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

by Michael Wood

For most of its history, however, the heartland of the two rivers was China. It was only in the eighteenth century that the much bigger shape of today’s People’s Republic was determined by the huge multi-racial empire of the Manchus – the Qing dynasty, which spread its rule over Mongolia, Xinjiang and its Tibetan protectorate.

Seven million died in the 1332 flood, precipitating the disorder that hastened the fall of the Mongol dynasty; there were 2 million dead in 1887, more than that perhaps in 1931.

This great figure who codified these ideas in the sixth century BCE was called Kong Qiu, but in later times became known as Kongfuzi, ‘Master Kong’. The name was Latinised by Jesuit missionaries in seventeenth-century China as Confucius

Hence, the central vision of Chinese philosophy for 2,500 years has been political and ethical. It was very different from the post-Classical West where until the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, monotheism took things on a very different conceptual path. In Europe, shaped by Roman and Germanic law, the institution of kingship developed a legal custom separate from political authority. These two paths have marked the traditions of the East and West to this day.

The historian Sima Qian tells the story that Shi Huangdi had palaces and pavilions built to symbolise each of the conquered nations, full of their treasures, artefacts and women, so the emperor could revisit each of his conquests:

Qin Shi Huangdi began a new epoch and put the ruler at the centre of the historical narrative. He created a unified territory and introduced a centralised bureaucracy. His government controlled people right down to the family group and measured land to the last mu, helping to reinforce the idea of one polity subordinate to the emperor’s will.

From the 130s BCE, Wu mounted several huge military expeditions into Xiongnu territory, with massive attacks by tens of thousands of cavalry, forcing his enemies to retreat beyond the Gobi Desert. These ‘Northern Desert Wars’ were on a scale never seen before in world history, dwarfing the armies with which Alexander the Great invaded Persia and India. From then on, the upper hand lay with the Han.

History was political in the truest sense. In no Chinese epoch of imperial times, therefore, are there historians like Herodotus or Thucydides, who were writing for themselves. In China, history was written to endorse the assumption of the Mandate of Heaven.

First was demographic change. Under the Han, the bulk of the population had been in the lower Yellow River valley. Now the colonisation of the subtropical lands of the Yangtze valley begins, filling unoccupied land, clearing hillsides and forests, draining marshes and developing and expanding the southern rice culture. China’s population rose perhaps as much as four- or fivefold between 280 and 464 CE. By the 500s, the south was the rice basket of China and a major centre of culture, with 40 per cent of the registered population now living in the Yangtze valley.

Beginning in 584 CE in the north and expanded between 605 CE and 609 CE, the canal crossed the countryside from north to south. It involved the labour of up to 5 million conscripts, men and women. The largest manmade waterway in history, the canal would be a major factor in joining the north and south. It also accelerated the shift in the economy and population from the traditional heartland of the Yellow River to the Yangtze valley and the south, linking their river systems, which would be such an important feature of China’s economic and social history during the next three centuries.

The arrival of Buddhism was perhaps the most important and long-lasting of the foreign influences that came from the Tang opening up to the world.

At that time Afghanistan was still a stronghold of Buddhism, though many places Xuanzang visited were in ruins after the invasions by the Huns in the late fifth century.

But both Confucianism and Daoism were uniquely Chinese. Buddhism, on the other hand, was a transnational, universal faith, which opened China to the wider world intellectually, as well as in its spiritual life, directly questioning the hitherto assumed centrality of Chinese culture and her unique civilising mission.

In 750, a severe drought led to poor harvests. In spring 751, the imperial grain fleet caught fire in harbour and 200 shiploads of grain were destroyed, so the government storehouses were ill stocked to meet the supply crisis. Later that same year a typhoon destroyed thousands of boats, large and small, at Yangzhou where the Grand Canal intersects with the Yangtze, losing more precious grain and rice. Almost incredibly, at that same time, a fire in the capital’s main weapons arsenal destroyed 500,000 weapons, crossbows, swords and spears. In the autumn it rained for weeks on end and floods caused havoc as far inland as the Wei River and the environs of Chang’an. As the people faced food shortages, the government found it impossible to respond effectively. In the capital, the population of nearly a million stared starvation in the face. In summer 752, a great hurricane caused huge damage in Luoyang, followed by more floods in the autumn.

Though the government had tried its best to deal with the food shortages, fury with the luxury of the court intensified. Worse was to follow. In mid-December 755, a huge rebellion broke out under a renegade general called An Lushan that would devastate China.

The war ended in 763, but the massive disruption to the country lasted much longer. The national census of 754 had recorded 52.9 million people in nearly 9 million taxpaying households. Ten years later, it counted 16.9 million in nearly 3 million. This suggests that more than 30 million people had been displaced as refugees, killed in war or died of famine. If so, it was one of the deadliest wars in history.

The year 755, then, would turn out to be a catastrophic break in Chinese history. To seek a psychological parallel in Western culture we must turn to the First World War – for example to the French, German and English poets; to Apollinaire’s anguished understanding that on 4 August 1914 a new world had been born.

much as in the sixteenth century Henry VIII and his successors moved against the vast inherited wealth of the Catholic Church in England. In the early 840s, a massive campaign of temple closures began. It was brutal, sweeping and destructive. The government’s persecution of the Buddhists between 842 and 846 came at time of growing internal and external threats, when marauding private armies threatened the Yellow River heartland and pirate fleets plundered the coasts. In the far west, Turkic and Uighur kings and warlords overran the frontier provinces. It was in this troubled time that Wuzong launched ‘the great anti-Buddhist persecution’.

The plunder of the immense wealth of the Buddhist establishment had helped the imperial family and the nobility pay their armies and survive in the short term, but it did not address the continuing economic crisis. In 860, there were mutinies of the army on the frontiers, while at home unrelentingly heavy taxes and labour burdens provoked rural revolt. One peasant uprising, terming itself the ‘Righteous Army’, gathered over 200,000 peasants, vagrants, beggars and pirates. The empire was now hugely overstretched geographically and secession wars began in frontier provinces. Then droughts, floods and famine struck. In the 870s and ’80s, there was widespread belief that heaven was displeased, that the dynasty had lost its Mandate. The coup de grâce was the rebellion of Huang Chao, a final brutal spasm of almost unimaginable violence with many parallels to the Taiping, the bloodiest war of the nineteenth century, as this was of the ninth.

The people of Song-dynasty Kaifeng were probably the best-fed citizens on earth, and perhaps the best-fed people who had lived so far in history. Thanks to improved farming and distribution, Song cooks had a bigger range of ingredients than ever before, and they developed the first great restaurant culture in the world, complete with cookbooks, gourmet diaries and guides to dining etiquette.

but while that would be transformational in the West, with its small alphabet, in China, moveable type never took off to any great extent, its use limited by the nature of Chinese script, which required thousands of individual pieces of type. Woodblock printing continued to be widely used up until the end of the nineteenth century, and even today is still used in China for prestigious texts, deluxe productions and family genealogies, which are currently experiencing a revival.

From the mid-eleventh century the economic revolution that underpinned the Song state allowed it to maintain a huge army – perhaps the biggest the world had yet seen. By 1040, the regular army comprised 1.4 million men – over three times the size of the Roman army at its peak in the third century CE.

From autumn 1048 through 1049, standing waters were left in so many places that three seasons of crops were ruined; three harvest failures that led to apocalyptic stories of starvation and cannibalism.

The 1048 flood destroyed the indigenous water systems of huge swathes of northern China, in places erasing centuries of communal channel and dyke building, and in the end undermining the stability of the Song state.

The 1048 flood also had a massive effect on taxation: in the northern provinces tax revenues were reduced to a fifth of their pre-disaster levels.

Military expenditures, as well as the ongoing cost of the payments which Song China continued to make to her other neighbours, eventually absorbed up to three quarters of the government’s annual cash income. So, despite the flourishing economy, the government began to run out of money.

China’s first standing navy was created in 1132.

The first Chinese person to go to Western Europe travelled from Beijing to Bordeaux in the 1280s, attempting to negotiate an alliance between the rulers of Christian Europe and the Mongols against the Muslim Caliphate.

Northern China had been under non-Chinese rule for 300 years, but the south had never experienced foreign government and not once had China, in its entirety, been conquered by a foreign people.

The general consensus is that, though China’s population was around 120 million on the eve of the Mongol conquest around 1200, it was only half that number by the late 1300s. Data from Mongol censuses suggest the main losses took place after 1290. So the population loss in the last three decades of Mongol rule could easily have matched the estimate that one third of the population died during the Black Death in Europe.

Hongwu’s tax system did indeed generate gigantic amounts of paperwork. The records for the entire population were stored by the Finance Ministry on three islands in the Xuanwu lake in Nanjing, curated by Finance Ministry staff. Each time the national census was carried out, thirty rooms had to be added to the archives to accommodate the new records. Though largely destroyed at the time of the Manchu conquest in 1645, it was perhaps the greatest archival project in history before modern times.

None of this should be seen as exploration. All these routes had long been travelled by Arab navigators. The Chinese themselves had first gone to East Africa as early as the Tang dynasty. In some places, such as the Straits of Malacca, there was a deliberate effort to develop commercial entrepots.

The voyages, then, were to advertise Chinese power, exact tribute and open up new trade routes, and in particular, to get the states of Southeast Asia to acknowledge the power and majesty of the Ming.

Modern theories that the Ming ‘treasure ships’ could have exceeded 400 feet in length are rejected by all experts in naval technology, as the size of wooden ships was always limited by the length of trees available for the keel. For sailing in heavy seas, a single strongly protected scarf-jointed keel is the most that shipwrights judge acceptable for safety. According to today’s traditional shipbuilders in Fujian, this would allow a boat, in Chinese junk style, to be between 200 and 240 feet long, a size that would fit with the find in one of the Nanjing basins, of a 35-foot stern rudder post.

The Confucian ethic was the cultivation of the Middle Kingdom, not the conquest or domination of other peoples. China was civilisation. Why go to all this effort and expense to make contact with, say, Africa? In the end, the Confucian bureaucracy and the Ministry of Finance complained that the enterprise brought no profit and was enormously expensive.

So we should see the voyages as motivated neither by exploration, nor by conquest; let alone as mere flag waving. Instead, they were part of a sustained attempt to establish China as a maritime power with a network of commercial links across the South China Sea and into the Indian Ocean.

There were also pressing political and military reasons for giving up on sea power. In the 1430s, the threat was growing by land from China’s old enemies, the Mongols. Out to the north, Ming armies made almost annual expeditions beyond the mountains into the vast steppe lands of Mongolia. Then, in 1449, the Zhengtong emperor was defeated in battle near Beijing and captured by the Mongols. The greatest military fiasco in the Ming period, this led to a massive rebuilding of the Great Wall into the form we see today, as well as a new mood of defensiveness and retrenchment.

From a starting point in which merchants occupied the lowest rung of the ideal social structure propounded by the Ming’s founding emperor, by the seventeenth century commerce was a profession in its own right and all aspects of culture, from artworks, ceramics, books and fashion, to education and leisure services, were commercial commodities.

Qing society had many features of the European Enlightenment: banks, trading guilds, charitable institutions, widespread access to education, scientific and literary clubs.

Like the Mongols, the Manchus would always be seen as foreigners, and there would be risings urging the restoration of the Ming until the very end of the Qing empire. Among the secret societies behind many of the peasant revolts of the Qing period – the White Turbans, the Red Scarves, the White Lotus, the Boxers, or the 1910 rising in Changsha witnessed by Mao Zedong – the watchword was still ‘Restore the Ming’.

The Manchus’ great project would be not only the creation of China’s largest empire, but the re-establishment of the Confucian ethos of China. They would rebuild the state and its culture by being almost more Chinese than the Chinese.

Over this time, China’s borders expanded to incorporate nearly twice as much territory as the Ming dynasty had ruled, making it the largest unitary empire in history. And there were no serious domestic or external rivals to challenge Manchu rule.

at home the Qing lacked competitive contenders. They had fought many regional wars around their borders from Mongolia to Burma, but had no overwhelming need to improve their military technology to conquer relatively backward inner Asian peoples and to enforce their hegemony over parts of Korea, Tibet, Xinjiang and Greater Mongolia.

Effectively, there are two canons in Chinese literature. Each is defined by the language in which it is written: the classical literary language of China, and the vernacular. Xueqin was a champion of vernacular literature.

His predecessor, Yongzheng, had battled corruption and tax evasion, but Qianlong reversed his prudent fiscal policies, and with tax levels frozen since Kangxi’s days, from the 1780s the state’s finances became precarious while it experienced a rapid population rise. Civil servants and magistrates were underpaid, bribery and extortion were habitual, and rebellions in the outer provinces now began to occur with growing frequency.

In the eighteenth century they had enthusiastically engaged with Western ideas in science and art; emperors had even had their portraits painted by European artists. They were especially interested in military technology; indeed, perhaps what the emperor really wanted was guns and artillery, which were not on offer. But Chinese wariness of European trade, and the fear of importing European ideas, cosmologies and morals, seem to have outweighed other considerations.

For all its glories, therefore, the empire was not in good shape. Population rise, inflation and a decrease in tax revenues, combined with the enormous cost of maintaining the ruling class and the imperial structure in days of rampant corruption, created a tough situation for the many local governors, clerks and magistrates.

Attacks on intellectuals, book inquisitions and censorship had played a part in robbing China of intellectual vigour on the eve of her encounter with the West, while the unresolved issues of land use and population growth, together with economic stagnation, unemployment and an unfair tax system, meant that the country was heading for trouble in the next generation.

The most serious was the 1796–1804 White Lotus rebellion, which started as a tax protest and became an anti-Manchu revolt that led to 100,000 deaths. A millenarian rising incorporating many strange sects, in the early stages they defeated the imperial army, only later to be surrounded and crushed.

The Taiping had now gained power, but what would they do with it? It is a question faced by all of China’s revolutionaries. Once God’s kingdom on earth had been established in Nanjing, a blizzard of ideological pronouncements came pouring from the throne. In one of the book-production capitals of China they set up printing presses and a workshop for woodblock cutting; their publications included Taiping translations of the Old and New Testaments. They banned opium, tobacco, alcohol, footbinding, prostitution and gambling. Gender separation was enforced in public places and the death penalty introduced for sex between men. Most important of all, China was to be classless. Private ownership of property and land was abolished; both would be owned and distributed by the state.