On China (13 page)

Li summed up the impetus of his diplomacy in a mournful memorial to the Empress Dowager shortly before his death in 1901:

The strategy of pitting Russia against Japan in Manchuria produced a rivalry in which both powers progressively tested each other. In its relentless expansion, Russia jettisoned the tacit agreement among the exploiters of China to maintain some balance between their respective claims and a degree of continuing Chinese sovereignty.

The competing claims of Japan and Russia in northeast China led to a war for preeminence in 1904, ending in Japanese victory. The 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth gave Japan the dominant position in Korea and potentially in Manchuria, though less than what its victory might have made possible, due to the intervention of the American President, Theodore Roosevelt. His mediations of the end of the Russo-Japanese War based on principles of balance of power, rare in American diplomacy, kept Japan from seizing Manchuria and preserved an equilibrium in Asia. Stymied in Asia, Russia returned its strategic priorities to Europe, a process that accelerated the outbreak of the First World War.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Chinese world order was totally out of joint; the court in Beijing no longer functioned as a meaningful factor in protecting either Chinese culture or autonomy. Popular frustration boiled to the surface in 1898, in the so-called Boxer Uprising. Practicing a form of ancient mysticism and claiming magical immunity to foreign bullets, the Boxers—so called because of their traditional martial arts exercises—mounted a campaign of violent agitation against foreigners and the symbols of the new order they had imposed. Diplomats, Chinese Christians, railroads, telegraph lines, and Western schools all came under attack. Perhaps judging that the Manchu court (itself a “foreign” imposition, and no longer a particularly effective one) risked becoming the next target, the Empress Dowager embraced the Boxers, praising their attacks. The epicenter of the conflict was once again the long-contested foreign embassies in Beijing—which the Boxers besieged in the spring of 1900. After a century of vacillating between haughty disdain, defiance, and anguished conciliation, China now entered a state of war against all of the foreign powers simultaneously.
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The consequence was another harsh blow. An Eight-Power allied expeditionary force—consisting of France, Britain, the United States, Japan, Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy—arrived in Beijing in August 1900 to relieve the embassies. After suppressing the Boxers and allied Qing troops (and laying waste to much of the capital in the process), they dictated another “unequal treaty” imposing a cash indemnity and granting further occupation rights to the foreign powers.
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A dynasty unable to prevent repeated foreign marches on the Chinese capital or to forestall foreign exactions from Chinese territory had plainly lost the Mandate of Heaven. The Qing Dynasty, having prolonged its existence for a remarkable seven decades since the initial clash with the West, collapsed in 1912.

China’s central authority was again fractured, and it entered another period of warring states. A Chinese Republic, deeply divided from its birth, emerged into a dangerous international environment. But it never had the opportunity to practice democratic virtues. The nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen was proclaimed president of the new republic in January 1912. As if by some mysterious law commanding imperial unity, Sun, after just six weeks in office, deferred to Yuan Shikai, commander of the only military force capable of unifying the country. After the failure of Yuan’s abortive declaration of a new imperial dynasty in 1916, political power devolved into the hands of regional governors and military commanders. Meanwhile in the Chinese heartland, the new Chinese Communist Party, established in 1921, administered a kind of shadow government and parallel social order loosely aligned with the world Communist movement. Each of these aspirants claimed the right to rule, but none was strong enough to prevail over the others.

Left without a universally acknowledged central authority, China lacked the instrument for the conduct of its traditional diplomacy. By the end of the 1920s the Nationalist Party, led by Chiang Kai-shek, exercised nominal control over the entirety of the ancient Qing Empire. In practice, however, China’s traditional territorial prerogatives were increasingly challenged.

Exhausted by their exertions in the war and in a world influenced by Wilsonian principles of self-determination, the Western powers were no longer in a position to extend their spheres of influence in China; they were barely able to sustain them. Russia was consolidating its internal revolution and in no position to undertake further expansion. Germany was deprived of its colonies altogether.

Of the former contestants for dominance in China, only one was left, albeit the most dangerous to China’s independence: Japan. China was not strong enough to defend itself. And no other country was available to balance Japan militarily. After the defeat of Germany in the First World War, Japan occupied the former German concessions in Shandong. In 1932, Tokyo engineered the creation of a secessionist Japanese-dominated state of Manchukuo in Manchuria. In 1937, it embarked on a program of conquest across much of eastern China.

Japan now found itself in the position of previous conquerors. It was difficult enough to conquer such a vast country; it was impossible to administer it without relying on some of its cultural precepts, which Japan, prizing the uniqueness of its own institutions, was never prepared to do. Gradually, its erstwhile partners—the European powers backed by the United States—began to move into opposition to Japan, first politically and eventually militarily. It was a kind of culmination of the policy of the self-strengthening diplomacy, with the former colonialists now cooperating to vindicate the integrity of China.

The leader of this effort was the United States, and its instrument was the Open Door policy proclaimed by Secretary of State John Hay in 1899. Originally intended to claim for the United States the benefits of other countries’ individual imperialism, it was transformed in the 1930s into a way to preserve China’s independence. The Western powers joined the effort. China would now be able to overcome the imperialist phase, provided it could survive the Second World War and once again forge its unity.

With the Japanese surrender in 1945, China was left devastated and divided. The Nationalists and Communists both aspired to central authority. Two million Japanese soldiers remained on Chinese territory for repatriation. The Soviet Union recognized the Nationalist government but had kept its options open by supplying arms to the Communist Party; at the same time, it had rushed a massive and uninvited Soviet military force into northeast China to restore some of their erstwhile colonial claims. Beijing’s tenuous control of Xinjiang had eroded further. Tibet and Mongolia had gravitated into quasi-autonomy, aligned with the respective orbits of the British Empire and the Soviet Union.

United States public opinion sympathized with Chiang Kai-shek as a wartime ally. But Chiang Kai-shek was governing a fragment of a country already fragmented by foreign occupation. China was treated as one of the “Big Five” who would organize the postwar world and were granted a veto in the United Nations Security Council. Of the five, only the United States and the Soviet Union possessed the power to carry out this mission.

A renewal of the Chinese civil war followed. Washington sought to apply its standard solution to such civil conflict, which has failed time after time then and in the decades afterward. It urged a coalition between the Nationalists and Communists, who had been battling each other for two decades. U.S. Ambassador Patrick Hurley convened a meeting between Chiang Kai-shek and Communist Party leader Mao Zedong in September 1945 at Chiang’s capital in Chongqing. Both leaders dutifully attended while preparing for a final showdown.

No sooner had the Hurley meeting concluded than the two sides recommenced hostilities. Chiang’s Nationalist forces opted for a strategy of holding cities, while Mao’s guerrilla armies based themselves in the countryside; each sought to surround the other using
wei qi
strategies of encirclement.
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Amidst clamor for American intervention in support of the Nationalists, President Harry Truman sent General George Marshall to China for a yearlong effort to encourage the two sides to agree to work together. During that time, the Nationalist military position was collapsing.

Defeated by the Communists on the mainland, Nationalist troops retreated to the island of Taiwan in 1949. The Nationalists brought with them their military apparatus, political class, and remnants of national authority (including Chinese artistic and cultural treasures from the Imperial Palace collection).
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They declared the relocation of the Republic of China’s capital to Taipei, and maintained that they would husband their strength and someday return to the mainland. They retained the Chinese seat in the United Nations Security Council.

Meanwhile, China was uniting again, under the newly proclaimed People’s Republic of China. Communist China launched itself into a new world: in structure, a new dynasty; in substance, a new ideology for the first time in Chinese history. Strategically, it abutted over a dozen neighbors, with open frontiers and inadequate means to deal simultaneously with each potential threat—the same challenge that had confronted Chinese governments throughout history. Overarching all these concerns, the new leaders of China faced the involvement in Asian affairs of the United States, which had emerged from the Second World War as a confident superpower, with second thoughts about its passivity when confronted with the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war. Every statesman needs to balance the experience of the past against the claims of the future. Nowhere was this more true than in the China that Mao and the Communist Party had just taken over.

T
HE ADVENT OF a new dynasty in China had, over the millennia, developed a distinct rhythm. The old dynasty would begin to be perceived as failing in its mission of protecting the security of the Chinese population or fulfilling its fundamental aspirations. Rarely as the result of a single catastrophe, most frequently through the cumulative impact of a series of disasters, the ruling dynasty would, in the view of the Chinese people, lose the Mandate of Heaven. The new dynasty would be seen as having achieved it, in part by the mere fact of having established itself.

This kind of upheaval had happened many times in China’s dramatic history. But no new ruler had ever proposed to overthrow the value system of the entire society. Previous claimants to the Mandate of Heaven—even, and perhaps especially, foreign conquerors—had legitimized themselves by affirming the ancient values of the society they took over and governing by its maxims. They maintained the bureaucracy they inherited, if only to be able to govern a country more populous and richer than any other. This tradition was the mechanism of the process of Sinification. It established Confucianism as the governing doctrine of China.

At the head of the new dynasty that, in 1949, poured out of the countryside to take over the cities stood a colossus: Mao Zedong. Domineering and overwhelming in his influence, ruthless and aloof, poet and warrior, prophet and scourge, he unified China and launched it on a journey that nearly wrecked its civil society. By the end of this searing process, China stood as one of the world’s major powers and the only Communist country except Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam whose political structure survived the collapse of Communism everywhere else.

Revolutionaries are, by their nature, powerful and single-minded personalities. Almost invariably they start from a position of weakness vis-à-vis the political environment and rely for their success on charisma and on an ability to mobilize resentment and to capitalize on the psychological weakness of adversaries in decline.

Most revolutions have been on behalf of a specific cause. Once successful, they have been institutionalized into a new system of order. Mao’s revolution had no final resting place; the ultimate goal of “Great Harmony” that he proclaimed was a vague vision, more akin to spiritual exaltation than political reconstruction. Cadres of the Communist Party were its priesthood, except their task was crusading, not fulfilling a defined program. Under Mao, cadres also led a life at the edge of perdition. For them, there was always the danger—over time the near certainty—of being engulfed in the very upheavals they were incited to promote. The roster of leaders of the second generation (that of Deng Xiaoping) had almost all suffered that fate, returning to power only after periods of great personal trial. Every close associate of Mao during the revolutionary period—including in the end his long-serving Premier and chief diplomat Zhou Enlai—was eventually purged.

It was no accident that the Chinese ruler whom Mao most admired was the founding Emperor Qin Shihuang, who ended the Period of the Warring States by triumphing over all other rivals and unifying them into a single polity in 221 B.C. Qin Shihuang is generally considered the founder of China as a unified state. Yet he has never been afforded ultimate respect in Chinese history because he burned books and persecuted traditional Confucian scholars (burying 460 of them alive). Mao once remarked that China’s governance required a combination of Marx’s methods and Qin Shihuang’s, and he eulogized the Emperor in a poem: