Time after time, China (or her officials) demonstrated that she was not interested in change or modernisation. Where perhaps the peasants may have benefited from controlled change, the Emperor and his administrators were comfortable and happy. When the English attempted to establish free trade with China sometime in the 1800s, the Chinese Mandarins (officials), claiming that China had no need for Western goods, insisted on placing all manner of tariffs on the English goods. The English soon became indignant at the imbalance of trade, so they found a way around the Mandarins by introducing the Chinese both to opium and addiction. "The most serious bone of contention involved treaty relations: because the British refused to submit to the emperor, there were no formal treaty relations between the two countries" [Richard Hooker]. The Chinese demanded the right to deal with British criminals on Chinese soil, but the English refused to hand over British citizens to Chinese courts which they felt were 'vicious and barbaric'. All this eventually led to the Opium Wars of the 1840s [beginning in '39], where English troops marched to Beijing with their superior fire power, and then subjugated the Emperor. He was forced to make many concessions, including Hong Kong.

After this, it became party season for the imperialistic Western powers and Japan. With territory in the Americas and Africa now fairly much determined, everyone wanted a slice of China. The English, Russians, French, Germans, Americans and Japanese all moved in, and established their concession areas. With this began the disintegration of the Chinese Empire and by 1900 it was done for. Out of desperation, some Chinese formed a determined xenophobic movement, known as the Boxer Rebellion [1900], where 'foreign devils' were murdered indiscriminately. For the first and only time Europe united to violently oppress the reactionaries. Japan helped. For the next fifty years, China was destined to lead an oppressive life with unconsolidated power, feuding warlords, rival government factions and foreign exploitation. When the Japanese invaded Manchuria, they were horrifically violent [see, Japanese Atrocities]. Only the most bitter, desperate and determined causes could find their footing in this environment, and as we all know it was to be the peasant-backed communists.

Mao Zedong (left), onetime librarian at Beijing University, started out as a peasant's son in the south of China. He read up on socialism and actively sought and established debating forums. He soon became well recognised in the revolutionary ranks, where eventually two leading camps emerged - the Communists, and the Nationalist Party (or Guo Min Dang [as spelled in modern pin-yin]).

The Guo Min Dang was headed my Chiang Kai-shek (right). It had American and Soviet sponsorship and for some while it looked as if it would come to consolidate power. After a bloody coup in Shanghai [1926] against the communists, with whom they had formerly been in alliance, the Nationalist Party held the cities (with their capital in Nanjing) whilst Mao Zedong took the initiative to organise resistance in the country side. Mao's plan was to "to surround the cities with our countryside and eventually take the cities". At the time, the communist ideals proved very appealing to the peasants, who had for so long been oppressed and exploited by the land-owning class. Wherever the communists went, they redistributed land, and for the majority the situation improved. Consequently, the peasants were ready to fight off any government that threatened a return to the former status quo. This act helped lead to Mao's dominance within the party, and with 90 per cent of China being peasants, this was eventually to prove the Nationalist Government's downfall.

In Hunan in 1927 Mao organised the disastrous Autumn Harvest Uprising. In 1934, having withstood five encirclement campaigns launched by Chiang Kai Shek (who was also trying to hold off the Japanese in Manchuria), Mao led the 100 thousand strong Red Army on the Long March, which supposedly covered 12 500 km. Famously, they crossed eleven provinces, eighteen mountain ranges and twenty-four rivers, during which point Mao asserted guerrilla tactics and ousted rivals until he had gained absolute command of the Communist Party. Only twenty-eight thousand marchers, many of whom had joined the march along the way, made it to their ultimate destination in Shaanxi province. Once there, they quickly established a strong base.

The communists finally took control of the country in 1949, forcing the Guo Min Dang to escape with its navy to Taiwan, where they promptly set up camp. This later lead to the contention over Taiwan. At this point, history showed the Nationalists to be no better than the communists, as they were a violent socialist dictatorship themselves (and under them corruption was rampant), but America maintained it's backing and for a long while the communists didn't have the navy or the resources to do anything about it.

It seemed to me for a long while that China had no claim to Taiwan, which was internationally recognised as an independent, sovereign state, but now it all seems politically questionable to me. For a thousand years Taiwan was a part of China, it is ethnically comprised of Chinese, and many Taiwanese I know would like for Taiwan to one day be a part of mother China again. But before this happens, they must first be sure that the Communists won't drastically alter the democratic capitalism on which they now thrive.

In this respect, Taiwan is supposed to look to its neighbours. With Hong Kong and Macao, there is now 'One China, Two Policies'. This means that although both these districts have formally returned to China (in '97 and '99 respectively), the government still allows them degrees of autonomy and sponsors duel economic strategies. Simply, Hong Kong and Macao work, China knows this, and so they haven't interfered too significantly.

Meanwhile, Taiwan is watching. China hopes to show Taiwan that if she comes back to China, everything will be good. I think that this is very likely true, as the Communist Government strikes me as progressive and pragmatic these days. Every year, however, the Communists try to take more and give less to Honk Kong - leading to massive street protests - and so perhaps only the future can tell.

When I taught English in Christchurch, New Zealand, my Chinese students out-numbered the Taiwanese five to one. My Taiwanese students sat quietly and shaked their heads whenever my Chinese students proclaimed that Taiwan [already] belonged to China. In China, I found that no Chinese could even consider the possibility of Taiwan's sovereignty.

After various difficulties and disappointments, however, things went well astray when Mao declared the 'Hundred Flowers' period [1957]. The idea here was that thought and creativity was to flourish ("Let a hundred flowers bloom") and people were supposed to freely criticise the government. It was Mao's opinion that "... we can really foster correct ideas, overcome wrong ideas and really settle issues". Of course, this promptly backfired, as the party apparatus was not prepared to deal with such criticism. With the Party's hierarchy under threat, Mao changed his mind and promptly persecuted many of those who had taken part.

Tragically, Mao Zedong then called for 'The Great Leap Forward' [1957-61]. China was supposed to become a leading industrial power, and this was to stimulate the Chinese economy towards the levels reached by the Americans. It was the same tune as the Russians had been singing, and in both cases it cost the citizens dearly. Mao's idea was to demand that every community meet a proscribed quota of smeltered iron. Peasants were to build backyard smelters and to extract the iron from the earth. This would provide China with more iron than it could have otherwise hoped for in so short a time, and thus provide a cheap means to meet it's industrial needs.

To meet this quota, people were forced to tear down picture frames and door handles, and everything iron, to supply the furnaces. This produced extremely low-grade iron which found little use and practical benefit. What resulted was brought about because the peasants, who should have been out toiling the land, were committing themselves to this futile endeavour. The grain output quickly fell alarmingly below the proscribed levels, but the figures were falsified (as happens in totalitarian societies where feedback cannot come from the bottom up). Around 550 000 people, who protested against this radical change of pace, met with their deaths, and before anyone had time to stop it the country was thrown into a massive famine. Perhaps to protect the Mandate of Heaven (where such a tragedy would [rightfully] undermine the government) the communists suppressed this horrible reality from its people and the world, and so millions of people who may have benefited from international aid perished.

Around this time, Edgar Snow (an American correspondent and writer [see, Books]), was able to tour China relatively unhindered by the authorities and report to the world that everyone was alive and well. But China can conceal much within her massive lands. Estimates now have it that very likely somewhere between 30 and 60 million people starved to death in this period. It counts as one of the biggest tragedies of the 20th century, and virtually nobody - including modern Chinese - know anything about it.

Unfortunately, amidst the conspiracies and power struggles that followed, Mao Zedong finally lost the plot and succumbed to megalomania. He purged much of the government (the later Chairman, Deng Xiaoping, was twice jailed) and appealed to Chinese school and university students to turn against their teachers. Workers were also to turn against their managers. With their arm bands and their 'Little Red Books' (of quotations from Chairman Mao), the students then formed a Red Guard and began terrorising the country in a campaign against bourgeois values and 'closet capitalists'. It was to become known as The (Great Proletarian) Cultural Revolution [1966-76]. Perhaps Mao's aim was to 'wipe the slate clean' of China's burdensome traditions and institutions so that a new China could be rebuilt. Perhaps he was blaming the failure of the Great Leap Forward on China rather than on himself.

For ten years, with Mao Zedong reigning as a de facto and immovable emperor, China (with her people now clothed identically in blue and green) experienced the worst of totalitarianism. Families were torn apart. Neighbour spied upon neighbour. Children were encouraged to report on and denounce their parents. Communities were institutionalised to such an extent, largely under direction of work units or 'danwei', that an individual couldn't even marry or have a baby without approval from above. Former landlords and landowners, who had already suffered incredibly, were terrorised to the point where even their grandchildren were stigmatised and discriminated against. And this was supposedly an egalitarian and classless society! Teachers, intellectuals, and even politicians were hunted down. Hundreds of thousands of youth and students were sent to the countryside (often willingly at first) so as to remove their sense of privilege and teach them peasant ways. Many never returned. They became China's 'lost generation', having missed out on a proper education. Just as Stalin purged all the original Bolsheviks in his 'Terror', many Chinese communists were themselves terrorised by student mobs. (I have met former members of the Red Guard, as civilised and rational as anyone, who plainly admit their part in those years. I know university professors who did their time in the countryside.)

When Mao Zedong finally died in 1976, the country wept. ("I remember that we all had to stand outside our school and cry for most of the day. I cried, but I didn't really know why I was crying", said one of my old friends, speaking about when he was around ten years old.) As the country organised itself in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, the infamous 'Gang of Four' (Jiang Qing [Mao's fourth wife], Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen) were tried in front of the country and the world. It was a mockery nothing less than the Nuremberg Trials. They received their sentences (where capital punishment was to be overturned) and Mao was set up inside a mausoleum (now known as the Mao-soleum) in the middle of Tienanmen Square. The plaque more or less reads that, after a certain period, he may have made some mistakes. In Deng Xiaoping's words: "To build up Mao's errors too much would only damage the image of our Party and our country, and harm the socialist system". The official view remains that 'Mao was 70 per cent right and 30 per cent wrong', and I heard this quoted by Chinese friends and students many a time. One wonders how such a calculation is made: "Well, he caused absolute misery, but he was also right about the football, yesterday's spelling-B winner, and the colour of his wife's hair. Three out of four's not bad".

Nevertheless, I will agree that he was an amazing man and that his leadership was incredible at least up until about the mid-1950s. Perhaps we should blame mankind, rather than a single man, for allowing a dictatorship to take effect where the inevitable megalomania and corruption could cause so much wrath. And we must remember where China had been before Mao led in the Reds. The Communists took a country that was plagued by anarchy, feudalism, bandits, famine, unemployment, corruption, and all such things, and turned it into a state where practically everyone was fed and employed (most of the time), where there was some manner of social order and justice, and where there was at least some sense of equality.

But this is all relative, of course. To a citizen of developed nations, China's plight may seem like oppression and suffering at its worst. My point is that it was a lot better that what was and what could have been, and we must be careful not to ignore such relativity. Gone was concubinage, where concubines had absolutely no rights and were either abused by others or forced to abuse others themselves. Gone was female slavery into marriage and prostitution. No more was there the horrific foot-binding of girls (although, that had been phasing out). In their place came universal education, fairer distribution of land, and increasing international power and prestige. The plight of women was drastically improved, as men and women were to be treated as equals under the communists. Stability replaced instability. Perhaps we can look back with hindsight from our sheltered positions and find fault and blame in China's post Revolution woes, but by my opinion China was considerably worse before 1949 (having been raped and abused by foreign powers for a hundred years, and having been victim to a system that was riddled with corruption and arbitrary justice). The question in my mind, therefore, is not whether the Chinese Communist Party made mistakes, but whether it shall continue to make mistakes in the future. Simply, will it lead the country and its people forward, or backwards?

To begin to answer this question, several years after Mao's death, Deng Xiaoping (the former political prisoner who had lost a son to the Cultural Revolution) finally emerged as China's new Chairman. He was not Mao's choice. This man was wholly more sensible, moderate and enlightened than Mao ever was, although he was not without his faults. He opened China's doors once more to foreign trade. From his ideas emerged such quotes as 'To get rich is glorious', and he advanced the idea that one person's wealth is not necessarily the cause of another's poverty. It became accepted that some might get rich quicker than others. The main idea was that the entrepreneurs could help bring the others up, rather than the 'crabs-in-a-bucket' policy where the poor held everyone else down with them.

Based on what I've read, Deng Xiaoping held a moderating influence within the party. He supported Democracy Wall in Beijing, where people could post up what ever they wanted. The seeming contradiction when it was pulled down may well have been as a result of the counter-influence of various communist hard-liners within the party. Perhaps this also throws some light onto his failure over the Tienanmen Square massacre in '89. Students and sympathetic workers continued to protest and fast despite earlier threats until someone (not necessarily Deng) called in the army. Comprised mainly of poorly educated and apolitical peasants, the army eventually did what armies do: It opened up its guns on the panicking masses. Thousands went to hospital and a conservative estimate is that around five-hundred students and workers lay dead. ("I was held back in my career and my studies after that", said a language student of mine who had taken part in the protests as a student of Beijing University. "Now I'm just happy to lead a simple life and to be left alone".)

I don't believe it's known whether it was Deng who ordered the guns. My suspicion, as I've read, is that amidst the chaos someone made a judgement without consulting Deng. Deng then had to accept responsibility as the head of the government, for it wouldn't seem strong leadership for the leader to lose control of such matters, and since then his reputation has been tarnished. He resigned from office soon afterwards.

I feel that my perspective as a later-day witness, if not as a historian, proves interesting also at this point. I spoke to many Chinese about the matter and several themes ran strong. One was that they seemed to know very little about it. The other was that many blamed America for interfering and for 'arousing the students to protest'. It shows how these things go, because from what I understand, America was doing it's best to stay out of it. But then there's a large Chinese population in America. Considerable pressure must have been on the government not to ignore the situation, and so America made sure that it's correspondents got the story to the world. Whatever the case, America is China's scapegoat for the Tienanmen protests. 'America should learn to stay out of China's affairs', as I heard time and time again.

To read about the changes that have happened in China since Mao's death is incredible. The change from a totalitarian central economy to an authoritarian market economy has been dramatic, and as its economic growth keeps rocketing ahead (up at plus 9.1 % in 2003), so does the standard of living. What's to come is not for me to guess (and guesses about China are demonstrably precarious, no matter who's making them), but what I witnessed was a completely different country to the one I had read about in books - some of which were only five or six years old. Take a book from twenty years ago, and it's as if you're comparing North Korea to Japan.

In the years since Deng Xiaoping, until very recently influenced by Jiang Zemin (who still holds control over the military forces - and so it beats me who's really in power), China has sought continually to open itself up. It joined the WTO (World Trade Organisation) while I was there in 2002, and, as it sells off its lumbersome state-owned enterprises and invites in private ownership, it continues to integrate with the World's economy. This year, China's Premier, Wen Jiabao, has announced that "the constitution will be changed to allow private property ownership for the first time since the Communist Revolution in 1949" [bbc.co.uk]. People have choices again (who they marry, where and what they study, if they travel, what they do for a career, etc), and the cities are becoming more and more vibrant.

But China still has many burdens and difficulties to overcome. For one, there are it's failing banks, which, according to Gordon Chang in 'The Coming Collapse of China' [see, Books], have been forced to carry the burden of China's failing state-owned enterprises by indiscriminately approving ridiculous loans. Perhaps this is so that the Chinese government won't have to acknowledge a deficit there. But then who else but the government has to prop up the banks? It's a logical circle. My advice: don't put your money in there! [see my negotiating horrors' essay: Banks.]

There's also her legal system. Everyone from America to Amnesty International is constantly having to put pressure on China's government to release various political prisoners, etc. Recently, I've read that there's has been some success; but these may only be the famous ones, as it's "well received abroad". Perhaps it remains as it was in Mao's time, whose policy was: "We kill small Chiang Kai-sheks. We don't kill big Chiang Kai-sheks." [From Wild Swans, p. 184.]

Ting and I knew one Chinese lawyer who gave this answer when I asked her about the legal system in China: "Oh, Jonny. Every day I'm very upset. If I want to win a case, I must bribe the judge. Innocent people go to jail unless I bribe the judge." Presumably, guilty people might also bribe the judge to buy their freedom, but for innocent people it's worse. Of all the jails in the world, I wouldn't want to find myself in the Chinese Gulag.

Then there's Jiang Zemin's American educated son. He wishes to further oppress the Internet by establishing a separate mainframe. This would mean that Internet users wouldn't be able to access China's Sites, and vice versa. When I was there, all of Beijing's Internet cafes were being closed down under the excuse of their being fire hazards. But then every building in China is a fire hazard! [see my journal, China II: Fire.] Already, China blocks many foreign and local Web sites, such as Amnesty International, the BBC's pages on China, as well as (unbelievably!) my own.

Finally, as a legacy of communism that I myself witnessed, there remains in China a crippling social backwardness. China is still a place where ten people do one person's job. One might easily find a hundred Chinese staff working in a supermarket over there, where the same supermarket would only warrant ten staff in my own country. Partly, this is the government's way of keeping people employed with at least some food in their bellies, but then it's not really the way to go about capitalism. For now, it's running horribly inefficiently, but then I guess that this problem will solve itself as capitalism becomes a greater part of the national consciousness.

The Chinese government proclaims that it is 'doing communism in the Chinese way'. Partly, I think that this is face saving. It wouldn't do for the Communist Party's 'Mandate of Heaven' to suddenly proclaim that it wasn't a communist party. But also, I think it is just a reflection of the Party's pragmatism towards matters these days. Who cares about ideology any more? Time after time the ideologies of the Twentieth Century brought about the very opposite of what they were aiming for; and this meant misery. China has watched Russia's collapse with cautions eyes - Mao's famous statement, "Russia's today is China's tomorrow", has been long since forgotten - and so she's not about to pull the rug out from under her own feet in the same way. Any change must be gradual. Personally, I'm every bit behind her, and it is my guess, as many Chinese believe, that China will join America as a dominant World Power within another twenty (and possibly ten) years. I just hope that by then her influence is moderate, tolerant and somewhat more open to democracy.



Copyright © Jonny B Harman, 15 March 2004