The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

by Michael Wood

The reaction in China was fury. Foreign Minister Lu left Versailles early, refusing to sign the final treaty. Student demonstrations broke out across China and on 4 May 1919 a huge protest took place in Tiananmen Square, where loyal remonstrance had taken place through Chinese history.

‘Hope is like a path in the countryside,’ Lu wrote. ‘At first there is no path, but if enough people walk in the same direction, the path appears.’

At the heart of Marxism (as understood by the generation after Marx, especially Lenin with his ‘scientific socialism’) was the idea that human history could be divided into defined phases: from its primary stages of feudalism and capitalism to its ultimate development in a socialist society.

But it is important to see that at this point the Chinese knew very little about Marx’s original ideas; none of the key texts were available in Chinese apart from The Communist Manifesto, which was only translated into Chinese (from English) in 1920. Far from being theoretical Marxists, then, these early Chinese followers are better described as revolutionary nationalists.

The communists, in five armies totalling about 87,000 fighters with 18,000 civilians, broke out of the encirclement and set out on a series of retreats to northern China. This retreat, collectively known as the Long March, in time grew to be the epic founding myth for China’s Communist Party.

So, two great historical factors brought China to its revolutionary moment: the actions of the imperialists, and the unresolved state of the peasantry. The course of the revolution, however, would be determined by the Japanese invasion.

Chinese resistance (as ‘the Fourth Ally’) was crucial in bringing the war to a close more quickly than it might have otherwise been: 40 per cent of all Japanese casualties were in China.

But the so-called ‘first phase of socialism’ was brought to a halt with the Great Leap Forward – a disastrous drive to industrialise the countryside using village forges, which ruined the environment, destroyed a household’s metal utensils and made metal too poor to be of any use.

At the end of the 1950s, these misguided campaigns pushed China into the Great Famine.

Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng in his Tombstone – a book to set beside Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago – estimates that 36 million people died. Others have put the figure higher still, which makes China’s Great Famine by far the worst in human history.

In summer 1966, Mao mobilised millions of young people – Red Guards – to reignite the nation’s revolutionary fervour, attacking all figures of authority, whether the party, the universities, teachers or intellectuals in general. The causes are still debated.

Such are the deep continuities of political ideas at the centre of the Chinese tradition. In sum, the emperor has the supreme authority ‘to determine the nature of Heavenly principle, the human heart, centrality, correctness, benevolence, and righteousness!’ The supreme power, then, is also the supreme ideological authority.

The turning point came in 1978, a moment historians now see as China’s second revolution, and one of the most significant events in modern world history. After Mao’s death, his clique, the so-called ‘Gang of Four’, were defeated, and in the following two years of party infighting, Hua Guofeng was sidelined and a new leader emerged – the very man condemned by name in Hua’s funeral oration for Mao: Deng Xiaoping.

His goal was to use capitalism to build a socialist society, while not loosening the dictatorship of the party. His focus was on economics, science and technology; the planned reform would not be political.

China had not been a socialist society from 1956 to 1978. It was a period characterised by economic stagnation, political turmoil, cultural decay, and a population living in poverty and distress.

‘Four Modernisations’ (industry, agriculture, defence and science and technology)

key ideas which together form the blueprint for today’s China: 1. Free our minds from ideology 2. Promote democracy inside the party and in the legal system 3. Review the past to guide the future 4. Curb excessive bureaucracy 5. Allow some regions and enterprises to get rich first

Deng needed the US to help his great reform, while the US realised that China could be a huge market, and helping China to develop would open opportunities for their economy too. Meanwhile, back home on TV, Americans who had been demonised during the Cold War were shown as welcoming and keen to help China,

In just a few years, therefore, China’s agriculture was de-collectivised, education and industry were reformed and private business allowed to flourish.

public platforms in the universities now spoke openly of freedom of expression and democratisation as the keys to scientific and economic progress; real reform and opening up, they said, was impossible without political reform.

hardliner Li Peng had been promoted to premier. With that, the party appeared to be turning away from the path to reform, so Hu’s death was the spark for the student demonstration in Tiananmen Square. There were calls for reform, an end to corruption and for more democratic participation in decision making.

authorised by Deng. The editorial called the movement an anti-Communist Party conspiracy and declared that the students were ‘counter-revolutionary and unpatriotic’. Inevitably this only caused fury, and the protests grew.

First, the party saw itself as under permanent siege from opponents at home, backed by enemies abroad. Secondly, the weapons in this siege were Western liberal democratic values, which were contrary to the Chinese way. Thirdly, economic reforms were needed to keep the party in power. And, finally, ideological discipline must be enforced; if the party is allowed to become internally divided by factions, it will fall.

The inherent danger of continuing growth on this scale, of course, is a further phase of environmental disaster when the country has yet to deal with the catastrophic pollution caused by Mao’s war on nature, which left massive problems in the loss of cultivable land and failures of the food chain.

China has 20 per cent of the world’s population but only 11 per cent of its land is arable. It is estimated that between 15 and 20 per cent of that land is heavily contaminated.