The Creation of Modern China, 1894–2008: The Rise of a World Power

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The Creation of Modern China, 1894–2008

The Rise of a World Power

Iain Robertson Scott

THE CREATION OF MODERN CHINA, 1894–2008

THE RISE OF A WORLD POWER

Iain Robertson Scott

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

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Copyright © Iain Robertson Scott 2016

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Scott, Iain Robertson, author.

Title: The creation of modern China, 1894–2008 : the rise of a world power /

Iain Robertson Scott.

Description: New York, NY : Anthem Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016001350| ISBN 9781783084975 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN

1783084979

Subjects: LCSH: China–History–1861–1912. | China–History–Republic, 1912–1949. | China–History–1949–

Classification: LCC DS755 .S295 2016 | DDC 951.05—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016001350

ISBN-13: 978 1 78308 499 9

ISBN-10: 1 78308 499 5

CONTENTS

Preface

Timeline of Modern Chinese History

Maps

1. The Last of the Emperors, 1894–1912

1.1 The Crisis of China in the Late Qing Era

1.2 External Threats: Foreign Intervention, 1840s–90s

1.3 Internal Threats: Revolts and Reforms, 1850s–90s

1.4 A Reformist Agenda, 1898–1900

1.5 The Boxer Rising, 1900

1.6 The National Momentum for Change, 1900–1910

1.7 The End of the Imperial System: The Events of 1911

1.7.1 Railways

1.7.2 Changes in the army

1.7.3 Economic hardship

1.7.4 The uprising

1.8 The Significance of the Revolution

2. Division, Deceit and New Directions, 1912–37

2.1 Overview

2.2 The New Republic, 1912–17

2.2.1 The constitutional experiment

2.2.2 The ‘reign’ of Yuan Shikai

2.3 The Era of the Warlords, 1917–27

2.3.1 Warlord rule

2.3.2 The May Fourth Movement

2.3.3 Early Communists

2.3.4 The United Front, 1923–27

2.4 The Nanjing Decade, 1927–37

2.4.1 Internal and external opposition

2.4.2 Nanjing’s government

2.4.3 The Chinese Communist Party during the Nanjing decade

2.4.4 The Long March and the Yan’an years

3. War and Civil War, 1937–49

3.1 Sino-Japanese Relations

3.2 Manchukuo, 1931–37

3.3 War with Japan, 1937–45

3.3.1 The Xi’an Incident

3.3.2 The first phase of the war, 1937–41

3.3.3 China, Japan and the Second World War, 1941–45

3.4 Yan’an during the War Years

3.5 The Civil War, 1946–49

3.5.1 Northern Manchuria, 1946–47

3.5.2 The struggle for the northeast, 1947–48

3.5.3 The final campaigns, 1948–49

3.6 Why Did Communism Triumph?

3.6.1 Nationalist shortcomings

3.6.2 Communist strengths

4. Communism in Action, 1949–57

4.1 Expectations

4.2 The System of Government in the People’s Republic of China

4.3 Mao’s Enforcement of Power

4.3.1 Economic priorities

4.3.2 Regional struggles

4.3.3 Political and domestic control

4.4 The Korean War, 1950–53

4.5 The First Five-Year Plan

4.5.1 Industrialization

4.5.2 Collectivization

4.6 The Hundred Flowers Campaign

5. The Great Leap Forward, 1957–65

5.1 The Cult of Certainty

5.2 The Great Leap Forward, 1957–62

5.2.1 Relations with the USSR

5.2.2 Agriculture

5.2.3 Industry

5.2.4 Women in the years of collectivization

5.2.5 Tibet

5.3 Mao Resurgent, 1962–66

6. The Cultural Revolution, 1966–76

6.1 A Swimming Lesson

6.2 A Revolution of the Young

6.3 The Aims of the Cultural Revolution

6.4 The Red Guards Unrestrained, 1966–67

6.5 The Cultural Cost of the Revolution

6.6 Retrenchment, 1967–76

6.6.1 The Red Guards replaced

6.6.2 The Lin Biao Incident

6.6.3 The death of leaders

6.7 Mao’s Legacy

7. Deng Xiaoping and the Boom Years, 1976–2008

7.1 The Transition of Power to Deng, 1976–81

7.2 The Reform of Agriculture

7.3 The Reform of Industry

7.4 Political Reform Stalled

7.4.1 Change and stasis

7.4.2 The Democracy Movement

7.5 The Extension of Economic Reform

7.6 China as a Global Player

7.7 The Challenges and Achievements of China’s New Society, 1980s–2008

7.8 Conclusion

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

It should be noted that, in China, the surname comes first followed by the given name. In this volume, the pinyin system of transliteration has been used for all Chinese names (e.g., Mao Zedong), except in passages from primary sources where the original author has used an older form of spelling.

In writing this book, I have accumulated many debts of gratitude, the first and foremost being to my editor Dr Helen Pike, who has been an unfailing source of wisdom and good advice and has been a great support during the composition process. I would also like to thank everyone at Anthem Press, particularly Brian Stone and Tej P. S. Sood, for their encouragement, guidance and professionalism in the production of the completed text. Finally I thank my friends, who have had to endure years of enforced discussion and endless progress reports on the state of the book; they have done so uncomplainingly and have provided much enthusiastic support. Needless to say, any mistakes are entirely my own.

The greatest influence on my decision to read history and political philosophy was Professor H. T. Dickinson at Edinburgh University, who continues to be a great mentor and inspiration. I dedicate this book to the memory of my parents.

Iain Robertson Scott

April 2015

TIMELINE OF MODERN CHINESE HISTORY

MAPS

MAP A  Map of Modern China

MAP B  The Civil War Years: Northern Manchuria, 1946–47: the main railway lines and field of battle

MAP C  The Civil War Years: The Final Campaigns, 1948–49: important provinces and cities

CHAPTER 1

THE LAST OF THE EMPERORS, 1894–1912

1.1   The Crisis of China in the Late Qing Era

Revolutions rarely occur at the moment of greatest hardship or at the point of severest oppression, but rather when conditions are beginning to improve, when hope is kindled and the prospect of a better world can be glimpsed – when change seems possible but is neither adequate nor sufficiently fast. So it was in France in 1789; so it was in China in 1911. During the last years of the Dowager Empress Cixi there had been numerous attempts to reform backward, corrupt, semi-feudal conditions; in education, industry, taxation, government and the military there had been reforms and modernization – small sometimes grudging improvements, but progress nonetheless. These reforms, however, merely whetted the appetite for more extensive changes and, instead of being regarded as the first steps along a path of reconstruction, merely led to cries for far greater and more immediate changes – changes that first engulfed the Qing dynasty, which had initiated the reforms, and then swept away the imperial system altogether.

The historical interpretation of these last decades of the Qing dynasty has undergone substantial revision in recent years.¹ Traditionally, the Chinese themselves have always had a great respect for the study of history and tend to regard the past as a source of object lessons for the present and the future. However, in the twentieth century, Chinese historical scholarship became heavily influenced by the views of the Communists, after they won the civil war in 1949 and formed the People’s Republic of China; thereafter all past events were viewed through the prism of Communist belief, particularly as articulated by Mao Zedong. Grounded in Marxist thinking, Chinese writers rejected the feudal repression of the imperial period with its reliance on Confucian scholarship and the court’s focus on high culture and elitism. However, they were to be equally damning of the period that followed the downfall of the empire in 1911, that of the newly formed Republic of China; truly admirable history only began with Mao’s assumption of power in 1949. The only early history worth studying and emulating was that of the growth of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the actions of the peasant rebels against the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalists, and the transformation of China into a Communist state. The study of high culture was replaced by the study of folk culture and the only inspiring figures from the past were Mao and a few of his comrades who led the early struggle. History had become an uplifting chronicle of the popular collective and its economic successes; it was to become a political propaganda tool.

After the demise of Mao in 1976, there has been a gradual revision of Chinese history; now Marxist history, and its succession of class struggles, has itself been rejected and, though Mao is still seen as a major figure, his flaws are increasingly acknowledged and he is no longer the object of cult status. This, in turn, has led to a reappraisal of the Maoist interpretation of the past. Although there will be no subsequent rehabilitation of the imperial era, contemporary Chinese are quite willing to encourage mass tourism based on their imperial past. The new generation, who have witnessed huge economic successes since the 1980s, are liable to look more favourably on the early years of the twentieth century, when fledgling capitalist business was being developed, a new middle class of entrepreneurs was beginning to form and there were experiments in a greater degree of democratic government.

In Europe and America, historians have also begun to reappraise the history of the late Qing era.² In opposition to CCP historiographical interpretations, mainstream scholarship in the West (dependent on Western-friendly sources in Hong Kong and Taiwan) has always sympathized with the regimes that preceded the victory of Mao in 1949, while acknowledging that the Communists were instrumental in fighting and defeating the Japanese Empire. Although the late imperial period has had a certain exotic fascination for writers and the tale of the last emperor Puyi (who ended as a gardener in his former palace) has always been of interest, historians have tended to criticize the imperial court for being out of touch, bound by outmoded tradition and mired in corruption. The court’s blind intransigence and their economic, military and political failings thus inevitably led to the revolution of 1911. However, in the wake of America’s own ‘imperialist’ intervention and aggression in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, Western liberal historians have begun to take a kinder view of the Qing emperors, who had to face a multitude of intrusive foreign powers, and tried to defend their traditional life and customs against rapacious, mercenary Europeans. There has also been increasing interest in the reforms which the emperors, and the Empress Dowager Cixi, began to introduce in the late nineteenth century.³ Although these reforms were largely ineffective, they still spoke of a system which was not inflexible or totally blinkered, but which was trying to understand and adapt. Thus the last years of empire have been reassessed in a more generous light: the fault was not so much the intransigence of the imperial rulers, but rather the lack of boldness and urgency in the reforms they did undertake. The Qing court had acknowledged that there were problems, but their limited measures in response to the situation merely drew attention to their own shortcomings and their inability to deliver a solution. Thus revolutionary animus tended to focus on the Manchu dynasty itself – a desire to lop off the corrupt head rather than construct a more democratic body.

It will be argued that the revolution of 1911 fundamentally disposed of a ruling dynasty. Despite the proclamations of contemporary liberal reformers, the revolution was more anti-monarchical than pro-democratic. The causes of the revolution lie deeply embedded in the nation’s experience of the nineteenth century; as always, in China, the present is freighted by the burden of the past. Behind the revolution lay decades of dissatisfaction with a weak, corrupt imperial system – a government that was overwhelmed and humiliated by the external threats of foreign intervention, both military and commercial. China was also subject to the internal threat of social, religious and economic unrest and the uprisings of an increasingly divided, heterogeneous nation, cut off from the elite centres of power in the West. The imperial government’s attempts at reform were far too limited in scope and were often made fearfully, under duress. When bolder schemes of reform were promulgated they were instantly curtailed or completely crushed by the forces of conservatism at court. Imperial reforms stirred, rather than quelled, rebellion. The revolution also grew from the work of individual thinkers, writers and groups of agitators who articulated an agenda for change which struck a chord with some of the more radicalized elements in the cities. These reformers helped to foster a growing sense of national distinctiveness which shunned foreign intrusion, but still hoped to use Western ideas and systems. This resulted in a search for more liberal forms of government, though it must be stressed that this political, ideological aspect of the revolution affected only a small, educated, liberal elite, which perhaps helps to explain why the final advent of a republic never met with more widespread support and enthusiasm. Finally there was the hardship of the immediate economic and social circumstances of 1910–11, which crystallized all these issues and finally impelled people to act. Not only did all of these factors serve to undermine the Qing rulers and result in the revolution of 1911, but their potency stretches far beyond the deposition of a boy emperor, for they represent broad, ever-present forces which were to shape the destiny of China for the next half-century and were only addressed effectively by Mao Zedong and the Communist Party in their bid for power in the 1940s.

* * * * *

The Qing dynasty had ruled China since 1644, when they invaded the country from the north and terminated the three-hundred-year rule of the Ming emperors. Initially they were a very successful imperial family, bringing stability to this vast, racially heterogeneous land and creating a period of economic prosperity when new agricultural crops were introduced and trade was expanded. However, they were never a popular dynasty as they were regarded as foreigners. The Qing were Manchus, who were originally hunting tribes from beyond the Great Wall, which divided the civilized Chinese from the ‘barbarians’ who lived in the north. The Manchus were not from native Han stock (though the Han themselves were merely the most numerous of the countless ethnic groups that constituted China). The Qing actually saw themselves as an elite, separate from the rest of the Chinese population, but though they forced people to accept some of their own customs, such as shaving the forehead and wearing a ‘queue’ of hair at the back, they also tried to rule in compliance with traditional Chinese practice. As a result, in government, they continued to use a traditional elite class of scholars who had passed civil service exams based on ancient Confucian texts, but who did not necessarily have much knowledge of everyday life in China; it was unfortunate that the customs which the Qing sought to honour were often those which should have been subject to more critical appraisal. This ill-fated attempt to ally the dynasty to ancient Chinese precepts never convinced the people that the Qing emperors were any more than foreign usurpers, and this attitude was to be a major factor in the eventual overthrow of the dynasty in 1911.

By the mid-nineteenth century, all the early great Qing emperors had passed away, leaving a succession of weak rulers who instead of determining events were swept along by them. Principally, the intervention of foreign powers limited their power over trade, the economy and territory. However, the rule of the emperors was also circumscribed by local lords who increasingly acted as they pleased – thus the geographical range of the emperors’ power was also limited and they could not control events in the provinces. By that stage the Qing attempts to uphold traditional Chinese values, protocol and hierarchy had resulted in an ossified society, incapable of change. The government had become sclerotic, run by remote Confucian scholars in Beijing who knew little of the modern technological world and continued to see China as the ‘Middle Kingdom’ of the earth, whereas it had now become something of a peripheral backwater, untouched by the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the West. Its bureaucracy was infamous the world over for its byzantine complexity, corruption and complacency; the rules of cultural formality, which the Qing had been so keen to embrace, were now strangling the country and preventing progress. The peace and productivity of the previous centuries had resulted in a fast-growing population and a competition for land, crops and resources, without the benefits of the new agrarian practices which had enabled more food to be produced in Western countries to support their growing populations. The result was a people who lived at subsistence level and were at the mercy of the many natural disasters, such as droughts and floods, to which China was habitually subjected. These uneducated peasant farmers also had to pay taxes for local government and these were much resented as they often went to fill the pockets of corrupt officials. In this huge empire, so culturally, religiously and ethnically diverse, the ordinary Chinese people felt physically and metaphorically remote from central government in Beijing, presided over by a foreign Qing emperor. There was little to bind the peasant to the state except a deferential respect for traditional political, social and economic practices and an abiding regard for imperial rule, which was deeply ingrained despite their innate dislike of the Manchus. In the second half of the nineteenth century these ancient ties and assumed loyalties were to be subjected to enormous strain through a mixture of external and internal forces which were to erode traditional reverence for imperial rule. The weakness of the emperors in the face of foreign intervention inculcated a spirit of nationalism as well as anti-imperialism.

1.2   External Threats: Foreign Intervention, 1840s–90s

By the end of the 1830s the British were intimately involved in the affairs of China through the opium trade, which they sought to dominate. The British increasingly came into conflict with the Qing rulers, who had yet to decide whether they should legalize or proscribe opium, but who were certainly against the encroaching British presence in Chinese ports. This resulted in the Opium Wars of 1839–42 and victory for the modern military and naval might of Britain. The subsequent Treaty of Nanjing effectively ended the tight, exclusive control the Chinese had always maintained over their commercial and diplomatic relations and over any foreign activity on Chinese soil. The Opium Wars witnessed the most complete defeat the Qing emperors had ever experienced and its profound psychological effect, as well as its dire military and commercial implications, cannot be exaggerated. China was exposed as an outmoded industrial and military power. The British treaty, followed by even more extensive ones with the Americans and French, could hardly have been more humiliating. The Qing lost control of some of their most vital economic interests, opening five ports to the British, including Shanghai and Canton. Indeed in a ‘most favoured nation’ clause to a subsequent 1843 treaty the emperor agreed that if he granted any additional privileges or immunities to the citizens of foreign powers these would also be extended to the British. This meant that in future Chinese emperors could not effectively play off one foreign power against another or show favouritism in its dealings, thus drastically reducing its potential to make treaties or conduct diplomacy. This severely limited any room for manoeuvre in the remaining decades of the century and this period can be characterized as a time of increasing foreign interference and domination in Chinese affairs. From then on not only the British but other European powers, Japan and America were emboldened to take an interest in China and cut a slice of Chinese territory and trade for themselves.

There were sporadic attempts to reach an accommodation with the Westerners and to learn from their new technologies. In 1861, senior members of the emperor’s staff set up the Office for the Management of the Business of All Foreign Countries (usually known as the Zongli Yamen), which attempted to aid the conduct of business with foreigners and try to understand them. At first some headway was made and there were productive discussions with the British concerning changes in administration. Government language schools were set up which taught a more modern vocational and scientific curriculum and used Western teachers. Even the small but culturally significant act of ‘kowtowing’ to the emperor was dropped in diplomatic circles. However, these efforts and the actions of the Zongli Yamen never really escaped from the commonly held view that the Chinese were inherently superior to other nations and there could be no possibility of dealing with foreigners, in any area, on an equal footing. This predisposition was to roundly affect Chinese politics, when its actual power, wealth and prestige could no longer support such notions. This belief greatly limited the Chinese capacity for useful diplomatic action and made the incursions of other nations easier and more destructive. The Chinese fear of a possible ‘loss of face’ in front of foreigners also meant that business and diplomacy could rarely be conducted transparently and, as a result, the attitude and the intentions of the Chinese government were often misinterpreted. Similarly, there was little attempt by any of the foreign powers to understand the social and business etiquette or the traditions of the Chinese.

All attempts to reach a rapprochement with the West ended in 1870 with violence against foreign Christian missionaries who had settled in Tianjin. Confucian Chinese considered themselves to be innately moral, honest and just and resented the Christians’ increasing intrusion into Chinese life and their alternative stance to traditional Confucian values. They also resented the growth of Christian schools and the distribution of texts not just in the treaty ports but also inland. In this heightened atmosphere there was a tendency to exaggerate the danger that missionary activity posed for traditional Chinese life, and even to demonize the actions of the Christians. Propaganda was published to discourage any contact with the missionaries and they used Chinese superstition to spread fear among the local population. A Cantonese propaganda pamphlet of 1892 describing Christian indoctrination was particularly alarming:

At Tientsin they used constantly to beguile and entice away young children in order to scoop out their eyes and hearts. When the people discovered it, they tore down their tall foreign houses, and found heaped up inside bodies of kidnapped children, boys and girls. All these acts should make us careful not to incur similar dangers. We should unite hands and hearts to keep out the evil before it is upon us.⁴

The Chinese were suspicious even of the positive boons brought over by Christians. Many Western missionaries were also doctors and introduced highly effective new medical techniques in the prevention and cure of illness, but which went against traditional Chinese teaching and were thus regarded as evil. Many of the missionaries were women and took an active role in spreading the gospel, teaching and nursing, in diametric opposition to the more subjective status that women had in traditional Chinese society. This all amounted to a new and revolutionary way of looking at the values of the world. For some modernizers in Chinese society it heralded the future and was to be a major influence in the period leading up to the revolution of 1911; in the meantime, however, it was to provoke more opposition than admiration. For some time, missionaries in different areas had suffered beatings and had their houses destroyed, but in 1870 in Tianjin stories of Catholics who behaved in a brutal, excessive and amoral fashion triggered a series of savage attacks, leaving sixteen French and three Russians dead.

The last decades of the nineteenth century were marked by increasing friction and violence between the Chinese and foreigners. As the population grew, some Chinese who had quit their country to go to America in search of work found themselves vilified as cheap labour by fellow workers, whose language and customs were too much of a barrier to be overcome. They were held in contempt and this prevalent attitude in foreign countries had a reciprocal effect on how they were treated when these same nations arrived in China to do business or capture trade. Foreign feelings of innate superiority rubbed up against Chinese feelings of superiority, in combustible fashion.

In all their dealings with foreign powers from the 1870s–90s the Qing were constantly forced to acknowledge their weakened position. When the French seized Hanoi and Haiphong in 1880 and tried to expand further into present-day Vietnam, the Chinese initially took a belligerent stance. However, the newly developed Chinese navy was no match for the modern French fleet anchored off the coast and was totally destroyed within an hour. A year after the French had successfully taken Indochina, the British seized Burma. To have adopted a wiser, more ameliorative, diplomatic course would have seemed like a loss of face to the Qing, but the actual outcome was much worse: losing land, wealth and prestige in the eyes of their own people. It seemed that the weakness of the Qing and of China’s defences offered up the country to any power wishing to expand its imperial ambitions – there were many, but none so determined in the Far East as Japan.

The Qing totally underestimated the power of its close rival. Japan’s growing power caught the Chinese authorities unprepared, disbelieving that it would dare to challenge the might of China. However, the Japanese had recently enjoyed a military, economic and administrative renaissance and was no longer China’s isolationist neighbour. In 1879 they took over the disputed Ryukyu Islands (which China had claimed as theirs) without much resistance. In the 1890s the Qing were anxious to have friendly diplomatic relations with Korea, a country in which the Japanese were also interested. Both countries professed only to care for Korean independence, but both saw Korea as strategically influential and a bulwark against its neighbours. In 1894 both China and Japan promised to send an army to protect the Korean king against rebellion, but the latter mobilized more quickly and appointed a friendly regent. Worse, the Japanese fired on and sunk a ship carrying Chinese troops, resulting in the loss of over a thousand men. Battles were fought in Korea and then spilled over the border into China itself and the port of Lushun was taken. The North Chinese fleet then tried to protect the key port of Weihaiwei only to find that the Japanese had sent a force of soldiers by land across the peninsula and captured the port from the mainland side. The Japanese then trained the port guns on China’s own fleet and sunk half their ships. It was such a humiliating defeat for the Chinese, who had been totally outmanoeuvred and outwitted, that the commanders involved committed suicide. The resulting treaty between China and Japan proved to be a disaster for the Qing and Korea was now effectively within Japan’s sphere of influence. The Japanese also gained 200 million taels (an exorbitant sum in silver currency), four ports, Taiwan and part of southern Manchuria. The 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki marked a new low point for the Qing and for China’s status as a nation. The odour of failure, humiliation and diminishing power and wealth would have been hard for any country to bear, but were intolerable for the Chinese, who had traditionally believed in their innate superiority to other powers. The 1894–95 war with Japan proved to be a decisive turning point in Chinese history, tarnishing forever the reputation of the Qing leadership, leading to calls for reform which were eventually to result in the downfall of the imperial system.

1.3   Internal Threats: Revolts and Reforms, 1850s–90s

As China faced these external threats to its power and independence from the middle of the century onwards, it also faced mounting pressures from within its own lands. The population was rising dramatically and with it the pressure on land availability, exacerbating social dislocation as the gulf between the elite governing class and the great masses grew ever wider. As always, there were also huge regional variations in wealth and social conditions, with the ever-present possibility of natural disasters intervening to create a particularly bad harvest in particular areas, resulting in famine, poverty and disease. The larger cities and ports were wealthier, but there had been no development of a fully fledged middle class in the style of the West, as industrialization and commerce were still very primitive. However, the ports were also centres for new ideas from abroad and so tended to be more radical in their outlook. The rest of the nation was so vast, the Qing’s control over its constituent parts varied and was reliant on often corrupt and power-hungry provincial governors. The result was a profoundly fractious and dislocated society.

The 1850s and 1860s saw two major rebellions against the Qing dynasty. Perhaps most interesting as an indicator of future developments was the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–64 based in the country around Nanjing. This was in many respects an ascetic rebellion which advocated a ban on opium, prostitution, alcohol and entertainment such as dancing; in other words the rebels were protesting against what they saw as widespread corruption in Chinese society which dulled the senses of ordinary people and rendered them passive and socially and economically repressed. They argued that money should be commonly held and all land divided among the families of Taiping supporters, with everyone receiving an equal share. This Christian-led movement was unable to achieve widespread anti-Qing support and was fairly uncoordinated. Eventually imperial forces were able to reclaim the Taiping stronghold of Nanjing in 1864, but individual rebels did not surrender and many chose to burn themselves to death rather be taken prisoner. This blend of fanaticism, purist values, egalitarian reform and revolutionary mobilization was to be a foretaste of the greater and more successful revolutions of the twentieth century, particularly that of Mao’s Communists.

The second revolt was the Nian Rebellion, which began in 1851, although the origins date back to the eighteenth century. The revolt was centred in a region to the northwest of Nanjing but lacked the unity and ideological focus of the Taiping Rebellion. They comprised a fairly disparate group of guerrillas, generally made up of poor peasants led by variety of local leaders, raiding village crops, capturing rich landowners and attacking government traders. Eventually the Nian forces were to be subdued in 1868, but the significance lies first in their successful guerrilla tactics as a mode of revolt: this was to prove instructive for Mao and his people’s army in their successes in the 1930s and 1940s against the Japanese and then in the civil war against the Nationalists. The other significant feature of this revolt was its resulting lesson: the Qing had to depend on local commanders to suppress the uprising. This was part of a more general process in the latter years of the nineteenth century which saw the rise of powerful local generals who owed little to central authority; it also weakened the Qing’s direct control over its kingdom and made it more of a dependent power.

At the same time as the Taiping and Nian revolts, Muslims were rebelling in the southwest of the country in Yunnan province and then again the northwest. These rebellions had economic origins and were principally caused by increased taxation; they did not pose as big a threat to the imperial authorities as they were spread over a vast area of land and coordinating the rebellion proved to be impossible, but the Muslim rising was not quelled until 1873. These revolts further served to highlight the fact that the imperial system was under domestic stress.

All these internal dissensions occasioned by economic, religious, political or ideological factors proved the Qing to be weak and ripe for attack from within; although each revolt was quelled they were an inspiration for future groups who were emboldened by these early successes. Although central authority had seemingly been restored by the 1870s, it was clear that the territories and their local commanders were becoming increasingly powerful and the Qing depended on them for control. However, the revolts also proved to be the trigger for more positive action, as they persuaded the Qing that reform was necessary in the government and organization of the country. If these reforms had been more extensive and wholehearted in their implementation, then the history of twentieth-century China might well have been very different.

When a policy of reform and revival was first mooted, it was not by the Qing emperor himself but by a few important councillors and local officials. Reform was adapted to tradition, and so the changes could be characterized as a restoration (zhongxing) of moral values, educational principles and a more secure structure of administration and government. There were to be a series of ‘self-strengthening’ reforms which would enhance, but not alter, the existing structure of Chinese government. It therefore all rested on Confucian values and, as such, was more easily assimilated into the fabric of Chinese life. Confucianism was a philosophy based on the teaching of Confucius (551–479 BCE) and of his disciples and which was open to varied interpretations. Basically it stressed righteous, restrained social behaviour, respect and obedience for parents, deference to elders and superiors, worship of ancestors, the value of education and the study of the classics, and the promotion of social harmony: an ordered world under heaven. In political terms it emphasized that government should be based on moral principles rather than harsh laws, submission to authority and the obligations of rulers as well as those of the ruled. The traditional interpretation of Confucian philosophy suggested that people who wanted to improve society should look to the past for models to follow rather than try to devise something entirely new. It was a philosophy that had been at the heart of Chinese life for centuries, and the ‘self-strengthening’ reforms had no designs to overturn it, but rather build on its precepts. This type of process was to be seen time and again in the proceeding century, when much more radical Communist changes were introduced – but always with a canny regard for tradition, so that they could be presented in a more familiar light and have the sanction of history. Indeed, the very success of the Chinese version of Communism has been its ability to graft its practices and ideas on to the stem of Chinese moral, political, social and cultural beliefs, to create something that was both a new departure and a venerable organic growth. When Chinese Communism was introduced, neither the ideological content nor its practical methodology were to be entirely alien.

Councillors in Beijing tended to be too conservative or incompetent, so the first institution of reforms in the 1860s and 1870s fell to provincial statesmen, the most important of whom was the Confucian scholar and general Zeng Guofan from Hunan. As a Confucian, Zeng believed in principled, moral action acquired through education and rigorous scholarship combined with a pragmatic sensibility. He rebuilt schools after the Taiping Rebellion and tried to ensure that students did not buy their degrees and qualifications but studied for exams which were judged on merit. He tried to restore the wrecked agricultural economy and ensure that land taxes were more honestly assessed and less corrupt. He attempted to restore order to the areas which had been most affected by revolution but also develop long-term plans to help the whole of China prosper and advance. He also tried to incorporate some of the more successful elements of Western technology into the still-backward Chinese state. He was much influenced by the academic Feng Guifen, who had had first-hand experience of warfare and wanted China to be able to emulate the power of the West and its martial technology. In military matters, but also in affairs of trade and in the encouragement of more technical, science-based education, the aim was to learn from the West, become proficient in its languages and catch up with its advances; the innate abilities of the Chinese would then ensure the ultimate dominance of China and a complete reversal of fortune, restoring China to its rightful place at the forefront of the world’s great powers. Feng believed that China had to ‘strengthen’ itself to compensate for years of relative decline. China was far bigger than any of the great powers of Europe, yet they were pre-eminent on the world stage, whereas China was a backwater; Feng believed that China must advance and attain a position commensurate with its size, first by educating itself in the knowledge and skills of the West and then overtaking it. These were to be basically the same aims of the first Communist government which took power in 1949.

These ideas had a huge influence on Zeng Guofan. Thus by the 1870s and 1880s Chinese statesmen had set about a programme of more scientific/technological education, restoring order (even if that meant granting autonomy for local leaders) and constructing more effective modern weaponry. This process was known as ‘self-strengthening’; it seemed that the officials of the Qing dynasty had realized just in time what perils faced the imperial regime and had instituted a series of reforms to save it from revolutionary forces. Western historians have traditionally argued that these attempts at reform would never have succeeded and were, at best, half-hearted. Ultimately, the traditional forces of Confucianism, in which the regime was steeped, would prevent change. In the 1980s, however, more documents from the period became available in translation and there have been detailed studies of Confucianism which show that, in many respects, it was a forward-looking, adaptive philosophy, more open to new economic and political trends than had been previously been suspected. As a result, historians now argue that the self-strengthening movement was a real and serious attempt at change and one which had the potential to bring real gains.⁵ Even if, ultimately, the measures did not radically alter conditions, they did influence and encourage the future trend of reformist thought.

However, if the self-strengthening reforms were not foredoomed through their clash with the Confucian mindset, why did they prove to be little more than a veneer of shallow, reformist gestures? Firstly, there was still a leadership vacuum at the heart of Chinese government. A number of the most active and progressive of the provincial leaders, including Zeng Guofan, died in the 1870s just at a crucial moment in the implementation of changes. In 1875 the 18-year-old emperor Tongzhi also died, leaving a pregnant wife who subsequently died before her baby was born. Tongzhi’s mother, the Dowager Empress Cixi, was rumoured to have driven her daughter-in-law to suicide so that she could put forward her own candidate for emperor: her 3-year-old nephew Guangxu. This meant that she could retain her role as regent and be the real power in the court at Beijing. Even when he had attained adulthood, her nephew was weak and so it was Cixi who effectively dominated central government from the 1860s until her death in 1908. Though she adhered to the traditions of the Qing, she was a clever woman who could see the value of minor reform both as a necessary and symbolic gesture, so she approved of many of the self-strengthening measures without fully encouraging them or wishing to see them extended too far. Cixi’s most recent, and most enthusiastic, biographer Jung Chang seeks to dispel her reputation for despotism and traditionalism and instead praises her as a ruler who faced increasingly insurmountable odds by allowing a degree of reform which introduced China to the modern age. Her era in power saw technological advances in electricity, communications and transport, modernized military equipment and the institution of social reforms such as the end to foot binding and an interest in Western styles of education.⁶ However, in the early years of the new century, Cixi was to permit reforms only under duress and in response to revolutionary action; in vital matters such as constitutional change the implementation was often fatally delayed. If she had been as successful a reformist as Chang claims, the 1911 revolution would have been avoided.

There is no doubt, however, that despite deficiencies in leadership, the Cixi era did witness attempts at reform. Principally they were the work of Li Hongzhang, a governor-general in the north, who brought about economic reforms in the region with the establishment of the China Merchant Steamship Navigation Company, which tried to reassert Chinese control over trade in its own waters. Li expanded coal mining and cotton production, as well as armaments; he could see the desperate need to develop new industrial technology and armament production if China was ever to regain its old wealth and status in the world