Past the People’s Republic of China declares

Heavenly Mandate

Amid the swelling stream of publications trying to explain China’s rapid rise as the world’s second largest economy, a remarkable book was published in the Dutch-speaking world in 2018. Entitled “The Heavenly Mandate,” it covers the history of the Chinese empire in nearly 600 pages in great detail and extremely expertly. The final chapter, entitled ‘From Tradition to Modernity,’ begins with the sentences, “In 1911, the history of the Heavenly Mandate came to an end. In place of the empire came a republic.”

The latter is true, the former is not. For after 40 years of domestic and foreign struggle, power finally comes firmly into the hands of a new party which, entirely in the line of age-old tradition, claims power with the legitimacy of ensuring order and prosperity. That unwritten social contract between the ruler and the people was called the Mandate of Heaven in the empire.

This mandate, this mission, corresponds exactly to the preamble of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, founded in 1949 by the Chinese Communist Party. It is also well recognized in its implementation practice.

Opposing views

My book “The History of China, or How the Past Explains the People’s Republic” centers on the thesis that the current Chinese system has clearly identifiable roots in the past. Anyone who wants to better understand China’s current political, political and also economic system should therefore delve into Chinese history. The history of its own deviant culture that came about and spread over a huge area. This area was fairly isolated by oceans, deserts and mountains, yet it also allowed interaction with strong outside influences.

The world outside China – especially the Western world – and the world inside China, each developed vastly different views. In both views, judgment, often condemnation, of each other’s system plays a major role. Today, more than ever, those two views are in opposition. As people understand less about each other, dangerous conflicts are more likely to arise. My history of China was written to better understand the Chinese state system and the related economic order in the People’s Republic of China. Not to pass judgment on it from a Western perspective, but to understand how it actually works.

The Chinese Empire

Clearly, people in China’s one-party state have different views about democracy and the operation of a rule of law or the blessings of unrestricted free speech. Equally clear is that this deviant Chinese system has achieved unprecedented success in economic terms over the past 40 years. While the communist system in the Soviet Union was definitely shipwrecked, China chose a different path, and the party did not lose its power, the party state did not disintegrate, as happened with the Soviet Union.

To understand this development, we need to chart the historical development.

The process of disintegration that began in China in the 19th century under the influence of foreign invasions and domestic uprisings was followed by the 1911 Revolution. That revolution ended the centuries-old empire, which was succeeded by the Republic of China in 1912.

Three institutions had underpinned the ancient empire for centuries: the central leadership, the ruling class and a unifying ideology to both of these. The empire was governed from the Forbidden City in Beijing by a central leadership. This worked with a professional ruling class that emerged early in Chinese history. This was formed in an elaborate recruitment system of imperial examinations. In it, a theory of state and society was passed down from generation to generation.

The Republic of China

How did these institutions fare after the 1911 revolution? The central leadership was beheaded not literally but figuratively: the emperor disappeared from the scene. The examination system had been abolished earlier. The lore of civics came under fire from foreign-imported ideas and views such as socialism, liberalism, democracy, etc. Concepts that were not well understood in China.

The functions embodied in the aforementioned institutions took on a different form.

The literate upper class had become rudderless and lost its moral compass. They supplied the now fighting warlords and also the landlords who continued to exercise magistracy in the province. They were increasingly hated by the peasantry, which comprised almost the entire population in this still almost entirely agricultural giant country.

After the fall of the empire and the subsequent turbulent period of internal strife, anger was directed against the ruling upper class, against the warlords, the landlords and against the resulting branching class of bourgeoisie in the coastal port cities. And also against the foreign interests that penetrated China’s economy through those port cities.

Its own handed-down ancient values were now cloaked in the garb of an ideology blown in from the West, which joined the Chinese tradition and grafted itself onto a social philosophy that places the community above the individual. This became socialism with Chinese characteristics, the ideology of a new elite, which took shape in the party that founded a new state.

People’s Republic of China

For the Republic of China, founded in 1912, was succeeded by the People’s Republic of China in 1949 after a fierce internal struggle. In that People’s Republic of China, the country went through a thorough shake-up. An awful lot of bills had to be settled after decades of struggle. The thorough remodeling of the entire political, social and economic edifice probably cost millions of lives. But the overall population, after a half-century growth halt, began to grow extraordinarily strongly again from 1950 onwards.

When, after a century of struggle, the country re-emerged in its original stature as an independent geographical superpower, after all the balderdash, rebuilding and trimming, the three institutions that underpinned the empire for centuries also took shape again: a decentralized central administration, a governing class and a unifying ideology or state and social doctrine.

After the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong established the People’s Republic, the struggle was not over. What followed was a struggle against the hated thin upper crust of landlords and bourgeoisie; a struggle that also, because of disagreements over the path to follow, led to a struggle within its own ranks. The consequences for the economic system were profound and unprecedented. The economy, already cut off from foreign countries by the war, now took the form of a completely closed economy. Property was forfeited after some experimentation; all private property was collectivized. But the planned economy modeled after the Soviet Union soon ran into its limits. What followed was first a decentralization of central leadership and, after the catastrophic struggle within its own ranks during the Cultural Revolution, a program of reform and opening up to foreign countries.

The profound changes in the Chinese party state from the change in direction that began after Mao’s death led to the country’s integration into the world trade system as an economic superpower in the following 40 years.

The Western gaze

In the West, there had long existed an image of ancient China, the China of empire, as romantic as it was unclear. This China, it was thought, would, after the revolution, embrace universal Western values, created and anchored in Western political systems. But an impetus to do so met with resistance from the “Own Power Movement” in China and, in the time of crisis and war in the first half of the 20th century, proved utterly hopeless.

In the middle of the last century, a completely different image of China emerged in the West, the image of Communist China, Mao’s China. This image of China at the end of the last century was at odds with perceived reality. For the new ruling class, after all the purges in the Party, had now definitely changed from a revolutionary vanguard to a pragmatic class of administrators. The Mandarins of old, the magistrates in ancient China, were now party functionaries. The leading cadres, once recruited with the imperial examination system, were now trained at party schools. An ideology initially borrowed from abroad was thoroughly reworked and grafted onto Chinese thought. The central leadership settled, quite symbolically, in a new building complex right next to the old administrative center, the former imperial palace in the “Forbidden City” (now Palace Museum).

There has been a sharp shift in opinion toward China in the West, especially in the United States but also in Europe and the Netherlands in recent years. After admiration for China’s growth performance, mixed with hopeful expectations of benefiting from a huge growth market, came disappointment that the Chinese government was adopting the economic but not the political system of the West. This disappointment can ultimately be traced to a basic disinterest in what really animates the Chinese government and a lack of knowledge of Chinese history and culture.

The Chinese government, from the latter days of the empire up to and including the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, never left any doubt that it was interested in Western knowledge and technology but not in Western ideas about the organization of society and state.

Misinterpretation

In this context, it is interesting to look back at an event from now 35 years ago: the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. This is the last time there was such a massive demonstration against the incumbent leadership on that scale. “Tiananmen” has always been interpreted in the West as a demonstration against the Chinese political system, but it was primarily, so much is clear in retrospect, a protest against the policies of the incumbent leadership. The latter had embarked on a new path in the 1980s. It was not the political, but rather the economic system that was being changed. The planned economy had come to a standstill. The subsequent gradual liberalization of the economic system, experiments with markets and free pricing also had negative consequences. Dissatisfaction with this manifested itself in massive protests. These were brutally put down, because the transformation of the economic system could only be successful under strict government control.

Economic and political success

In 25 years, China turned from a developing country into the world’s second largest economy. In Russia, where the political system was dismantled at the same time as the economic system, the latter completely collapsed.

In China, the gradual introduction of free market forces and price formation after 1990 also led to adjustments in the constitutional institutional framework. While the Party retained its political monopoly, it did suck in the social changes resulting from a change in economic direction. The political system changed to remain itself, just as China changed to remain itself.

How economic change in the straitjacket of this political system could be so successful is analyzed in two recent books, “How China escaped the poverty trap” by Yuen Yuen Ang and “How China escaped shock therapy” by Isabella Weber. Both works also highlight the institutional framework in which economic growth could take place.

‘Lordliness’ versus ‘Greed’

One can, somewhat schematically, also name this institutional framework as the political system. Herein is the shaping of governance, or “lordship. In the West, the political system has taken shape in a two-party system, as for example in the US and the UK, or a multiparty system, as in many European countries. In China, the divergent historical development has led to the current one-party system.

The economy, the actual process of production, distribution and consumption, then constitutes the economic system. In this, “greed” takes shape in market formation, free or regulated pricing, or hybrid forms of these.

Overall, “lordliness” and “greed” interact differently in China and in the West. If we want to understand this better, we need to study the past in order to use it to explain the present. I hope to have made it clear that the historical roots of the deviant Chinese institutional framework go far back.

Do we have a picture of this book : Victor Wesseling

A History of China; How the Past Explains the People’s Republic

Walburg Press

ISBN 9789464561302