The Story of China: A portrait of a civilisation and its people

by Michael Wood

And all of it driven by the personality of Mao himself, centre of a ruler-cult that in some respects recalls that of the sage-emperors of the past.

Seen in this light today, we can see that Mao’s appeal was on many levels. His credentials as a revolutionary spoke for themselves. His utopian dreams, which chimed with ancient currents of Chinese thought, were at first hugely popular among the lower classes who had always been downtrodden. He came to power after a long period of ‘national humiliation’ and the breakdown of the modern state, so strong rule was much desired. In that light, the adoration of Mao can be understood.

The natural outcome was the dictatorship of a single man which, in the words of a contemporary Chinese historian who lived through the Cultural Revolution, became ‘very frightening, where terror envelops the entire society, suffocating the entire nation’s ability to think’, and in the end ‘the attempt to create utopia on earth by using these dictatorial powers brought about disastrous consequences’.

That said, it would be a great mistake – and a Western-centric one – to view all of Chinese civilisation and history as a story of unrelieved totalitarian oppression.

The balance sheet on his rule is still contested; perhaps it is too early to tell. As an interim verdict, the party stalwart Chen Yun put it succinctly: ‘Had Mao died in 1956 he would be an immortal; in 1966 still a great man, but flawed. But he died in 1976. Alas, what can one say?’

In a revolution two things must be avoided: You must not move with excessive haste; and you must not use excessive ruthlessness against the people. The revolution must correspond to a higher truth. A revolution not founded on inner truth will come to grief for in the end the people will support only what they feel in their hearts to be just.

But in 1979, their new leader Deng Xiaoping announced a ‘Reform and Opening Up’ policy, turning his back on communism. So began an unparalleled economic and social transformation.

On many reckonings China already has the biggest economy on the planet, and is back on the world stage as a great power.

At 3.43 am on 28 July, the Tangshan earthquake struck. It lasted twenty-three seconds. Witnesses more than 60 miles away saw a red glow in the sky and heard a distant roar.

The seismic wave of energy was, it was said, 400 times that of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. Within minutes the centre of the city was a scene of total devastation, looking as if it had indeed suffered a nuclear blast.

Tangshan, whose buildings were largely made of wood, brick and cheap concrete, had been obliterated. That day, 85 per cent of the buildings were demolished, and more went in a series of aftershocks through the next day and into the autumn. The death toll has never been established; the official estimate was at least a quarter of a million; others put it at more than 655,000.

More than 100 miles away in Beijing, 10 per cent of the buildings were damaged and many people died.

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.

Deng presents us with a paradox, then, which none of his modern biographers has been able to resolve, perhaps because he left no diaries or letters, let alone a personal memoir.

Purged twice by Mao during the Cultural Revolution, Deng’s amazing career would have three comebacks.

During the Cultural Revolution, his son was imprisoned by the Red Guards, tortured and thrown out of a fourth-floor window leaving him paralysed (he later become an important fighter for disability rights in China).

So how did the biggest change in China’s history begin?

In early 1976, Deng had been savagely criticised and then removed from power shortly before Mao’s death by the Chairman’s old comrades, the ‘Gang of Four’, but in July 1977 he was reinstated and, from then on, all eyes were on him.

His goal was to use capitalism to build a socialist society, while not loosening the dictatorship of the party.

Deng understood this and was not so blinded by ideology that he did not see the need for fundamental change. He began to push through reform in several areas, including the law, while being careful not to criticise Mao directly.

Things now moved fast. In mid-September, Deng, who was nearly seventy-five years old, went on a tour of northeast China to ‘light the spark’.

In her tiny apartment in a block of flats in Shanghai, for example, Rao Meitang, now a canteen worker, wrote a letter to her husband, who was in the twentieth year of his re-education in the Anhui countryside: ‘We’ve rented a TV; the screen is nine inches wide but fine if you are just watching at home.’

Reading Meitang’s letters, one feels the astonishing patience and stoicism of the Chinese people, and the optimism in the air of the post-Mao age.

On 24 November, eighteen of the local farmers, heads of families, met in that mud-brick farmhouse at the far end of the village to sign a secret agreement to divide the land of the local people’s commune into family plots. For one of the farmers, Yan Jinchang, ‘it was just heart-breaking. If we didn’t do so, we would starve to death. If we did, we’d take a risk. Eventually we chose to go down this road. Even with the threat of prison or death, we divided the land. To end starvation.’

Within two years, collective farming right across China was abandoned, resulting in a huge increase in agricultural productivity.

The Communist Party Works Conference took place from 10 November to 15 December 1978.

Most of all, what concerned him was the closing of the Chinese mind. ‘Today’, he began, ‘I mainly want to talk about one question, how to emancipate our minds… seek the true path from facts and form a united view on how to face the future.’

The headline topics in his handwritten notes can be reduced to certain key ideas which together form the blueprint for today’s China: Free our minds from ideology Promote democracy inside the party and in the legal system Review the past to guide the future Curb excessive bureaucracy Allow some regions and enterprises to get rich first

Then, on 1 January 1979, after months of secret diplomacy, the US announced a major change in foreign policy, downgrading its relationship with Taiwan and recognising the People’s Republic of China, thus ending three decades of antagonism.

In early 1979, therefore, the stage was set for the reforms.

‘If Guangdong was an independent country’, he told Deng, ‘and I was the leader left to get on with it, I could make huge changes in a few years.’ Deng agreed and, although he couldn’t supply funding, he was happy to sign off on a policy giving Guangdong the status of ‘Special Economic Zone’.

Thus China embarked on an economic and social experiment mixing the communist command economy with the energy of capitalist entrepreneurship.

Within a decade, this tension reached breaking point. By early 1988, the reform stalled and economic indicators were poor. The production of staple crops was declining and prices were on the rise.

The new entrepreneurial developments, therefore, were taking place in an increasingly tense and problematic economic situation, with real splits in the ideology at the top of the party, and in early 1989 these issues were being aired openly in the Chinese press.

The breaking point came early in 1989, as calls for more political openness grew louder.

Tiananmen Square 1989 is still a controversial event in the history of modern China, one that remains very difficult to talk about in official circles or in the Chinese media.

With the PLA troops stationed in Beijing reluctant to confront the demonstrators, the leadership now brought in units from distant provinces who were told the demonstrators were agitating to overthrow the state. Six generals protested, but their letter was suppressed.

The loss of life across the city ran into hundreds, according to the government, but may have been two or three thousand, mainly ordinary working-class citizens of Beijing.

This was intended to be the last word on the Tiananmen tragedy. Four important pointers for the future emerge from the records of this meeting. 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. These remain the party’s credo today.

His legacy has been overshadowed in the West by the events of 1989, but of all national leaders in the twentieth century, he did most to improve the lives of his people, who, let us not forget, make up one fifth of humanity. Indeed, more than any other individual perhaps, he changed the course of history.

Their era saw the return to China of Hong Kong and Macao from British and Portuguese rule respectively.

And at the start of the new millennium, as new Chinese tech companies like Alibaba, Huawei and Tencent reached out across the world, increased prosperity at home saw the growth of a huge Chinese middle class. History was on the move.

Charter 08 was signed by over 300 Chinese intellectuals, human rights activists, lawyers, poets and artists, most of them living inside China.

The charter met with a swift, nervous reaction from China’s rulers. State media were forbidden to report it, arrests and interrogations followed, and one of the authors, Liu Xiaobo, was later sentenced to eleven years in prison for ‘inciting subversion of state power’ (Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2010, Liu would die in custody in 2017).

With communism abolished, and Marxist theory discarded, what did the Communist Party actually stand for? If its only goal was to keep power by fostering the pursuit of materialism, was this not indeed the betrayal not only of the people, but of the greatness of Chinese civilisation itself?

To the outside observer in late 2012, when Xi took over, it was not clear which way the new leadership would take the country, whether indeed Deng’s path of economic reform might at last continue into the realm of politics. But within a year or two the signs became clear. Xi himself, as characterised by one US diplomat, was ‘repulsed by the all-encompassing commercialization of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveaux riches, official corruption, loss of values, dignity, and self-respect’.

Behind this was the question of what the party stood for. ‘Ever since Mao’s day, and the beginning of Reform and Opening Up,’ Xi said, ‘we have talked about a “crisis of faith”, the sense that rapid growth and political turmoil have cut China off from its moral history.’ The answer was to renew the ideology, and the source of renewal would not be Western liberal ideals; it lay, Xi thought, in a re-energised party and in the rediscovery of the greatness of Chinese civilisation.

Since then Xi has pursued this goal, deploying both hard and soft power to assert the pre-eminence of the party, and backing the massive growth of internal security and surveillance technology.

At home, the state has become more and more intrusive in people’s lives, particularly so in places like Xinjiang, where the current clampdown on the Uighur minority has seen a massive assault on Muslim culture and local languages, with blanket facial recognition technology and mass incarceration disturbingly similar to Mao’s prison and re-education camps.

as ‘Document Number 9’,