A Brief History of China
by Joel Aufrecht
(For simplicity, most dynasties are omitted, especially the boring ones and the ones with unpronouncable or implausible names. If someone mentions the Spring and Autumn Period, the Warring Kingdoms Period, or the Five Dynasties and Sixteen Kingdoms, just smile and compliment the tea. The Era of Giant Tortoise Kings, though, is fictional.)
Recorded history in China starts around 3000 BC with regional thugs, warring empires, and general-purpose chaos. China was unified once and for all by the Qin emperor in the negative third century, but his dynasty was replaced soon after his death by the Han dynasty. The Han set the record for dynastic longevity at 400+ years, not counting a brief intermission for refreshments and Wang Mang (don't ask), and gave their name to China's dominant ethnic group. Qin and Han institutions, such as centralized government, national Confucian examinations, and a Great Wall to defend against rogue nations, endured into the 20th century.
"Once and for all" turned out to be under 500 years, as the Han dynasty eventually succumbed to the balkanization of the Three Kingdoms era. Eventually, the short Sui dynasty was followed by the longer Tang dynasty, arguably China's Golden Age, and we're up to 907 AD. After more chaos, the Song dynasty lasted three hundred years, but the last third as a refugee dynasty in the South while the North had more - wait for it - chaos.
This was finally put straight in 1279 by invading Mongols, the Great Wall having been as effective a defense as Star Wars, and Kublai Khan became the first non-Han Chinese emperor. His Yuan dynasty hadn't broken the 100-year mark before it was replaced by a home-grown dynasty, the Ming. The Ming, though notoriously corrupt, lasted almost 300 years. In 1644, also undeterred by the Wall, the Manchus came south, conquered, and ruled for two and a half centuries as the Qing Dynasty. Also, somewhere in this paragraph the Chinese abandoned a substantial technological lead versus Europe, including at one point the largest ocean fleet in the world, in favor of tradition and stability. Oh, and the island of Taiwan was colonized. Tibet was still Tibet, though.
By the time Europeans were showing up in large numbers in the 19th century, the formerly sturdy Qing dynasty was pretty feeble. Germany, England, America, and others - eight nations in all - pretty much had their way with China for decades, using cannons whenever simple demands failed to produce concessions. The Germans built a few breweries, the British and Portugese grabbed a few islands and whatnot, and Japan took Taiwan and didn't give back change. When the Brits realized how much they were spending on Chinese spices and tchotchkes, they created a Chinese market for Indian opium to balance things out, making foreigners about as popular in China as CIA crack-peddlers in inner-city Detroit.
The Qing dynasty collapsed completely in 1912 as revolution ended two millenia of dynastic rule. (The last emperor, in case you missed the movie, ended up working at a machine repair shop before dying of cancer in 1967.) The big name in revolutionary China is Sun Yat-Sen, Father of Modern China, but he seems to obtained the title by default, being much less unsavory than the other Founding Fathers. He traveled all over the world raising money and occasionally going home to start revolutions. They all failed, and he was out of town when the real revolution came. He was China's first (and only) democratically selected president, but within months had to surrender the title to Yuan Shikai, a former Qing general turned political thug who had already assassinated the leading candidate for premiership.
Between 1912 and 1949 China had four main players: the Communist Party, the Nationalist Party (Guomindang), the Japanese, and Chaos. Mostly Chaos won, because Chiang Kai-shek, ruler of the Guomindang, was a huge prat. He lost to both the Japanese and the Communists despite initial advantages and the backing of the Americans and, amazingly, the Soviets. This latter because, by the mid-thirties, Mao Zedong was in charge of the Communists, and Stalin realized that Mao wasn't going to be anybody's stooge. Preferring to deal with more amenable despots, Stalin kept ordering the Chinese Communists to subordinate to the Nationalists. Since Mao wasn't going to be anybody's stooge, he ignored Stalin.
After World War II, the Communists wiped the floor with the Guomindang, who eventually retreated to Taiwan, taking the national treasury with them for safekeeping, and put themselves in charge of the island despite a one-to-ten ratio with native Taiwanese (native in the sense of having been there 400 years; the original native Taiwanese, who weren't even Han, get short shrift from everybody). Eventually Chiang Kai-Shek's son, who inherited the presidency, reformed Taiwan into a real democracy, and a non-Guomindang president was finally elected in 2000.
By the time Communists established the Peoples' Republic of China in 1949 and things started to stabilize, they were extremely popular as a) they were less corrupt than almost any government or army in the history of China, and b) the land reforms they'd been carrying out for the last two decades (in between all the fleeing and Marching) were fair and successful. The Fifties went as well as could be expected. Plans to invade Taiwan were in motion when Kim Il-Sung, Great Leader of North Korea, pulled a "Mommy said I could/Daddy said I could" on Mao and Stalin to get permission to invade South Korea. Forced into the Korean War and blocked by the US Navy from invading Taiwan, China settled for bloodily liberating Tibet. "Liberation from whom and what?" wondered the surviving Tibetans.
Mao had been a pretty sharp cookie, a brilliant general and organizer and a passable Great Leader, no weirder than can be expected of someone who spent his career running around the countryside organizing peasants, fighting Guomindang and Japanese, and obsessing about bowel movements. Some time in the fifties, though, he lost it for good. The Great Leap Forward, a program of forced land reform and backyard steel production, worked so well that it exacerbated a drought and produced a Baby Unboom, as those that didn't actually starve to death (30 million) still forwent procreation. Mao didn't notice.
However, after a century of war, chaos, famine, and dislocation, the Great Leap Forward was last big population-depressing event. Between 1950 and 2000 China's population went from equalling Europe to nearly doubling Europe. Mao, head firmly up his ass, responded to early reports of a growing population problem with, "People have one mouth to fill, but two hands to feed themselves." Even with all the purges, deprivations, murder, and repression, Mao's worst legacy is that he delayed family planning in China for two critical decades.
As people recovered from the Greap Leap Forward, Mao worried that he was losing his grip on absolute power and gave the nod to his more fanatical followers to start a Cultural Revolution. This was a period of ten years when the whole country went insane and destroyed most of the historical sites, artifacts, and documents of the last five thousand years. They also shredded the fabric of society as campaign after campaign dismantled the education system, every major social bond (parent-child, teacher-student, co-worker, neighbor, employer-employee, etc), and basic human dignity. The modern attitude is to try and forget it ever happened, but the psychic debris is still lying in plain sight.
Finally Mao died, and the thrice-rehabilitated ("three up and three down," as non-baseball-savvy Chinese will earnestly tell you) pragmatist Deng Xiaoping won the succession power struggle. Once in charge, he came out of the closet as a capitalist, and as it just so happened that economic liberalization was about the only option left for the Communist Party to retain legitimacy and power, everything worked out fine in the end. For the Party.
Since 1979, China has moved away from Communism as a social system in favor of simple authoritarianism. Economically, China is still transitioning from a genuinely communist economic system to capitalism, under the brand name "socialism with Chinese Characteristics." Politically, things lightened up in fits and starts until the 1989. The Tiananmen demonstrations brought Deng out of retirement to choose between two of his own proteges, liberal premier Zhao Ziyang, and hard-line president Li Peng, who wanted rivers of blood. Deng went with blood, a very traditional choice for Chinese leaders.
Since 1979, as the economy has grown and living standards have risen, the Chinese have gained most basic human freedoms, except for the freedom to do or say anything to challenge the Party's authority. The country is run, ultimately, by a somewhat fluid group of twenty or thirty technocrats. Key factions include the psychopaths, the bureaucrats, and a series of relatively sane former Shanghai mayors. While the population has been numb to Campaigns and harrangues for decades, the new propaganda successfully promotes rabid nationalism. Meanwhile, the general consensus among Chinese young and old is that, as long as things are getting better (any facts to the contrary are vigorously suppressed), best to sit down and not rock the boat, lest the psychopaths get jostled back into power.
Appendix A: A Brief History of Taiwan, by Desmond Ho Fu Lo. Taiwanese --> Dutch --> descendants of a Ming general --> Qing --> Japanese (long before they invaded the mainland) --> Nationalist Party fled from the mainland --> two China?/one China?/one China, one island? but certainly a good place to have a variety of gourmet Chinese food
Sources:
Spence, Jonathan D.. The Search for Modern China, 2nd Ed. 1999. WW Norton & Company, New York & London.
Poon, Leon. History of China. http://www-chaos.umd.edu/history. Accessed 7 March 2001.
Heilig, Gerhard K. Can China Feed Itself? 1999. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg. http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/LUC/ChinaFood/index_m.htm.
Schell, Orville and Shambaugh, David, Eds. The China Reader: The Reform Era. Vintage Books, New York. 1999.
Thanks to Loriann, Chang, and Desmond for feedback and corrections, and to my students for "three up and three down."