In Conversation: Kerry Brown on China

IN CONVERSATION WITH KERRY BROWN

6 August 2020

Your latest book China, for Polity, covers the history of China from the 20th Century to the present day, what drew you to write the book? What have you found in the process of your research that surprised you about China’s recent history?

The exercise of trying to put this very complex and varied history into one manageable framework that only took up 45,000 words was the main thing – it made me look for lines of continuity and connections. The usual approach would be to see pre and post 1978 modern history in the People’s Republic as somehow falling into wholly different eras.

I was trying to find what would be the link between these ostensibly very different eras in the country’s development and reflected on how much renewal and renaissance of the idea of a Chinese nation through modernisation and development was important over both periods, even though the means used to achieve this were very different. The concept of renewal meant that I was able to acknowledge the radical differences between Maoist and post-Maoist China, while also recognising the deeper structural connections.

Following the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, you highlight the roles played by Sun Yat-sen, Chang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. How important were these figures in shaping contemporary China and its march to modernity? What role does each man’s legacy play today in mainland China and Taiwan respectively?

Each of these individuals contributed to the China that we see today – even though Sun Yat-sen died before he could see much of his nationalist vision achieved, and Chiang from 1949 developed a very different strand of Chinese nationalism in Taiwan. Each of them unpacked, and added to, the notion of what China as a nation meant – and China as an aspiring modern nation. Their mission, in very different ways, and through almost wholly mutually distinctive ideological language and concepts, was very similar – to supply unity and coherence around what it meant in the modern world to say `China’ and mean something. For Sun, famously, China was like `grains of sand’.

That notion of something too diverse, too complicated by its own very rich and varied histories, to be easily encapsulated in ways that meant it would mean much, emotionally or intellectually, to modern inhabitants across the country, was a problem they deployed their very different backgrounds and beliefs on. Their conclusion was of course radically different – particularly between Chiang and Mao. But the key thing is that they were fighting on a common battleground – that there was a modern notion of Chinese nationalism, and that it could be articulated and make sense. In that sense, the final confrontation in the civil war between the nationalist and the communist vision for this meant that, while there was nothing preordained about the defeat of Chiang, once his forces were defeated, the Communist nationalist vision became the dominant one.

The question is whether in the 21st Century it will prevail in Taiwan. At the moment, that looks very remote. We live in a world therefore where there remain two powerful, and very different, versions of Chinese nationalism.

Can you outline China’s post-civil war condition both in terms of people’s wellbeing and its global standing. How did it reconstruct its society and economy under Mao and the Party? What was China's role in the world during this period, and how did the conflicts in Korea and Taiwan impact mainland China?

In 1949, in terms of human development and industrial and hard infrastructure, the People’s Republic of China was a place marked by the deep impact of almost two decades of international and domestic conflict. The average life expectancy was 32 for men, largely due to high levels of infant mortality. It was a country with few living in the cities, and with deep and extensive poverty – even poorer per capita than India. It was also a place where the borders of the country were still not well defined, and where the USSR forces still maintained a presence in the northeast, in places like Dalian.

The 1950s, therefore, were a period of critical reconstruction – or at least the attempt to reconstruct. This was helped by the USSR, and impeded by the Korean War from 1950 to 1953. It was an era of largely unified political action in China, despite the first rectification campaigns around the Three and Five Antis early in the decade. Although part of this was from heavy use of propaganda afterwards, the early 1950s, because they had followed a period of so much instability and uncertainty, were relatively successful ones. These are usually recognised as the years of Mao’s main successes. Even, very briefly, the issue of Taiwan seemed in reach of resolution – though this was to be scuppered by the Korean War. It is little wonder that today these figures in the Party’s collective memory or almost akin to a Golden Age, even though they were a time too of huge campaigns against landlords, and rising tensions with the US and, in the end, the USSR.

You make clear in the book that during this period China was faced with waves of dissent. How damaging was the Sino-Soviet split for China and how extreme was the level of international isolation and domestic challenge faced by Mao Zedong from within the Party? In addition — how damaged was Mao’s standing as a result of the failures of the Great Leap Forward?

The decade after 1956 figures as one where much of the optimism and sense of purpose and unity of the era that preceded it slowly dissipated. One could say that the main reason for this was a huge sense of overreach – a country fired up by the Utopianism of Mao, and the sense that it could now do anything, with or without the help of others. The Party too became more entrenched, making deeper division lines between its supporters and its dissenters as a result of the Hundred Flowers Movement in 1957 and then the Anti-Rightist purge over the following year.

Of all the calamities, the one that had the deepest impact was the great famine in the early 1960s. The work of scholars like Ralph Thaxton and Yang Jisheng has shown just how tragic, and profound, this experience was to prove, even though the definitive number of fatalities has never been issued – and might never be possible to calculate. Whether ten, thirty or, as some claim, over 50 million people died, the ways in which this event touched the lives of almost everyone is something that leaves a profound memory stain to this day. The remarkable thing is that Mao was damaged, but not wholly defeated, by the fall out of this, and was able to make his political come back in 1966. The Great Famines will go down as the greatest mistake of the Party in its stewardship of China, and much of that must lie at the feet of its most important leader then – Mao Zedong. This is something that even the 1981 resolution on its own history issued by the Party Central Committee does not attempt to do.

What role did the Cultural Revolution play in Mao’s ability to govern and can you expand on the cost both in lives lost and regime stability? In terms of legacy, how do you view the Cultural Revolution and its effect on the Party’s current leadership?

The Cultural Revolution remains a perplexing, often difficult to understand and describe event. This is because it operated as a number of different campaigns, and over a period in which each of these changed, so we are really dealing more with a constellation of events, rather than one single one, even though the master narrative of national renewal and attempts to deal with the burden and weight of China’s ancient culture were so important. We can say today that the Cultural Revolution as an intra elite political struggle is well, albeit not fully, understood, and that elements of its manifestation at the provincial level have also been described and studied. I refer to some of these works in my book, but there are many more.

Scholars like Song Yongyi from the US have gathered a vast amount of data on the events from 1966. Tsering Woeser has produced a very powerful partly written partly photographic account of the event as it happened in Tibet. There is work by Andrew Nathan in the US on how to understand agency, and the role of different actors and interest groups, in the Cultural Revolution. All of this amounts to giving the sense of an event which is hydra-headed, and multi-layered. It also helps us understand that many engaged in it with enthusiasm and idealism, even though many others suffered badly. The Cultural Revolution is a unique period in Chinese history because it can be described as one where there was a unified belief system – Mao Zedong Thought – verging on the quasi-religious. It also showed the deep tensions and divisions in Chinese society. It is no wonder that in recent years the Party has been loath to undertake too deep an examination of this period. But at some point, it will probably be necessary. The fact is that the China of today would be a very different place if there had been no Cultural Revolution.

How radical a departure from Maoism was the tolerance and later acceptance of markets under Deng Xiaoping? What battles, notably with the Gang of Four, did Deng need to engage in, to secure his leadership and what role did the Special Economic Zones play during this period of opening?

While many refer to the slogans that were used in the period after the death of Mao, when a major reorientation of the country was viewed as being pragmatic and adopting approaches that at least materially improved people’s daily lives, perhaps the most important was `liberate thought’ - `jiefang sixiang.’ The 1978 ethos, going forward, was to not commit to any very strict dogma. The main protagonists blamed for the Cultural Revolution were not so much accused of ideological crimes, but crimes of attitude. They were dogmatists. This means that they insisted on knowing the absolute truth, rather than finding it out. That simple philosophical change meant that the Deng leadership (from 1976 to 1981 it would better be characterised as the Hua Guofeng leadership with Deng taking an increasingly prominent role) was able to avoid divisive clashes with the more conservative part of the Party, but also start to open up new spaces for change, innovation, and reform.

This was all encapsulated in the key plenary of December 1978, and then documents that started to be issued over the following few years manifesting this change of attitude. It meant that the costs of innovating at lower levels of government, even when they failed, were not high – and that when there was a success, as in Sichuan and Anhui with the household responsibility rural reforms where farmers were able to sell surplus crops back to the state for a profit – it could then be permitted to other areas, and ultimately nationally. Special Economic Zones really represented this sense of areas and spaces for innovation and experimentation under control – these were interfaces with capitalist economies and economic ways and means beyond China’s borders, but in a way that meant they could be controlled and regimented.

How traumatic an event was Tiananmen Square for the people of China, but also the Communist leadership? How important is the reformist figure of Zhao Ziyang during this period? What role did Jiang Zemin play in stabilising the regime as Deng Xiaoping declined in health? What, to your mind, is Jiang’s legacy?

Tiananmen Square in 1989 was a moment of genuine crisis and instability in China, and while the main events in the capital are well known, it has to be remembered that the protests spread to over 250 cities across the country and that there were significant events in Shanghai, Tibet, and in cities like Changsha in Hunan. The build-up to the incident indicated divisions in the Party, and the military, and raised questions about the viability of the Party’s rule in China. The fact that for so many weeks over April and May of that year there seemed to be a stalemate in the Party elite, and that Zhao Ziyang, ostensibly the leader of the Party, ended up pitted against his Premier Li Peng, and the elders in the Central Leadership Group, showed that in the end, the `immortals’ who had been key to bringing the Party to power in China still maintained a decisive voice and that their mindset was still a harshly militaristic one.

For Deng, used to sending soldiers into battle in the wars of the 1940s and famous for being able to accept high levels of fatalities as long as victory was achieved, the deployment of troops on the Chinese people was accepted, in the end, as a price worth paying. Afterwards, he expressed regret but never apologised for what he had ordered. Party leaders till the present have never revisited the official judgment on the incident as a counter-revolutionary one. They probably also feel vindicated. The Party endured two tough years, economically, and politically, but it did not, as the USSR did, perish. For Party leaders, therefore, Deng made the right call. The issue, of course, is that for much of the rest of the world, what the Party did was morally repellent, and ushered in a new era where the more optimistic, idealistic attitude of the 1980s was replaced by a harder, more reserved tone of engagement. Zhao was never likely to be a reformer like Gorbachev, largely because he did not have anything like the powers that the Soviet leader did, and largely because we understand better now that Communism in terms of ideology and practice in China was very different to that practiced in the USSR.

For Jiang, despite being elevated as someone regarded as a lightweight and largely unknown because every other viable candidate was either discredited by the events of June 1989 or simply lacked elite level support, Jiang was to prove a shrewd choice. He had dealt with the 1989 events in Shanghai without any bloodshed and went on to post some major achievements – many of them with his formidable premier from 1998, Zhu Rongji. These were reform of state enterprises, stabilisation of the country, and restart of reform from 1991, a successful bid to enter the World Trade Organisation in 2001, and for hosting the Olympics. He also made sure the 1996 crisis in the Taiwan strait did not escalate into conflict, due to the first democratic elections held in Taiwan. Jiang was a significant and major leader.

How transformative was WTO membership for China's economy and how will history judge Hu Jintao's leadership? What role did the 2008 Olympics play in introducing Hu's China to the world? Was China's 'Peaceful Rise' during this decade truly ever peaceful?

WTO entry was to prove, somewhat to the surprise of many, transformative for China, Far from exposing its agricultural and other sectors to fierce external competition, it proved to offer pressure for resistance to change and inefficiency to be overcome. From 2002, China entered the era of explosive growth, quadrupling the size of its economy by 2012. This was despite the impact of the global financial crisis of 2008. Hu Jintao presided over this with an almost invisible persona. While problematic in terms of explaining China’s role and its significance to the outside world, in domestic issues the focus of his administration on addressing rural tax reform, and at least trying to shift policy from an obsession with growth at all costs to looking more at the quality of growth, were tactically important. In the end, however, Hu’s great achievement was simply to see China become economically more and more important and successful.

By 2010, it overtook Japan to be the world’s second-biggest economy. It was a place in an almost perpetual ferment of growth. The 2008 Olympics best symbolise this, with their vast opening ceremony, and China’s success at coming top of the medals tables. Hu’s China was a China of exploding wealth. Without that wealth, the China of confidence and greater global prominence under Xi would not be able to take place. Of course, whether such a power, under such a system, would be able to rise to be the world’s most powerful economy without some kind of turbulence and conflict with others remains, even today, an unanswered question. Hu’s efforts to articulate the notion of `peaceful rise’ and `harmonious society’ were at least attempts to try to explain how this might happen. The question was however whether they were realistic and viable.

Considering China’s recent roster of leaders, how powerful is Xi Jinping today and how important is Xi's discourse about the Chinese Dream and national rejuvenation as a mobilising political force within the Party?

Xi is a lucky leader in as much as he has inherited the achievements and the foundation of his predecessors. This is something he acknowledges up to a point in his speeches. Without the unifying achievement of Mao, the pragmatic engagement with western capitalist methods under Deng while not swerving from Communism with Chinese characteristics, and then the achievements of Jiang and Hu in terms of stabilising the country, and then allowing it to economically grow, Xi would not be able to deploy the confident tone he has been able to since coming to office in 2012. Xi has been called a new Mao, without any real recognition that the China of Mao was so different at least in terms of its economic, military, and financial capacity to that which exists today.

Xi Jinping in many ways has to deal with one issue – how to ensure that China maintains political unity under the system it has had in place since 1949, while also achieving the long-held objective of being a strong, rich nation – in a sense, his era is the one in which we can see if the Communist vision for nationalism with Chinese characteristics is really viable. Can China be both rich, and powerful, and communist, or does something have to change? At the moment, once could say that the court is out. Many are sceptical. And yet never has the country seemed so close to achieving what Xi has called the ‘China Dream.’ As part of that, while the ideology of Marxism Leninism serves as the basis of unified discourse within the Party elite, for the broader society Xi uses the language of nationalism. That too links him with his predecessors. The only real difference is that he talks on behalf of a China that is no longer a marginal actor but now represents a fifth of global GDP.

Looking to the future, how has COVID-19 affected China’s standing in the world and what are the implications for Xi Jinping's future as Party leader? Has COVID-19 damaged the Party’s standing among its citizens? Finally — do you think the pandemic has made a new Cold War between the West and Beijing more likely?

COVID-19 occurring the way it did, at the time it has, is truly a critical moment, and one of deep challenge and carrying major problems. The pandemic symbolises the ways that China can impact massively on the outside world whether that world wants this or not. Now it is no longer a case of needing to go to find China. China can come to find you. It is part of the global space, in good and not so good ways. The one thing it isn’t is avoidable. This means that attempts to create a new kind of Cold War are unlikely to be as neat, or as possible, like those the West deployed against the USSR. Firstly, China presents a much more formidable and complex challenge. It does not wish to export its ideology and belief system- perhaps the most that can be said for it is that it wants to have its mindset of self-interest be permissible, perhaps optimal and accepted by others. That runs against the more normative, values-driven sense of globalisation that has prevailed till now.

Secondly, China is far more successful at capitalism than the USSR ever was. Indeed, were it to become the world’s largest economy in the next decade it would show that a Communist country can be the greatest practitioner of capitalism. This upends many of the fondest tenets of modernity, where economic development is assumed to run alongside democratisation and the rise of a more represented middle class. Finally, China’s interests in climate change and development are interlinked with those of much of the rest of the world in ways that are sometimes aligned, sometimes opposed, but rarely straightforward to disaggregate. This makes the issue of China’s relations going into the future so hard to predict and feel complacent about.

It seems for much of modern history, the developed world could deal with a China which was often ailing and failing. The one thing it never thought it would have to deal with is a China that is succeeding. That is the greatest challenge of the present moment – and one about which there is no easy answer except to try to at least know more about this remarkable country and its culture, before starting to judge it.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.

Author biography

Kerry Brown is a Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute. He is currently working on a study of the Communist Party of China as a cultural movement. From 2012 to 2015, he was Professor of Chinese Politics and Director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia. Prior to this, he worked at Chatham House (2006 to 2012) as Senior Fellow and then Head of the Asia Programme. Meanwhile, from 2011 to 2014, he directed the Europe China Research and Advice Network (ECRAN), giving policy advice to the European External Action Service. From 1998 to 2005, he worked at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as First Secretary at the British Embassy in Beijing, and then as Head of the Indonesia, Philippine and East Timor Section. From 1994 to 1996, he lived in the Inner Mongolia region of China.

His latest book China (Polity Histories) was published in July 2020.

In Conversation9DLAugust 6, 2020China, India, Indian Ocean, Japan