The Five Waves of Chinese History

Think of Chinese history as a series of five waves that rise, crest, then crash. After the First Wave, all the crashes involve foreign “barbarian” invasions.

The key is to remember the barbarian crashes: Wave 2) Xianbei (they didn’t cause the crash – weak emperors and eunuchs did – but

they figure heavily in the Period of Disunity that follows the HanWave 3) Jin and MongolWave 4) Euro-American

Here they are. Look at the table first, then let yourself see the details of the story in the summaries that follow it. I’ll pay you if you tell me you gave this a couple of hours, and it didn’t help. And I’ll pay you if, 10 years from now, you email me and honestly say this “Five Waves” analogy didn’t stick in your head.

Wave DatesDynasties,

Rise to PeakCrash

1. Ancient2000-770 bce

(1800 yrs)Xia, Shang,

Western ZhouEastern Zhou / Warring States

Period

2. Classical220 bce – c. 600 ce

(800 yrs)Qin and Han

Period of Disunity: Three Kingdoms,

failed Jin Unification,Northern Invasion (Xianbei)

3. Medievalc. 600 – 1350

(750 yrs)Sui, Tang, Song/S.

SongJurchen Jin conquer north;Mongol Yuan conquers all

4. Early Modernc. 1350 – 1911

(650 yrs)Ming, Early Qing

Late Qing:Western Imperialists “carve up

China”

5. Late Modern1911 – present

(100 yrs and counting)

Nationalists (ROC)Communists (PRC)

Still rising….

Now drill deeper into each Wave below. Think, don’t memorize. Picture what’s happening. To help you, I’ve put the main developments under each title under two categories: 1) “Foundations Laid” describes the lasting contributions of the dynasties in that Wave; 2) “New Growths” describes innovations and new developments that appear in the wave. Again, picture them and watch the story evolve from Wave to Wave.

1

Wave 1 DatesDynasties,

Rise to PeakCrash

Ancient China2000-

220 b.c.Xia, Shang, Zhou Warring States Period

Foundations Laid: Cultural, social.

A. Cultural foundations 1. Shang: Writing, priest-kings, ancestor worship, ritual and family values

already rooted in the first dynasty. They’ll remain until 1911. No priestly class to rival king.

2. Western Zhou: a. Religion and Ideology: Tian and the Mandate of Heaven

Wen, Wu, and the Duke of Zhou end Shang Di-worship; Chinese theism ends here. (Several millenarian movements – Yellow Turbans, Red Turbans, European Christian Missionaries, Taiping movement – will seek to establish theism in the future, but they’ll all fail.) Zhou concepts of Tian and the Mandate of Heaven replace Shang theism. This is the virtue-based “political religion” that Confucius will champion – and that will ultimately guide Chinese politics from the Han to the Qing.

b. Literature: the Confucian ClassicsWestern Zhou produces Shujing (Book of Documents/Classic of History), Shijing (Book of Odes/Classic of Odes), The Book of Rites (Lijing), and The Book of Changes (Yijing). All will hold “Biblical” status in China for the next 3000 years – except the Chinese are free to criticize these classics rationally, and do so throughout their history.

3. Eastern Zhou (Warring States Period): a. Confucianism, Daoism and Legalism

The 100 Schools of Thought gives birth to what I call the “First Lotus Blossom” – world-historical philosophical traditions rising from the chaos. Confucian humanism and Daoist simplicity, calm, and harmony with Nature will guide China to this day.

i. Specific titles: Analects (Confucius), Dao De Jing (The Classic of the Way) by Laozi, and the Zhuangzi by, um, Zhuangzi.

b. Yin and Yang concepts emerge. China will think in terms of harmony of opposites, not conflict between them as in the Western concepts of “good and evil”.

B. Economic foundations 1. Silk, bronze, lacquer, and agriculture industries rise. Silk is China’s gold,

commercially, for the next 3,000 years.2. Agrarian over commercial values: business and the pursuit of excessive

wealth will be permitted, and obviously convenient, but without honor for the next 3,000 years – until Deng Xiaoping declares “To Get Rich is Glorious” in 1980.

2

Wave One, Discussion:Culturally, we have the invention of a form of writing that will make

possible the unifying all the earliest tribes into a single culture, despite their different languages, because the writing is pictographic, not alphabetical. You’re reading and writing pictures of ideas, not phonetic sounds, so it doesn’t matter what language you speak. It’s a stroke of luck that Europe, with its alphabet, didn’t have. “Cat” means nothing to a German, even if he can sound out the word, but the pictograph of a cat means “cat” to anybody who knows the pictograph, even people who speak different languages. Learn the writing, you’ve got unity with other tribes that do – even if they speak different languages.

We also have the literature that will shape the Chinese elite and, through them, the illiterate peasantry, for the rest of China’s history. The Confucian Classics will arguably shape Chinese behavior more powerfully than religious texts in other civilizations shape their followers’ behavior. The Chinese actually read their books, and practice their teachings daily. A walk through most non-Westernized areas in Singapore will show you that. Incense still burns for ancestors as a daily rite all over Asia.

Socially, we have the belief in ancestors that will make family the central value of Chinese civilization to this day – though modern industrialization and capitalism are weakening it significantly now.

Politically, we have a king who, fearing those ancestors’ powers after death, does his best not to anger them by performing rituals to appease them. The king is the ritual official, instead of priests, and this will keep Chinese politics free of a powerful priestly class for almost all of its future history. Though China will fight many wars in its history, none of them will be Holy Wars, a claim most other civilizations cannot make. When the Zhou add the Mandate of Heaven and Tian to the picture, that king adds to his duties not only being a good son to his ancestors, but also being a good father to his people. It also adds an unfortunate element of superstition that interprets natural disasters as a “report card” for a ruler, which will plague Chinese governments regularly as “China’s Sorrow” causes political sorrow when the people blame a ruler for a drought or flood. A final political weakness can possibly be seen in China’s dynastic system, which gives the throne to sons instead of others with more merit.

Economically, being a good father-king means keeping those people fed and protected – benevolence and virtue, in short. This is reflected in the Chinese values of agriculture and defense, and the ancient disdain for merchants and profit-seekers who, selfish and “parasitic” gain of unproductive buying and selling of things other people produce.

The Crash is caused by a political weakness: Zhou feudalism. It brings the Warring States. Qin Shihuangdi will solve that problem by laying the political foundation of a centralized, bureaucratic government in Wave 2.

3

Wave 2 DatesDynasties

Rise to PeakCrash

Classical China220 b.c.e. –c. 600 c.e.

Qin and HanPeriod of Disunity:

Xianbei conquer northFoundations LaidA. Political

1. Modern government: Qin Shihuangdi solves problem of feudalism with his centralized bureaucracy and abolition of the aristocracy. Feudalism in China ends.

2. Political Confucianism: Han Emperor Wudi solves the problem of Qin’s harsh Legalism by adopting Confucianism as the official Han ideology: scholar-officials serve the bureaucracy and advise the emperor, the “Son of Heaven.” Qin’s legalistic government solution is infused with the spirit of Confucianism and Taoism, and the Han Synthesis has done its work.

B. Economic1. Silk Road:

Wudi’s expansions secure it; a lasting source of revenues for most of the next 2,000 years.

2. State Control of Commerce: Wudi establishes precedent with monopolies of Salt and Iron markets. State control over markets will come and go over the millennia, but the precedent is set, so Communism finds fertile soil in China, and is not so radical at all, the way it is in the West, with its fetish for wealth and profit.

3. State Ownership of Land: Wang Mang establishes precedent by confiscating and re-distributing large estates to alleviate the rich-poor gap. He fails, but the precedent is set and, again, anticipates communism 2,000 years before Marx. (Ancient Rome had similar “proto-communist” reformers – the Gracchus brothers, for example – so this isn’t unique to China.)

New GrowthsA. Religion

1. Buddhism enters China in the late (Eastern) Han, and its popularity explodes during the Period of Disunity due to its appeal to the barbarian conquerors, women, and others.

B. Artistic and Cultural1. Literature:

a. Han Dynasty: HistoryHistorian Sima Qian’s Shiji (don’t confuse it with the Shijing), a.k.a. Records of the Grand Historian, saves pre-Qin history after Qin’s book-burning, and sets the standard for official histories for the next 2,000 years

b. Period of Disunity: Neo-Taoist Counter-Culture Writing Non-conformist, escapist literature is born: “Scholars without a cause” in the “Second Lotus Blossoming”: The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, Tao Qian, and Wang Xizhi’s “Orchid Pavilion”

2. Period of Disunity: Art With no good government to work for, these scholars also create calligraphy as a classic art

C. Technological1. Han Dynasty invents paper and a good hundred other things.

D. Social1. Territorial expansion: Han refugees settle the Yangtze for the first time during the

4

“crash” of barbarian invasions. Wave Two, Discussion:1. Political:

Rise to Peak: Qin unifies Warring States, creates modern empire: bureaucratic, centralized government that will survive almost unbroken until 1911. He divides his empire into Commanderies (provinces) and Prefectures (counties), all run by government officials taking orders from, and reporting to, the Emperor. This foundation lasts until a mere 100 years ago, when the Qing fell. Not a bad legacy.

The Han builds on Qin, but softens Legalism with Confucian administration. This, too, ends 99 years ago. Both started over 150 years before Jesus, which is jaw-dropping as a measure of their success – and both were admired by Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and Leibniz in the 1700s for how closely they approximated in reality the ideal utopia only imagined by Plato in the Republic: Philosopher-kings served by philosopher-officials, protecting their people with an army for defense, and limiting the appetites of the nation to what is healthy and necessary, not what is unhealthy but tempting to the unphilosophical masses.

So the Han sees 400 years of general prosperity (Silk Road trade) and unity – though Wang Mang’s reforms point to economic problems of land and taxation policies, and an inability to prevent the concentration of wealth and land in the hands of a small wealthy elite – until it hits its decline in the end.

Decline: the Dynastic Cycle ends with weak emperors (the curse of China’s dynastic system). Corrupt Inner Court eunuchs and rich-poor gap cause radical religious movements among the oppressed peasants (Way of Righteous Harmony and Yellow Turbans), whose rebellions are crushed, but by generals who turn on the emperor and declare three competing dynasties as warlords (Cao Cao and others begin the Three Kingdoms).

Crash: The Western Jin unites the Three Kingdoms, but fails when its feudal government leads to civil war. Barbarian tribes fill the power vacuum in the north, sending the Yellow River Chinese south to the Yangtze as refugees for the first of several times. Xianbei later conquers the Yellow River tribes for an interesting 150 years of Tianxia Sinification, ending when Wendi unites China and founds the Sui Dynasty – the start of Wave 3.

2. Cultural: Qin burns books, but during the Han, Sima Qian does the amazing thing

we read about in class: he writes a history that saves that burnt learning from oblivion. The Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian) sets the standard for the dozens of classic histories that will follow it over the next 2,000 years. He’s remarkably modern in his method, refusing to grant anything as true unless he’s satisfied by the evidence.

The Period of Disunity is “not Dark” – Chinese culture lives on and grows.

Buddhism enters China via the Silk Road during the Han, and spreads during Disunity due to several factors: its popularity with barbarians, who can’t easily read the Classics, and enjoy Buddhism’s universalism anyway (it’s harder to relate to Confucianism, since it’s so tied to Han Chinese history and ancestry); its popularity with women, to whom it offers more equality and hope than

5

Confucianism; and its appeal to disheartened Han Chinese, to whom it offers the hope of salvation and alleged certainties about the mystery of death that Confucianism and Daoism refuse to pretend to know.

Disunity also sees “Confucians without a cause” create a literary flowering in my “Second Lotus Blossoming” – those escapist essays we read, blending Confucian refinement with Daoist wit and harmony with nature (and with that lovely fondness for wine, calligraphy – not “women,” mind you, but poetry – and song). Those same writers – especially the “Preface to the Orchid Pavilion” author, Wang Xizhi – create the golden age of Chinese calligraphy.

(You don’t have to know this, but you should so you can love it: three hundred years later, Tang Emperor Taizong so loved Wang Xizhi’s writing and calligraphy that he sent an official to a monastery where an old monk had the original copy of the “Preface,” and told that official to bring that masterpiece back come hell or high water, which the official did – by tricking the old monk to leave the room to fetch something, and then grabbing the “Preface” and running away with it. Legend has it that Taizong loved it so much, he had the original buried with him. We only have copies.)

This story makes me love Tang Taizong, and the civilization that produced emperors of such a spirit. (Yeah, yeah, he was dishonest. But it was for love of beauty, so I can’t hate on him too much. It’s not like he was stealing an iPhone, cheating customers or governments on Wall Street, robbing a bank, or plundering Troy or Jerusalem. Beauty thieves are special.)

This isn’t going to be on the test, of course. But it’s awfully pleasant to think about anyway.

6

Wave 3 DatesDynasties

Rise to PeakCrash

Medieval China

c. 600 – 1350

Sui, Tang, Song/S. Song

Jurchen Jin conquers north;

Mongol Yuan conquers allNew growths:A. Economic miracle

1. Grand Canal, moveable type, printing press, mass publishing, commercial revolutions (paper money and credit, modern banking), agricultural innovation, rise of tea as China’s national drink (and, when England develops a taste for it a few centuries later, China’s national curse), Tang Silk Road trade, Song shipbuilding and Indian Ocean trade, mechanical engineering, steel production, suspension bridges, on and on.2. Population doubles from 50 million in early Tang to 100 million by 1,000

B. Political tragedy, then perfection1. Tang fatally weakened by the romantic story of Emperor Xuanzong, concubine Yang Guifei, and the An Lushan Rebellion.

a. Decline of central government causes growth in power of a military-

aristocratic elite. Rivals Confucian scholar-officials for power, threatens the

Confucian political order.2. Song establish Confucian Examinations as only route to official jobs. No corruption for 300 years. Military-aristocratic elite is civilized by the “honor economy” that grants status only to the scholarly literati who succeed at the exams. In short, the wealthy or military elite are tamed by scholarship and art. The next 1,000 years, from the Song to the Qing, will make China’s the most educated government in world history.3. Yuan Dynasty makes Beijing the capital for the first time. It remains so today, 700 years later.

C. Cultural and religious1. Tang multiculturalism and splendor in Chang’an. Religious tolerance and curiosity, cultural fusion in music, food, dance, fashion, sport, and art.2. Japan and Korea export Tang politics, culture, and the Chinese script to their countries.3. Jurchen and Mongol conquests sour China’s “openness” to foreigners

D. Artistic Golden Age1. Landscape Painting emerges2. Golden Age of lyric poetry (Li Po and Du Fu).

Wave 3, DiscussionSui Emperor Wendi – a rebel general of the now-sinified Xianbei – unifies

China after 400 years of disunity, and restores the Confucian Examination System. Han China is back (though with new genes in its pool).

7

But Wendi, like Qin Shihuangdi 800 years earlier, over-reaches. He overworks the people with the 1,000-mile Grand Canal – a brilliant economic and military move that linked the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers to enable faster transport of goods and troops between the north and south, and built in an amazing five years, using a million workers – and a million-man military campaign in Korea (which, equally amazing, and to the credit of Korean toughness, failed). Wendi’s dynasty, like Qin’s, is overthrown within four decades. The Tang take the Mandate.

As the Han built on the Qin, so the Tang builds on the Sui – and the Song later builds on the Tang. The Tang and Song create a 600-year period of high culture, prosperity, and multi-cultural openness. Advances are made in every imaginable sector: art, politics, agriculture, trade and commerce, technology, philosophy, literature, industry, mechanics, engineering.

Tang China, with its capital at Chang’an – today’s Xi’an, at the eastern end of the Silk Road and only a few miles from Qin Shihuangdi’s mercury-filled resting place – was the most advanced civilization in the world in its time, and Chang’an the largest city.

Unlike to all the foreigners trading and living in the capital, and its tolerance of their religions. You should also remember the porcelain sculptures and art: landscape painting rises in this wave, bringing out the Daoist nature-lover inside the Confucian soul, with those exquisite mist-crowned mountains cradling humans and other small animals in their valleys. Tang women dance their elegant long-sleeved numbers, but also play polo with men on horseback. Amazing acrobats and Kung Fu martial artists add their sparkle to the brilliance. Tang lyric poetry reached a Golden Age with Do Fu and Li Po, still recited by the likes of our little Hong Kong YouTube cutie today. (If you like poetry, the moonlit water in these poems is fine. You shouldn’t die without drinking it.)

Life was prosperous, literature and art and entertainment thrived in the cities, fashion was high, music blended international with native sounds (the first “world music” scene?), and politically, administration was good – especially under the most cultured Tang Emperor, Xuanzong, who both tamed some rebellious barbarians in war, and opened an imperial art academy in his court. Like Florence 800 years later in the Italian Renaissance, it brimmed with the cultural geniuses of his realm. By his time, the Tang capital was the New York City of the medieval world.

But this same Xuanzong brought on the Tang decline. His story-book infatuation with the lily-faced concubine Yang Guifei led him to reward her favorite barbarian general with too many soldiers, which that general used to rebel and sack the capital. This was the An Lushan Rebellion, and the Tang barely survived it. Xuanzong’s bodyguards strangled the concubine as they fled the city, and the doting old emperor fell into a depression over his bad judgment and gave up the throne to his heir. The Tang never recovered from this, because it had to reward its allies against An Lushan with semi-fiefs, which weakened the administration of the empire. The dynasty declined until the Song claimed the Mandate around 900, and quickly regained the upward momentum of Tang civilization before An Lushan – and pushed it higher.

8

Song foreign relations are especially interesting: they decide the best policy with the northern barbarians is to pay them tribute in exchange for peace. They still have a massive, well-equipped army just in case, but when the Jurchen nomads invade China – using Chinese weapons against the Chinese – those bad-a$$ horse-masters (don’t quote that in your essays) were more powerful still.

Midway through the Song, for the second time – this time it’s the Jurchens instead of the Xianbei – barbarians take the Yellow River. Also for the second time, the Han become refugees, fleeing south to the Yangtze in a mass exodus. Thus begins the Southern Song.

In true Daoist fashion, the Southern Song adapts to the commercially disastrous loss of the Silk Road by taking a “path of least resistance” in a new direction – the sea – and turns bad luck into good. The government prioritizes commercial shipbuilding, and soon China not only joins the Indian Ocean international trade network, but out-competes its Indian and Muslim rivals to dominate that trade. Southern Song government revenues from the sea trade will grow larger than their revenues from domestic trade and taxes. These ships will fund the bulk of government expenses, they’re so successful so quickly.

A tragic end: Many historians agree that the Southern Song Dynasty of 1100 c.e. bore many of the hallmarks of England 700 years later, when it underwent the Industrial Revolution that enabled it to conquer the world: a publishing explosion due to the printing press led to the spread of technological knowledge and the inventions of machines, pumps, steel. The coal and river-power England used in its first factories were also in abundant use in Song China. Advanced banking practices necessitated by the sea trade made capital and finance available for more enterprises. Mass production of books, china, silk, and other items took place in Song factories. As a sharp student said in class, “Give them 50 more years, and they may have industrialized 600 years before Europe.”

But they didn’t have 50 more years, despite the fact that no Dynastic Cycle nosedive brought their empire down. Song politics are the most boring in Chinese history, because the most honest and professional. No eunuch or concubine or empress problems, no significant corruption to speak of, no worthless daddy’s boy emperors. Historians consider this governing class among the most intelligent, ethical, and tasteful in world history.

The Southern Song ended because it was simply butchered, as was the rest of the known world, by the Mongol hordes of Kublai Khan, grandson of world-conquering Genghis.

And a staggering “What if?”: If the Mongols hadn’t cut off the Song in its prime, we might today have not the theoretical “Tianxia” we read about in class, but a real one instead of the (dis-) United Nations. The imagination reels, too, at the possible uses to which Song Confucians, instead of today’s capitalists, would have put modern industrial power. Would they have harnessed it for public good instead of private gain? Would they have limited it, out of their disdain for the “unnecessary,” to the production of goods that are necessary for the public good, thereby leaving more of earth’s surface unscarred by those rapacious machines disemboweling the earth to make what is so often merely next month’s junk? There’s no way we can know, of course – but there’s good reason to suspect today’s world would be a very different place, one perhaps less consumed with hyper-competition, hyper-stress, hyper-waste, and hyper-dependence on things for human happiness. (In view of the Confucian respect for education, one can

9

easily imagine classrooms with one teacher for every five or so students, studying vastly more interesting subjects, and developing vastly different skills that make humans independently happy, instead of miserably dependent on money for that happiness.)

Anyway, things didn’t turn out that way.

Instead, Kublai Khan employed Italian foreigner Marco Polo – able to safely travel across Eurasia due to the Pax Mongolica – in his court in Beijing, and Polo later co-authored a book about China and India that will launch Europe’s Age of Exploration. It inflamed the minds of Late Medieval Europe with a fever to find India and China for “God, Gold, and Glory” – though not necessarily in that order, as we see when the European explorers, traders, and missionaries finally find China in the next dynasty, the Ming.

But 100 years before Europe first appeared in the high seas, the Ming launched its own Age of Exploration – one as fatefully ill-timed, one might argue, as the Song Dynasty’s proto-industrial climb.

10

Wave 4 DatesDynasties

Rise to PeakCrash

Early Modern c. 1350 – 1911 Ming, QingWestern Imperialists

“carve up China”

Main Developments:

A. PoliticalMing:

1. Forbidden City in Beijing (Yongle): Ming’s new capital.2. Zheng He’s Voyages (Yongle): Tribute System diplomacy and trade relations.

Qing1. Manchus, descendents of the original Jurchens, take the Mandate from the Ming in 1644 – the time of the European Scientific Revolution. 2. Kang Xi and Qian Long together rule for 120 prosperous years.3. Macartney’s Embasy to Qianlong ends in failure4. Free Trader British Opium smuggling addicts much of China, drains its revenues5. The Crash: The Five Disasters of the Late Qing (1840-1900) – see discussion section for details

1. First Opium War2. Second Opium War3. Taiping Rebellion4. Sino-Japanese War5. Boxer Rebellion--The Qing is finished, though it won’t fall for another 11 years.

B. EconomicMing

1. Grand Canal extended to Beijing (Yongle)2. Great Wall renovated (Yongle)2. Population boom: Agricultural revolution doubles population by end of Ming, triples it by mid-Qing. Living standards fall by mid-Qing.3. European sea-traders find China, trade at Canton. British East India Company profits from good relations and mercantile monopoly. Huge European demand for Chinese silk, tea, and porcelain enriches both the traders and the Qing. England’s silver flows one way to China.

Qing1. Later capitalist traders push for free markets and end of Canton Policy.2. Opium trade after 1830 intensifies, reversing the flow of silver from China to England.3. China’s economy staggers under the costs of Opium War treaty payments and other “Five Disasters”. Western products, cheaper because mass-produced, drain more Chinese silver to the Imperialists.

C. Cultural and religiousMing

1. Matteo Ricci serves the late Ming court.Qing

1. Kang Xi expels missionaries after showdown with the Vatican2. Opium Wars force China to allow missionaries to preach.

11

Wave Four, Discussion:The Rise of the Ming:The Red Turbans revolt against the Yuan, and their orphaned peasant

leader, face pockmarked from childhood disease, establishes the Ming Dynasty as Emperor Hongwu. The Han are back on the throne. Since they didn’t eliminate the Mongols, but only chased them back up north – where they still remain a threat – the Ming builds the Forbidden City in Beijing to defend the northern frontier.

As if to announce to the rest of the world that the Han are back, the Yongle Emperor launches the Ming Treasure Fleets under Admiral Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch, around 1400 (Yongle also commissions an ambitious 11,000-volume encyclopedia of Chinese literature – by comparison, Diderot’s celebrated Encyclopedia during the French Enlightenment 300 years later totals 35 volumes). Thirty years and seven expeditions later, the campaigns are canceled. Their objective was both political and economic. Politically, the spectacle of these “floating cities” of 400 ships, the largest Dragon Ships among them larger than a football field, carrying up to 30,000 troops, scientists, historians, naturalists, and merchants, served notice to the lands they visited that Han China was back, and was once again the Middle Kingdom. To have seen these fleets rise on the horizon and approach one’s city must have felt like watching an alien invasion. Yet when they beached, instead of warriors spilling forth, Zheng He came with chests stuffed with silk, books, china, and other largesse, offered in exchange for tributary alliance with the local ruler, who in return simply had to acknowledge China’s superior power and civilization. In sum, it was diplomacy made peaceful by a show, on the one hand, of magnanimous generosity, but of an overwhelmingly intimidating force on the other. Formal tributary relations were established, alliances formed, and trade agreements signed and sealed. The Tribute System extended from Japan to Southeast Asia, India, Arabia, and East Africa. The Middle Kingdom was back.

Zheng He never conquered a land he visited, though on one occasion in Ceylon – today’s Sri Lanka – he did assist one side in a civil war, and help it win. Nor did the Chinese ever force their cultural values on the foreign lands. (Zheng He himself, being a Muslim in charge of China’s largest fleet in history, speaks for itself about China’s “live and let live” attitude toward different cultures. No “Whish and Whoosh” stuff for this civilization.)

The unfortunate fact of the matter, though, was that China was so economically advanced and self-sufficient, it didn’t gain much economically from these expeditions. Their expenses weren’t offset by their profits. This, as well as Confucian mistrust of the eunuch-managed fleets and arguments that the money was better spent defending against a Mongol return and finishing the construction of the Forbidden City, persuaded the next Ming emperor to cancel the voyages and dismantle the ships.

Fifty years later, this decision would prove fateful – when the Europeans finally round Africa, find the Indian Ocean (with the help of Chinese compasses) and arrive on the scene. In stark contrast to the Ming, Portuguese and Spanish explorers bring canons (using Chinese gunpowder) to conquer the foreigners, and Jesuit missionaries to convert them, often by force, to Christianity. (The hated Muslims, after all, were trading in these seas, and Europe still had a grudge left over from the 200-year Crusades they’d fought and lost a century earlier).

12

When the Europeans finally find China, their trade is limited to the port at Canton, near Hong Kong, and overseen by the Cohong merchants working for the imperial government. The first traders, the Portuguese, are seen as strange sea-barbarians (relative to Asian civilization at the time, this was largely accurate), and given an isolated piece of rock in the sea called Macao to keep them from disturbing the Indian and Muslim traders living outside Canton itself. They were a pretty brutish bunch, the Portuguese sailors of that time. This is all in the 1500s.

Things get more interesting when England arrives in the 1700s. Mercantile – not yet free-trade capitalist – England’s British East India Company has a monopoly on Asian trade, so it has no problems with the restrictions of the Canton Policy. Canton was considered the cushiest trade outpost for a Westerner to live in because of the conveniences provided by the Ming and Qing: translators, servants, porters, etc. Both Mercantile Europe and China were based on government control of markets, so their economic policies were more similar than different.

Besides the traders came the preachers, and Matteo Ricci is the first Jesuit in China. Relations start good: Ricci seems to become a bit sinified after learning Mandarin enough to read and, by all appearance, really learn Confucianism. He comes to respect it, and tries to spread Christianity by stressing the similarities between Jesus and Confucius. The Ming court hires him as an advisor, the emperor is fascinated by the discoveries of the scientific revolution, and by Ricci’s photographic memory.

Things sour when other Catholic missionary groups, the Dominicans and Franciscans, arrive, and it all comes to a head after the Ming falls – for typical dynastic cycle reasons we don’t need to bother with: weak, self-indulgent emperors who let their eunuchs do the governing while they themselves wallowed in pleasure.

The Manchu coalition, led by descendents of the Jurchens who conquered the northern half of Song China, found the Qing Dynasty in 1644. Not since the Mongols have “barbarians” ruled all of China. First emperors Kangxi and Qianlong rule 60 years each, and very impressively. They’re sinified Confucians, poets and calligraphers, readers of the classics, and nomadic horse-mastering bad-a$$es all in one. They commission massive literary projects employing thousands of scholars, including, under Qianlong, European artists to design and decorate some buildings in the Summer Palace. Many of our portraits of Qianlong were painted by an Italian artist.

By the mid-1700s – now the time of the European Enlightenment, with its political ideas of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” and it’s radically new economic ideas of Adam Smith’s capitalist bible, The Wealth of Nations – China’s relations with the West begin to sour on religious, political, and economic fronts.

Religiously, Kangxi’s showdown with the Vatican over the Names and Rites Controversies prompts him to expel most missionaries and restrict the movement and action of those who remain.

Economically, the British East India Company loses its monopoly on Asian trade as English mercantilism – government-controlled trade – evolves into free

13

market capitalism. Free traders now compete with it for a cut of the China trade, and push for end of the restrictive Canton Policy.

Politically, European nations have entered the age of modern Western diplomacy, in which each country considers all others its equal, and carries out relations through ambassadors living in each capital city.

So England sends Lord Macartney to visit Qianlong and propose he Westernize in both ways: allow free trade, and allow an embassy in Beijing. From the first attempted kowtow, things don’t go swimmingly. Qianlong, good Confucian that he is, acknowledges that the products Macartney shows him are “ingenious toys,” but shows little interest in them. They’re “unnecessary” products to a China that has everything it “needs,” and that regards unnecessary trade as socially undesirable. He rejects both requests.

Britain takes this very seriously, since its importation of Chinese tea (for the crumpets, you know, at High Tea), silk, and porcelain is draining its silver reserves. It wants China to open those markets. Over the next 30 years, England will reverse that trade imbalance by smuggling opium into China, and addicting a large swathe of its people to the drug.

That was around 1790, when America was 14 years old, and the French Revolution and Napoleon rocked Europe with terror. England forgets China for the next 30 years of Napoleonic Wars, but when it comes back in the 1830s – with stronger weapons developed to win those wars at home – China will be weaker. Qianlong will be long-dead, and his successor half the man his father was.

Western Imperialism inflicts five disasters, from 1840 to 1900, that end China’s 2,000-year-old imperial civilization:

1. First Opium War (1840): The Treay of Nanking forces China to increase number of trade ports (5 “treaty ports), grants extraterritoriality to Westerners (they can break Chinese law without punishment by Chinese courts), gives Hong Kong to England, allows Westerners to build neighborhoods called “Concessions” in the treaty ports that are run by their own laws and officers (call them “mini-colonies”). (The French Concession in Shanghai today is one of the most fashionable downtown districts.) Other Western nations demand same deal in these “unequal treaties.”

2. Taiping Rebellion (1850-64): After an apparent nervous breakdown following his third or fourth failure of the Civil Service Exams, Hong Xiuquan had a vision in which the Christian God and Jesus appeared to him and told him he was Jesus’ little brother with a mission from God: expel the foreign Qing and end poverty and inequality forever. Hong destroys Confucian and Taoist temples as “idolatry,” and leads a 14-year civil war from Jiangxi north to the Yangtze, where he captures Nanking and makes it his capital. Besides the carnage and death, the economic destruction of the Yangtze Valley rice fields was devastating – as was the damage to the reputation of the Qing and its army for its inability to quickly put down this peasant revolt – without help from the armies of the hated Westerners in Shanghai. Costs: around 25

14

million dead, agriculture along the Yangtze “rice basket” devastated. Qing looks weak to its people.

3. Second Opium War (1860): The Treaty of Tianjin adds more treaty ports; makes opium legal; gives Christian missionaries and Western traders freedom to travel and proselytize anywhere in China. British military considers punishing the Qing by burning down the Forbidden City, but instead burns the Summer Palace.

4. Sino-Japanese War (1895): China’s modern navy, built during the Self-Strengthening Movement of the ‘70s and ‘80s, is crushed by Japan’s. The defeat is the ultimate humiliation for the Qing because Japan has always been seen as a vassal state in the Tribute System. Little brother has humiliated big brother. The Qing mandate is seriously threatened.

5. Boxer Uprising (1900). Finally, the Boxer Rebellion, an anti-Christian movement caused by popular hatred for Chinese “Rice Christians” and the missionaries who influenced them, led to a foreign invasion and occupation of the Forbidden City by a multinational force of the Imperialist countries in 1900. The Forbidden City is looted and plundered, and a rape-and-killing spree by the Western armies shocks the Japanese (who brought “comfort women” with them, mind you). China is forced to pay astronomical reparations – valued at their entire GDP for 2 years – over the next 50 years. It will seriously hamper the Nationalist government’s efforts to create order during the Republican Era.

Within 11 years, the Qing would fall with a whimper and Wave 5 would begin: The Republican and Communist era.

15

Wave 5 DatesDynasties,

Rise to PeakCrash

Late Modern1911 – present

(100 yrs and counting)

Nationalists (ROC)

Communists (PRC)

Still rising….

REPUBLIC OF CHINA/NATIONALIST ERA: RISE OF THE COMMUNISTSUnited Front #1: The Northern Campaign: Nationalists and Communists v.

WarlordsCivil War #1: Nationalists v. Communists: Shanghai Massacre & Extermination

Campaigns United Front #2: War of Resistance: Nationalists and Communists v. Japanese invasion (WW II)

Civil War #2: Nationalists v. Communists: Communist VictoryPEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA: RISE OF DENG AND THE RIGHTISTS

1. The Mao Years, 1949-76:1950-53: Korean War1953-58: Mao in Glory: the First Five-Year Plan1958-61: Mao in Disgrace: Great Leap Forward and Three Bitter Years1961-65: The Rightists Take Charge1966-76: Mao’s Last Stand: the Cultural Revolution

2. The Deng Years, 1980-present1980: Rightists Triumphant: the Four Modernizations1980-89: Special Economic Zones and One-Party Capitalism1989: Tiananmen Square Protest and Crackdown1990-present: Post-Tiananmen Economic Miracle

STILL RISING….

Wave Five, Discussion: (You’ve outlined this, so I’ll keep it brief.)

The last 100 years have seen China rise, as it has so many times before, from disunity and chaos following foreign invasions to renewed unity and prosperity.

The Republic of China (The Nationalist Era), 1911-1949:

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend” – this sums up the broad shape of the 38-year history of Nationalist China.

The two mortal enemies of the era were the capitalist Nationalists (Guomindang), led by Jiang Kaishek, and the Chinese Communists led by Mao Zedong.

These mortal enemies joined forces to form a United Front against a greater common enemy twice – first, the warlords in the Northern Campaign, and second, the Japanese invaders during World War II (1937-45).

After both of these fights were over, the two sides turned on each other in two civil wars.

The first civil war was from 1926-37, when the Nationalists first massacred the Communists at the end of the Northern Campaign, then tried to exterminate Mao’s Jiangxi Soviet during the Extermination Campaigns of

16

1930-34, and the Long March of 1935. Though the Communists suffered severe losses, Mao’s leadership throughout the ordeal earned him control of the Communist movement.

The second civil war started as soon as the Second United Front against Japan ended in 1945. By 1949, the Communists had won, and declared the People’s Republic of China. Jiang and the Nationalists fled to Taiwan to set up the Republic of China there. Upon his arrival, Jiang declared his intention to re-take the mainland.

Why did the Communists win? In the simplest terms, they had more popular support among the masses, and it only grew as the Nationalists grew more desperate to wipe the Communists out. Jiang Kaishek’s reluctance to fight the Japanese invaders until forced to in the Xi’an Incident also lost him popularity, as did his government’s corruption.

It’s worth pausing to look back from 1949 to the twelve decades preceding it, and take in just how much suffering and humiliation China had undergone, practically decade by decade, during that 120 years. The First Opium War: 1840. The Second Opium War: 1850. The Taiping Rebellion: 1850-64. The Sino-Japanese War: 1895. The Boxer Rebellion: 1900. The Warlord Era: 1916-27. The First Civil War: 1927-37. The Second Sino-Japanese War (WW II): 1937-45. The Second Civil War: 1945-49. Knowing this history changes the way you see the senior citizens in today’s China.

That quick review also serves to show the challenges the Communists faced in building a new nation. Mao had inherited a nation with its farmland and infrastructure devastated by war, its population largely illiterate, and its treasury broken – because Jiang had taken all of China’s gold reserves with him to Taiwan when he fled.

The People’s Republic of China (The Communist Era), 1949 to present:

Today’s People’s Republic turned 60 years old last year. It’s helpful to split those years neatly in half, with the first 30 years being the Mao years, and the last 30 being the Deng years.

The Mao years can be seen as the Idealistic Stage, with its effort to forge a pure Communism of absolute equality in a classless society, in which individuals work cooperatively for the common good, and not competitively for private advantage.

That idealism got off to a promising start for most of the first decade of Mao’s rule in the ‘50s. Government land reforms and equality laws (especially for women) earned the enthusiastic loyalty of the masses, which they showed in the economic miracle of the First Five Year Plan, as well as in the military miracle when that same peasant army fought the Americans to a stalemate in the Korean War. Diplomatically, China’s alliance with the Soviet Union provided it a valuable trade and technology partner to help in its modernization attempts.

But the disaster of the Second Five Year Plan –the Great Leap Forward – and the Three Bitter Years of drought and flood shattered all of this hope. Inflated reports of grain production by local party officials that led to the

17

starvation of up to 30 million peasants damaged both the loyalty of the peasants to their government, and the confidence of that government in its managerial competence.

Many of Mao’s fellow leaders in the government, the “Rightists” including Deng Xiaoping among them, drew the lesson from this debacle that serious reforms were needed: a professional, technocratic managerial class was needed to oversee future projects, and peasant morale should be lifted by the reward of extra pay for higher production. Both of these ideas went against Mao’s idealistic Communist vision: a managerial class would form an elite that contradicted the goal of a classless society, while extra pay based on production would encourage competition and selfishness instead of social altruism. This disagreement set the stage for the great cataclysm of the following decade: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Mao and Deng, fellow survivors of the Jiangxi Soviet and the Long March, suddenly found themselves facing off in a battle for the future of Chinese communism.

The Cultural Revolution raged from 1966 until Mao’s death in 1976, the year of Mao’s death. Four years later, in 1980, Deng became the government leader and launched China on the path it’s still following today.

The Deng years can be seen as the Pragmatic Stage. “Pragmatism” is the belief that “whatever works in practice is good,” regardless of whether it fits in your theory, and Deng famously summed this view up when, discussing whether his reforms were communist or capitalist, he quipped: “It doesn’t matter if it’s a black cat or a white cat. As long as it catches mice, it’s a good cat.”

Under Deng’s leadership, the Communist government introduced the capitalist reforms that Mao had earlier fought to prevent in the Cultural Revolution. Private property and limited private enterprise was allowed, workers received bonus pay for more productive work, a professional managerial class was finally created and, most radically of all, Special Economic Zones were created to invite foreign capitalist enterprises to set up factories in China. The foreign companies were required to invest capital to modernize China in these zones, and to share their technology secrets and managerial techniques with the government so that China could use them to create more competitive native industries; in exchange, China provided cheap labor and other incentives to enhance the foreign companies’ profits. (Your iPhones are made in China. Chinese factories get $2 profit from every unit, and Apple keeps the other $100-plus. The Chinese proletariat working to make these things gets maybe $30/month to live on.)

Deng’s pragmatic approach produced a political-economic system entirely new in the world: an authoritarian single-party Communist dictatorship managing a mixed capitalist-socialist economy. For hundreds of millions of Chinese, it meant a rise into the middle class and escape from poverty; for hundreds of millions of others, it meant unemployment, loss of health care, grinding exploitation, and growing insecurity.

That insecurity grew to a head eight years into Deng’s reforms, with the Tiananmen Square protests. The issues of the protest varied: many were protesting for the end of one-party rule and democratic elections, while many others demanded a return to the social security guaranteed during Mao’s “pure” communist years. Regardless, Deng found himself in a situation uncannily similar

18

to Mao’s after the Great Leap Forward: like Mao, Deng had delivered an economic miracle within eight years, and also like Mao, Deng found his leadership threatened due to unforeseen difficulties that led to inflation and other problems. And just as Mao finally resorted to violence in the Cultural Revolution to defend his vision, so, too did Deng: after three months of warning the protesters to stop causing “disharmony,” Deng called in the Army to squash the protests. The 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, flashed across television screens around the world, made China a pariah nation and seriously blackened Deng’s image.

But only for a short while. Foreign businesses found the Special Economic Zones too tempting to resist, and their devotion to profit trumped their concern for individual liberties. With their contributions back in full force, Deng’s government continued to lead China higher in its economic ascent.

From the standpoint of 1989, the Tiananmen crackdown was monstrous. From the standpoint of today, it’s not so simple: Western democracies are suffering social, economic, and political decline, while China’s single-party dictatorship is outperforming them all. More Chinese have been lifted out of poverty since Tiananmen, but more have been left behind as well.

China’s party leaders today are not the peasant veterans of the Mao generation, but instead highly educated technocrats with expertise in engineering, trade and finance, science. Every five years, this inner circle – “Inner Court”? – of highly-educated leaders vote to decide who will next lead the party and the nation, arguably solving the dynastic succession policy that plagued so many of China’s earlier dynasties during the Imperial era. It’s a solution that pro-democracy factions criticize. Whether they will succeed in lifting all the Chinese out of poverty remains to be seen, but as things stand now, there are no signs that democracy will come to China any time soon.

19