China’s history is one of immense depth and complexity, and Frank Dikötter is one of its leading experts. For over three decades, he has published tome upon tome exploring the nation and culture, including the wildly acclaimed ‘People’s Trilogy”. His latest - Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity - was published in February of this year.
Why did we invite him on?
In the next decade, China’s position on the world stage is set to change drastically. For centuries, it was destitute; soon, it may be the central superpower in geopolitics.
Understanding how we got here is a challenge, but crucial. Our knowledge - ours, as well as the West’s - is, instead, poor. We’ve been meaning to have a conversation on the subject for some time - Frank is a natural first-draft pick.
What is it that makes China distinct from other countries? Why has it persisted for millennia? How is its current trajectory being shaped by its past?
What did we learn?
China, to the layman, is defined by three key features: conquest, culture, and brutality. Most of its past, at least as far as what’s known by anyone outside of the expert class, is most defined by the last of them. Is that fair?
”I don’t think it’s any more brutal than anywhere else. You have to be fair. During the Great Leap Forward, millions were starved to death, but proportionally, it’s about the same. China is so much large and more densely populated; there’s more to ‘play’ with. The answer: human beings kill. And if you’re very lucky, you’ll have an emperor or king who is likely to contemplate an alliance with their neighbours, rather than massacring them. But, until the advent of the division of power, that’s just not the human way.”
Common understanding of Chinese history is, as Frank will go on to prove, a flawed one. Even our comprehension of modern China is muddled. Is it a communist country, or a capitalist one? Is it an empire, or an isolationist nation-state? A paper tiger, or the one true rival to Western hegemony?
What we see today, Frank stresses, is nothing new. Knowing that, we may be able to predict what comes next.
”The China we see today is roughly based on the empire we saw from the middle of the 17th century up to 1911, when it collapsed … They were overstretched, and had to control a huge amount of territory. They also conquered so much through pure violence that as soon as there was a moment of weakness, the subjects rebelled. Then, from 1911 - ‘49, you see the rise of this extraordinary time in Chinese history: the Republic of China.”
Today, China is understood to be a monocultural, top-down-enforced monolith. One of tight restrictions, rigid laws and customs, and an overarching adherence to tradition. In many ways, the antithesis of the West.
But that wasn’t always so; for a few decades in the 20th century, China could credibly claim to be the most modern, progressive nation on the face of the Earth.
“At every level of society, from scholars to artists to writers to ordinary workers, they take the freedoms they have acquired - of speech, of assembly, of travel - and go to discover the world. This is a new age of openness. They can read, publish, almost anything they want - though, within limits. Compared to some of the regimes in Europe in the ‘20s and ‘30s - Hitler, Mussolini, Franco… the Republic Of China is very liberal, very free. Keen to be at the vanguard of modernity.”
It sounds like nirvana. Knowing what was to come in 1949, one can’t help being puzzled at how the Chinese gave it up.
Communism typically arises in times of discontent. When the populus is beholden to the iron fist of the state, they come to fantasise about being the fist themselves. Mastering their destiny, extolling their own, seizing the means of production.
This bears little elation to the image of the Republic that Frank paints for us. What’s the story?
”You can read any book about it, you can read Wikipedia, any text book, the story is always the same. The collapse of the Xing, nasty social forces appear, fascists and imperialists and feudal landlords rise, the communists rise up in response… But that’s not true. Throughout the age of the Republic, China’s communist population is consistently dwarfed, relative to other countries. By 1940, 1 in every 1,700 people were Communists; the same, in relative size, to the United States. And the USA is hardly considered the vanguard of the worker’s revolution. Moscow is sending immense resources, yet China remains one of the least communist countries you can find.”
In many parts of the large country, communists were hugely unpopular. The party were seen, contrary to their message, to be enemies of the typical worker, not without just cause.
”The “rich peasants” [farmers] have their land seized, until soon there is no land left. Then “middle peasants” are deemed rich, and “poor peasants” are deemed “middle.” Soon, there is nothing left - peasants quickly realise that the Communist Party will take any surplus. They need grain and cannon fodder, and they’ll take everything. They were bandits - they squeeze until it’s dry.”
So, why were communists able to secure power in ‘49?
Here, we arrive at Mao.
