The ‘Making’ of ‘Modern China’

So for two thousand odd years the Chinese culture area had been generally more or less united and unbowed. And it had been a flourishing area in most ways. The Middle Kingdom was the usual state of China; it was in the middle of the world and the best state to which all others were formally tributaries. But something strange was coming and that was the science and modernity and equal feelings of superiority – in shorthand, the guns – of European powers. Never mind that gunpowder had been invented in China, it was now to be successfully used to intimidate China, classic Sun Zi methods were employed. There was a bit of opium in there, too.

China had to decide what was going on and also think what was to be done about it. The task fell mainly firstly to the Qing rulers. They ruled from the 17^th to the 20^th Centuries. The last in the line attempted modernisation and many of China’s intellectuals also absorbed European ideas that they sought to use to make China strong. China had nevertheless come under virtually the complete control of a number of European governments including Russia’s and the Japanese government.

Regardless of these city developments, China at the beginning of the 20^th Century was a mostly traditional subsistence-based agrarian society despite containing many large especially coastal cities. Men were obliged to wear the queue as a symbol of subservience to the Manchurian Qing dynasty. The revolt of 1911 and overthrow of the dynasty led to China’s first weak republic. Men everywhere cut off their queues. Before many decades would pass, Mao and Chiang Kai-shek and their armies would be duking it out for the final control of the land.

China remains quite agrarian today but it is following the worldwide modernising trend towards urbanisation. Managing this development has naturally occupied much of the attention of various Chinese governments of the 20^th and 21^st Centuries. The other tension in modern Chinese history has mainly occupied the communist period of the late 20^th Century and into this century and that is the tension between revolutionary Maoist/Trotskyite development and Dengist capitalist development with Chinese features. From around 1976 to 1978, Dengism has been in the ascendancy. I’ll get into more on all of that later.

The first government of 1911 was ineffective and many regional warlords effectively ruled their regions. It was a very violent and complex time. Warlords varied from bloodthirsty tyrants holding large landholdings to Christian generals often at war with each other. Foreign powers supported the ruling warlords in their spheres of influence and foreigners, called ‘foreign devils’ by many Chinese because they were seen as working to keep China weak and divided, lived in the foreign ‘concessions’.

That was China's parlous state as Europe entered into its first major 20th Century civil war; a war that would shake up the world ultimately including China.