Culture and Conflict,
1949–1997
The Chinese people have stood up.
China will never again be an insulted nation.1
—Mao Zedong, 1949
After the Communist victory in the war for control of the Chinese mainland, the stability and durability of the new regime remained uncertain. Domestically, even apart from the imperative of remolding the country along revolutionary lines, China was in urgent need of wholesale reconstruction after more than a decade of foreign and civil war. In order to rebuild the country, China needed to make use of members of the “bourgeois classes”—scientists, entrepreneurs, teachers, and technicians—but their overseas education raised the fear they were politically unsound and susceptible to imperialist subversion.
Internationally China’s desire for autonomy now had to contend with the threat of active opposition, even a nuclear attack, by an increasingly anti-Communist United States. American technological supremacy had been well established since the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. Even after the Soviet Union’s explosion of its own bomb in September 1949 had offered some hope for deterrence, it was impossible to feel any confidence that the United States would not deploy this new and deadly weapon against China. With reason, China felt extremely apprehensive about the world situation in general and American intentions in particular.
The Cold War polarization of the world into blocs dominated by two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, suggested that China’s most sensible strategy in the face of U.S. hostility was to tilt toward the Soviet Union. But Soviet behavior over three decades had furnished China with ample evidence of its dubious reliability as an ally. In the emerging climate of the Cold War, then, China found it necessary to align itself with one powerful but untrustworthy superpower, the Soviet Union, against the other, an extremely powerful and antagonistic United States. But the price Stalin exacted for Soviet support was the retention of strong Soviet influence in China’s northeast (Manchuria) and in Xinjiang, a strategy he hoped would insulate the Soviet Union from encirclement by the United States. Among other things, this demand served to remind China that both political ideological bonds and China’s territorial integrity ranked lower in the hierarchy of Soviet priorities than Soviet security.
Moreover, the enemy was near at hand. The world was still, psychologically and militarily, geared for war. The Chinese Nationalists (Guomindang), who had taken refuge on the island of Taiwan in 1945, were unambiguous about their firm intention of recapturing the mainland. American lamentations about the “loss” of China to communism made continued U.S. military support for the Guomindang a virtual certainty, while Stalin made clear he would not risk war with the United States over Taiwan. Not much farther away, American troops were still occupying defeated Japan, while Korea, newly released from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 into a joint American-Soviet trusteeship, was effectively divided into mutually antagonistic northern and southern zones by late 1946, occupied respectively by Soviet and U.S. forces.
This chapter explores two vital and interconnected aspects of the Chinese People’s Republic that, taken together, epitomize China’s recent interaction with the West and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the world. First, we examine the main thrust of China’s formal foreign policy. Second, we explore China’s relationship to Western culture in its broadest sense.
Here there is some considerable divergence between China’s official stance and the approach adopted by ordinary Chinese people. At times the official demonization of “the West” has been an integral part of Chinese revolutionary strategy, designed to strengthen China through popular unity against a supposed common enemy. Animosity toward capitalist societies has at times extended to any kind of cultural association, broadly conceived, with outsiders, a policy that made any and all foreign links fraught with risk. One might be denounced, for instance, because of an overseas relative, a Western education, a Christian connection, a predilection for Beethoven, or even some more inadvertent and tenuous relationship, such as a conversation struck up on the street by an unwitting foreigner. Campaigns against such subversive foreign imports as free speech or the desire for greater political participation have partly been motivated by the inherited awareness that imported goods almost never come detached from their cultural context; Mao himself knew from his many years in the political wilderness that ultimately it is impossible to expunge unwanted ideas altogether. In short, the maintenance of cultural purity has been problematic.
Outside official circles, Chinese attitudes toward the West have confronted subtler issues. Some men and women, echoing the strategies of their late Qing and early republican predecessors, have sought to draw on the West as a source of alternative ideology whereby they can offer resistance to a repressive state. But decades of exposure to nationalistic propaganda produced by that very state (often for the very purposes of repression) have made Chinese intellectuals acutely self-conscious about cultural independence. They are thus caught in a bind. They can resist the state in the realm of culture by appeal to Western models, or they can resist Western culture in the name of nationalism, but in so doing, they risk willy-nilly lending their support to state policies.
Much of the history of the People’s Republic concerns these issues of self-reliance and independence and related questions about what Chinese people mean by “the West” and how they have used it in different ways and for different purposes. The first test of new China’s ability to address these conundrums was the Korean War of 1950–1953.
In 1950 sporadic armed conflict between northern and southern Korea in the years following World War Two escalated into full-scale civil war. In June of that year troops from the north, many of whom were veterans of the wars in China, invaded the south, quickly devastating South Korean troops and American occupation forces and capturing the capital city of Seoul. Three months later American soldiers landed at Inchon, near Seoul, which they recaptured. They then fought their way northward with some success, only to be driven back by the unexpected entry into the war in November of several hundred thousand “Chinese People’s Volunteers,” following an initial Chinese foray a month earlier. A savage war ensued, with great loss of life, punctuated by American threats to deploy nuclear weapons in Korea or China or both.
Many observers, on the assumption that North Korea was acting under orders from Moscow and with substantial Soviet aid, feared that the Korean War would soon develop into a third world war. In fact, the Soviet Union’s role in the invasion and the extent of its subsequent military assistance remain somewhat nebulous. Certainly it wished to avoid provoking the United States into taking military action against itself and, as a corollary, to block any rapprochement between China and the United States. For these reasons the Soviet Union left all the actual fighting to Korean and Chinese forces and, at a critical early juncture in the war, failed to provide promised air support. This failure caused both North Koreans and Chinese to conclude that Moscow had in effect contributed to their high level of casualties. One result of this perception was that subsequently North Korea was much more favorably inclined toward China than to the Soviet Union, with which it dealt more out of necessity than choice. Another was, as we shall see, that China began more actively to come to terms with the perils of dependence on outsiders.
American assumptions that the Soviet Union was behind events in Korea aroused new fears about the spread of bolshevism that greatly affected U.S. conduct of the war. One early casualty was American judgment about China. U.S. policy makers failed to grasp the complexities of the three-way relationship among Mao, Stalin, and the North Korean leader Kim Il Sung, leading them to underplay the possibility that China might well come to North Korea’s aid. Moreover, their habitual disparagement of Chinese military capabilities led to a near-fatal underestimation of the Chinese People’s Volunteers’ ability to fight. No less significant than these miscalculations, the United States deployed its naval forces in the strait between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland, in a clear demonstration that it would continue to stand by Chiang Kaishek against the Communists.
China’s decision to enter the Korean War derived from the assessment that both its domestic and its international interests were crucially at stake. Even before the outbreak of war there had been considerable anxiety about possible attempts by the United States to collude with the Nationalists in sabotaging the revolution from within or to back a Nationalist invasion. With this went the Communists’ ever-deepening doubts about the reliability of China’s educated middle classes, which radical party leaders still suspected were insincere in their support.
On the home front in late 1950 Mao launched a nationwide campaign to “Resist America, Aid Korea.” Intended both to reinforce external security and to bolster the strength of the party within the country, this campaign boosted morale through an all-out appeal to nationalism. Its success persuaded Mao of the efficacy of such tactics for political gain. The flood of anti-American sentiment it unleashed also placed in a perilous position those who had received their education in the United States, including not a few who had returned home from abroad specifically in order to contribute their foreign-learned skills to rebuilding new China after 1949.
Neither the North Korea–China side nor the South Korea–
United States side really won the war, which lapsed into a protracted stalemate benefiting no one. After a truce in 1953—the Korean War has never been formally ended—the real losers were the Koreans. Their country was devastated, and the political divisions bequeathed by a half century of Japanese colonial occupation, a significant element of the original conflict, remained unresolved. Neither side drove out the other; any territorial gains were for the most part recovered, and the dividing line between north and south was not substantially changed.
For China the Korean War was profoundly important in a number of ways. First, it brought to the forefront of Chinese policy-makers’ attention their already existing sense that in the long term, divergent interests would make a Sino-Soviet alliance unworkable. In this way the war both played a part in the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s and underscored China’s need to acquire the capability to go it alone. Mao and other leaders began to focus on the principle of self-reliance that later they would be compelled to translate into reality. Second, the mass mobilization campaigns of the Korean War era were only the first of many in which Chinese were called to action by anti-imperialist, often specifically anti-American propaganda. The politics of mass mobilization and the years of antiforeign activism left a lingering influence on the mind-set of Chinese of all persuasions; making outsiders the scapegoat for problems of whatever origin became to some extent a habit of mind.
Third, the failure of the Chinese People’s Volunteers to drive the Americans out of the Korean peninsula confirmed that notwithstanding the pervasive propaganda about “people’s war,” Mao’s theory about the irresistible power of numerical advantage and presumed superior morale, the reality was that technological superiority still counted for more. Pragmatic recognition of this persuaded Mao that China must acquire whatever advanced military technology the superpowers had, including the atomic bomb. The knowledge that the United States possessed nuclear weapons lent a potentially terrible substance to its threats against China, while the uncertainty about Soviet willingness to back China in a crisis to the extent of deploying its own nuclear weapons further reinforced Chinese determination to ensure that “whatever they have, we must have,” a decision arrived at in early 1955.
A fourth extremely significant consequence of the Korean War was that it greatly enhanced the international stature of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). At the beginning of the war the CCP was seen by many as a possibly temporary regime dominated by Moscow and one whose continued political power was by no means certain. By the end of the war, three years later, the CCP and the People’s Republic had proved a formidable force to be reckoned with. Although China had suffered immense numbers of casualties and been forced into retreat, it had stood up to the United States, the most powerful nation in the world and, to boot, the leading imperialist. It had compelled the United States to reach a compromise in Korea and to deal on equal terms at the negotiating table with the Chinese Communists, whom they so much detested. As General Peng Dehuai (1898–1974), then senior People’s Liberation Army commander in Korea, noted in a speech made in late 1953, “The time has gone forever when the Western powers are able to conquer a country in the East merely by mounting several cannons along the coast.”2 This situation strengthened China’s confidence about pursuing a number of other goals in East Asia, among which the resumption of control over Tibet was a high priority.
China had effectively controlled the mountainous nation on its western frontier from the early eighteenth century, when the Qing had incorporated Tibet into their expanding empire. Tibet had, however, always retained a fair degree of autonomy, and since the early twentieth century it had been more or less independent. In the thirties and forties Chinese Communist leaders had consistently expressed their intention of reincorporating such areas as Tibet and Xinjiang into the Chinese polity as “autonomous regions,” and in 1950 they took steps to bring this objective to fruition.
In 1950 and 1951, taking advantage of the fact that most of the world’s attention was riveted on Korea, China had first invaded and then occupied Tibet relatively free from international protest. The Dalai Lama, spiritual and political leader of Tibet, remained in Tibet until 1959, when he fled into exile in India in murky circumstances. By then the foreign powers were ready to condemn Chinese actions in Tibet, including widespread killings and the suppression of Tibetan culture, moves that appeared to signal an intention to destroy Tibetan independence. But the powers’ long inaction since the original Chinese invasion limited their credibility and made it possible for China to reject their criticisms as interference in its internal affairs. It was a claim that many foreigners, haunted by postimperial guilt and their own problems of postwar construction, were willing to accept. Tibetan independence fighters thus garnered little support internationally, although the United States’ covert encouragement of resistance efforts for a while aroused their hopes.
By the early 1950s the People’s Republic had become a significant player on the international stage, even though Taiwan still retained China’s seat at the United Nations. It now had the international prestige—and the consummate diplomat, Zhou Enlai—to represent its interests at international conferences. Most notably, at Geneva in 1954 Zhou successfully forced the Vietminh leader Ho Chi Minh to compromise with France on postwar arrangements that primarily suited Chinese interests.
Zhou also played a leading role at Bandung in 1955, at the first international conference of newly independent Asian and African nations. Reiterating China’s peaceful intentions, he endeavored to address the concerns of such nearby countries as Malaya and Indonesia that China was using those countries’ large overseas Chinese populations to back the international spread of communism. On this issue Zhou had to tread very carefully, because remittances sent home by overseas Chinese were an important source of foreign exchange for China. That year China signed a dual nationality treaty allowing overseas Chinese to choose their citizenship, but allegations of Chinese support for Communist groups abroad continued, amid occasional outbreaks of violence against Chinese immigrants—some of long standing—whom local communities resented for their evident prosperity.
In the early decades of the People’s Republic China actively sought to assume the leadership among the nations of the third world, to which they wished to spread the word about socialist revolution and successful resistance to imperialism, at the same time securing support in the international arena and denying it to the Soviet Union and Taiwan. In Southeast Asia, as we have just noted, this goal was viewed with considerable suspicion, both because of China’s proximity and because of the presence of sizable overseas Chinese populations. But in at least some parts of Africa, China’s message was much more welcome. To Tanzania, Angola, Mozambique, Ghana, and other African countries, China sent material aid and provided military training and supplied funding and manpower for economic development projects. It also hosted African students at schools within China, teaching both its ideology of revolution and its tried-and-true methods of guerrilla warfare. The point here, at its simplest, is that the oft-cited “fact” of China’s international isolation at this time is misleading. More accurately, in the 1950s and 1960s China was isolated from the United States and to a lesser extent Europe, and later from the Soviet Union, but it was fully engaged with many other non-Western nations.
In the early 1950s the Soviet Union delivered extensive military, technical, and financial aid to China. It sent experts and advisers and generally served as a model for the People’s Republic. Particularly after the Korean War, Chinese intellectuals, whose political attitude had always been suspect, began to find themselves increasingly passed over for employment in favor of Soviet experts. Those who went overseas to study now went to Moscow; no one went to the United States any more.
But the close relationship between the Soviet Union and China did not last. When Stalin died in 1953, Mao saw his chance to enhance his already considerable prestige by creating a distinctively Chinese revolution based on his own theories, known as Mao Zedong Thought. At the same time, he sought to seize the leadership of the worldwide Communist movement, causing resentment among Stalin’s less prestigious successors and thwarting Soviet ambitions to extend its influence around the world. After the 1956 anti-Soviet, anti-Communist uprisings in Hungary and Poland the Soviet Union needed to shore up its support; partly for that reason, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev undertook that year to help China build its own atomic bomb. But as China saw it, the Soviet Union continued to act in a condescending way toward it, treating it as a junior member of the ideological league and a technological bumpkin.
The 1956 uprisings had other repercussions in China. Attributing them to repression against intellectuals and to the isolation of the Eastern European Communist parties, Mao issued a call to “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.” His purpose in launching the Hundred Flowers Movement was to avoid the kinds of problems that had arisen in Eastern Europe; he hoped to revitalize intellectual life by allowing more freedom in academic debate and to use intellectuals’ criticisms to improve political and bureaucratic efficiency.
The call for debate let loose a flood of criticisms that, from the party’s point of view, exposed the alarming vitality of bourgeois, liberal ideas. The movement ended in June 1957, thirteen months after it had begun, when Mao implemented a policy of harsh repression that stemmed the flow and, besides, brought China into line with other Communist regimes across the world. This period of repression was known as the Anti-Rightist campaign. Debate was stifled, and intellectuals were subject to censure; some of those who fell from favor at this time were banished to remote parts of the country for ten or twenty years.
This repression partly related to Mao’s assessment of the de-Stalinization campaign in the Soviet Union. The dismantling of the Stalin personality cult, begun in 1956, had at first served as something of a curb on Mao’s power. But this spurred Mao to condemn de-Stalinization as a sop to capitalist interests and to move to reinforce his own power by squelching his critics.
The Anti-Rightist campaign merged into what was to become one of the most utopian, most disastrous episodes in the history of the People’s Republic, the Great Leap Forward of 1958–1961. Essentially this was an economic program intended to raise China to the industrial level of Britain and the United States within a short time, leapfrogging over the socialist stage of development envisaged in classic Marxist theory to arrive much more quickly at the goal of a communist society. The principal methods were the collectivization of agricultural production and living, the decentralization of industrial production, and self-reliance.
Overall the Great Leap Forward resulted in the death from starvation of tens of millions of Chinese, particularly during the Three Hard Years of 1960–1962. Moves toward collectivization and rapid industrialization were in every sense counterproductive. It took some little time before the exhilarating prospect of catapulting the nation into the revolutionary future gave way to a recognition of the harsh realities. The fate that had befallen so many of those who had spoken out in the Hundred Flowers Movement—disgrace and banishment—gave pause to many would-be critics within China. Even as ravenous people were scavenging for wild grasses to assuage their hunger, local officials vied with one another to report breathtaking successes, putting pressure on others to match or surpass their imaginary production figures. Growing political divisions among the leadership further contributed to the failure to halt in mid-Leap. Concealing the full magnitude of the disaster was possible in part for these reasons and in part because there were very few foreign observers in China who might have been able to contradict phony reports or to muster support from international relief organizations. For by the early 1960s China had fallen out not only with the United States, with which it had again come to the brink of war over Taiwan in 1958, but also with the Soviet Union.
During the Great Leap Forward, in a logical outcome of earlier campaigns to promote politics over everything else, it became markedly preferable to be “red” than “expert”—that is, it was better to be able to boast a “good” class background (to come from a worker or poor peasant family) and to be free from the contaminating effects of a foreign education (Western or Soviet) than to be technically skilled but ideologically tainted. The preference for political correctness over technical knowledge meant that Chinese men and women of good class backgrounds were promoted to positions requiring scientific and technical knowledge in areas such as physics or engineering, regardless of their training. This tactic deepened the revolution but, in the name of self-reliance, hindered industrial progress.
Moreover, despite the rhetoric, China’s need for Soviet expertise had not diminished. At just the same time as Great Leap advocates were trumpeting the phenomenal potential of the revolutionary will of the masses, China’s demands for Soviet military aid were greater than ever, particularly in light of China’s plan to build its own nuclear weapons. What Mao appears to have meant by self-reliance was, then, not at all technological independence, but only a diminution in Soviet political influence, which in his view threatened to dilute the indigenous purity of the Chinese Revolution.
In the late 1950s Sino-Soviet relations became acutely strained. There were many points of difference. The fundamental distinction was that Mao’s confidence in the redeeming power of politics led him to the view that it would be possible to survive a nuclear attack, whereas Khrushchev considered this unlikely. Thus Mao was ready to confront the possibility of nuclear war, whereas Khrushchev was increasingly inclined to seek ways to prevent it. Khrushchev’s fear that Chinese combativeness would drag the Soviet Union into a nuclear war with the United States was a major factor in the final Soviet decision to withdraw from China.
Disagreement arose over mutual accusations that Soviet blueprints were less than state-of-the-art and that Chinese copies of an advanced American missile Moscow had somehow obtained and passed on were crucially incomplete. Further disputes arose over Soviet demands to install a long-distance radio transmitter in China with which to keep in contact with submarines in their Pacific fleet, which China rejected as an infringement of its sovereignty by means of infiltration of its intelligence and communications systems. Fortified by enhanced self-confidence and unnerved by the spirit of détente between the Soviet Union and the United States that temporarily followed Khrushchev’s summit with U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower in 1959—China at last accused the Soviet Union itself—the great anti-imperialist—of imperialism.
Sino-Soviet cooperation on China’s nuclear project came to an abrupt end in 1960, at the height of the Great Leap Forward. Although China had seen the split coming, an eventuality that the propaganda about self-reliance anticipated, it was taken aback by the speed of the Soviet withdrawal. In the space of a few months all Soviet technical experts had been withdrawn. Almost half the promised equipment and raw materials for the strategic weapons program never reached China. Soviet and Eastern European artistic, literary, and musical experts were also withdrawn from their assignments all over China, leaving a huge vacuum in the arts and education worlds. In time those who had struggled to learn the Russian language found that it was politically unacceptable, even dangerous to admit to such a connection to the treacherous former ally. In 1962, when the Soviet Union as well as the United States supported India in its border war against China, China’s isolation from both superpowers emerged in stark relief.
Despite the setbacks of Soviet withdrawal, however, China exploded an atomic bomb in 1964. As a top priority national security project, the nuclear program received the active protection of the top leadership from the potentially damaging effects of continuing political campaigns against intellectuals, experts, and overseas education. The dire need for technical expertise outweighed the risks inherent in the supposed counterrevolutionary class affiliations of the best scientists and engineers. This need was made all the more pressing by the growing presence of U.S. forces in Indochina.
The Chinese Communists had long expressed solidarity with oppressed people and their revolutions around the world, although Vietnam and China were traditional enemies. It was the fear China would export its success, as the Soviet Union had to Eastern Europe, that underlay much postwar American foreign policy, especially toward China and Southeast Asia. By the late 1950s Mao had come to the opinion that the overextension of American power was in China’s interests because eventually the United States would hang itself with its own overextended rope (the “noose” strategy). Hence, although China did not actively intervene in Vietnam, where revolutionaries had continued to make progress after the failure of the 1954 Geneva talks to bring an end to hostilities, it encouraged the Vietnamese Revolution in the hope that this would in the long term reduce America’s ability to implement the threat of armed intervention, nuclear or otherwise, in the continuing impasse over Taiwan.
By the early 1960s disagreements within the Chinese Communist Party, especially the realization that the Great Leap Forward had been a devastating mistake, had produced rifts among party leaders and greatly undermined Mao’s prestige within China. Out of a desire to recover both his own political power and the momentum of the revolution, Mao increasingly referred in his speeches to the immediate and grave threat posed to China by the forces of foreign imperialism. The United States’ avowal in late 1963 that it intended to expand its involvement in Vietnam provided the perfect pretext for rallying the Chinese people to unite against foreign aggression.
But China had to act cautiously because it could not risk actually provoking the United States to attack it. It was to deter such an eventuality, after all, that China had devoted such intense attention to completing construction of its atomic bomb. China issued belligerent public pronouncements but at the same time secretly let the United States know that, although China intended to support the Vietnamese Revolution, it did not seek war with the United States. It would defend itself against U.S. invasion, but it would not initiate a conflict. For China, then, the Vietnam War was a highly delicate matter. On the one hand, it was critically important that war with the United States remain no more than a threat and not be allowed to become a reality. On the other hand, the possibility of war helped activate the extraordinary mobilization that became the Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution was a mass movement based on class struggle and had much to do with a sense of insecurity about foreign culture. It lasted officially for “ten bad years”—from 1966 to 1976. Mao launched it for several reasons. First, as we have seen, he wished to consolidate his own power and to dispose of his critics in the party leadership. Second, articulating a theory of “continuous revolution,” he wished to give the generation come to maturity since 1949 a taste of revolution firsthand, in order to revitalize the nationalist-infused ideological élan that had brought the Chinese Communists to power in the first place. Third, he wished to eliminate lingering bourgeois influence in China and the continued social and political predominance of those who labored with their minds over those who labored with their hands. In Mao’s view, this situation impeded China’s progress toward the genuinely egalitarian society originally envisaged by the revolution.
“Bourgeois influence” became a code phrase for any form of foreign connection. Everything foreign was publicly condemned as antirevolutionary and anti-China. During the most violent attacks on intellectuals, schools and universities closed down, and many intellectuals were dispatched to rural areas to live and work among the peasants in order that they might become closer to and learn from the most revolutionary social class. Many were subjected to horrifying physical and mental abuse and were publicly disgraced, leading to imprisonment and even death. Yet notwithstanding the suffering, many found the volatile conditions of the Cultural Revolution liberating after the stifling atmosphere of the early People’s Republic and later recalled it with considerable nostalgia.
Possession of books, especially translations of foreign works, routinely led to confiscation and punishment during this period. But foreign culture did not absolutely disappear. It simply went underground. In the cities, particularly in Beijing, illicit copies of foreign novels—Balzac, Hemingway, and Lorca, for example—were clandestinely passed from hand to hand, to be avidly devoured and passed on in great secrecy. Music by the Beatles played in underground salons, whose members also shared their nonsocialist artworks among themselves. Even in the countryside intellectuals sent to work among the peasants sometimes managed to obtain or keep their books, including banned foreign translations. A scholar who read German literature in the malodorous privacy of a pigpen epitomized such efforts. In short, foreign culture in diverse forms found ways to survive in China despite official condemnation and despite aggressive neighborhood vigilance on the part of individuals seeking to prove their own revolutionary zeal.
The conflict between revolutionary purity and professional expertise came to a head during these years. But because national strength remained China’s chief ambition at the highest levels, in special cases the crucial need for technical expertise was secretly allowed to prevail over political imperatives. National security was deemed a special case, as it had been in the case of the atomic bomb. For that purpose, also, the leadership created what became known as the Third Front, shifting major military-industrial installations deep into the interior of China, as a protection against possible superpower attack, much as the Nationalists had done during the wartime Japanese occupation. Military factories were built on a massive scale in remote and mountainous areas. The Third Front had mixed results, but like the self-strengthening projects of the late nineteenth century, it left an important legacy: it greatly facilitated the later development of Chinese industry, including military industry. Chinese leaders’ desire to pursue that path eventually led to rapprochement with the United States.
In the 1960s and 1970s the Cultural Revolution focused international attention anew on the goals of the Chinese Revolution. Its reverberations spread all around the world. In the United States, for instance, many feminists and socialists looked to China as a model of greater equality to which they might aspire. In Europe, Chinese students’ leading role in the Cultural Revolution influenced the widespread mass student demonstrations of 1968. In Southeast Asia the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot derived inspiration from Maoist ideology, with unpredictable and often terrible results. Some two hundred thousand ethnic Chinese in Cambodia—about half the Chinese population—were killed, often for their urban as much as for their racial origins; many Cambodians who favored the Cultural Revolution also perished. In Latin America several pro-Chinese groups sprang up; one of them, the Peruvian organization known as Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), became a powerful guerrilla movement that has endured as a political force until the present. Shining Path openly paid tribute to Maoism and demonstrated its ideological debt by, for example, its work among the common people and its commitment to violence. Notwithstanding the antiforeign propaganda pervasive in China at the time, it is not altogether clear that those then in power actually desired their country’s complete separation from the rest of the world, but in any event these examples show that absolute isolation was impossible.
NORMALIZATION OF RELATIONS
WITH THE UNITED STATES
The outwardly xenophobic strains of the Cultural Revolution and the related mistreatment of intellectuals were the particular accomplishment of the Gang of Four, the radical group associated with Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, and army leader Lin Biao. By the end of the decade of the 1960s Lin Biao’s power was second only to that of Mao, who declared Lin his successor even as he began to express doubts about his ambitions. The power struggle that ensued had much to do with China’s international position.
In early 1966 the Soviet Union signed a mutual defense pact with Mongolia and stationed troops in Mongolian territory within reach of Beijing. Within a few years the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Brezhnev doctrine of limited sovereignty for socialist states, and Sino-Soviet border clashes in 1969 all greatly heightened China’s apprehensions about imminent Soviet attack. In Chinese perceptions, the Soviet Union became a more immediate threat than the United States, which was deeply distracted by its engagement in Vietnam and had, besides, so far showed little sign of attacking China. Moreover, the deep divisions over the war within the United States suggested that the hard-line anticommunism of an earlier era was beginning to fade.
U.S. President Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run for re-election, in the wake of the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, further persuaded Mao that America was on the defensive. Proceeding on this assumption, and out of a sense of acute vulnerability, China edged toward the normalization of relations with the United States, as a way both of moving on from the chaos of the early years of the Cultural Revolution and of obtaining advanced technology from abroad. Supporters of rapid economic progress backed this move, but others condemned any rapprochement as capitulation to the imperialist enemy.
Among those who opposed normalization was Lin Biao. He and the radicals saw this policy as part of a more general move to restore normal political structures. From their point of view, that was undesirable because it would strengthen their political opponents, notably Zhou Enlai. Lin’s opposition to normalization thus formed an integral part of the struggle for power. At the same time, it was not implausible because continued U.S. involvement in Vietnam did pose at least a potential threat to China. From Lin’s perspective, moreover, continuing skirmishes with the Soviet Union, which an alliance between China and the United States would presumably discourage, were a proven way for him to enhance his power because they enabled him, as army commander, to assume the mantle of a national savior.
Lin Biao died in 1971 in a plane crash, allegedly while fleeing to Moscow following an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Mao. His death came shortly after a secret visit to China by U.S. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. Within a few months the People’s Republic of China replaced Taiwan at the United Nations, and U.S. President Richard Nixon, once a ferocious opponent of communism, visited China, thus formally ending its isolation from the Western world.
On February 28, 1972, after intense negotiation, the joint U.S.-China Shanghai Communiqué set out the parameters of the new relationship. Two of the most important aspects concerned the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam and a major shift in United States policy on Taiwan. According to this, the United States agreed to recognize Taiwan as part of a single China and set out its intention of gradual military disengagement from what could now be claimed as “China’s internal affairs” on the island. From China’s point of view, such a public statement was prerequisite to the normalization of relations, even though it fell short of a proposal for imminent reunification with Taiwan. For political reasons on both sides, it took seven years before the exchange of ambassadors marked the full normalization of relations. Nonetheless, the Shanghai Communiqué played a major role in reincorporating China into the global capitalist economic system.
Normalization also brought back into the foreground of Chinese concerns all the old questions about autonomy and dependence. No less in the late twentieth century than in the late nineteenth, it was well-nigh impossible to limit the terms of a relationship with outsiders to commercial exchange and technology transfer. Foreign ideas, beliefs, and values, from rock music to economic capitalism to political democracy, were simply impossible to keep completely under control.
Some of the consequences of this dilemma were a little incongruous. In the late twentieth century Western liberals, philosophically more kindly disposed than their conservative counterparts toward overall Chinese revolutionary goals, laid an emphasis on human rights and democracy that seemed to pose a more subtle threat to Communist authority than did mere capitalism. For that reason, Chinese authorities preferred dealing with conservative Western leaders, whose links to international business interests made them far less likely to criticize China for its authoritarian government and poor human rights record.
Mao’s death in 1976 formed part of a series of momentous events that year. Zhou Enlai died in January, and in the spring nationwide demonstrations, purportedly in Zhou’s honor, indicated the presence of simmering discontent; in Beijing, official attempts to crush the pro-Zhou demonstrations led to a violent incident centered on Tiananmen Square. In early July top military commander and strategist Zhu De died. Three weeks later a massive earthquake shook the industrial city of Tangshan, only a hundred miles from Beijing, with the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. Traditionally Chinese believed that natural disasters portended disharmony in human society. Although such beliefs were anathema to the staunchly antisuperstitious Communists, many people privately regarded the earthquake as a sign that the extremism of the past few years must come to an end, as well as a possible indication of impending upheaval. When Mao died in September, then, the third major leader to die within a few months, many regarded the earthquake as cosmic confirmation of figuratively earth-shattering events.
After a period of intense political maneuvering, in which the fall of the Gang of Four shortly after Mao’s death signaled a halt to radical politics, Chinese leaders began to focus attention on pulling the country back together again after the social and economic dislocations and the political mayhem of the past few years. In 1975 Zhou Enlai had reiterated an earlier call for sweeping reforms in four broad areas: agriculture, industry, defense, and science and technology. Known as the four modernizations, these goals now received high priority. They became the focus of a campaign to reunite the country after the deep divisions brought about by the Cultural Revolution. This project also included an important new departure: the gradual opening to trade with nonsocialist countries.
In late 1976 the United States elected a president (Jimmy Carter) whose commitment to freedom from oppression around the world prompted him to make human rights a factor in U.S. foreign policy, including its policy toward China. Although subsequent presidents often gave human rights relatively low priority as they formulated foreign policy, Western attention thereafter continued to focus on such issues. To many international observers, however, the United States’ own social inequalities invalidated its credibility as a critic, while its singling out of China on human rights, as it apparently glossed over abuses elsewhere in the world, was tantamount to bad faith. It strongly suggested that after all, the United States had yet to overcome its Cold War–era demonization of China.
The chief contenders for leadership of the nation after Mao’s death were Hua Guofeng, a hitherto relatively minor player who held the position of vice-premier, and Deng Xiaoping, a veteran revolutionary who had been the particular protégé of Premier Zhou Enlai’s. An early member of the Chinese Communist Party, he had held a variety of government positions in the 1950s but fell from power early in the Cultural Revolution. Reinstated in 1973, he disappeared from view once more after Zhou’s death in early 1976, as the Gang of Four sought to eliminate all potential opposition in anticipation of Mao’s death. After that event and the fall of the Gang of Four, Deng reemerged as a contender for the leadership despite attempts by Hua Guofeng’s supporters to block him.
The contest for the succession remained unresolved when, in early 1978, handwritten posters appeared on a wall near Xidan Street in central Beijing, objecting to the official verdict that the 1976 outpouring in honor of Zhou Enlai had been a counterrevolutionary plot. To many this bold demand seemed a natural outgrowth of the public criticisms of the Cultural Revolution era. In an unexpected outcome it achieved its desired result within six months.
Posters on what soon became known as Democracy Wall began to express a broad spectrum of dissatisfactions, ranging from criticism of residual radicalism and those who promoted it to complaints about individual injustices and calls for human rights and democratic reforms. Crowds gathered, relishing this new forum for debate, copying the posters by hand and circulating them among their friends. At the same time, several dozen underground periodical magazines containing polemical literary writing and other not-so-veiled political commentary started to appear. It was something unprecedented under the People’s Republic, the kernel of an organized dissident movement.
But as the 1978 activists soon discovered, the relatively liberal climate did not last for long. The overturning of the negative verdict on the 1976 Tiananmen incident, and the toleration of the fledgling democracy movement itself, were beneficiaries of the ongoing power struggle rather than an indicator of an official embrace of Western political ideals. In other words, Deng Xiaoping, by now in the ascendant, wished to represent himself as a reformist alternative to Hua Guofeng.
In December 1978 a man from a high-ranking party family, Wei Jingsheng, put up a poster in which he called for a “fifth modernization,” democracy. Wei’s call brought together a number of like-minded people, some of whom began to criticize the political system itself even more openly. But this “Beijing Spring” was short-lived. In March 1979—very shortly after Deng Xiaoping’s triumphant visit to Washington marked the normalization of relations with the United States and the final confirmation of his accession to power—signs of a crackdown began to appear. Official publications accused those who wrote in unofficial magazines and signed their names to wall posters of collusion with foreigners. Before long Wei, who had gone on to criticize Deng Xiaoping personally, was sentenced to fourteen years in prison.
Wei Jingsheng became a symbol of the new ambiguities. In some circles in China, and throughout the liberal West, his calls for democracy made him a hero, but in China the political times moved on, and other dissidents came to surpass Wei in the public mind. Some saw Western admiration for Wei, and his transformation into a symbol of the oppressiveness of new China, as a sign of the resurgence of the old attitude that outsiders knew what was best for China. Proponents of this view dismissed Wei’s supporters within China as dupes of foreign imperialism but at the same time lay open to the accusation that they themselves were little more than mouthpieces of the official Chinese government viewpoint.
By 1980 Deng Xiaoping had launched China on a series of economic reforms generally intended to give freer play to market forces in China. First he sought to modernize the agricultural sector by ending collectivization and permitting farming households to work on their own account and by a major shift toward commercialization. One major consequence of these changes was that the relative unprofitability of growing food crops led to a decline in food production by the mid-1980s. As a result, far fewer people could subsist on the land, so that millions of farm workers had to find other work.
These changes in the countryside were followed by wide-ranging urban economic reforms, among which the most important were a new sanctioning of the profit motive and the abolition of the “iron rice bowl” system, which guaranteed pay for workers in state enterprises irrespective of profitability; the removal of governmental controls on prices; and the creation of a free labor market (in which the newly redundant rural workers also offered themselves for hire). Among other things, private enterprise became far more competitive than it could be under a system dominated by state ownership.
Third, Deng adopted an open-door policy that allowed a rapid and massive increase in foreign investment in China, particularly by the nations of the capitalist West. The results were dramatic, with a fourfold increase in foreign investment in the ten years to 1988 and a further incremental rise over the course of the next decade. At the same time, however, China began to incur a growing foreign debt.
Deng’s economic reforms led to startling results. Internationally, by the end of the 1980s China had become one of the world’s leading economic powers. Domestically the pursuit of profit became, for the first time under the People’s Republic, not just acceptable but an act of patriotism. At the same time, the standard of living increased enormously, particularly in the cities, where a vigorous consumer culture enjoyed official encouragement. But with these changes came a greater disparity between rich and poor and between urban and rural dwellers. A new migrant population, many of whom moved from the countryside to the cities in search of opportunity, became a fact of Chinese life. So did violent crime and corruption, the inevitable accompaniments to the changes in the economy.
A significant side effect of Deng’s reforms was that Westerners became much more of a commonplace in China. International tourism surged as more and more parts of the country became accessible to foreigners. The foreign exchange this boom produced helped China pay some of the bills for the imported technology fueling the four modernizations. But not all foreign visitors complied with what the Chinese authorities apparently regarded as a tacit contract to spread the good word about socialism’s achievements in return for access.
Accompanying the economic reforms and the new openness to the Western world was a relaxation of official control over cultural matters. During the late 1970s and early 1980s many victims of the Cultural Revolution were officially rehabilitated, some posthumously, and the opprobrium officially attached to intellectual status again dissipated. Moving beyond the athletic exchanges (“Ping-Pong diplomacy”) that had marked the beginning of the process of normalization of relations with the United States, the government permitted an influx of Western culture, in the form of plays, movies, and other forms of artistic expression that had nothing to do with socialist construction.
At the same time, Chinese writers and artists began experimenting with new form and content, in a surge of intellectual excitement at the relaxation of the old constraints on their creativity. One striking new genre was scar literature, which described and criticized the wide-ranging mistreatment people had suffered during the Cultural Revolution, a rich fount of source material. But this direction alarmed hard-liners in the party and the army, whose political power was still considerable, since many of the poignant tales of suffering were in part addressed against their own earlier excesses. Deng himself, much touted in the West for his reforms, had already shown his ambivalence about cultural freedoms in the crackdown on Democracy Wall. Over the next several years a series of campaigns were mounted against malign influences from the West, characterized as “spiritual pollution,” “bourgeois liberalization,” and “peaceful evolution” to capitalism. These campaigns demonstrated that even though China now was a sovereign state increasingly powerful on the international scene, its authorities nonetheless felt tremendous ambivalence about the infiltration of cultural influences on the coattails of economic development.
Since the Cultural Revolution years, when the official line had been that everything foreign was bad almost by definition, Chinese men and women, and especially Chinese youth, had developed a keen interest in the outside world. But many had only incomplete knowledge of the West, which made them highly idealistic about, for example, the perfections of a society governed by the rule of law. Many fell prey to “study abroad fever.” Young people studied English obsessively in order to pass the language tests necessary for admission to American universities and devoted enormous energy to forging useful connections with visiting scholars and other foreigners.
China began to send students abroad as part of a general broadening of international exchanges. At first most who took part in such programs were senior scholars, but by the later 1980s there was a steady flow of younger Chinese students overseas. Chinese authorities struggled to exercise control over those who went abroad to study through a careful selection process, but this became more difficult as students found ways to fund their studies privately—for instance, with the help of a relative living abroad. A major issue was whether the students would return home or whether China would in effect suffer a brain drain of its best and brightest young men and women.
Students who did return experienced a number of difficulties. A foreign degree was helpful in obtaining employment, but others who had not had the chance to go overseas often felt resentful. In the course of time intellectual divisions appeared between those whose academic training in the West gave them often profound new theoretical insights and those still in China who based their scholarship on the observation of actual conditions. These differences sometimes became acrimonious. Those overseas claimed that their distance from China gave them the advantage of perspective, while those at home asserted that that perspective was so grounded in alien cultural values and in the assurance that speaking freely carried no personal danger as to have become intrinsically less worthy of respect in a properly Chinese context, if not altogether irrelevant. The same kinds of conflict brought hopeless divisions between dissidents at home and those in exile.
CHRISTIANITY
UNDER THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC
Another contentious source of foreign values was Christianity. In the early days of the People’s Republic the new authorities generally denounced religion as feudal superstition that had no place in a modern socialist state. This condemnation applied alike to foreign religions, such as Christianity and Islam, and to more or less indigenous religions, such as Daoism and Buddhism, that recognized a power higher than the state. All religions came under suspicion because they offered Chinese believers an alternative source of authority; unquestioning acceptance of the state was a necessary part of the anticipated transformation to communism.
Christianity was something of a special case. Apart from the blanket disapproval of religion, it suffered both from the upsurge of antiforeign sentiment and from the perception that it was a thinly disguised instrument of imperialism. On all counts it was utterly unwelcome. By the mid-fifties all Christian missionaries had been expelled, and any hint of association with Christianity bore with it the virtually automatic assumption of political untrustworthiness. Believers were forced to practice their religion in secret. Bishops were imprisoned for decades at a time.
Catholics in particular were subject to persecution because of their ties to the Vatican. The People’s Republic resorted to a tactic that the Kangxi Emperor would have appreciated: It sponsored the creation of a Catholic Patriotic Association, all of whose members had to abjure any connection to Rome. Those willing to join could win freedom from persecution, while continued acknowledgment of papal authority remained illegal. Chinese Catholics were forced underground in large numbers. Discovery carried considerable personal risk. In a single case toward the end of 1996, for instance, more than one hundred Catholics were reportedly arrested, beaten, and imprisoned.
The People’s Republic was more tolerant of other branches of Christianity, both because it had little choice and because they seemed to pose less of a threat. Although there was little chance that China would become predominantly Christian, Christianity remained alive and well in China at the end of the twentieth century, but its future remained uncertain. In the late 1990s attention to religious freedom for Christians around the world was beginning to become an issue in American political circles, with unpredictable consequences for those in China. Finally, whereas in Hong Kong under British rule many churches had functioned as bases for mission work on the mainland, China’s resumption of control over Hong Kong seemed likely to influence their future direction.
HONG KONG, TIBET, AND XINJIANG
In 1984 China and Britain negotiated the terms for the return to China of Hong Kong upon the expiration in 1997 of the ninety-nine-year lease on the New Territories, on the Chinese mainland opposite Hong Kong Island. Contrary to British expectations, China made it clear it would not renew the lease. Given Hong Kong’s dependence on the mainland for such essential resources as oil and water, Britain had little choice but to agree to return Hong Kong Island itself. One of Britain’s few remaining colonial possessions, Hong Kong had by this time become a thriving center of capitalist enterprise, with a British governor and an English-style legal system with final appeal to the Privy Council in London. As a financial center, it offered a huge potential asset to a modernizing China.
In the 1984 joint Sino-British declaration, China agreed to maintain “one country, two systems” in Hong Kong. For fifty years after 1997 Hong Kong would remain a center of capitalism with some degree of autonomy. The agreement promised that during the fifty-year period society and politics would remain unchanged. Among other things, it was a possible model for the eventual reincorporation of Taiwan.
During the next thirteen years both sides tried to institute changes. Although Britain had ruled Hong Kong with a firm hand and had been extremely reluctant to share significant power, it hastily introduced a democratic process in Hong Kong before the colony reverted to Chinese rule. Under these last-minute British reforms, a new legislature was democratically elected, but Beijing soon appointed a provisional legislature to replace it. Changes also took place at the individual level. Many Hong Kong residents began to make preparations for the handover, for example, taking care about the free expression of opinion, as they tried to anticipate Beijing’s presumed wishes. Other wealthy Hong Kongers moved away, including some of the huge corporations whose original fortunes had been made in the old opium trade. The vacuum they left was quickly filled by entrepreneurs from the Chinese mainland.
The impending return to Chinese control of the Portuguese colony of Macao in 1999 attracted less attention and less emotion in China. Portugal had played a far less important role in China’s nineteenth-century history than had Britain, and Macao had never been so significant an international center as Hong Kong. In any event, after riots in the 1960s that were related to the Cultural Revolution and Portugal’s own revolution in the 1970s, Macao had effectively already reverted to Chinese control some years before.
Tibet was another matter. Since the Dalai Lama had fled in 1959, great numbers of Chinese had been moved to Tibet, an “autonomous region” of the People’s Republic that considered itself an occupied nation. Repression of Tibetans was widespread, amid accusations of genocide and the destruction of Tibetan culture. In 1987 the Chinese government brutally suppressed a Tibetan uprising and imposed martial law. Conditions were stringent. The merest mention of Tibetan independence might provoke arrest. Foreign journalists were expelled, but periodic reports of grave abuses, including torture, eventually reached the West, where activists began to take up the cause of a “free Tibet.”
To Chinese chagrin, the U.S. government bowed to the pressure of the “free Tibet” lobby and announced the appointment of an official with special responsibility for Tibetan affairs, implying that it did not regard Tibet as an integral part of China. Within China itself Tibetan independence was hardly even at issue. The general view was that Tibet was and had long been a part of China and that Western criticism of Chinese behavior in Tibet was nothing more than yet another attempt to infringe on China’s sovereignty by interference in its internal affairs.
Another source of anxiety about religious minorities was the reverberation of Islamic revivalism across Xinjiang from Central Asian states newly independent after the fall of the Soviet Union. In the late 1990s a series of bus bombings and a riot by Uighur Muslims in the west Xinjiang city of Yining prompted new calls for secession. Secular issues, including resentment of Chinese nuclear testing in Xinjiang’s vast wastes, were important in the strengthening drive for independence. But what most concerned Beijing was the influence of Islam, which showed no inclination to retreat from its claims on the hearts and minds of Chinese citizens resident not only in Xinjiang but throughout the nation.
In the last decades of the twentieth century, memories of the imperialist era still lingered in Chinese minds. The emergence of Japan as China’s leading trading partner caused anxiety to some who feared that Japan’s wartime goal of creating a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere might after all come to fruition through economic infiltration. Hostility toward Japan was widespread among urban intellectuals, indignant at Japanese government efforts to whitewash Japan’s war record in school textbooks. In Nanjing a memorial to the 1937 massacre was erected, attracting considerable attention. In the countryside recollections of wartime suffering remained vivid. Before the arrival of the first Japanese tourists in the late 1970s local inhabitants received intensive “education” from officials panicked about possible violence. But in the case of Westerners, curiosity about representatives of the former imperialist countries overcame any lingering hostility. In the late 1970s and early 1980s visitors from all countries reported crowds of Chinese thronging to catch their first-ever glimpse of a Caucasian. This fascination soon dissipated as Europeans and Americans once again became a common sight throughout the land, but for some time they continued to receive special treatment in China, an incongruous echo of the bad old days.
By late 1985 the uncertainties bequeathed by the Cultural Revolution years, the swings in cultural policy, and the dislocations and contradictions inherent in rapid economic development had begun to take their toll. Economic progress and material improvement provided personal satisfaction and made Chinese feel less scorned by outsiders for their backwardness and poverty. But as noted above, violent crime and corruption increased noticeably. Many of those charged with curbing corruption turned out themselves to be prime offenders, effectively obstructing a return to integrity and prompting widespread resentment. Against such a background, calls for greater freedom and greater political participation began once more to return to the surface.
In 1986 the well-known astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, who, like many of his academic colleagues, had spent years in political disgrace, provided a focal point for the expression of some of these concerns, particularly among students. Fang inspired many by his commitment to greater political openness and participation and was a leading figure in student demonstrations staged to protest the party’s manipulation of local elections at the end of that year. The size of the demonstrations was too unsettling to disregard. Fang was removed from his academic positions and deprived of membership in the Communist Party. Hu Yaobang, a senior party leader widely regarded as a likely successor to Deng Xiaoping, was dismissed for failing to keep a lid on simmering discontents. At the time the arrests and the condemnations of bourgeois liberal tendencies issued by party leaders appeared once more to have put an end to the revived movement for democracy and greater civil rights. But in fact 1986 was the beginning of a continuum that came to a head three years later.
In 1988 the extraordinary success of a six-part television documentary signaled the continued ambivalence Chinese felt about the relative merits of Chinese and Western culture, broadly conceived. He shang (“River Elegy”) presented such national symbols as the Yellow River and the Great Wall in a highly negative light, portraying them as the sources of poverty, backwardness, and isolation: “The stubborn diseases of the old society are like silt carried in the Yellow River—accumulating day after day, it slowly elevates the river channel in the lower reaches and eventually precipitates a crisis.”3
He shang called on Chinese intellectuals to take the lead in bringing China back to health, thus reversing the revolutionary narrative that gave priority to workers and peasants in the proper development of the state. Turning upside down many generally accepted facts of Chinese history and rewriting parts of Western history to suit its own purposes, it contrasted China with a dynamic West, on whose advanced science, technology, and democracy it heaped lavish praise.
The documentary’s extraordinarily favorable account of the West, taken together with attacks on a broad range of Chinese failings said to have resulted from what was described as China’s unduly hermetic history, was, in the view of many analysts, intended less as a paean to Western culture as such than as the revamped use of a familiar weapon: deploying the West to transform China, while nonetheless staking a claim to great patriotism. In doing so, however,He shang appeared to adopt a patronizing outsider viewpoint that in a different time and place many of the same Chinese who now extravagantly admired it would have denounced as cultural imperialism. Many did indeed condemn He shang on just such grounds, calling it anti-Chinese; they claimed it “vilified the Chinese people” and compared it to “pus oozing from a sore.”4 But its immense popularity—it was rerun on official TV stations only a couple of months after its initial showing, the script was a best seller, it was featured in many leading newspapers, and it received thousands of fan letters—suggested that the most patriotic Chinese, however much they may have resented “the West,” still saw some utility, if not inevitability, in invoking it as a valuable source of ammunition against the official line at home. But by the end of 1988 He shang had been banned, and a few months later its author was in political disgrace.
The kind of criticism leveled against He shang surfaced repeatedly. It arose, for instance, in analysis of several Chinese movies shown abroad to international acclaim. Some considered that the foreign success of such movies as Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern and Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine, among others, was due to a cultural sellout. They charged that by pandering to presumed foreign expectations about China, the filmmakers in fact betrayed national culture by portraying not “real” China but what they thought a Western audience thought was the “real” China. In this view, the filmmakers’ international success in putting Chinese movies back on the map was hollow. It was not at all the triumph for China that some people claimed it to be. Such circularity was not unusual in the debates about national identity and foreign influence that permeated cultural circles in the last decades of the twentieth century. Discussion about postmodernism, for instance, disputed at length whether this was too rooted in Western culture to be desirable for China, and whether in any case it was possible to experience postmodernism without first passing through some form of modernism, and whether China could be said to have done so.
The year 1989 marked the fortieth anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic and the seventieth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement. Anniversaries had often provided the government with the opportunity for nationalistic display, but on this occasion they also provided a basis for dissident action. Early in the year several prominent intellectuals, including Fang Lizhi, made a number of bold proposals in a letter to the paramount leader Deng Xiaoping. They called for “socialist democracy,” suggesting that democratic reforms need not necessarily subvert the cause of the revolution. They called for the release of political prisoners and for freedom of expression. They framed their call in terms of national need, asserting that the relaxation of restrictions was vital for practical and intellectual progress and to enable China to leave behind the reputation for repression that still prevented full resumption of its former prestige in the world.
The death of Hu Yaobang, the senior leader dismissed over the 1986 demonstrations, provided a pretext for supporting these proposals. Thousands of students demonstrated in Tiananmen Square in April 1989. In addition to expressing their grief at the death of a party leader who had seemed to back them, they called for a reversal of the verdict on the events of 1986, an end to corruption, improved economic conditions, and greater participation in the political process. The demonstrations expanded into an occupation of Tiananmen Square, hugely symbolic as the site of the 1976 demonstrations and of the mass rallies of the Cultural Revolution a decade earlier, as the place where Mao had declared the People’s Republic in 1949, and as the locus of antiforeign demonstrations in 1919.
The occupation of Tiananmen Square and the several thousand students on hunger strike created an extraordinary spectacle that completely overshadowed the visit of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to Beijing in mid-May. This was to have been a momentous occasion, the first such visit since the Sino-Soviet split almost three decades before. Journalists from all over the world who had traveled to Beijing to cover the meeting reported instead on the student demonstration. Astonished overseas audiences became incorporated in the drama as Chinese students began to concentrate their demands on their calls for political participation, often in ways that they hoped would gain them international support. For example, the students erected a replica of the Statue of Liberty, which they called the Goddess of Democracy, in front of Mao’s portrait in Tiananmen Square as a highly effective way to appeal to the sensibilities of American television audiences.
These were incomparably euphoric times for Chinese men and women accustomed to a restraint born of repression. Apart from students in Beijing and around the country, newly formed autonomous (nongovernmental) groups of workers began to join in the demonstrations. Citizens turned out to express their support. Journalists working for official newspapers and television channels, unprecedentedly, occasionally expressed views at variance with the party line. Senior scholars returned home from abroad. More than once the numbers of demonstrators in Beijing surpassed one million. An electric sense of excitement spread throughout the cities. As one middle-aged party member put it, for the first time in his entire life he was free from fear. In the largest upsurge of support for a political movement within China mounted by Chinese overseas since the time of Sun Yatsen and Kang Youwei, perhaps one million Hong Kong residents took to the streets to demonstrate their backing for the students and sent them quantities of money and supplies. Taiwan and Macao followed suit. But many of those watching the unfolding events felt a deep sense of foreboding.
By late May the moderate faction in the deeply divided government was losing ground to those who wished to suppress the demonstrations at whatever cost. The imposition of martial law should perhaps have sounded a clear warning bell, given earlier events in Tibet, but the momentum of the protests was almost irresistible. Demonstrators armed with the invincibility of youth persuaded the first approaching troops to turn back. But on the night of June 3 and into the next day, the army forced its way across the city, through barricades of vehicles and humans, to the center of the city, where they cleared the square by force. Hundreds, if not thousands—the numbers remain in dispute—died.
Chinese government attempts to restrict reporting of the Beijing massacre and the violence in many other cities were foiled by overseas Chinese and others who faxed in foreign news reports, prompting official accusations about the cultural imperialism of the West. The government denounced the students’ nonviolent demonstrations as a counterrevolutionary rebellion caused by what Deng Xiaoping later characterized as “an international and domestic climate” in an attempt to “overthrow the Communist Party and socialist system” and to “establish a bourgeois republic entirely dependent on the West.”5
Here Deng fell back on the saw that claimed in effect that those who opposed the government lacked patriotism, a quality only the government could properly define. This view underpinned many of the bitterest conflicts of the People’s Republic era, but it was one with which, increasingly, Chinese men and women came to find issue as the twentieth century wound down.
Beyond the killings carried out by the People’s Liberation Army, a number of workers were executed. Many of the student leaders and intellectuals accused of inciting them escaped abroad, where they became temporary celebrities. Others were arrested and served lengthy periods of imprisonment, enhancing their political credibility in a way that those who left the country would never be able to do. Fang Lizhi and his wife took refuge in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. They remained there for many months before a graceful formula was found to allow them to leave the country. By this act Fang too lost much of his stature as a dissident leader because his action appeared to lend credence to charges that the movement was part of an international plot to subvert the Chinese government.
The association of democracy and human rights with the liberal West provided potent ammunition to the Chinese authorities and other conservative opponents. Appealing to an ill-defined Chinese nationalism, such people decried the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which war-torn China had not been a party, as cultural imperialism. These “cultural relativists” claimed that human rights were specific to the West and at odds with Asian and Chinese values. Pursuing this theme, they likened the attempts of Westerners to impose their views about human rights to the attempts of nineteenth-century missionaries to force Christianity down China’s collective throat. Criticism by foreigners of China’s continued oppression of dissidents was assailed as an unwarranted interference in China’s internal affairs, a mantra that, as we have seen, was invoked frequently. Chinese antiliberals did not hesitate to draw attention to the shortcomings of the Western record on human rights, such as the British record in Northern Ireland and racial inequalities in the United States. Despite these arguments, however, and despite continuing arrests, a number of influential intellectuals within China continued, at some personal risk, to press for political reform and for the release of political prisoners.
Tiananmen and its repressive aftermath undermined the dwindling legitimacy of the CCP. Before long the collapse of the Soviet Union and the general discrediting of communism around the world further weakened the CCP’s position. As the democratizing new governments in the former Communist countries ran into trouble, however, Chinese ambivalence toward what a Western model might be able to offer China began to deepen. The allure of order, even the oppressive order provided by the Communist government, remained strong. Better the Chinese devil they knew, perhaps, than the devil of foreign origin that they did not.
Chinese men and women, moreover, grasped all this, for however much the Chinese government might have desired to block out news of the rest of the world, this was no longer possible. In the 1990s the advent of the Internet made the flow of information even easier, although rules requiring registration of access to the electronic media were quickly introduced. It remained unclear whether and to what extent it would be possible effectively to enforce them. The numbers of Chinese men and women known to have Internet access remained a relatively small percentage of a population of one and a quarter billion.
Popular culture toward the end of the century showed a distinctly nationalist strain. Among the best-selling works published in the middle and late 1990s were The China That Can Say No, a lowbrow and immensely popular diatribe against foreigners, broadly conceived. “Saying no” to almost everything became, for a while, all the rage. More specific was an attack on the media in the United States, Behind the Demonization of China, which built a case many found highly convincing by reference in particular to articles published since 1989 in the New York Times and the Washington Post. The authors found these articles to be almost uniformly negative and altogether lacking in the kind of objectivity those newspapers brought to their reporting of domestic issues. They concluded that the negative attitude represented the perspective of the U.S. government.
Many leading members of the government in the 1990s both lacked the prestige of a Mao Zedong or a Deng Xiaoping and were directly associated in the public mind with the Tiananmen massacre. To continue to govern with any authority at all they faced a choice: reversion to the politics of fear or allowing the economy so to expand that people’s material lives improved significantly enough that they would forget their political grievances. The latter path seemed their best bet. If such economic expansion were skillfully managed, moreover, China’s position in a world in which even the economic superpowers were showing signs of fragility would be enhanced.
Chinese economic growth in the 1990s was breathtaking, giving it immense political standing internationally. A tacit agreement between rulers and ruled allowed economic prosperity in return for not openly questioning the rulers’ legitimacy. Foreign countries soon overcame their distaste for Chinese policies in their desire to tap the China market; occasional attempts to influence China’s human rights policies or its actions in Tibet by threatening commercial sanctions were largely ineffective. Many Chinese believed that their political freedoms were steadily expanding, although they were still a long way off the standards found in Europe or the United States.
That ultimate Western threat to the Chinese status quo—democracy—refused to disappear. The argument that Chinese people were inherently unsuited to a democratic political system was definitively disproved by general elections held in 1996 in Taiwan. By this time Taiwan had become economically powerful despite CCP efforts to isolate it internationally. Although it was no longer dominated by the aging politicians who had accompanied Chiang Kaishek in the flight from the mainland half a century before, its political dispute with the mainland remained unresolved. Moreover, by this time calls for Taiwan independence had further complicated the issue.
To the government in Beijing, Taiwan’s shift toward democracy seemed to confirm the unwelcome view that political liberalization was the inevitable consequence of economic liberalization. Events on the mainland and on the island of Taiwan had a distressing tendency to influence one another, as in the case of demonstrations for democracy that each experienced in 1986. At the time of the 1996 elections in Taiwan, Beijing conducted military exercises in the Taiwan Strait with a view to discouraging any move toward independence, but this only enlarged the vote for Prime Minister Li Denghui, a Guomindang member and native-born Taiwanese.
The Taiwan issue remained for China the single most important issue left over from the bad old days, but most people around the world expected it to be resolved peacefully, a view reinforced by occasional visits by mainland leaders to Taiwan and vice versa, as well as by Taiwan’s heavy economic investment in the People’s Republic. Yet in 1996, when the United States issued Li Denghui a visa for a private visit to a college reunion at Cornell University, Beijing protested vociferously (“interference in our internal affairs”).
Nationalist sentiment began to cause the Beijing government a range of problems in “Greater China,” as Hong Kong and Taiwan came to be called. Toward the end of 1996 Japanese claims to a set of islands they called the Senkaku and Chinese called the Diaoyu prompted vigorous protests from Taiwan and Hong Kong. Students and others on the mainland, spreading the word partly by the Internet, began to join in. Beijing, powerless to control Chinese from beyond the mainland, strongly discouraged these energetic demonstrations of nationalism. It did so for three reasons. First, it had no wish to compromise relations with Japan, since it valued Japanese power to make economic investments that would speed Chinese industrialization. Second, it wished to minimize the risk that any kind of political organization, even in a “good” cause, could turn sourly against their own authority. The impending return of Hong Kong to Beijing’s control made this concern especially compelling. Finally, it hoped to preempt anyone else from seizing the nationalist initiative, wishing to retain that prerogative for itself as a much-needed source of legitimacy.
In early 1997 Deng Xiaoping finally died. The transfer of power to a new generation, headed by Deng’s appointee, Jiang Zemin, took place without conspicuous upheaval, but Deng’s passing had some fairly immediate results. It appeared to enhance the prospect of eventual reconciliation between Beijing and the Dalai Lama, already the subject of secret dialogues, because Deng had long been associated with China’s Tibet policy. Dissident Wei Jingsheng, whom Deng reportedly regarded as a personal enemy, was released a few months after Deng’s death, three years into a second long prison sentence imposed in 1995 after a brief period of liberty. The timing of his release, which came only a few weeks after President Jiang Zemin’s state visit to the United States, led Americans and other Western observers to claim credit, but Chinese commentators, both official and unofficial, denied any connection between the two events. Joining the ranks of dissidents in exile, Wei moved to New York City. His release was followed by that of other political prisoners who were sent into exile abroad.
In late-twentieth-century China, two things stood out. One was the pursuit of material wealth. The other was a fervent nationalism evidenced, for example, in widespread excitement at Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty. The depth and patent sincerity of the Chinese people’s collective sense of national dignity and pride, inflated by a powerful sense of past wrongs, were immense, even though official support for such sentiments laid open the way to charges of manipulation. This kind of nationalism offered the government a further measure of legitimacy and helped it tap the enormous wealth of the overseas Chinese community, as the Qing had once done. It also made the condemnation of dissidence as unpatriotic rather more persuasive.
China’s new economic power helped Chinese men and women around the world to hold up their heads in patriotic pride, even though economic instability elsewhere in East and Southeast Asia aroused considerable antagonism toward ethnically Chinese members of local communities. Nevertheless the ambivalence many still felt about national culture, and its relationship to the West and to foreign culture, remained unresolved, a sting in the tail of history.