CHINA´S 60 YEARS OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY / THE FINANCIAL TIMES COMMENTARY & ANALYSIS

China’s 60 years of living dangerously

By Jonathan Spence

Published: September 30 2009 22:47

Sixty years ago, China was in a chaotic condition. Few people inside or outside the battered country would have bet much on its chances of survival over the long term. The devastating effects of Japan’s invasion and occupation were visible from northern Manchuria to the southern border; the Soviet Union had shown no great faith in China’s future as a viable state and was unimpressed by Mao Zedong’s eccentric and personalised leadership style; Great Britain and France seemed still intent on shoring up their economic presence in Hong Kong and south-east Asia; Korea was divided and unstable; Tibetan policy was uncertain; the Chinese Nationalist forces were consolidating their anti-Communist bastion on Taiwan; and the US, though nominally neutral in China’s protracted civil war, had clearly been disillusioned about the chances of China establishing any kind of viable democratic structure as the Communists tightened their hold over a population of close to 600m.

The fact that China’s Communist regime was nonetheless able to hold on to power for the following 60 years is one of history’s most unlikely political wonders. The attempt to find a convincing explanation for the role of Mao Zedong in this grows harder rather than easier year by year. Again and again, by dint of his persistence and apparently unshakeable ideological self-confidence, Mao was able to impel his political allies and hundreds of millions of subjects to follow him into utterly unknowable terrain: immense military commitment to the cause of North Korea, a ruthless use of mass-criticism campaigns to destroy China’s capitalists and intellectual elites, implementation of compulsory land seizure and redistribution, emasculation of all unions, nationalisation of foreign and domestic investments and assets, nationwide suppression or censorship of the press and other media, ideological obedience in schools and colleges, political use of the power of the People’s Liberation Army, collectivisation of rural land-holding, labour and the market system.

When, in the late 1950s, the enforcement of totally unviable farming procedures was added to this list – close planting, ever-deeper ploughing, stripping of grasslands, destruction of livestock, uprooting of private vegetable plots – China was set on course for one of the most deadly famines in human history. Barely had some economic recovery begun in the mid-1960s than Mao instigated the Cultural Revolution, designed to eradicate all traces of China’s history and culture – along with the living exponents of that culture, be they party officials, artists, teachers, the elderly or schoolchildren. Many of these policies remained in place after Mao’s death in 1976, and correction of the worst abuses often took decades.

But it will not ultimately help us to view these volatile years as just a chamber of horrors that ended with a burst of trumpets hailing the arrival of Deng Xiaoping. Deng, after all, worked alongside Mao for decades as a meticulous and successful supervisor of Communist party recruitment and management. Deng was no automatic lover of liberty, no inveterate believer in the virtues of pluralism. If he was willing to tolerate new levels of artistic and literary expression during the “Democracy Wall” movement of 1978 and 1979, he was also perfectly willing to close that period of fairly free expression when he felt that social order was threatened.

A decade later, when he felt that the atmosphere of the Tiananmen demonstrations was moving in the direction of criticism of the party and fostering rebelliousness even among the workers and ordinary citizens of Beijing, Deng moved to use the military with deadly effectiveness. Nor did he ever hint that such forceful suppression might not have been the correct response. As had been the case with Mao, who purged even his most senior colleagues (including, for a time, Deng Xiaoping), Deng himself purged his own designated successors for their slackness in suppressing disorder, even though they had been dazzlingly successful at steering the economy into a new market-directed path. Subsequently, though Deng was still regarded as China’s supreme political leader, he left the day-to-day running of the country and the party to comparatively unknown and untried political and party allies.

From 1997 – the year in which Deng died in his early 90s – China has been run by a sharply restricted number of senior party members, who reach consensus on a small number of safe figures from the party bureaucracy to hold the reins of power publicly: currently the two most visible are Hu Jintao (as president and party chairman) and Wen Jiabao as premier. These two men and their visible cohorts are a homogeneous group, born during the final years of the civil war, just before the Communists came to power. They are well-educated and poised, but any claims they might have to be members of a revolutionary generation are limited to their experiences during the years of the collectivisation of the Great Leap Forward and labour in the countryside during the subsequent Cultural Revolution, and to courses attended in the party school. In any case, they will be retiring in 2012, passing the leadership torch to a new generation of 60-somethings, with even less experience of social upheaval.

For these leaders of the new China, Mao’s era is long gone. They will get little guidance from his spirit as they explore the deeper recesses of China’s own early history, ponder the possibilities of an independent judiciary, scan the world for access to new and expanded energy sources, calculate China’s best investment strategies or estimate the costs of a new blue-water navy.

The writer is Sterling professor emeritus of history at Yale. His latest book is Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.