Friends and Enemies: The Past, Present and Future of the Communist Party of China
224
Friends and Enemies: The Past, Present and Future of the Communist Party of China
224Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781843317814 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2009 |
| Series: | China in the 21st Century |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
A History of Violence: The Rise to Power of the CCP
The Japanese are a disease of the skin. Communists are a disease of the heart.
— Chiang Kai-shek (Leader of the KMT)
The rise to power of the Communist Party took almost three decades to achieve. This history is one which is riddled with controversy, counterclaims and a mytholigizing process, meaning that getting back to the real narrative of how the CCP was formed, how it first established its membership, who the earliest and most influential leaders were and how it built up its power base, sometimes proves almost impossible. Even the Party itself, in 1945 and again in 1981, produced solemn Resolutions, trying to spell out to itself and its members what its past had actually been and what it had meant.
Its interaction with the main political competitor for control of China, the Nationalist Party (KMT), with whom it initially shared revolutionary goals, then had bloody fallings out with, and finally had to engage in a battle to the bitter end with (over control of the mainland), has meant that at least some material from the early years of the CCP is available in the more open archives of Taiwan. Even so, key documents and sources of information are, if they are still available, kept under lock and key in the closely guarded archive centre on the outskirts of Beijing. One day, as with the USSR when it fell apart in 1991, the PRC might throw the doors of this resource open. But that hasn't happened yet, and nor is there any sign it will in the foreseeable future.
The rise to power of the Party is intimately linked to the figure of Mao Zedong. He was the victor, in terms of leadership struggles, in 1949. It is hardly surprising, therefore, to find that figures who had influence in the early years were to have their roles reappraised, rewritten, and in many cases either utterly falsified or modified so as to bare no real relationship to reality. Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, Wang Ming, Zhang Guotai, and Li Lisan, intellectually, or in terms of leadership, were to have clear, major input into the formation of the Party and its direction during its first decades in existence. But they were to fall on the wrong side of history. Mao, who had initially appeared as merely a side figure, a librarian at Beijing University, and an assistant and adjunct, an activist in the small but hardcore revolutionary base of Hunan, was to monopolize the power to tell the story of the Party for many years after 1949. This process has itself become part of the history of the Party, with many historians and experts both within and outside China in recent years trying to rediscover what happened, before Mao was pre-eminent. They are also gradually putting the pieces together again of how Mao succeeded in gaining ascendancy. Even so, Mao proved to be a genius in identifying himself with the Party and its goals, aspirations and purposes. The Party became his creature, and the fact that he succeeded in leading it to power means that, rightly or wrongly, until very recently, his shadow falls across much of the Party's past.
The Roots of Revolution
In the beginning, before the CCP even came into existence, there was a history of peasant and grassroots rebellion in China. Dynasties had been felled by popular discontent. The Ming (1368–1644) had been founded by a peasant, and ended with the Li Zicheng rebellion, which then precipitated an attack in the Chinese heartland by the northern Chinese Manchu, ethnically different from the predominant Han Chinese. They were, after the Mongolians in the Yuan dynasty (1240–1368) to be the second non-Han ethnic group to rule the Chinese empire in the millennium leading up to 1911. The Qing dynasty, which the Manchurians founded in 1644, was itself to experience sometimes cataclysmic popular attacks. Its period of aggressive expansionism during the Kangxi reign in the late seventeenth century, leading to the conquest of Mongolia and Xinjiang (the new territories) in the mid-eighteenth century, created tensions and instabilities. A Muslim revolt in the early part of the eighteenth century predated the most savage and damaging of these uprisings, the Taiping Rebellion from 1850, which ran deep into the 1860s and killed over 20 million people out of a population of 350 million. The Taiping had famously been inspired by the quasi-messianic, apocalyptic claims of a failed applicant for the imperial exams that he was the brother of Christ. It raged throughout central China, pulling in 16 of the country's then 18 provinces, lapping at the gates of the newly enlarged city of Shanghai where foreign forces managed to repulse it, taking in a few lucky refugees from the chaos reigning outside the city gates. The Taiping leaders even made themselves a new capital in the city of Nanjing. The Nien, Tungun and Muslim rebellions that occurred around this period only contributed more to the disintegration of centralized state power. The Qing, weakened by this internal struggle, and by increasingly predatory and aggressive foreign intervention, was to feel the force of grassroots rebellion again, in 1900, when the Boxers, linked to an esoteric cult, turned on foreigners, brutally killing some of them. This reignited tensions with European and North American governments, resulting in swift military retaliation and equally brutal financial reparations. Half a century after many had predicted it, the Qing fell, over two messy years from 1911 to 1912. From this period forward, China was engaged in a battle to maintain some sort of unity, and to rebuild itself – a battle, the painful outcome of which was, 40 years later, after war, famine and devastation, the imposition of unity by the Communists.
Chinese Power Structures
Peasant rebellion has figured in Chinese history for centuries. But there are two key elements in understanding this counter-history of revolt. The first is the longstanding attempts to reform China's political model. And the second, and equally important, is the creation of the Chinese geographical and political entity as it exists today. Both of these involved complex historical processes. Both of them explain some of the context in which the CCP was created, and which partly it worked with and benefited from, and partly viewed itself as a solution to.
Explanations for the power system in China, and its historic genealogy, are manifold. A political culture which can put the sort of resources into constructing assets like the Great Wall (or at least the Ming Great Wall) betray a high level of absolutism and centralization. Scholars of China are fond of pointing out that the semi-mythical first emperor in the third century BC, Qin Shihuangdi, was to unify a Chinese nation, and then effectively bankrupt and destroy it with massive projects, in only three generations. Speculation over the decades has tried to understand the proclivity for highly centralized and hierarchical power structures in China by looking at both the need to have a strong unified political centre to deal with problems of water management (Karl Wittfogel in his Oriental Despotism, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1957, to take the most celebrated example) to blaming the civil service which grew up in the Tang and Song periods from the fifth century onward and which created a self-interested cadre of advisors and officials running a highly bureaucratic government. The longevity and robustness of these top-heavy power structures discernible in previous dynasties, and passing down almost seamlessly into the PRC, is striking. Just as China was largely to avoid the early processes of industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so was it to only flirt with political reform. As Britain, France, and then most of Europe was to undergo various kinds of revolutions and power transitions from elites to more diverse new classes from the seventeenth century onward, Qing China rigidly maintained its political system, introducing superficial reforms, fighting to the death any attempts to dilute or compromise its central government's authority. As in the past with the ending of other dynasties, such brittle power meant that regime change was all or nothing. There was no gradual evolution or transition. Dynasties were blown away in a matter of months or years, leaving only a stain, and the same power structures, behind.
Attempts to strive for something different in China have deep roots. As far back as the late Song period a thousand years before, Ouyang Xiu, a major neo-Confucian intellectual, had been part of the Minor Reforms period from 1043–45. He had agitated with other scholars to strengthen governance and allow for opposition to be heard and not immediately castigated as insidious and inherently bad. This was unsuccessful. 'Loyal opposition,' as the historian of Imperial China, F. W. Mote has said, 'could not be acknowledged within a system of politics defined by ethical and personal rather than operational and institutional norms. China still struggles with the heritage of this eleventh century political failure.' Legalists, and idealists, had contributed ideas for devising a new political system in China, where power was more diluted, right up to the end of the Qing. But the reigns of emperors were usually successful or unsuccessful, and China prosperous or not, according to the abilities of the person occupying the position at the top. Qing China was lucky in the eighteenth century to enjoy the long reigns of three exceptional leaders, the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong emperors. The dynasty even forbade the formation of elite political organizations in 1651, only a few years after taking power. But its political stagnation was to start with the arrival of less gifted beings. The real rot set in with a series of fundamentally weak, compromised figures under the shadowy control of the infamous empress dowager, Ci Xi, from the 1870s onward. Her reactionary and conservative attitude meant that even when the opportunity for reform came, in the 1890s, towards the end of what was called the Self Regeneration Movement, bringing with it the chance to perhaps extend the dynasty's lease of life, it was not taken.
China historian Ray Huang of Cambridge, in his book about the Wang Li emperor in the Ming period, captures this element of the political straightjacketing of the imperial throne, and the stasis around it well. Wang Li, who was to reign for over 40 years, was to withdraw into a cocoon, obsessed by a young concubine, literally, according to Huang's colourful account, disappearing into his own little world, regarding the structures and apparatus of authority around him with indifference, almost as though it had nothing to do with him. A tight bureaucracy ran things, on a day-to-day basis, and the rest of the China that existed then survived largely on local power structures. The emperor was impossibly remote, his powers negative, working within endless unwritten conventions and rules.
[Wang Li] was too intelligent and sensitive to occupy the dragon throne. The more he gained an insight into its apparatus, the more sceptical he became. He began to realise that he was less the Ruler of All Men than a prisoner of the Forbidden City. His power was basically negative. He would remove or punish an official or a group of officials, but he could hardly promote a favourite or grant him an unusual request ... Was the benefit of occupying the imperial throne worth so many restrictions? He had no say in deciding that either. He had become the Son of Heaven by birth, not choice.
According to Immanuel Hsu's account, the emperor later in the Qing period 'decided all important state policies, made appointments, conferred titles, approved promotions, demotions and dismissals, awarded pensions, commanded the army, and ratified treaties ... As the supreme legislator he enacted, annulled, and amended laws by decrees and edicts. Judicially, he was the highest court of appeal.' As if this were not enough, he was also a religious head, and the main sponsor for education and culture. Such intense concentration of power in the hands of very few continues to haunt the Chinese body politic to this day.
Running beside this is the issue of how China was created, and the growth and evolution of the country over which this system of power was exercised. The shapes and territories of China prior to the one created in 1949 were radically different. The Yuan dynasty, once it had been founded, was to explode over a territory so vast it was to prove politically impossible to maintain for more than a few decades. Consolidation over a more manageable territory under the Ming was to precede the expansionist early era of the Qing, in which territories like the Northwest (now largely Xinjiang, conquered in 1759), Mongolia (conquered from 1685 to 1696), and Tibet (brought into a complex tribute relationship with China) were pulled into the sphere of influence of the Qing government. By the nineteenth century, the contours of the modern PRC are already clear – a territory that, with the addition of Tibetan and other border territories, was almost the size of Europe. After 1949 the PRC was simply to reassert and formalize control over these areas, upgrading some 'areas of special influence' into full sovereignty.
The complexity and potential disunity that lurks beneath this superficial unity is ignored at any commentator's peril. US sinologist, the late John K. Fairbank and others in the introduction to the Cambridge History of China talk of the difficulty of treating China as a unitary entity. 'The old notion of "China's cultural differentness" from the outside world, though it still strikes the traveller, is becoming fragmented by the variety of sub-cultures to be found within China.' The period of expansion under the Qing, which in effect created most of the entity we now call China, was to embrace such a range of cultures and territories that it is entirely legitimate to ask whether there was really any meaningful political system or sense of nationhood that could mesh all this together. For the last two centuries, therefore, China has not only been battling with modernization and political reform, but also with the creation of a meaningful concept of nationhood that its highly complex and vast population can all feel they belong to and sign up for. This challenge remains up to the present day, and is the source for the anxiety that lurks behind many of the demands for allegiance that the CCP makes of its disparate territories. The CCP, as the party in power, were the re-creators and are now the custodians of this unity. They, more than any others, are aware of the fragility and vulnerability behind all this.
Intellectual and Political Roots of the CCP
The CCP was founded in the context of international conflict, and national breakdown. The first decade of the Republic Period, after the collapse of the Qing, had been chaotic – with a popular, but highly flawed election held in 1912, only for the victor to be assassinated, and the rise to power of northern Chinese leader Yuan Shikai after the brief presidency of Sun Yat-sen in 1912. Yuan was to declare himself President in 1915, but he was forced to resign before dying in 1916. Attempts to set up new structures of power embodied in a legislative council were accompanied by the continuing efforts to introduce industralization, at least along some of the coastal cities and in Canton (Guangdong). China was also an ally of the US and the UK during the First World War. But the granting of former German interests in Northeast China to the Japanese during the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 resulted in one of the seminal events in modern Chinese history, the May 4 Movement, in which students were to go out on the streets in Beijing and other cities and demand fairer treatment, and urgent political reform. Their catchphrase of wanting 'Mr Democracy and Mr Science' was to echo through the following decades. They would not have known what trauma and tragedy was to await them in the coming years, before only a small part of these reforms were ever introduced. Accompanying this was the New Culture Movement, introducing ideas into China from the industrialized West. Republican China has had a bad press. But as sociologist and historian Frank Dikotter has argued, this era marked down as the period of warlordism, banditry and instability 'might very well be qualified as a golden age of engagement with the world'.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Friends and Enemies"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Kerry Brown.
Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction; Chapter One: A Disease of the Heart: The Rise to Power of the CCP; Chapter Two: Revolutionary Administrator: The Party in Power; Chapter Three: The Party in the Reform Era; Chapter Four: The Chinese Communist Party from 1992 to 2008; Chapter Five: The Challenges Facing China and What they mean for the CCP; Chapter Six: The Chinese Communist Party as it moves into the 21st Century; Conclusion: Gambling with the Devil: Why the Fate of the CCP Matters to Us AllWhat People are Saying About This
'Dr Kerry Brown does the business in a brisk, no-nonsense way. For those who want an easy, short and very readable guide to an organisation which has shaped China's present and could help mould the world's future, Brown's book can be warmly recommended.' —Chris Patten, ‘The Independent’
'Brown's book is an indispensable insight into the party's mind, culture and history. Unless we understand, we cannot help. And this book helps that understanding.' —Will Hutton, excerpted from the Foreword
'Anyone who wants to understand China has to understand the Chinese Communist Party and where it is taking the country. This truly insightful guide to the world's biggest, most secretive and most powerful party is required reading.' —Isabel Hilton, Author, Broadcaster and Editor, ‘China Dialogue’