Revolution and Its Past

Identities and Change in Modern Chinese History

R. Keith Schoppa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351723930
• Edition: 4
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

Revolution and Its Past is a comprehensive study of China from the last quarter of the eighteenth century through to 2018.

A fascinating and dramatic narrative, the book compels interest both as a history of an ancient civilization developing into a modern nation-state and as an account of how the Chinese as a people have struggled and continue to work to find their identity in the modern world. Beginning in the last two decades of the reign of the Qianlong emperor (1736–1795), the book provides a baseline that allows readers to understand China's rapid decline in the nineteenth and part of the twentieth century, and extends into the present day, a time when China has the second largest economy in the world and aims to become a leading global power by 2050. The vast changes that have swept over China between these times are probed through the lens of the broad and important theme of "identities." This fourth edition has been updated throughout, providing a more thorough examination of recent history since 1960, and increasing coverage of such topics as "new Qing history, " frontier and ethnicity, women and their roles, environmental concerns and issues, and globalization.

Supported by maps, images, tables, online eResources and suggestions for further reading, and written in an engaging, concise, and authoritative style, Revolution and Its Past is the ideal textbook for all students of the history of modern China.

Part 1

From the Heights to the Depths

Challenges to Traditional Chinese Identities, 1780–1901

1
Identities

There are almost 1.4 billion Chinese living in the People’s Republic of China today. In Western minds over the years, images of these masses have often focused on the sameness—the “hordes” moving in “human wave” assaults in the Korean War, the “blue ants” mindlessly carrying out the bidding of their Communist overlords in mass campaigns of the 1950s, the mobs of Red Guards screaming in demonstration marches in the 1960s, enraged students attacking the U.S. embassy in 1999, and so on. Indeed, in all these images, all Chinese seemed to look alike. But the identities of Chinese, like people of every country and ethnic group, are as different as the number of Chinese who exist. Thumbnail sketches of a quartet of Chinese figures point to the stark individuality seen amid the masses throughout China’s modern history.

Zeng Guofan (1811–1872) was a stolid Confucian conservative. With the highest civil service degree under his belt, he became perhaps the most important Chinese official serving the alien Manchu dynasty. What mattered to him most were his family, his family’s farm, and his culture. He organized an army to defend his home province, Hunan, against the threat of the Taiping rebellion led by a man who claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ. During his leadership of this army, he, as the elder brother, wrote letters to his brothers in Hunan, urging them, in good Confucian terms, to pay attention to their duties at home. Although he was impressed with modern Western technology, when he was old and infirm he refused to seek Western medical treatment, preferring to be treated with traditional Chinese medicine.

Qiu Jin, a thirty-two-year-old woman, was beheaded at dawn on July 15, 1907. She had left her husband and children several years earlier to go to Japan to study. With a reputation for wearing men’s clothes and riding horses in men’s style, she was photographed wielding an unsheathed dagger and antagonized locals by having female students at her school train in military drills. She became involved in an elaborate plot that included assassinating the governor of a province and staging an uprising against the government. But she was arrested before she could rebel and paid the bloody price.

Soong Meiling (1898–2003), the daughter of a wealthy Chinese merchant, attended Wellesley College in Massachusetts, spoke excellent English, and was a Christian. In 1927 she was married to Chiang Kai-shek, who would become the leader of the Republic of China, first on the mainland (1928–1949) and then on Taiwan (1949–1975). Madame Chiang became the darling of the American press and political elites during World War II, when she addressed a joint session of Congress stressing China’s plight. Though she maintained a home in Taiwan after Chiang’s death, she lived in New York City until her death in October 2003.

FIGURE 1.1 Known as thoroughly Confucian, Zeng Guofan was China’s most outstanding scholar-official in the third quarter of the nineteenth century.

Source: Historic Images/Alamy Stock Photo.

FIGURE 1.2 China’s first feminist, Qiu Jin wrote, “We, the 200 million women of China, are the most unfairly treated objects on earth”.

Source: via Wikimedia Commons.

Born in 1961, Cui Jian is China’s most famous rock star. Beginning his career as a trumpet player in the Beijing Symphony Orchestra, he started experimenting with rock in the mid-1980s. His musical genres merged Chinese folk music and traditional Chinese instruments with guitar, sax, and Western percussion instruments. Although the government tried to keep him off television and attempted to cancel his concerts, this long-haired, often open-shirted cultural rebel became a hero to the youth of China. His song lyrics scandalized government leaders and censors. An American journalist commented that Cui’s “raspy outbursts of alienation [became] the anthems of his generation.”¹

Zeng, Qiu, Soong, and Cui all put the lie to the stereotype that Chinese were faceless and colorless masses with minds benumbed by powerful authorities, whether emperors, generals, or Communist ideologues. As the world entered a new millennium and China found itself in the midst of vast change, three questions were raised with increasing frequency: What does it mean to be Chinese? What attributes, ethical and cultural values, attitudes, and worldviews are typically Chinese? Most important here, what is the shared history of the Chinese that gives them their identity?

This book focuses on the history of modern China, that is, China’s history from the late eighteenth century to the present. It is concerned with Chinese characteristics, customs, idiosyncrasies, past experiences, and relationships. It probes the identities that China and the Chinese have assumed and the identities that others have ascribed to it and to them. It analyzes the changes seen over time. Above all, this is a story of people—men and women who shaped China’s identity and history and who, in turn, were shaped by them. This chapter sets the stage for the study of Chinese identities by focusing on the cultural commonalities that were the foundation for Chinese society and the dynamics of social relations, actions, and interactions. Because these cultural elements often played key roles in historical events and developments, understanding them is the first step in understanding the Chinese and their past.

FIGURE 1.3 Noted for her grace and eloquence, Soong Meiling (Madame Chiang Kai-shek) speaks on the radio during one of her trips to the United States.

Source: Keystone/Getty Images.

HISTORY AND IDENTITY

A person’s identity comes from many sources. Contextual sources are important: time and place of birth, ethnic heritage, parents’ occupations and socioeconomic status, the nature of the local community, schools, and friends. Perhaps equally significant components are personal characteristics—appearance, personality, and habits. But people’s identities are fundamentally their personal history, what has happened to them during their lifetime; that history has created each person as he or she is at the present time. Understanding someone’s past or the past of any institution or political and social body—nation, town, neighborhood, school, church, company, organization, sports team—is recognizing a person’s or group’s identity. In other words, the shape of the past gives meaning to the present.

There are three important corollaries to seeing the relationship between history and identity. Take, as an example, a college senior in a fraternity. On an individual level, he has his own characteristics, personality, habits, and history that give him an identity through which he sees and understands himself. But ultimately, in the outside world, his identity is given or bestowed by others; a fraternity brother, a freshman classmate, a girlfriend, or a professor would likely all bestow on our hypothetical fraternity man substantially different identities. Sometimes how he is perceived might be as or perhaps more important for those around him than what he really is.

So it is with China’s past and its identity. Over the past 250 years, China has acted on its own for its own reasons and according to its own standards. But the outside world has often perceived Chinese actions and motivations in entirely different ways, sometimes through direct reactions to Chinese events, policies, or actions, and sometimes, unfortunately, through bias and stereotype. Thus, the violent crackdown of the Chinese government on student demonstrators in 1989 continued for many years to shape and color views of American politicians and journalists about the goals and motives of the Chinese government. This particular coloration remained despite changes in Chinese political leadership and several decades of staggering economic and consequent attitudinal changes. In the first years of the twenty-first century, that economic success itself may produce new, challenging images of the Chinese as cheap laborers taking outsourced American jobs and as workers whose products stock the shelves at Wal-Mart.

FIGURE 1.4 Cui Jian’s 1986 song “Nothing to My Name” has been called the biggest hit in Chinese history and was the beginning of Chinese rock music. Cui gave a Thirty-Year Retrospective Concert in Beijing in September 2016 and played in Sydney in August 2017.

Source: VCG/VCG via Getty Images.

Second, a person’s identity may be bestowed by people with biases and ulterior motives as well as by those seeking to truly understand what kind of person he or she is. Thus, our fraternity man may be judged on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or social group. Because different people with different agendas are bestowing different identities, it follows that every individual will have many identities—so too with China and the Chinese. Thus, in the early twenty-first century, China can be seen primarily as an ambitious economic power and soon-to-be global leader, or a country awash in corruption and money-hungry greed, or a state facing huge demographic and environmental problems, as the main regional power in East Asia, or as a country marked by a gaping, perhaps nation-rending economic inequality, or a country where dissenters are harshly oppressed. Just as in any perception of an individual’s identities, some of the many identities or all of them may apply in a variety of combinations.

Third, because identity comes in large part from history and because a person’s present and future will become a part of that history, the person’s identity is continually evolving and developing. He or she might react to a new situation in a way that would be seen as totally out of character with the expectations of others. Yet that reaction would help others redefine that person and give him or her a new identity. Identity is therefore very fluid, provisional, and tentative. Again, such is the case with China and the Chinese. Each new event and reactions to events shape anew our understanding of Chinese attitudes and goals. My work as a historian—and the goal of this book—is to try to reach and present an understanding of Chinese historical identities that reflects as closely as possible China’s culture and past experiences.

ASSOCIATIONAL IDENTITIES: LINEAGES AND FAMILIES

It is a truism that whereas the basic social unit in the modern West is the individual, in China that foundational unit is the group. There is probably no clearer illustration of the relationship of the Chinese individual to the group—and here the most important group, the family—than the nature of Chinese names. Many Chinese personal names are composed of three characters and pronounced as three syllables. Traditionally the surname came first, pointing clearly to the priority of the surname group, the family, or, taken more largely, the lineage (sometimes called a “clan”), that is, all Chinese descendants of a single patriarch. Take the name Zeng Guofan. The surname is Zeng. The second name, Guo, is a generational name. For those families deeply rooted in the Chinese tradition of the extended family, all brothers and cousins of one generation should ideally share a common name. Thus, Zeng’s brothers were named Zeng Guoquan, Zeng Guohua, and Zeng Guohuang.² It follows that only the last character in the three-character name is the individual’s own—the family, the generation, and then and then only the individual—a marked difference from the modern West, where the individual name precedes all others.

Such a Chinese naming pattern suggests the role of the individual in the family; he or she was submerged in the group, with implicit responsibilities to that group. There was no concept of an individual’s rights within the family in the traditional cultural view: when Qiu Jin’s parents arranged her marriage to a bland, conventional man with whom she had little in common, she did not assert herself against the family’s decision (though, later showing considerable spunk, she eventually left him). An assertion of individual rights would immediately jeopardize family harmony and solidarity. Elder brother Zeng Guofan set off bitter quarreling with his brothers by insisting that they remain at home, tending family needs, instead of serving in the military campaigns against the Taiping. At least two brothers saw him as blocking their individual careers and possible paths to higher status and prestige.³ This situation reveals an important facet of family structure: it was hierarchical, and, as in any hierarchy, there were superior and subordinate ranks. Elder brother Zeng Guofan could tell his younger brothers what to do, and they were expected to comply. The elder brother–younger brother relationship was one of five “Confucian bonds” that defined cardinal relationships in Chinese society. Three were familial. Joining elder brothers in the superior ranks were fathers and husbands, who could direct and control sons and wives, respectively. Clear in these bonds was that maleness and age outranked femaleness and youth.

Within the family, “responsibility” was the watchword. Both superiors and subordinates had responsibilities: superiors to direct, train, provide for, and control and subordinates to obey, comply, and respect. For sons and daughters the proper family ethic, filial piety, had a number of aspects. First and foremost, it meant doing whatever was necessary to provide for the physical and psychological needs of parents in a spirit of respectful obeisance. Stories abound, many likely apocryphal, about the dimensions of such action. There was the filial son who cut off flesh from his own thigh to feed a starving parent; there was the filial daughter who breast-fed an elderly parent for nourishment; there was the seventy-year-old son who clowned around on the floor to lift his elderly parents’ depression. There was the story of one Guo Ju, desperately poor and trying to support his wife, son, and mother. When there was no way for all to survive, he decided it best for his son to die so that his mother might have enough to eat. But this extreme solution was aborted, for while digging the grave for his son, he dug up buried treasure, which allowed all to live and prosper. The moral: upholding filial piety will bring solutions to a family’s bleakest plights and ultimately happiness and prosperity.

A second component of filial pi...