The Ideas That Shaped China
By: Jerry Thomas
Tags: China, Foreign Policy, History, World, Economic Development

China often comes across as an enigma. Due to its authoritarian regime, we have little insight into how life in China looks. China makes the news for international incidents, and for many of us, China evokes suspicion and distrust. We find it hard to understand the random border skirmishes, the astute geopolitical moves, and how China has come to dominate the world in the blink of an eye. We explain it away with metaphors of Chinese Checkers and quotes from Sun Tzu’s Art of war, but to understand a nation, we need to understand the ideas that formed it. As an Indian, I know that the ideals of Non-Violence, Secularism, Socialism, and Democracy have come to define the India I know today, albeit, some of these ideals are under threat. So, what are the ideas that shaped modern China? To explore this, we must go back to 1839.

Humiliation, Wealth and Power

1839 marked a new chapter in China’s history due to its first conflict with a western imperialist power and its subsequent losses. China was then ruled by the Qing Dynasty, who had been ruling since the 17th century. Their society was traditional, steeped in Confucianism teachings of hierarchy and obedience to their rulers. Like many countries today, the British had a massive trade deficit with China due to its imports of silk and tea. The Chinese were not interested in British goods, and this led to a trade imbalance.

Two opium smokers in a Shanghai, China, den in the early 20th century. Source: Unknown / Public Domain

To offset this, the British started selling Opium to Chinese citizens and got them addicted to it. It says a lot about the British of the time. China wanted to stop the import of Opium, and this led to the First Opium War between Britain and China in 1839. Due to its naval, technological, and military superiority, Britain won the war and made China sign the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The Chinese had to pay for losses, exempt the British from local laws, give away five ports and hand over the island of Hong Kong to the British. Later in 1865, the British and French launched the Second Opium War, which ended badly for China. Notably, when the Chinese tortured and killed British hostages, the British in retaliation burnt down Yuanmingyuan, ‘The Garden of Perfect Brightness’ and the most beautiful Chinese architecture of that time.

Ruins of Yuanmingyuan, Source: 懒众山小 / CC BY-SA

China always considered themselves to be a superior civilization with unmatched sophistication. To them, the British and the west were barbarians. Hence, the shock of their humiliation was even greater. They had believed they had nothing to learn from the barbarians. This shock was compounded by their defeat to the Japanese in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. China had to declare its tributary state, Korea, as independent and cede islands to Japan that included Taiwan. The Chinese had always looked down condescendingly on the Japanese as ‘dwarf people.’ To be defeated by them and lose their land was another source of enormous humiliation. This humiliation would be repeated when the Japanese invaded China and conquered large parts of it during the Second World War (1939 to 1945).

Paradoxically, the Chinese people decided to look upon this stage of humiliation as something positive, as motivation for progress. A ‘School of Legalists’ started gaining popularity in contradiction to the prevailing Confucian thought. The Legalists pushed for the adoption of technology, authoritarian rule, and enforcing the rule of law. Its greatest theoretician, Han Feizi, would say,

“ If a wise ruler masters wealth and power, he can have whatever he desires.”

These ideas of humiliation, wealth, and power would go on to define Modern China. Everything the Chinese have done since then has been a quest for wealth and power, and to this day, they constantly remind themselves of the humiliation that they faced a century ago. The idea of humiliation is so entrenched that China celebrates (?) September 18th as National Humiliation Day every year.

Self-Strengthening

Feng Guifen, Source: Public Domain

The idea of self-strengthening in China was first put forward by the famous thinker, Wei Yuan, but was popularized by Feng Guifen, another leading thinker, and reformer of 19th century China. Inspired by Wei, Feng devised a new plan for something he called ‘ziqiang’ or ‘self-strengthening.’ The central question that Feng posed was this,

“Our territory is eight times that of Russia, ten times the size of America, one hundred times bigger than France, and two hundred times England. Why is it that they are small and strong, yet we are big and weak?”

He believed that the barbarians in the west had something to teach the Chinese and that their methods and techniques had to be diligently studied. He identified four areas in which the west had surpassed China — Education, Economics, Politics, and Science. He attacked the Chinese hesitation to learn and borrow from the west. Feng also reiterated the idea of humiliation or shame as a catalyst for their progress.

The next generation of Chinese Officials, Zhang Zhidong and Yuan Shikai, took Feng’s ideas forward. They created a new Self-Strengthening Army, along with an Academy for Self-Strengthening in Nanjing. Zhang would soon coin the most famous motto of the movement,

“Chinese learning should remain the core, but Western learning should be used for practical use.”

Zhang also implemented ‘New Policies’ to modernize the military and police, revising the legal code and even drafting a state constitution. A committee was formed by the Chinese Empress, Dowager Cixi, to study constitutions abroad, but eventually, they decided that the Chinese people were not ready for self-governance, and a preparatory period of 10–15 years was needed. It still hasn’t happened today. The Chinese Empress abolished the Civil Services Examination in 1905. This was revolutionary since it had been the only way to get into the Chinese Elite, and many families and generations had invested in succeeding at it.

Despite the idea of ‘self-strengthening,’ efforts to modernize the country and adapt to the new world failed. The Chinese faced defeat after defeat, and no one could place a finger on what the problem was. In 1912, the Qing Dynasty inevitably collapsed, and the Republic of China was formed.

Destruction before Construction

At the turn of the century, Liang Qichao, a leading writer and thinker, visited Chinatown in San Francisco and saw that the Chinese there were not better off from those back home despite living in the heart of the west. He identified that the lack of a ‘national consciousness’ was a significant factor holding back the Chinese universally. In his influential journal, New Citizen, he wrote,

“If we wish to make our nation secure, wealthy, and respected, then we must discuss how to create ‘new citizens’ ”

Sun Yat-sen was another influential thinker who attacked the Qing dynasty and was invited to become the new Chinese republic’s first provisional President in 1912. He compared the Chinese people to a ‘sheet of loose sand’ who needed a strong state,

“If we add cement to the sand, it forms a rock, a solid body. Once transformed into rock, this body is quite solid and the sand has no freedom.”

In the period after 1912, two parties emerged — The Nationalist party led by Chiang Kai-shek, who consolidated power as the President of the Republic, and the Communist Party of China led by Mao Zedong. In 1927, Chiang unleashed his ‘white terror’- a witch hunt for communists. Mao and his followers retreated deep into rural China. The tables eventually turned during the Second World War, when the Japanese assault on China weakened the Nationalist Party. Mao and his followers took control, and Chiang fled to Taiwan in 1949 and became known as ‘the man who lost China.’

Mao Zedong, 1959, Source: Unknown / Public domain

Mao was the first ‘Supreme Leader’ of modern China. He is notorious in history for his deeds, but for the Chinese, he was a demi-god. Mao harnessed the power of peasants to orchestrate a revolution and rise to power. He believed in chaos and destructionism. He felt the only way to build China into a great nation was to first destroy it completely — Destruction before Construction.

In his essay ‘On New Democracy,’ Mao delivered this well-known line,

“There is no construction without destruction, no flowing without damming and no motion without rest”

He went against the traditional Chinese values of harmony and peace and encouraged chaos. Mao believed in a ‘permanent revolution’ and wanted to keep Chinese society in a constant state of change. This thought culminated in his notorious Great Leap Forward. Through this program, he tried to reorganize the entire country. He mandated that agriculture be done at the individual level, and each household would have a fixed amount of land and cattle to grow the mandated crops. He also asked everyone to build furnaces and make iron in their backyard. Mao’s Great Leap Forward was so disastrous economically that it resulted in a famine that killed millions of people. Some estimates put the deaths at 45 million people. Corona who?