Mao’s attack has not been easy. The path of modernity since the nineteenth century has involved fierce arguments about what relationship modern leaders need to take to this history, and what sort of resource it offers. The common point is that all eras of modern Chinese history, despite their very different political convictions and attitudes, have been driven by the desire for renewal. Chinese modern history has involved many things: the mission to industrialize, to create national unity, to struggle against colonial interference and achieve national self-determination. But, above all, it has been a history of trying to renew.
China’s Struggle to Catch Up
China’s engagement with modernity was an arduous one. It has spawned many myths, some of which are unresolved. In recent decades, there has been a lively debate about the issue of why industrialization and economic modernization took the very different trajectories they did in Europe and China. In The Great Divergence, historian Kenneth Pomeranz joins those who contest the popular idea that Europe had something unique in terms of its culture and philosophical outlook which meant it was predisposed to innovate and industrialize. ‘There is little to suggest,’ he writes, ‘that western Europe’s economy had decisive advantages before [the 1800s], either in its capital stock or economic institutions, that made industrialization highly probable there and unlikely elsewhere.’7 Rather than attributing Europe’s ultimate success in pulling ahead so dramatically in the nineteenth century to holistic explanations that range from the cultural – Max Weber’s Protestant work ethic, for instance – to the more overtly economic or political – like the rise of consumption and the prevalence of individualism and its associated governance models – Pomeranz looks at a host of interrelated, but different, more localized causes. Some of these derive from the various forms of resistance to change and transformation within Qing China. Some refer to the strengths of Europe in terms of political and social flexibility. What is indisputable is that in the nineteenth century the Qing was in seemingly irrevocable decline. In gross terms, China ranked as the world’s largest single economy up to 1820. But this claim is rendered almost meaningless by the deep structural differences between the Qing’s economy and that of, for instance, Great Britain. Nineteenth-century China did not have the same levels of urbanization, infrastructure building, and capital formation that powers like the United States, Great Britain, and Germany did. While its lack of naval assets made it incapable of reaching and impacting on Europe, Europe was more than capable of involving itself directly in China. By 1900, China was weak, exposed, and vulnerable.
These issues are illustrated by one of the key moments of encounter between the Qing court and an industrialized and modernizing Great Britain approaching its century of radical transformation. The Macartney Mission during the era of George III (r. 1760–1820) is a key moment in the histories of both China and the West. The outcome of this mission was a rejection by the ageing Qianlong emperor (r. 1735–96) of the manufactures and goods offered by the visiting dignitaries. Throughout the whole mission there were many moments of cultural miscommunication. Lord George Macartney’s refusal to show his status as a visitor from a vassal state by kowtowing to the emperor and the tortuous negotiations to achieve a way around was one of the most striking. But Macartney’s journal recording the visit presents many more examples. On 13 October 1793, he gave vent to his general frustration:
How are we to reconcile the contradictions that appear in the conduct of the Chinese government towards us? They receive us with the highest distinction, show us every external mark of favour and regard. … Yet, in less than a couple of months, they plainly discover that they wish us to be done, refuse our requests without reserve or complaisance, precipitate our departure, and dismiss us dissatisfied; yet no sooner have we taken leave of them than we find ourselves treated with more studied attentions, more marked distinction and less constraint than before. I must endeavour to unravel this mystery if I can.8
Macartney’s expression of bewilderment has been echoed ever since. In the twenty-first century, the creation of confusion with interlocutors has been one of the consistent characteristics of Chinese negotiating behaviour.
Macartney’s mission had limited success. Half a century later, the vast Manchu-run Qing empire was to pit itself against less benign aspects of the West. The first Opium War of 1839 figures in Chinese historiography to this day as inaugurating a period of China as the victim – one it is only now emerging from fully. This involved the British using advanced gunboats to force the Qing to accept the import of opium drugs they had banned because of widespread addiction within the country. Despite this attack, it was domestic challenges that proved more tumultuous in the short term, raising the question of who in the end was most responsible for the country’s woeful state: itself or outsiders. The Taiping Rebellion from 1850 to 1864 was the most extreme. Approximately 20 million died from the upheaval caused by the revolt. While it did not finish off the Qing, it contributed to the regime’s eventual collapse half a century later. The Taiping remains a bewildering event. Inspired and instigated by Hong Xiuquan (1814–64), a native of Guangdong, it mixed traditional peasant rebellion with a semi-mystical, messianic-style movement. Hong claimed he was the brother of Jesus Christ, setting up a Heavenly Kingdom based in Nanjing. From idealistic beginnings, the rebellion evolved into a civil war. Its destructiveness was compounded by the Second Opium War from 1856 to 1860, one that resulted in the creation of more treaty ports and foreign concessions open to Western powers.
The Key Chinese Modernizers
Many within China acknowledged the critically dangerous position of their country after these crises and the urgent need for modernization to overcome this. Core figures in this modernization effort were Liang Qichao (1873–1929) and Kang Youwei (1858–1927), who supplied key ideas that inspired the 100-day 1898 Minor Reform movement. Their ambitious list of proposals, inspired in part by the example of Japan reforming under the Meiji Restoration, embraced the abolition of the centuries-old examination system, the creation of new universities, the adoption of Western free-market-orientated economic models, and the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. These proposals failed. The sitting emperor Guangxu was placed under a form of house arrest, his powers largely taken from him by the Empress Dowager Ci Xi (1835–1908). Kang and Liang fled to Japan to continue their reformist work. Despite this, these events left a powerful memory, one that remains haunting to this day. ‘After the defeat by Japan [in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–5],’ Liang was to comment many years later, ‘people with good minds in the nation really seemed to have met a thunderbolt in a dream. Accordingly, they wondered why the great and grand China should have declined to such a degree, and discovered it was all due to her bad political system.’9 Within two years, however, the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901), another hybrid uprising, this time more targeted at foreigners accused of having too much influence in China, resulted in even more punitive indemnities. A decade later, the Qing finally collapsed. China’s long imperial history had ended.
The ‘100 Days’ reform’s most powerful legacy was the notion of China needing once more to be a wealthy, powerful nation. ‘Fuqiang Guojia’ was the Chinese expression of this. It gave birth to a sense of nationalism that transcended all social and political boundaries. The founder of the Nationalist Party and, for a brief period, the President of the new Republic, Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), gave this even sharper definition, along with figures like early Communist movement activist and academic Chen Duxiu (1879–1942). The aim for both was the same: to create a place that was unified, powerful, strong, and no longer victimized. This vision has endured, figuring in the work of Mao Zedong (1894–1976), Chiang Kai-shek, and in writings by intellectuals as disparate as the great author Lu Xun (1881–1936) and the polymath Hu Shih (1881–1962). In this interpretation, China’s cultural uniqueness, its extraordinary ancient civilization, was a source not of weakness but of strength. The key task was to modernize and renew it.
Competing Visions: Sun, Chiang, and Mao
In the three decades after the collapse of the Qing, China experienced
