49 The resurgence of China

At the beginning of the 20th century the glory of imperial China, at one time the most advanced civilization on the planet, had long been eclipsed. Within ten years, nationalist revolutionaries known as the Kuomintang had overthrown the last emperor, the opening move in a century of sometimes cataclysmic upheaval, involving civil war, invasion, revolution, ideological about-turns and—ultimately—astonishing economic growth.

In less than 100 years, China has transformed itself from a backward feudal society into a great industrial and commercial powerhouse—and a force to be reckoned with on the world stage.

Civil war and revolution The leader of the 1911 revolution, Sun Yat-sen, died in 1925, having failed to establish the rule of the new republic over northern China, which was still controlled by fiercely independent warlords. Sun’s successor, Chiang Kai-shek, was more of a military man, and campaigned against the warlords while crushing a series of urban revolts by the Chinese Communist Party, which had been formed in 1921. Following Marxist orthodoxy, the communists believed that the revolution could only be brought about by the urban proletariat, but in the 1920s this class in China only comprised a tiny proportion of the total population.

Toward the end of the 1920s, a new figure emerged among the communist leadership. This was Mao Zedong, who developed a revolutionary strategy based on China’s huge peasantry. In 1931 a Chinese Soviet Republic was formed in the mountainous region of Jiangxi, but this came under pressure from the nationalist armies, precipitating the Long March of 1934–5, in which the communists retreated some 6,000 miles (10,000 km) to Yunnan in the remote northwest. Only half of the 100,000-strong army reached its destination, but during the course of the Long March Mao established himself as undisputed leader of the communists.

Civil war continued until the Japanese invasion of 1937 (see The Second World War: Asia and the Pacific), when communists and nationalists agreed to form an alliance against the common enemy. After the defeat of Japan in 1945 the civil war resumed, and on October 1, 1949 Mao declared the People’s Republic of China in Beijing. Chiang Kai-shek and the rump of the nationalist army retreated to the island of Taiwan, where they set up the rival Republic of China.

From communism to capitalism The People’s Republic was initially an ally of the USSR (for example in the Korean War; see The Cold War), but the two fell out in the late 1950s, turning the Cold War into something of a three-way affair, accentuated in the early 1970s when the USA and China embarked on a policy of détente, improving their mutual relations in a drive to isolate the Soviets.

“No foreign country can expect China to be its vassal, nor can it expect China to accept anything harmful to China’s interests.”

Deng Xiaoping, speech to the Twelfth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, September 1, 1982

At home, Mao led China through a succession of massive convulsions, including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution (see box below). Mao’s death in 1976 was followed by a power struggle in which modernizers such as Deng Xiaoping came to the fore, resulting in a rejection of Mao’s belief in permanent revolution. In 1978 Deng emphasized the need for four “modernizations”—of agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology. This involved the reintroduction of capitalist free enterprise, while at the same time maintaining the Communist Party’s monopoly on political power. Economic liberalization necessitated an opening-up to the West, required both as a trading partner and a provider of new technologies.

The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution

Mao’s so-called Great Leap Forward of 1958–61 was intended to sweep away traditional customs and ways of thinking, and to mobilize China’s vast population to modernize the country through rapid industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture. Resistance from bureaucrats and from within the party, combined with the withdrawal of Soviet technical support and a series of poor harvests, led to failure and famine, in which some 20 million people may have died. By the end of the 1950s a similar number had been “liquidated” for opposing Mao’s policies.

Facing increasing internal party threats to his leadership, in 1966 Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, in which he mobilized millions of radicalized young people, the Red Guards, to purge the party and to restore ideological purity. Party officials, industrial managers, scientists, technicians, academics, teachers and other professionals were subjected to bouts of public criticism and often violent humiliation, and sent off to the countryside to rid themselves of “bourgeois elitism” by working on the land. Education and industry were neglected, the economy badly damaged, and chaos reigned. Eventually the army stepped in to stop the worst excesses of the Red Guards, but the Cultural Revolution was still underway when Mao died in 1976.

The consequent influx of Western influence led to widespread demands, particularly among students, for political liberalization. For a while in the spring of 1989 it seemed that pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square—coinciding as they did with the liberalization then underway in the Soviet Union—might bring about a radical political change. But in early June the aged Chinese leadership moved to crush the demonstrations, and thousands were killed.

Since then, China’s human rights record has not improved, but its economy has grown and grown, and vast amounts of goods once manufactured in Europe and North America are now made in China. One consequence of this growth is that China, in order to obtain more and more natural resources for its industries, and to satisfy the increasing consumer demands of its own population, has established an ever-growing presence in areas such as Africa. Many Western businesses are part-owned by Chinese enterprises, and the Chinese government itself owns hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of US Treasury bills, helping to fund America’s budget and trade deficits.

“China is rising, and it’s not going away. They’re neither our enemy nor our friend. They’re competitors.”

Barack Obama, speaking in April 2007

A number of questions arise. How long can the Chinese leadership resist the external and internal pressures for democracy? How likely is it that in the next half century China will overtake the USA as the world’s greatest superpower? If it does, will we find ourselves dominated by a foreign power with little regard for human rights? China’s rise would not be possible without globalization, but globalization is a process that works both ways, so it is a moot point how long the notionally communist leadership in Beijing can cling to their monopoly of power.

the condensed idea

A rising global power