Modern China. A Very Short Introduction (21 page)

tried to show their modernity by adapting globalized (that is, Western) urban planning; that tendency is still evident for China’s government in the early 21st.

Conclusion

China exists in a global cultural context. In the 20th century it has tended to absorb cultural norms above all, whether it is modern literary genres, cinematic styles, or artistic and architectural techniques. However, there are signs that aspects of the trend are reversing and China is beginning to project out not just military and economic power, but also cultural strength (sometimes termed ‘soft power’). Films have helped here, such as the popularity of Zhang Yimou’s martial arts extravaganzas.

Chinese language learning has risen around the world, stimulated 137

by a new perception of China’s global importance, and nurtured by a government-sponsored programme of ‘Confucius Institutes’, language schools modelled on the British Council of which over one hundred will be established by 2010. Furthermore, one should note the heavy infl uence of internationalism in the shaping of modern Chinese culture. Even in the most closed period of modern Chinese history, Mao’s rule, cultural models came from the USSR, and Marxist-Leninist ideas were widespread.

In the period before 1949 and since 1978, a stunning variety of infl uences, from American management gurus to French philosophers to Mahatma Gandhi, have reshaped the Chinese sense of the modern self and the meaning of ‘Chinese culture’.

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138

Brave new China?

This book started with a ‘new China’ envisioned a century ago. What you think of modern China may be affected by your response to another vision, not written with China in mind – the modernity of Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World
(1932).

The book’s protagonist, the Savage, is brought from the wilds into a ‘civilization’ set several centuries into the future where everybody is happy: material comforts on demand, everybody slotted into social categories that suit their needs, and dangerous and uncomfortable information kept fi rmly suppressed. Those who have overactive minds – and they are few in number – end up exiled to Iceland, where the system sends ‘all the people who aren’t satisfi ed with orthodoxy, who’ve got independent ideas of their own’.

Near the climax of the book, the Savage confronts Mustapha Mond, the ‘World Controller’, who defends the safe, cosy, and unquestioning world that he and his system have created: Mond admits that ‘being contented has none of the glamour of a good fi ght against misfortune … Happiness is never grand’.

The Savage claims ‘the right to be unhappy’. The Controller replies:

139

‘Not to mention … the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.’

There was a long silence.

‘I claim them all,’ said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulder. ‘You’re welcome,’ he said.

Of course, both Mond and the Savage are right – and wrong.

China today is very far from being a brave new world, even though Shanghai’s night cityscape may look like one. But the conversation between the Savage and the Controller says something about the infi nitely diffi cult balancing act that has affected all governments – the Qing of the ‘New China’ of 1910, the Nationalists, Mao’s ‘New China’ of 1949, or the current leadership’s nurturing of ‘peaceful development’ – in deciding
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what the relationship will be between the state, the party, and the people in a truly modern China. Can China afford to give people
Modern C

‘the right to be unhappy’, or does it need to exile those who ask for it to its own Iceland? Are people who live in desperate poverty able to be free in any meaningful sense? Are those who have television, running water, and a car, but cannot openly discuss their views on politics being infantilized by an over-protective, sometimes vindictive state and party? The answers to those questions are at the heart of the ever-changing, perhaps never-ending, journey to what it means to be modern and to be Chinese.

140

Timeline

1368

Foundation of the Ming dynasty

1644

Fall of the Ming, foundation of the Qing dynasty 1842

Treaty of Nanjing ends the fi rst Opium War

1856–64 Taiping

War

1900 Boxer

Uprising

1911

Revolution causes collapse of the Qing dynasty 1919

May Fourth demonstrations

1925

May Thirtieth Movement

1926–8

Northern Expedition by the Nationalists and Communists 1928

Establishment of Nationalist government at Nanjing 1934–5

Long March by Communists: Mao begins rise to power 1937

Outbreak of war with Japan: Nationalists retreat to Chongqing

1945

End of war with Japan

1946–9

Civil War ends with Communist victory

1958–62

Great Leap Forward causes massive famine

1966–76

Cultural Revolution: Mao at war with his own party 1976

Death of Mao

1978

Deng Xiaoping solidifi es position as paramount leader 1989

Demonstrations in Tian’anmen Square end in bloodshed 1989

Jiang Zemin chosen as new Communist Party leader 141

1992

Deng’s ‘southern tour’ energizes reforms

1997

Death of Deng Xiaoping: Jiang Zemin reconfi rmed as leader

2001

Beijing awarded the 2008 Olympics

2001

China enters World Trade Organization

2002

Leadership passes to Hu Jintao

2007 Hu

confi rmed as leader

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142

References

W. Y. Fullerton and C. E. Wilson,
New China: A Story of Modern
Travel
(London, 1910), p. 234.

Chen Hongmou: William Rowe,
Saving the World:
Chen Hongmou
and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century China
(Stanford, 2001), esp. ch. 9.

Wei Yuan: Philip Kuhn,
Origins of the Modern Chinese State
(Stanford, 2002), pp. 39, 48.

World War I: Xu Guoqi,
China and the Great War: China’s Pursuit of
a New National Identity
(Cambridge, 2005), esp. Part II.

Mortality rate in 1930: Lloyd Eastman, ‘Nationalist China during the Nanking Decade, 1927–1937’, in John K. Fairbank and Albert Feuerwerker (eds),
Cambridge History of China,
volume 13

(‘Republican China, 1912–1949’), p. 151.

Madame Chiang Kaishek: Pei-kai Cheng and Michael Lestz,
The
Search for Modern China: A Documentary Collection
(New York, 1999), p. 296.

Edgar Snow,
Red Star over China
(orig. 1937; London, 1973), p. 92.

Tan Zhenlin: Jasper Becker,
Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine
(London, 1996), p. 59.

143

Red Guard quotations: Song Yianyi et al. (eds),
Chinese Cultural
Revolution Database
(Hong Kong, 2002).

Wang Hui: Wang Hui,
China’s New Order
:
Politics, Society and
Economy in Transition
, ed. Theodore Huters (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), p. 180.

Zou Taofen: Rana Mitter,
A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with
the Modern World
(Oxford, 2004), p. 69.

Li Yu: Dorothy Ko,
Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of
Footbinding
(Berkeley, 2005), p. 152.

Mao on Miss Zhao: Stuart Schram (ed.),
Mao’s Road to Power
(Armonk, NY, 1992– ), vol. 1: 423.

Aging: Michael Backman,
The Asian Insider
(Houndmills, 2006), p. 225.

Figures on incomes: Randall Peerenboom,
China Modernizes: Threat
to the West or Model for the Rest?
(Oxford, 2006), esp. ch. 4.

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Brandt: Loren Brandt,
Commercialization and Agricultural
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Development: Central and Eastern China, 1870–1937
(Cambridge, 1989), ch. 7.

Economy of western China: Chris Bramall,
In Praise of Maoist
Economic Planning: Living Standards and Economic
Development in Sichuan since 1931
(Oxford, 1993), esp.

pp. 335–40.

Yangzhou: Timothy Brook,
The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and
Culture in Ming China
(Berkeley, 1998), p. 128.

Nine Horses scroll: (picture) Craig Clunas,
Art in China
(Oxford, 1997), p. 182.

Ah Q: ‘The True Story of Ah Q’, in Lu Xun,
Call to Arms
, tr. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (Beijing, 1981), p. 99.

Yan’an Talks: Bonnie S. Macdougall,
Mao Zedong’s ‘Talks at the Yan’an
conference on literature and art’: A Translation of the 1943 Text
with Commentary
(Ann Arbor, 1980).

144

Zhang Xiaogang: Jonathan Watts, ‘Once hated, now feted’,
Guardian
, 11 April 2007, p. 29.

Nanjing city planning: William Kirby, ‘Engineering China: Birth of the Developmental State’, in Wen-hsin Yeh (ed.),
Becoming Chinese:
Passages to Modernity and Beyond
(Berkeley, 2000), pp. 139–41.

Aldous Huxley,
Brave New World
(orig. 1932; London, pbk., 1984), pp. 178, 192.

Re

ferences

145

Further reading

The books on this list are mostly academic works, but I have deliberately included here a number that have been written with at least a partially non-academic readership in mind, and which do not demand a comprehensive knowledge of China to be read profi tably. No slight is intended to the many colleagues whose more specialist monographs and articles I have drawn on to compose this volume. For readers who do wish to tackle more detailed studies on particular issues, see the guide to reading at the end of Rana Mitter,
A Bitter Revolution
.

The pattern of modern Chinese history

John Fairbank et al. (eds),
The Cambridge History of China
, vols.

10–15 (Cambridge, various dates): detailed essays summarizing key themes in political, cultural, and social history.

John Gittings,
The Changing Face of China: From Mao to Market
(Oxford, 2005): detailed account of the People’s Republic from 1949 to the present.

Rana Mitter,
A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern
World
(Oxford, 2004): traces the impact and legacy of the May Fourth Movement on modern Chinese politics and culture.

Jonathan Spence,
The Search for Modern China
(New York, 1999): comprehensive survey history from the 17th century to the present.

146

Pre-1949 China

Robert Bickers,
Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai
(London, 2003): gripping account of the complexities of imperialism in China, told through one man’s life.

Lloyd Eastman,
Family, Fields, and Ancestors: Constancy and Change
in China’s Social and Economic History, 1550–1949
(New York, 1988): accessible guide to social and economic change in China from the Ming to 1949.

Henrietta Harrison,
The Man Awakened from Dreams:
One Man’s Life
in a North China Village, 1857–1942
(Stanford, 2005): moving portrait of one man living in rural China from the late Qing to the war against Japan.

Kenneth Pomeranz,
The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and
the Making of the Modern World Economy
(Princeton, 2000): highly infl uential study of the differences between the economic development of China and Europe.

Philip Short,
Mao: A Life
(London, 1999): deeply researched and thoughtful study of the life of Mao Zedong.

Further re

Politics, society, and culture in the reform era
ading

Geremie Barme,
In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture
(New York, 1999): wide-ranging account of China’s cultural scene by an expert observer.

Richard Baum,
Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng
Xiaoping
(Princeton, 1994): detailed and clear account of China’s development from 1976 to the mid-1990s.

Joseph Fewsmith,
China since Tiananmen: The Politics of Transition
(Cambridge, 2001): particularly strong on intellectual debates in China.

Lionel M. Jensen and Timothy B. Weston,
China’s Transformation:
The Stories Beyond the Headlines
(Lanham, MD, 2007): lively set of essays on a variety of topics to do with contemporary Chinese society and culture.

Graham Hutchings,
Modern China: Companion to a Rising Power
(London, 2000): comprehensive handbook dealing with a wide range of historical and contemporary topics.

147

Richard Curt Kraus,
The Party and the Arty: The New Politics of
Culture
(Lanham, MD, 2004): clear explanation of how China’s art and cultural world has entered the commercial era.

Norman Stockman,
Understanding Chinese Society
(Cambridge, 2000): detailed introduction to changes and continuities in Chinese social structures.

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148

Index

United Front with Nationalist Party

40, 50

United States 63

women 78–9

civil wars 22–3, 28, 48–50, 54–5,

81–3

class warfare 41, 56

A

Cold War 56–7

collectivization of land 57–8, 64

Africa 112–13, 116

Communist Party
see
Chinese

agriculture 3, 13–14, 27, 57–9,

Communist Party (CCP)

64–5, 82, 86, 103–9

Confucianism 7–8, 10, 12, 15,