disappeared; most of China shattered into innumerable fiefdoms of warlords and bandits. Much of China would remain exposed to the vagaries of warlordism until 1927 – a situation made familiar to contemporary readers in pre-Taliban Afghanistan where arms from abroad flooded the country, old elites struck deals with military strongmen, and ordinary people suffered from arbitrary taxes and confiscations of property. Mao Zedong’s native province of Hunan was particularly ravaged by rival warlords, and the bitter lessons of chaos and misrule would haunt future generations of Chinese.

  The age of imperial dynasties was coming to an end everywhere, it seemed, but the future now seemed more clouded than before. China was not alone in failing to build a viable new democratic state soon after the shattering of the old one. Turkey and Iran were also suffering this fate, and were soon to witness the rise of autocratic governments. As in these countries, the modernization of the military in China had shifted the locus of power internally and elevated men trained in modern military academies: strongmen who could bind other men to ideas of discipline, zeal and self-sacrifice. Far from being vested in mastery of the Confucian classics, power would now flow from the barrel of the gun, as Mao Zedong, who observed the brutalities of the warlord era in his home province, noted in 1927. The chaos unleashed by this warlord period would be invoked late into the contemporary era to justify authoritarian governments.

  Liang Qichao himself was not to remain untainted by Yuan’s failures. As a teacher in exile in Japan he had been greatly revered. Some of his own proteges had risen to powerful positions in republican China and were engaged in the factional struggles that ravaged the country. Liang, who had already begun to aim his message more towards powerful officials than to students, sided with them, and rose to ministerial posts in the new government in Beijing.

  He negotiated toughly with his former hosts, the Japanese, over their unreasonable demands. He also successfully advocated China’s entry into the First World War in 1917; he calculated that to emerge on the winning side was the best way to insert China into the international system, cancel the unequal treaties that still bound her, and recover the Shandong peninsula from the Japanese. As part of Liang’s deal with the Allied powers, Chinese workers and students, among them the first generation of Communist leaders such as Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping travelled to France to work and study there.

  Nevertheless, Liang’s political career had proved to be disastrous. Returning to China after fifteen years, he had thrown himself into the tumult of the post-Qing state only to find himself utterly compromised by politically expedient associations with corrupt and violent warlords. One of the many wild pendulum swings of political fortune in post-Yuan China finally dispossessed him, and forced him to retire from active involvement in the political scene. A younger generation would now come to the fore, building on the foundation provided by his ideas.

  The revolution of 1911 was a cruel failure in many ways, but it succeeded thoroughly in devastating old assumptions. Gone for ever was the sacredness of imperial dynasties, the millenn
ia-strong prestige of the gentry and of classical learning. By destroying the old, the revolution created a new political and intellectual space in which young Chinese, radicalized by the brutal disappointments of 1911, now became visible.

  The spectacle of total social and political fragmentation forced even a liberal thinker like Yan Fu to concede that Confucianism as a state religion might prove a cohesive force. But the days when a possibility like this could be realized were drawing to a close. Disillusioned with politics, young Chinese spoke of the necessity of a ‘New Culture’, a revolution in the mind which would preclude obeisance to the old ways. Consciousness-raising was deemed more important than party politics.

  In 1912 – 13, the Bloomsbury writer G. Lowes Dickinson met some officials of the revolutionary government and was ‘astonished’ by their readiness for a complete Westernization:

  They are doing all they can to sweep away the old China, root and branch, and build up there a reproduction of America. There is nothing, I think, which they would not alter if they could, from the streets of Canton to the family system, and the costume of a policeman to the national religion.82

  In the province of Hunan, a twenty-four-year-old Mao Zedong was moving swiftly away from his earlier reverence for Chinese tradition:

  I used to worry that our China would be destroyed, but now I know that is not so. Through the establishment of a new political system, and a change in the national character, the German states became the German Reich … The only question is how the changes should be carried out. I believe that there must be a complete transformation, like matter that takes form after destruction, or like the infant born out of its mother’s womb … In every century, various nationalities have launched various kinds of great revolutions, periodically cleansing the old and infusing it with the new, all of which are great changes involving life and death, formation and demise. The demise of the universe is similar … I very much look forward to its destruction, because from the demise of the old universe will come a new universe, and will it not be better than the old universe?83