Contemporary China - An Introduction

Michael Dillon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134290536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

This book presents a concise introduction to contemporary China. It is intended as a first book for those coming new to the subject, providing the essential information that most people need to know, without going into excessive detail. Its coverage includes the economy, society, politics and international relations; China's history, especially the twentieth century; and Taiwan and Hong Kong as well as the People's Republic of China.

The book provides an up-to-date and clear guide to the often bewildering changes which have taken place in China in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It draws on the enormous body of empirical and theoretical research that is being carried out by economists, political scientists and sociologists on contemporary China, but is itself written in non-technical and accessible language. It does not assume any previous knowledge of China and explanations of Chinese terms are provided throughout the book. It includes a map, a chronology, a glossary of Chinese terms, biographical notes on key figures, and a guide to further reading.

Part I
Introduction

1 Land, people and culture

China as a subcontinent

China is in many ways a country like any other—say, Denmark or Ecuador or Nigeria—but in view of its size and diversity, it is often more practical and fruitful to think of it as a subcontinent. It is commonplace to speak of the countries of South Asia as the ‘Indian subcontinent’ – a term which accurately reflects the size of the land mass; the geographical diversity; the variety of peoples, languages, religions and cultures; and the political differences of the states of which that region is composed. China has all of these, including the political antagonism that divides the mainland and Taiwan, but it is usually treated, both by Chinese and by foreign observers, as a single homogeneous entity. Thinking of it as a subcontinent, as well as a nation, makes it possible to understand more clearly the geographical and cultural complexity that has influenced its history and the evolution of its political structures.

There is resistance, often intense resistance, by some Chinese people, to the idea of considering China as anything other than a nation. This is invariably motivated by a sense of national pride or patriotism. In their view, to regard China in any other way appears to leave the door open to federalism or worse still to separatism—the possibility, however unlikely, that Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia or even one of the more prosperous southern provinces might achieve independence from the mainland. Many citizens of China are acutely aware of the historical legacy of division and weakness that made it possible for a disaggregated China to be colonised partially by the West and then to be invaded by Japan which occupied much of its territory between 1931 and 1945. A strong, unified China, it is argued, is the only way of preventing a repetition of that period of national humiliation. Attitudes such as these severely inhibit any discussion of possible alternatives to the existing configuration of China’s polity, such as federalism, but they are a very significant part of China’s political culture.

Size

China is vast by any standards: it extends from a point 54º North, on the Wusuli (Ussuri) River in the northern part of Heilongjiang province, which has a border with the Russian Far East, to 18º North, the southern point of the semi-tropical island of Hainan. It stretches for three thousand miles across the eastern part of the Eurasian land mass from the most westerly part of Xinjiang at 74º East to a point 135º East, which is to just to the west of the city of Khabarovsk, a reminder for Westerners, especially Europeans, who tend to assume that all of Russia lies to the west of China. China occupies an area of 3,657,765 square miles and has a land border of some 13,800 miles, mostly with Central Asia: it has a coastline that is over 9,000 miles long and functions as an important maritime frontier. Some of these figures may be disputed because of long-standing and unresolved boundary disputes but nevertheless they give a clear sense of the orders of magnitude involved in considering the geography of China. Because of the size and diversity of the country, it is essential that great care be taken when making generalisations about any aspect of Chinese society.

The population of China, which was 582 million when the 1953 census was carried out (the first in the entire history of China that had any degree of cred-ibility), has grown at a rate which is either impressive or alarming according to the observer’s point of view: it currently stands at approximately 1.3 billion. This makes China the most populous nation on earth, a distinction it has held for decades, although India with a total population of 1.1 billion is gradually catching up. It is instructive to compare figures for China’s population with other countries and regions. In 2005, the United Kingdom had an estimated population of 60.5 million, compared with the population of the Chinese province of Hubei which alone is over 60 million; the whole of Europe (East and West) is home to 728 million people who live in 6,500,000 square miles of land shared between twenty-seven separate nation-states; the United States has a total population of 300 million. The land area of North America as a whole is 9,450,000 square miles and it has a combined population of over 514 million. Taiwan has a population of 22.8 million and a declining birth rate,¹ while in the former British colony of Hong Kong there are only 6.86 million inhabitants. Population size is far from being the only determinant of a nation’s character and prospects for development and stability but it is a critical factor.

Great rivers

In common with all civilisations of great antiquity, China owes the earliest development of its agriculture and settlement to great rivers which run through its territory. The two best known, and by far the most important in the story of China’s development as a nation, are the Yellow River, and the Yangzi.

The source of the Yellow River, the Huanghe, is 14,000 feet high in the mountains of Qinghai province close to the Kokonor: in the Mongolian language, Kokonor means ‘Blue Lake’, which is also what Qinghai means in Chinese. The Yellow River runs for over three thousand miles through northern China and into the Gulf of Bohai to the north of the promontory of Shandong province. On its long journey to the ocean, the Yellow River describes a magnificent arc through the deserts and plains on China’s border with Mongolia and then bends sharply into the low-lying farmland of the eastern seaboard—farmland that the might of the river has been instrumental in creating. It is called the Yellow River because it carries yellow (more accurately, brown) silt from the mountains down to the plains. The silt is deposited to contribute to a fine-grained, easily worked loess soil that has enabled China’s farmers to till the land for centuries.²

The waters of the Yellow River then irrigate this loess terrain. However, the silt that has been such a boon to rural China has also destroyed it periodically: the accumulation of silt deposits builds up over time and causes the river to burst its banks, flooding the farms and villages of the North China Plain and causing great loss of life as well as physical devastation and economic and social disruption. In one fateful year, 1851, the spectacular intensity of the flooding forced the river to change its course. Before the inundation, it flowed into the ocean south of the Shandong Peninsula; afterwards it emerged to the north, at its present exit point. Not for nothing has the Yellow River been called ‘China’s sorrow’.

The river that the world knows as the Yangzi (Yangtse) is known in China as the Changjiang, which simply means ‘Long River’, which it is—its total length is 3,964 miles. It flows from its source high on the Tibetan Plateau through spectacular gorges, passes through the very centre of China and spills out into the Yellow Sea just to the north of Shanghai. Its great breadth is as significant as its great length. For centuries it was impossible to bridge the torrent for a distance of hundreds of miles and, in many places, it is still necessary to use a ferry to cross from one bank to the other. The construction of the great bridge at Nanjing, which was completed in 1969 during the Cultural Revolution, was proclaimed a major triumph for Chinese engineers and for the collective spirit of the People’s Republic.

Because of the difficulty that there has always been in crossing the Changjiang, the river was a major physical barrier and it is the natural boundary between northern and southern China—a separation which accounts in part for the pronounced cultural differences between the north and the south. The productive rice-growing areas of the south were traditionally known as Jiangnan (‘south of the river’, that is to the south of the Changjiang) and these areas have retained distinctive spoken languages and cultures which, especially in the rural areas, are quite unlike those of the northern, Mandarin-speaking part of China.

The Three Gorges hydroelectric project which dams the upper reaches of the river is a colossal and controversial feat of engineering which began in 1993, has submerged some 1,200 towns and villages and has displaced thousands of local residents. It has been criticised by environmental campaigners and many have blamed it for the increased pollution of the river. A more detailed consideration of the Three Gorges project can be found in Chapter 14.

Another important watercourse which is vital to the regional economy of south China is the Pearl River or Zhujiang. The Pearl River is China’s third longest and it is produced by the confluence of three smaller rivers: the Xi Jiang (West River), the Bei Jiang (North River), and the Dong Jiang (East River). The river and its tributaries flow through the provinces of Hunan, Jiangxi, Guizhou, Yunnan, Guangxi and Guangdong before emptying into the South China Sea in the great Pearl River Delta.

The Pearl River Delta is home to some of the most dynamic and enterprising urban economies of contemporary China, including the pioneering Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen, where Deng Xiaoping’s reform policies were first displayed to the outside world, Zhuhai with its modern high-tech industries and the old iron and porcelain town of Foshan. It has become one of the economic boom centres of post-Mao China and specialises in manufacturing, notably electronics and other consumer goods for the export market.

Mountains

Mountain ranges have always been the historical and the natural boundaries for many of the provinces in southern China. Mountainous terrain which is difficult to farm and challenging to cross has hampered communications and economic development over the centuries although the lack of land routes has, to some extent, been compensated for by the abundance of natural waterways—lakes and rivers—which have played an important role in communications and commerce in the south.

The Tianshan (Mountains of Heaven) and the Pamirs mark the geographical frontiers of western China. They form the boundary with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan although the Tianshan range (Tengri Tagh in Uyghur and in the other Central Asian languages) also extends into northern Xinjiang to the north of the Taklamakan Desert. The Karakorum mountain range, part of the Himalaya chain and home to K2, the second highest peak in the world, separates China from Kashmir and Pakistan; the eastern ranges of the Himalayas are the boundary between China and India. In the northeast of China, the Great Khingan (Xing’an in Chinese) range of volcanic mountains forms the geographical boundary between the plains of Manchuria and the high plateau of Mongolia.

Geography and development

Economic and social development in China has never been uniform. There are major differences between the north and south of the country. This is partly due to geographical factors: the northern climate is drier, it is difficult to guarantee regular sources of water for agriculture and there is a constant underlying threat of desertification. The south experiences rainfall in much greater abundance. This makes it possible to grow sufficient rice to feed large populations, in some areas by multiple cropping, but the drawbacks are the risk of flooding and the threat of tropical storms and typhoons which regularly assault the coastal regions of the southeast, often with devastating effect on settlements, lives and crops.

Geopolitical factors have also played a significant role: throughout recorded history almost all the capitals of unified Chinese states have been in the north and the paramount strategic necessity of defending agricultural China from the nomads of the steppes of Inner Asia shaped communications and settlement for centuries.

There is a striking contrast between the relatively high level of development in the eastern and southeastern coastal regions and the economic and cultural backwardness of the interior (the western regions). Although this disparity has a historical pedigree that can be traced back for hundreds of years, it was exacerbated by the creation of the treaty ports and their hinterlands under the influence of Western colonisation in the nineteenth century. The discrepancy in levels of development between eastern and western China has increased dramatically during the economic expansion that has taken place since 1978. One economic marker that illustrates the different level of development is gross domestic product (GDP), which broadly speaking represents the total value of all goods and services produced. Per capita figures for the GDP of individual provinces and cities illustrate the difference between the coastal (the first group) and the inland western regions of China (the second group).

Table 1.1 GDP per capita in RMB* 2002

Provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities

The major administrative subdivisions of China are its twenty-two provinces and five autonomous regions (ARs) – Tibet (Xizang), Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia (Nei Monggol), Ningxia Hui and Guangxi Zhuang—which are provincial-level administrations that exercise a degree of autonomy (arguably only token autonomy) in deference to the large populations of non-Han Chinese people who have lived in them for centuries. Provinces and autonomous regions are further subdivided into prefectures and, below those, counties: prefectures and counties are always based on an urban administrative centre. In areas where there is a concentration of ethnic minority communities, there are also autonomous prefectures and counties.

Towns and cities may serve as provincial, prefectural or county centres, but the largest cities—Beijing, Chongqing, Shanghai and Tianjin—are municipal administrations in their own right and also have responsibility for large tracts of rural areas that surround the cities as well as for the central urban areas.

Languages and cultures

Chinese is the principal language of China, but it is not the only language and, more importantly, it is not even one single language. The official language of the country is known today as Putonghua, which translates as the ‘common language’ or lingua franca and which purists tend to call Standard Chinese. In Taiwan, it is still known as Kuo-yu (in pinyin, Guoyu) which translates as the national language, a term that was common on the mainland in the 1930s and 1940s. Standard Chinese is almost universally known in the English-speaking world as Mandarin, an even more old-fashioned term than Kuo-yu and one which was used of the court language of the Qing period (1644–1911). At the time this was known in Chinese as Guanhua, ‘official language’.

Mandarin, or Standard Chinese, is in fact a standardised form of the spoken language of the region of northern China that includes the capital, Beijing. It is not, however, spoken universally, even in the capital itself where there is a dialect (Beijing tuhua) used by the local people and which can take some time for even seasoned speakers of Standard Chinese to get used to. Mandarin is the official spoken language of television and radio and it is taught in all schools: in theory, everyone in China should understand Putonghua even if they are more comfortable speaking a dialect of Mandarin or one of the southern variants of Chinese.

There are various dialects of Mandarin throughout the north and northwest of China, with the most noticeable difference being between the northern and southern dialect areas, but anyone who has ventured far from the major urban centres will have become aware of the great variations in pronunciation within the rural population of the Mandarin-speaking area. Because of the awareness of the existence of dialects within Mandarin, it has become more usual to see the other varieties of Chinese, which were once referred to as ‘dialects’, now promoted to the status of ‘languages’. This recognises the linguistic reality since they are as different from each other as the languages of, say, the Romance family in Europe—Portuguese and Romanian, for example. Regional forms of speech that are spoken a great distance apart, especially in the rural areas, are mutually incomprehensible, have quite distinct vocabularies and to some extent different grammars.

The most important non-Mandarin Chinese languages are: Cantonese, which is spoken in Guangdong province and in Hong Kong and is also used very widely as a lingua franca among the communities of the Chinese diaspora in Europe and North America; the Shanghai or Wu language of eastern China; and Fujianese or Hokkien from the southeastern province of Fujian, which is also spoken by a majority of the population of Taiwan, whose ancestors migrated from Fujian in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Taiwan, this form of Chinese is often referred to as Taiwanese to distinguish it from the Mandarin or Kuo-yu spoken by the ruling mainlander elite. Technically it is Minnan or Southern Min: both Northern Min and Southern Min are spoken in Fujian on the mainland. Fujianese is also important in the Chinese communities of Indonesia, Malaysia and other parts of southeast Asia.

What is unusual about the condition of language in China is that, while each of these regions has its own distinct spoken vernacular, they all use one single form of written Chinese—based on the grammar and vocabulary of Mandarin Chinese—for most practical purposes. This is possible because Chinese characters are essentially non-phonetic.³ There are in existence variant written forms which are used in certain circumstances to represent the local idiom in, for example, popular regional drama, but newspapers, magazines, books (including textbooks for schools) and the internet all use the standard written language.

This standard written language appears in one of two forms of script: the older form which is retained in Taiwan and Hong Kong, as well as in many expatriate communities, and the simplified script which was adopted in the People’s Republic of China as part of a programme of language reform in the 1950s. This reform was part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) efforts to grapple with the serious problem of illiteracy. Simplified Chinese characters, which are based on the original characters but with a reduced number of brush or pen strokes, are disliked and even rejected by many Chinese who live outside the mainland. In particular, they are avoided in Taiwan because of their association with the CCP, although these objections are often couched in terms of aesthetics and readability rather than politics. Written styles also vary: Taiwan and Hong Kong favour prose styles that have echoes of the classical Chinese tradition and tend to be terser and arguably more elegant, whereas writing on the mainland has deliberately remained closer to the spoken vernaculars as part of a policy of popularisation and in the hope that this would help to improve the spread of literacy.

As China has opened culturally to the rest of the Chinese world, there has been greater contact between these styles. Writers on the mainland have felt able to use more complex styles of writing that would once have looked out of place. In Hong Kong, the simplified script is used alongside the traditional version.

Chinese is not unique in this separation of standard written and local spoken forms: the near universal use of a standard form of written Arabic throughout the Middle East disguises the fact that there exists a variety of very different and often mutually unintelligible spoken vernaculars, but the separation between spoken and written Chinese is much greater than that between spoken and written Arabic.

2 China’s past in the present

Without some appreciation of the historical background to the colossal changes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it is very difficult to make sense of what is happening in China today. The historical legacy, which continues to influence attitudes in contemporary China, includes: the Opium War and the impact of the West in the nineteenth century; peasant rebellions; cultural nationalism which was in part a response to challenges posed by the West; the abortive Republican experiment of 1912–13 and the collapse into balkanised regional regimes under the rule of warlords; the military occupation by Japan during the Second World War; Civil War between Communists and Nationalists; the rise of Mao Zedong and the radical experiments of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Some of these events are still fresh in the minds of the older generation and are also familiar to the younger age group from studies at school and in popular culture, although some may wish to reject the political heritage of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

Two thousand years of imperial tradition

From 1644 to 1911, China was ruled by the Qing dynasty, the last in a long line of ruling houses that, by Chinese convention, stretches back in an unbroken line to the unification of the feudal warring states by the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, in 221 BC. A list of all of the dynasties of imperial China in chronological order provides a comforting illusion of continuity and stability but the transition from one dynast...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Map of the People’s Republic of China and its neighbours
• Chronology
• PART I Introduction
• PART II The economy
• PART III Society
• PART IV Politics and international relations
• Glossary of selected Chinese terms
• Biographical notes
• Further reading
• Notes