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Background Books BACKGROUND BOOKS Mao and his colleagues were not the Frederic Wakeman, Jr. in The Fall of first to feel the weight of the 4,000 Imperial China (Free Press, 1975, years of recorded Chinese history. cloth; 1977, paper), culminated in Every leader since Sun Yat-sen 1900 with the "Boxer Rebellion," the (1866-1925) has sought to restore doomed attempt of a dying empire to China to its 11th-century imperial expel all foreigners. Hostilities ended eminence, when it was, according to when the troops of Britain, the historian Charles Hucker, "the most United States, France, Austria, Rus- populous, prosperous, and cultured sia, and Japan occupied Beijing (Pek- nation on earth." ing). The weakened Ching dynasty In China's Imperial Past: An In- was then battered by a string of re- troduction to Chinese History and volts and fell in 19 11. Culture (Stanford, 1979, Hucker The infant Republic of China, sees the 11th century as marking the founded in 1912, was as shaky as the end of China's adolescence. It was dynasty it replaced. For two decades, followed, he notes, by nine centuries hundreds of "warlords" - com- of "chastened, sober, often grim and manders of small personal armies drab maturity." controlling at most a province or two The causes of that languid decline - divided up a beleaguered China. are set forth by Mark Elvin, an Ox- The dozen years after 1916 saw the ford economic historian, in The Pat- formation and dissolution of 25 gov- tern of the Chinese Past (Stanford, ernments, notes Northwestern histo- 1973). Like the United States at the rian James E. Sheridan in China in end of the 19th century, China began Disintegration: The Republican Era to "fill up" with people. But rather in Chinese History, 1912- 1949 (Free than look to foreign outlets for its ex- Press, 1977, cloth & paper). panded economy as the Americans The "warlord era" ended in 1928 did, the xenophobic Chinese turned when Chiang Kai-shek unified China inward, reducing their overseas and established his capital in Nan- trade and contacts. jing (Nanking). Yet Chiang, says Ironically, China's economy was Sheridan, was never more than the revived by European and Japanese nominal ruler of a fragmented na- imperialism. Opening the country to tion. the world market in the middle of the Though hit by natural disasters (in 19th century, according to Elvin, led 1931, flooding of the Chang, or to rapid commercial and industrial Yangtze, River displaced 25 million growth. people) and plagued by the warlords, Seeing little of value in European the Communists. and the Japanese, civilization and dismayed by West- the Nationalist government ;as hurt ern encroachments on Chinese most by its own corruption. In sovereignity, the Chinese govern- 1931-32, barely half of the taxes as- ment tried to contain the movement sessed by the government actually and influence of Westerners. Their ef- arrived at the national treasury, ac- forts, observes Berkeley historian cording to Lloyd Eastman, a Univer- BACKGROUND BOOKS: MAO'S CHINA sity of Illinois historian. (Univ. of Calif., 1978), Suzanne Pep- Yet, Eastman argues in The Abor- per argues that Mao's popular appeal tive Revolution: China under resulted from his success in bringing Nationalist Rule, 1927- 1937 (Har- about land reform and from Chiang's vard, 1974), under Chiang, China be- failure to stop hyperinflation (prices came a modern nation: Law codes increased by 2,000 percent between were promulgated; the old exploita- 1937 and 1945). tive treaties with foreign powers In China: Tradition and Trans- were abrogated; school enrollment formation (Houghton, 1978), John nearly doubled. King Fairbank and Edwin 0. Reis- The 1937 Japanese invasion chauer, two of America's most dis- changed all that. Chiang retreated to tinguished Asia scholars, describe Chongqing (Chungking) in south- China's traditional dynastic cycle: "a western China, leaving most cities to heroic founding, a period of great the invaders and much of the north- power, then a long decline, and fi- ern countryside to the Communists. nally total collapse.'' The invasion also brought Ameri- From the day he proclaimed the can war correspondents. Fresh out of People's Republic in 1949, Mao tried Harvard, Theodore White was to postpone that cyclical decline by counted among the best of them. constantly re-creating the Com- Written with Annalee Jacoby, munist revolution. Maurice Meisner, White's Thunder Out of China a University of Wisconsin historian, (William Sloane, 1946; Da Capo re- observes in Mao's China: A History print, 1975) provides a vivid account of the People's Republic (Free Press, of a famine in Henan province. After 1977, cloth & paper) that Mao began watching the starving citizens of his efforts with broad land reform Zhengzhou literally eat dirt, White and agricultural collectivization. was served "one of the finest and The late 1950s brought the Hundred most sickening banquets I ever ate" Flowers movement and the Great by the city fathers. Leap Forward. Finally, in 1966, Mao While White covered the launched the Cultural Revolution. Nationalists, his fellow journalist The emblem of China in the 1960s Edgar Snow followed the Com- remains Quotations from Chairman munists into the countryside. In Mao Tse-tung (China Books, 1967), 1936, Snow caught up with them in the "little red book." More complete Yanan (Yenan). His glowing observa- is The Selected Works of Mao Tse- tions are preserved in Red Star Over tung (Foreign Languages Press, Bei- China (Random, 1938; Grove, rev. jing, 1960-77; Pergamon, 1977, cloth ed., 1968, cloth & paper; Bantam, & paper). These five volumes contain 1978, paper). Snow found the then the official, sanitized version of 43-year-old Mao Zedong "rather Lin- Mao's pre-1958 work. colnesque," a "plain-speaking and During the Cultural Revolution, plain-living" man who had a poten- China became "a nation of spies," tial for greatness. Mao reciprocated avers the narrator of one of the en- by telling Snow the story of his life. tries in Chen Jo-hsi's The Execution Four years after World War 11, of Mayor Yin and Other Stories from Chiang fled to Taiwan and Mao ruled the Great Proletarian Cultural Revo- the mainland. In Civil War in China: lution (Ind. Univ., 1978). Chen's The Political Struggle, 1945- 1949 fiction makes it clear that the revolu- BACKGROUND BOOKS: MAO'S CHINA tion touched every aspect of life: Par- jing's renewal of diplomatic ties with ents worry about their kindergar- Washington somehow implied the ten-age child's political record; a liberalization of China's economy, political pariah who commits suicide politics, and art. The thaw that came is said to have "terminated his ties in the wake of Mao's death in 1976 with the Party and the people." seemed at first to support that belief. The height of the Cultural Revolu- For a time, a few Chinese felt free to tion also saw the nadir of the PRC's speak their minds. It did not last. The image abroad. So notes newsman fiction, poetry, and essays in Litera- turned academic A. Doak Barnett in ture of the People's Republic of his lucid China and the Major Pow- China (Ind. Univ., 1980), edited by ers in East Asia (Brooking, 1977, Kai-yu Hsu, a scholar at San Fran- cloth & paper). Since 1949, Beijing cisco State University, offer few has tried to balance its dealings with surprises. "Steel is refined in the Moscow, Tokyo, and Washington, struggle of production," writes a observes Barnett. Always at odds People's Liberation Army poet, "and with one or another of those powers, poetry should also be refined and the PRC was, during the whirlwind honed in class struggle." era of the Cultural Revolution, on Such orthodoxy provoked Belgian unusually bad terms with all three. Sinologist Pierre Ryckmans to write For a time, it had only one foreign Chinese Shadows (Viking, 1977, ambassador, stationed in Cairo. cloth; Penguin, 1978, paper) under China's relations with the United the pseudonym "Simon Leys." States have been especially volatile. Ryckmans details 20 years of Maoist Within a year of the establishment of mayhem, scholars' suicides, and cul- the People's Republic, Mao sent tural destruction. 200,000 "volunteers" to fight the When the original French edition Americans and their allies in neigh- was published in 1974, the People's boring Korea. In 1971, however, dip- Republic was commonly portrayed lomatic reconciliation began even as in the Western press as a nation with the United States battled the Com- few noticeable blemishes. Today, munist North Vietnamese on China's however, Ryckman's criticisms seem southeastern border. The history of an eerie anticipation of the down- Sino-American difficulties is re- grading of Mao and Maoism by counted in detail in Congressional China's present rulers. Ryckman's Quarterly's China: U.S. Policy Since conclusion might give those men 1945 (Congressional Quarterly, 1980, pause: The Chinese people, he as- paper only). serts, "have buried 20 dynasties, they Some Americans assume that Bei- will also bury this one." EDITOR'S NOTE: Harry Harding and Ingrid Larsen, an administrative assistant of the Wilson Center's East Asia Program, suggested some of the titles mentioned in this essay. .
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