By Eric Vandenbroeck
and co-workers
Understanding the 100 years of the current regime
in China Part One
While the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) recently
acknowledged the Tiananmen Square debacle as an attempted revolution, we
will follow the example of Shaun Breslin in China Risen?: Studying Chinese
Global Power (March 2021), who pointed out how important it is what leaders
like Xi
Jinping and the CCP say about Chinese history all the while perpetuating
its own truths in addition we will analyze an extensive range of
Chinese-language debates and discussions, including explaining the roles of
different actors and interests.
Early on already
Historian James Harrison considered the CCP party's actions of rewriting
Chinese history as "the most massive attempt at
ideological re-education in human history."1
In fact, even the
founding date of 1 July is
a myth and it seems clear from the available evidence that an organization
calling itself the Communist Party of China was born a full eight months before
the First National Congress as evidenced by the bulletin Gongchandang (left), published in November 1920 by
Chen Duxiu’s Shanghai group, and its British
counterpart, The Communist, dated August the same year:
As for First
National Congress, it has been detailed that representatives, disguised as
tourists, rented a small pleasure boat on which they officially formed the
party and approved their first political project on
3 Aug. 1921, not 1 July.
Political scientist
Peter Hays Gries stated: "It is certainly
undeniable that in China the past lives in the present to a degree
unmatched in most other countries. ... Chinese often,
however seem to be slave to their history".2 In fact just a few days
ago Xi Jinping stresses
drawing strength from CPC history to forge ahead.
Buried at the end
of the most
important Chinese political speech in a decade, President Xi Jinping’s 66-page
address to the 19th party congress in November 2017, was one short line: “The
Chinese Dream is a dream about history, the present, and the future.” Tired
after 71 ovations over three-and-a-half hours, the audience may have
missed this sentence. Yet it illuminates how history underpins President Xi’s “Chinese Dream” of national rejuvenation.
History plays an
increasingly important legitimizing role in China. As historian
Antonia Finnane writes:
Every country has its
national myths, most of which are grounded in or derived from history; but in
China, history alone is the bedrock. The People’s Republic doesn’t have a
religion, and it doesn’t have a constitution, or at least, not one that counts.
It no longer even has a revolutionary ideology. It just has history, lots of
it.
In contemporary
China, it’s put into practice with surgical skills. Specific memories of events
deemed sensitive by the state are not just forgotten, they are winnowed out and
selectively deleted. The Communist Party has succeeded in hacking the
collective memory.
National amnesia has
become what Chinese writer Yan Lianke calls a “state-sponsored
sport”. And as Beijing’s
global influence rises, its controlling instincts, to tame, to corral, to shape, to prune, to
expurgate history and historical memory, are increasingly being exported to the
world.
China has also
invoked history to legitimize its massive One Belt One
Road international
infrastructure scheme, despite critics claiming that its premise relies on mythologized
history.
But even in China,
not everybody believes what the State puts out, for example commenting on the
Chinese Academy of History; “They aren’t following an academic path,” said
a prominent history professor in Beijing, who said he declined the academy’s
invitation to collaborate on a project. “These people are doing this to suck up
and win
promotion.”
A recent book
titled The Chinese Communist Party: A Century in Ten Lives Edited by
Timothy Cheek, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Hans van de
Ven “does not control history,” but it does know when and how to
seize historical opportunities. The first story in the book is how the
young Dutch revolutionary Henricus Sneevliet helped establish the party. As an envoy of
Moscow, the then uncontested center of the global Communist movement, he also
urged his Chinese comrades to form a united front with Sun Yat-sen’s
Nationalists...Or as has been known for a long time while the PCCP/RC
adopted a Soviet model of multinational state-building, being ‘Chinese’ meant ‘socialist in
content while nationalist in form’.
To most observers,
China, that is the current the People's Republic of China (Chinese: 中华人民共和国;
pinyin: Zhōnghuá Rénmín Gònghéguó; PRC) appears to be a uniquely bounded
and indivisible entity with a long and unbroken history, a single, unified
civilization. Asserting that it is slightly absurd to ask how China
became Chinese among others, including more recently Tim Marshall 3
Jared Diamond stated that "China
has been Chinese, almost from the beginnings of its recorded history."
Yet, the very
concepts of nation, race, nationality, and ethnic minority, especially in
China, are modern political constructs. For example, as we earlier pointed out,
during the dying days of the last Chinese dynasty, the
Qing (1644-1911), the Chinese state sought to colonize
various parts of its imperial frontier through Han resettlement. This
program of settler colonialism (not unlike the intentions of the above-mentioned
Nationalists) continued following the establishment of the Chinese Republic
and, as recently was pointed out in The Diplomat, intensified as state power grew in
the post-Mao era.
Communist scholars highlighted the significance of
the Yellow Emperor and Peking Man
The belief that history
brought it to power is one of the few ideological constants in the Chinese
Communist Party’s hundred-year saga.
Having grown up under
communist rule in 2007 already Chinese history scholar, Weishi
Yuan strongly criticized the
distorted story's told in China’s history textbooks and history education
while due to the publication of this article, his weekly supplement was closed
down by the government showing how concerned the CCP is about letting people
know about its own history.
Today, this type of
interference is much stronger, as exemplified by the fact that in February
2019, the Chinese government even issued specific rules covering the printing
within China of maps in books or magazines intended for sale in overseas
markets. Each map would require permission from provincial officials, and none
would be allowed to be distributed within the country. The possibility that a
Chinese citizen might see a map showing an unauthorized version of China’s
territorial claims was perceived as such a threat to national security that it
justified the involvement of the ‘National Work Group for Combating Pornography
and Illegal Publications,’ according to the regulations.4 To prove the point, in
March 2019, the authorities in the port city of Qingdao destroyed 29,000
English-language maps destined for export because they showed Taiwan as a
separate country.5
Government statements
explicitly connected the mapping laws and regulations of 2017 and 2019 to the
state’s ‘patriotic education’ education’ campaign. Part of their purpose was to
guide the teaching of schoolchildren in the correct view of the country.
Messages from the national leadership obsessively remind the population that
the only way to be a Chinese patriot is to fervently seek the ‘return’ of
Taiwan to control by the mainland; to insist that China is the rightful owner of every rock and reef in the South China
Sea (what other call the Pacific Ocean), and insist on maximalist claims in
the Himalayas. The official media constantly remind citizens of the state’s
territorial claims, exhort them to personally identify with those claims and
nurture feelings of hurt and shame towards unresolved border disputes. Paranoia
about national boundaries in China is not merely an obsession of online gamers
or Weibo patriots; it is central to the state itself. The speeches of Xi
Jinping made clear that his vision of national rejuvenation can only be
complete when all the territory claimed by China is under Beijing’s control.
Thus, China's
rewriting of history as a The Diplomat (written by the author of the
forthcoming “China’s New Empire” stated on 1 June the South China Sea disputes are
today's version of the early 20th century Balkans, where “some damned foolish
thing” can trigger a devastating global
conflict without precedence and beyond our wildest imagination.6
As recently pointed
out by Su-Yan Pan and Joe Tin Yau
Lo the PRC state has adjusted its higher education policies to realize renewed
international prestige while at the same time coping with external and
internal challenges to its legitimacy due to changing international and
domestic circumstances. China's educational paradigm mirrors the state’s power
strategy in world politics. By serving the state's diplomatic relations and
national image building, Chinese universities have increased their
international profiles. Still, they have remained continuously dependent on
foreign-trained personnel for cutting-edge research and scientific publications
rather than cultivating innovation from indigenous knowledge and domestically
trained personnel. Moreover, China has reasons to celebrate its ‘brain gain’
successes - i.e., the ability to import highly educated international human
capital possessing the knowledge, skills, and/or potentials on which China
relies for economic growth, political stability, and global competitiveness.
While the CCP agrees
that on 23 July 1921, 50 delegates gathered in secret at an unprepossessing
house in the French
Concession in Shanghai and started arguing out the details of the new
party, after a week of this, on 30 July, the French police raided the house.
Only a dozen or so of the party members managed to escape. Less know and what
we will unravel here is the wider context of this development.
Hinted at by Weishi Yuan when he referred to China as a nation of
diverse ethnic groups, initially, Communist historians adopted a discursive
strategy closely resembling that of the Nationalist Guomindang intellectuals.
In their early
histories, Communist scholars highlighted the significance of the Yellow
Emperor and Peking Man in binding the heterogeneous peoples of the former Qing
empire into a single, organic minzu, which, following
Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, they termed the Zhonghua minzu (a key political
term in modern Chinese nationalism related to the concepts of
nation-building, ethnicity, and race which as explained below was borrowed from
Japan). Yet, the heightened ideological struggle that accompanied the collapse
of the Second United Front and the publication of Chinas Destiny forced CCP historians
to adopt an alternative myth of national unfolding. In particular, Communist
intellectuals pointed to the recent discovery of a racially distinct South
Pacific hominid to counter the “fascist racism" of the Guomindang and
assert the multiracial origins of the Chinese people. At the same time, faced
(as were GMD scientists) with Japan's manipulation of ethnic aspirations along
the Qing frontier, CCP historians also manufactured intricate ethno genealogies that placed the minorities at the
very origin of Chinese history. They linked the multivalent ‘‘Chinese” minzus together into a single organic, Han-centered whole.
In doing so, the Communists (like the Nationalists) projected Sun Yat-sen’s desire for a future state of national unity
backward in time using history, ethnology, and archaeology to demonstrate the
fundamental consanguinity and antiquity of the Zhonghua
minzu (Chinese: 中华民; Pinyin: Zhōnghuá Mínzú) And as we
have seen is still the rhetoric used by China
today.
The Zhonghua minzu lie in the
multi-ethnic Qing Empire, created in the seventeenth century by the Manchus.
The Manchus sought to portray themselves as the legitimate rulers of each of
the ethnic or religious identities within the empire. And as Rebecca E.
Karl explained, Chinese communism was part of the reaction to
the depredations of Western powers beginning with the First Opium War in
1839, and the impetus for change had come from the humiliation and exploitation
suffered at the hands of foreigners. There were many grievances against the
emperor and the social structure, as had often been the case in Chinese
history, but what ultimately discredited these entities was their failure to
defend China and their obvious inadequacy compared to the leading powers of the
age.7
In the dying days of the
Qing dynasty, the Chinese state sought to colonize Xinjiang and other parts
of its imperial frontier through Han resettlement. This program of settler
colonialism continued following the establishment of the Chinese Republic and
intensified as state power grew in the post-Mao era.
Contrary
to Russia, where the Leninist revolution (also referred
to as a coup d'etat) was tied
to its ability to replace the economic order of the Tsarist regime with
something more egalitarian and more productive, whereby the Chinese Revolution,
according to Jeremy Friedman, had a decidedly "nationalist
emphasis and rhetoric."8
In stark contrast to
Western liberalism, Confucianism, and Chinese political culture more broadly,
hinges on individual rights and the acceptance of social hierarchy and the belief
that humans are perfectible. Humans
are not equally endowed; they vary in suzhi (素质) or quality. A poor
Uighur farmer in southern Xinjiang, for example, sits at the bottom of the
evolutionary ladder; an official from the ethnic Han majority is toward the
top.
But individuals are
malleable, and if suzhi partly is innate,
it is also the product of one’s physical environment and upbringing. Just as
the wrong environment can be corrupting, the right one can be transformative.
Hence the importance of following the guidance of people deemed to possess
higher suzhi, the people Confucius called
“superior persons” (君子)
and the Communists now call “leading cadres” (领导干部).
So even a lowly
Uighur farmer can improve her sushi, through education, training, physical
fitness, or, perhaps, migration. And it is the moral responsibility of an
enlightened and benevolent government to actively help its subjects improve or,
as the China
scholar Delia Lin puts it,
to reshape “originally defective persons into fully developed, competent and
responsible citizens.” During its seven decades in power, the Chinese Communist
Party has repeatedly tried to remold recalcitrant students, political
opponents, prostitutes, and peasants alike.
Seen here preparing
for the 1 July 2021 100th anniversary of the current regime in China High
school students visit Xibaipo Memorial Hall (Xibaipo was an important base during China’s civil war)
From the Qing dynasty to present-day China
Following the
multiethnic Qing dynasty (1644-1911), its massive territory unraveled its
ethnic and provincial seams. Over the course of their long rule, the empire’s
Manchu rulers had fashioned a loose nomadic-style confederation of five ethnic
constituencies (today codified as the Manchu, Han, Mongol, Tibetan, and Hui
nationalities), doubling the size of the previous Ming dynasty’s territory and
boosting its population to 420 million from 130 million. Yet, this phenomenal
growth was not balanced. The empire's population ballooned at the geographic
and political center among its sedentary, densely populated Sinic
communities (today reimagined as a homogeneous Han nationality). At the same
time, its territorial advances occurred along the empire’s rugged nomadic and
seminomadic periphery. It should come as no surprise that once this rather
bloated and deformed “geo-body’’ started to decay in the nineteenth century, it
was set upon by predators from both within and without. By late 1911, the core
provinces of Ming China had broken away from the Qing court while many of its
impoverished peasants sought out new land and opportunities in the remote and
formerly sequestered frontier regions. At the same time, the dependencies of
Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang sought their political independence from
“China" while England, Russia, Japan, and other imperialist powers carved
deeper zones of influence on the rotting Qing geobody.
Attempting to stem this tide of disunity, Chinese
revolutionaries quickly announced a new Republic of China (1912-1949). They
declared their intention to assert sovereignty over all the former subjects and
territories of the Qing empire, which was reconstituted as a free and equal
“republic of five races” (wuzu gonghe
五族共和).
What came next is
important to understand the true history of the CCP and how the current People's
Republic of China (Chinese: 中华人民共和国; pinyin: Zhōnghuá Rénmín Gònghéguó; PRC) and while
we have pointed to the two forms of Nationalism of which the CCP/PRC is one we
have to introduce a third influence.
As we have
seen, 1919 was a year of radical cultural
transformation in China. Just how radical it was, as illustrated by the
U-turn taken in the career of Hu Shi (1891-1962). He had been a professor at
Beijing University since 1917. Today he is famous as one of the authors of the
magazine New Youth (新青年;
pinyin: Xīn Qīngnián) and
as an early advocate of baihua (the “Plain Language”
simplified Chinese: 白话文; traditional Chinese: 白話文; pinyin: báihuàwén), a
vernacular based on the Beijing dialect and infused with Western loanwords.
With disappointment
rife about the political mess left in the wake of the 1911 Revolution, many
intellectuals turned their attention to what they deemed the deeper substratum
of Chinese social life: its culture. Critique moved from considerations of
politics as state form, now a sphere condemned as endlessly corrupt and
ineffectual, to an unsparing critique of the culture that underpinned the
structures of everyday social hierarchy. The major target of this critique from
the New Culture through the May Fourth period (1915-1925) was Confucianism,
which was imputed as the mode of the social reproduction of hierarchy in
elevated and everyday behavior alike. The feudal infestation had to be
overcome.
From the mid-1910s
into the 1920s, the claims made for culture were totalistic. Everything was
said to have a cultural root. That cultural root was not gently sinological nor quaintly traditional or harmoniously
uniting, but rather entirely rotten, toxic even. Cultural rot became an
explanation for all manner of vice and ill and social problem, from the
high-level corruption of officials through to the everyday gendered practices
that sacrificed women's individuality and men’s freedom to family honor on the
altar of marriage. Indeed, the proliferation of what was identified as “social
problems" went hand in hand with what were understood to be the
devolutionary properties of Chinese culture, where the insufficiencies of the
latter were now said to subtend all failures of Chinas modern historical passage.
This radical critique and condemnation of culture and China not only
characterized but animated the New Culture/May Fourth movement, an extended
period of existential crisis in “Chinese-ness” that constituted the first of
several cultural revolutions in China's twentieth century.
An alternative
paradigm of the New Culture/May Fourth purveyed until very recently in PRC/CCP
scholarship, holds that this period led teleologically to the introduction of
Marxism and the formation of the Communist Party (1921), which is the true
revolutionary successor to this (petty) bourgeois phase of cultural critique.
Highlighting the role of the Communist Party in organizing and leading
progressive historical initiatives, this PRC narrative turns the New
Culture/May Fourth into a mere transmission belt for Marxism; it thus
forecloses the more radical aspects of the culture critique (its anarchistic
tendencies, for example), consigns to historical oblivion the competing liberal
contribution and emphasizes to the exclusion of much else the coming-into-being
of the Bolshevik-Communist nexus of political-cultural social relations and
knowledge production. In this party-centered narrative, the Russian Revolution
of October 1917 propels history into motion in a linear unbroken line traced
from Russia to China to the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.'9
In reality, many
different people were involved in making the New Culture Movement since many
groups participated in the patterning of reality, leading to the network of
reference points later inscribed into the buzzword. The academics debated. The
newspapers invented conspiracy theories. The politicians made their deals with
foreign powers about Shandong in reference to
the Paris Peace Conference. But in a way, no one really made the New
Culture Movement since no one group was responsible for combining these
patterns into the New Culture Movement’s matrix of reference points.
Although the Movement
was highly influential, many of the intellectuals at the time opposed the
anti-traditional message, and many political figures ignored it. "this
limited May Fourth individualist enlightenment did not lead the individual
against the collective of the nation-state, as full-scale, modern Western individualism
would potentially do."10 Chiang Kai-shek, as a nationalist and
Confucianist, was against the iconoclasm of the May Fourth Movement. As an
anti-imperialist, he was skeptical of Western ideas and literature. He
criticized these May Fourth intellectuals for corrupting the morals of youth.11
When the Nationalist party came to power under Chiang's rule, it carried out
the opposite agenda. The New Life Movement promoted Confucianism, and the
Kuomintang purged China's education system of western ideas, introducing
Confucianism into the curriculum. Textbooks, exams, degrees, and educational
instructors were all controlled by the state, as were all universities.12 Some
conservative philosophers and intellectuals opposed any change, but many more
accepted or welcomed the challenge from the West but wanted to base new systems
on Chinese values, not imported ones.
Confucianism from old to a new third way
Also called
the New Confucianism (Chinese: 新儒家; pinyin: xīn rú jiā) is an intellectual
movement of Confucianism that began in the early 20th century in Republican
China, and as we shall see further developed in post-Mao era contemporary
China. It is deeply influenced by, but not identical with, the neo-Confucianism
of the Song and Ming dynasties.
A native of
Guangdong, Kang Youwei, as was the case of many of
his generation, was sent by his family to study the Confucian classics in order
to pass the Imperial examination at an early age. In 1879 and 1882, Kang
visited Hong Kong and Shanghai. Deeply impressed by the sheer modernity of the
two cities under foreign administration, he bought numerous Western works in
Shanghai to study. In 1891, he opened a school in Guangzhou to teach Western
learnings and offer his own interpretations of Confucianism, declaring that
the Old Texts (Chinese: 古文經;
pinyin: Gǔwén Jīng) was
fabricated by Liu Xin also known as Liu Xiu
(Chinese: 劉秀) and resulted
in the sclerosis of Chinese intellectual tradition, Kang drew on foreign
political systems to inform his reformist ideas that he rationalized in the
framework of the New Text. Adopted by Confucians such as Dong Zhongshu, this school advocated a holistic interpretation
of Confucian classics and viewed Confucius as a charismatic, visionary prophet.
Initially, the reformers of Chinese Nationalism during the
anti-Manchu 19th century proposed a constitutional monarchy that would
include the Manchu emperor: their notion of a "yellow race" was
broad enough to include all the people living in the Middle Kingdom. In the
wake of the abortive Hundred Days Reform of 1898, which ended when the empress
dowager rescinded all the reform decrees and executed several reformer
officials, several radical intellectuals started advocating the overthrow of
the Manchu dynasty. Not without resonance to the 1789 and 1848 political
revolutions in Europe, the anti-Manchu revolutionaries represented the ruling
élites as an inferior "race" which was responsible for the disastrous
policies which had led to the decline of the country, while most inhabitants of
China were perceived to be part of a homogeneous Han race. In search of
national unity, the very notion of a Han race emerged in a relational context
of opposition to foreign powers and the ruling Manchus. For the
revolutionaries, the notion of a "yellow race" was not entirely
adequate as it included the much-reviled Manchus. Whereas the reformers
perceived race (zhongzu) as a biological extension of
the lineage (zu), encompassing all people dwelling on
the soil of the Yellow Emperor, the revolutionaries excluded the Mongols,
Manchus, Tibetans, and other population groups from their definition of race,
which was narrowed down to the Han, who were referred to as a minzu.
Lydia Liu has
remarked that the word minzu was invented in Japan, minzoku entered the Japanese vocabulary only in 1873.
However, the word did not find more popular usage in China before Chinese
students and intellectuals, who were sojourning in Japan, introduced the word
with its modern meaning to the Chinese public around 1898. This was when
cultural nationalism and the notion of "national essence" were
booming in Japan.13
Pictured below in 1906,
the library of the Society for the Preservation of National Learnings, the
first private library in China, opened its door in Shanghai.
Its founder welcomed
the fact that more and more foreigners were interested in ancient Chinese
objects and books. It showed that Chinese civilization had an important role to
play in the progress of humanity. However, he was deeply concerned by the
hemorrhaging of Chinese antiquities and books to overseas collectors, museums,
and researchers. Thus, the library assumed the mission of preserving Chinese
material civilization in China and had a collection of 60,000 ancient books,
most of which were donated. The library issued a statement declaring: "To
promote nationalism, the preservation of ancient learnings and the promotion of
national radiation now bears upon the shoulders of everyone." The library
later changed hand to the "Rare Book Preservation Society"
during the Japanese occupation.
Thus during the first
half of the twentieth century, cultural and political revolutions link together
to form a historical telos that favors the CCP's revolutionary ideology. Under
this paradigm, revolution dominated public life in modern China and constituted
the overarching themes of modern Chinese history. Specifically, these themes
are the Revolution of 1911 that overthrew the imperial system and established a
Chinese nation-state; the May Fourth and New Culture Movements of the mid-1910s
to 1920s that replaced 'feudal' Chinese traditional culture with Western
democratic and scientific enlightenment; and the Communist Revolution from 1949
onwards that 'compensated' for the Nationalist KMT's abortive
revolutions to bring about China's long-awaited national revival by the drastic
steering of Chinese society, its economy, and politics in a socialist
direction.
By contrast, the
second dominant historiographical theme takes modernization as the dominant
trend that permeated modern China. Since the middle of the nineteenth century,
China's socio-political structure and technological backwardness rendered the
country extremely vulnerable to colonial and imperialist profiteering advances.
Inequitable treaties were imposed on the Qing government, which opened up the
path for major Western powers and the Empire of Japan to penetrate China’s
economy and wrestle for special privileges. The modernization paradigm emphasizes
China's process of reconstruction, which began with the Self-Strengthening
Movement (1861-1895), the Hundred Days' Reform (1891), and the New Policies (Xinzheng, 1901-1911). The Manchu dynasty launched these to
facilitate Western technology, industry, armaments, and institutional models.
Underscoring China's path to social and political modernization, this
historiographical perspective portrays revolutions as counterproductive and
damaging to China's interests.
Despite the
contrasting visions of the two historiographies concerning revolution, both
paradigms are wedded to the concept of linear progress, creating a dichotomy
between tradition and modernity.
Recent years have
witnessed the rise of a historiographical trend that challenges this
progressive narrative. Elisabeth Forster's monograph on the New Culture
Movement proposes the story of the New Culturalists as being astute
entrepreneurs and self-promoters, who took over the intellectual landscape
around 1919, and not entirely due to their intellectual merit.14
At a cultural level,
many revolutionary intellectuals accused Confucianism of being the spiritual
culprit responsible for China's backwardness and an accomplice in the
dictatorship of the absolute monarchy. Refuting Kang's advocation of adopting the
Confucian calendar, Liu Shipei (1884 –1919) argued to
calculate years according to the Yellow Emperor. Having referred to him before,
Shipei was a
philologist, Chinese anarchist, and revolutionary activist. While he and
his wife, He Zhen, were in exile in Japan, he became a fervent nationalist. He
then saw the doctrines of anarchism as offering a path to social revolution
while remaining intent on preserving China's cultural essence, especially
Taoism and the records of China's pre-imperial history. In 1909 he unexpectedly
returned to China to work for the Manchu government.
Re-invoked by the
present-day Communist Party of China (CPC), annual ceremonies are held to worship the imaginative
Yellow Emperor.
The Yellow Emperor was a native of Mesopotamia…..
The influence of this
Japanese culturalist nationalism among late Qing Chinese intellectuals cannot be
emphasized too much. Chinese students and intellectuals began to seek exile or
study in Japan during the last few years of the 1890s. This was a period in
which the homogenization of the cultural nation and the political nation
prevailed in Japan and penetrated the Chinese political vocabulary. It was
exactly this idea of the nation as a culturally and politically unified entity
picked up by Chinese intellectuals in Japan after 1898. Liu Shipei
(1884-1919) wrote in 1903 that "minzu is the
unique character of guomin." This culturalist
nationalism carried two political imperatives in the 1900s. Chinese culturalist
nationalism first emerged as both a doctrine of popular sovereignty and a
movement for a Chinese nation-state independent from external oppressors. It
follows that the people who formed the Chinese nation-state should be
ethnically and culturally identical. Culturalist nationalism also implied that
political reforms should be undertaken to preserve selectively updated
traditional culture. China could only hope to have a unified and integrated
modern nation-state if she borrowed wisely from different political elements
within Western civilization.
But the essential
point remains that culturalist nationalism reveals a complex exchange between
opposing ideas. Conservative reformers and radical revolutionaries thought of
culturalist nationalism in the same way. Monarchist reformers in China and
Japan expressed a conservative culturalist nationalism to legitimize the Qing
dynasty. They argued that the Manchu had been assimilated into the Chinese
nation and began reinterpreting traditional sources to legitimize a
constitutional monarchy. In 1898, Liang Qichao, who escaped the Empress Dowager
Cixi's purge but continued to press for reform from
Japan, even communicated in classical Chinese with Shiga Shigetaka,
advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time. This was hoping to
obtain help from the Japanese government to restore the Guangxu
Emperor to power. In contrast, revolutionary intellectuals linked with Sun Yat-sen's (1866-1925) Tongmenghui
(Revolutionary Alliance), such as those of the National Essence School and the
Southern Society, associated national essence with Chinese history. This meant
that China's ancient socio-political system and cultural traditions would be
seen to comply with radical political reforms inspired by modern Western
politics and to rationalize revolution. As Zhang Taiyan
remarked, national essence served to "incite ethnic nationalism, promote
patriotism and fabricate a history of the Han."
Revolutionary
culturalist nationalism was forged to fit a republican political construct. To
this end, they even borrowed from the French orientalist Albert Etienne
Jean-Baptiste Terrien de Lacouperie's
(1844-1894) theory that the Yellow Emperor was a native of Mesopotamia.
Lacouperie’s argument was warmly accepted by Chinese nationalists
such as Deng Shi (1877-1945), Huang Jie (1873-1935), LiuShipei (1884-1919), and Zhang Taiyan
(1869-1935), who promoted Sino-Babylonianism to
support an anti-Manchu revolution. They argued that because the Han Chinese
were originally migrants from Mesopotamia, they should have the physical
strength and the mental toughness to start a revolution against their
oppressors. As descendants of the Yellow Emperor, the first Chinese king of the
migrants from Mesopotamia, they must have faith in creating their own
country.15
In addition to
showing a racial genealogy from the Yellow Emperor to contemporary Han Chinese,
Sino-Babylonianism revealed the complex networks of
human migration that began in prehistoric times and continued to the present.
For Xiong, the migration of the Bak
tribe to China was merely an example of the constant flow of people across
Eurasia. More importantly, migrants were often stronger and more determined to
succeed in difficult conditions.16 Not only did they have to adapt and adjust
to the new environment. Still, they also had to compete with the locals to
control land and resources.
Thus, for Xiong, the migration of the Bak
tribe to China was an episode of global significance. First, it demonstrated
that since prehistoric times there had been a constant movement of people from
continent to continent, forming multiethnic communities in various parts of
the world. Because of the high volume of migration, racial mixing amid racial
competition had been the driving force of history. Second, for contemporary
Chinese, the migration of the Bak tribe underscored
the importance of coming to terms with the age of imperialism and colonialism.
As Europeans migrated to East Asia in droves through imperialist expansion and
colonial rule, they would soon be the new rulers of East Asia if the natives
could not match their competitiveness and military prowess.
The same global scope
is also found in Bai Yueheng's article “Liding xingzheng qu beikao” (Notes on Dividing the
Administrative Districts, 1912). Bai suggested constant attempts had been made
to match political boundaries with natural boundaries throughout human history.
When a political boundary follows “the division in the mountains and the unity
in rivers” (shanli shuihe),
he said, it renders what is invisible visible, making the natural boundary
clear and concrete. When a political boundary allows effective use of natural
resources, he asserted, it creates “peace to the country and prosperity to the
people” (guotai minan.)17
In China, Bai argued,
throughout history, political leaders had made many attempts to match human geography with natural geography.
But Bai considered
that the success of the 1911 Revolution provided an important opportunity for
rethinking and remaking the political divisions in China.18 Unlike previous
attempts, he argued, the goal of restructuring the administrative districts
after 1911 was not to give the central government more control over the local
areas or expand the bureaucracy to remote places. Rather, the political
reorganization was to reflect the characteristics of natural geography and to
facilitate the movement of people and goods. The new political division, Bai
suggested, should 'model after nature,' focusing on expanding existing networks
that connected the local market to regional and global markets. Its goal was to
serve China and the world, making the country more connected to the global
system of circulation, consumption, and production.19
Thus the surge in
nationalist activism and the intensified insistence on establishing and
preserving sovereignty around that time reflected key transformations and
continuities. It marked a shift in conceptions of organizing world societies
from a hierarchy of time, which was based upon the idea of progression from
barbarism to civilization, from a hierarchy of time
to the hierarchy of space that emphasized the right of
self-determination and the defense of a conjoined territorial and political
integrity. This transition in worldview led to nation-states' production
that greatly resembled the sovereign units of the prior tributary order. That
is, a modern China filled most of the space of the old Qing Empire.
Continued in Part Two.
1. James P.
Harrison. The Long March to Power: A Political History of the Chinese Commimist Party, 1921-1972 (London: Praeger, 1972).
2. Peter Hays China's
New Nationalism: Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy, 2005, 15.
3. Tim Marshall,
Prisoners of Geography, 2015.
4. Zhang Han, ‘China
Strengthens Map Printing Rules, Forbidding Publications Printed For Overseas
Clients From Being Circulated in the Country’, Global Times, 17 February 2019.
5. Laurie Chen,
‘Chinese City Shreds 29,000 Maps Showing Taiwan as a Country’, South China
Morning Post, 25 March
2019, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3003121/about-29000-problematic-world-maps-showing-taiwan-country.
6. See our analyses
of can a potential future Pacific War be avoided? as exemplified
in: http://www.world-news-research.com/PacificRising6.html.
7. Rebecca E. Karl,
Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, 2002,
p.195.
8. For this, see
Jeremy Friedman, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition
for the Third World, 2015.
9. Rebecca E.
Karl, China's Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History,
2020
10. Chen, Xiaoming (June 5, 2008). From the May Fourth Movement to
Communist Revolution. SUNY Press. p.8.
11. Joseph T. Chen
(1971). The May fourth movement in Shanghai: the making of a social movement in
modern China. Brill Archive. p.13.
12. Werner Draguhn, David S. G. Goodman (2002). China's communist
revolutions: fifty years of the People's Republic of China. Psychology Press.
p.39.
13. Lydia H. Liu, The
Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making, 2006.
14. Elisabeth
Forster, 1919 –The Year That Changed China: A New History of the New Culture
Movement, 2018.
15. Kai-wing Chow,
"Imagining Boundaries of Blood: Zhang Binglin
and the Invention of the Han 'Race’ in Modern China,” in The Construction of
Racial Identities in China and Japan. Edited by Frank Dikotter
(Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 34-52; Frank Dikotter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 116-23; John Fitzgerald, Awakening China
Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1996), 67-88; Shen Songqiao,
“Wo yi wo xue jian xuan yuan: Huangdi shenhua yu wanqing
de guozu piango,” Taiwan shehui yanjiujikan 28.2 (1997):
1-77; Tze-ki Hon, "From a Hierarchy in Time to a
Hierarchy in Space: Meanings of Sino-Babylonianism in
Early 20th Century China/’ Modern China 36.2 (2010): 139-69.
16. Xiong Bingsui, “Zhongguo zhongzu kao ” Dixue zazhi
18 (1911): 3b.
17. Bai Yueheng, ‘lading xingzheng qu beikao," Dixue zazhi 7-8 (1912): 1a.
18. Ibid., 1b.
19. Ibid., 1b.
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