Count the present days until today arrives (The President of United States)
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In any case, I felt better with the public denunciation followed by a long silence from the Chinese Communist Party.
I know what they're thinking: they're ready to harden too, until the Western accounting poem fades into the Constitutional Logos and Chinese expansion continues in a second, sub judice phase, through procrastination and appeals. For decades, the Chinese have harbored a secret, lurking fire in their souls capable of tarnishing any Western counter-propaganda to the level of solid and sincere camaraderie. The construction of Chinese political thought is quite confusing. The survival of Confucianism in a society that claims to be modern is a reflection of this confusion. For two millennia, Confucianism provided the basis for institutional ideology in an imperialist regime that only completely disappeared in 1911. For decades afterward, Confucian thought was blamed for China's backwardness, and the "restoration of the Rites" was seen as the source of all its ills. In 1919, amid cries of "Down with Confucius and his thought," the iconoclastic movement emerged in this struggle. Between 1966 and 1976, the Cultural Revolution sought in every way to bury it as deeply as possible, culminating in anti-Confucianism in 1974 with the campaign against Lin Piao and Confucius, which we already discussed in the CIA report on historical psychic attacks. Incredibly, the same Confucianism persecuted in China reappeared in Japan in the late 1970s as the great philosophical engine of economic growth, spreading rapidly through the "four little dragons": South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Asian totalitarianism largely appropriated Confucian rhetoric in its official discourse, and in the 1980s, these values won over the People's Republic of China, which was struggling to rid itself of the Maoist vestiges of the Cultural Revolution. In 1984, Beijing created the Confucius Foundation, under the aegis of the highest Communist Party authorities. The bloody repression of the student protests for democracy in Tiananmen Square also bore an unmistakable Confucian mark. Chinese neo-authoritarianism, which rides on economic openness, is underpinned by Confucianism in its pursuit of family, the cultivation of hierarchical values, student motivation, a taste for persistent work, loving pragmatism, personal hygiene, and the ability to save more money than one spends; in addition to rice wines and delicious crayfish dumplings (soft, with a floury aftertaste). A blend of salt and spices! Thyme, perhaps cinnamon. Yangtze eels in garlic. Steamed ravioli in a large wooden bowl. And numerous other dishes. Steamed, fried, crispy bread: delicious! And great cigars.
Could it be possible (I wondered) that right now a kind of deep, sweet, resigned contentment will rain down on American minds like invisible radioactive cesium, in the silent listening of utopian imbecility?, greening the advertising smile of the same yellow advertisers with a repulsively meager policy of intention?, with newspaper rhetoric for everything, with Marxist skirmishes posing alongside stock market operators?
Right: my world resembles, at the moment, that of the great paranoids, I interpret it, I am actor and director at the same time, which aggravates my desire for heavy climates of failed diplomacy and political-commercial urgencies that allow me to "appear fiercely" at the "opportune moment".
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ResponderExcluirPost script
As the Japanese military challenge to Western dominance in East Asia went up in smoke, a new and more portentous challenge arose in that region, in the form of China's reconstitution as a modern state through a Chineseized version of Marxism-Leninism. Once the Japanese military challenge was defeated, what was imposed by this reconstitution became the single most important determinant of Western policy in the Far East. The immediate origins of this new challenge can be traced to the same bifurcation of Chinese and Japanese modernization trajectories that occurred in the wake of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894, and which had propelled Japan down the path of Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. Besides imposing on Chinese finances a crushing indemnity of 230 million taels, the Treaty of Shimonoseki obliged China to open several other ports not only to trade, but also to "industries and manufactures" ----- a concession made to Japan and which, by virtue of the most-favored-nation clause, was "ipso facto" extended to thirteen Western nations.
ResponderExcluirFurthermore, Chinese recognition of Japanese suzerainty in Korea and the cession of Chinese territories to Japan triggered a fierce struggle among the Western powers for exclusive spheres of influence over large swathes of Chinese territory. Thus, the centrifugal forces that had characterized Chinese modernization before the war received a tremendous boost from this war and its aftermath. Attempts to counter the empire's tendency toward territorial disintegration, undertaken by factions opposed to the Qing court, only made matters worse. The humiliation of defeat by a former tributary state and the ensuing struggle for exclusive spheres of influence prompted the young nominal emperor Guangxu to promulgate, in the summer of 1898, no fewer than 40 decrees, all aimed at a radical and comprehensive modernization of the Chinese state. The result, however, was a military coup orchestrated by the Queen Mother, Cixi, who wielded power behind the scenes.
ResponderExcluirThe revival of the Qing's fortunes, which Guangxu had sought through accelerated modernization, was pursued by Cixi through sponsoring an anti-foreign revolt, the Boxer Rebellion, which China waged and lost against the entire Western nation body (Fairbank). The new indemnity, a staggering 450 million taels, and the new restrictions on Chinese sovereignty imposed by the Boxer Protocol of 1901 paved the way for the final fall of dynastic rule in the 1911 Revolution and for the subsequent collapse of any semblance of centralized government in the era of military despots, from 1916 to 1927. Economically, the Boxer Protocol compounded the effects of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, undermining China's modernization efforts for decades. The loans taken out to pay reparations to the Japanese in 1895. "In 1902 these payments absorbed about 45 percent of the central government's revenue" (Thomas). Between 1895 and 1911, the combined cost of the two reparations was more than double the capital of all manufacturing enterprises founded in China by natives or foreigners between 1895 and 1913. Foreign investment more than doubled between 1902 and 1914, and again between 1914 and 1931.
ResponderExcluir'During the entire period 1902-1930, however, the capital leaving China in the form of 'repatriated profits' was 75 percent greater than that invested in the country by foreigners'' (Esherick). As a result of this drain of profits and taxes, ''(...) the industrial and transportation infrastructure in China on the eve of World War II was smaller, more unbalanced, and more fragmented than that of India, a colonial country with a smaller population'' (Bagchi). Politically, the Qing government ''was reduced to little more than a despised tax-collection agency for foreign powers'' (Esherick). Prevented by unequal treaties from raising tariffs, it was forced to raise taxes and reduce support for 'self-strengthening initiatives''. Worse still, constitutional reforms aimed at introducing a measure of representative government and winning the support of the upper class of landowners for the faltering regime through the creation of provincial assemblies failed. Provincial interests and authorities were quick to transform the assemblies into instruments for consolidating and legitimizing their autonomy from Beijing.
ResponderExcluirAs soon as the opportunity arose, the assemblies declared their independence from the central government, precipitating the Revolution of 1911 (So and Chiu). The Sino-Japanese War, therefore, left opposing legacies for China and Japan. Victory in the war propelled Japan onto the path of full sovereignty and respectability in the Western game of imperialist politics. Defeat plunged China even deeper into the path of imperial disintegration and foreign domination. Shortly before the collapse of the Boxer movement, Henri Borel, a well-informed Western observer, ventured a prediction that still frightens the West: "The revolutionary party tends to do exactly what the Japanese did: rid the country of all foreign influences and transform it into an independent power in the East. If the movement succeeds, the West will be practically finished, and the future will belong to China, and Japan to the East" (quoted in Romein). The movement was unsuccessful, and the future belonged to the West for another century. But, as Jan Romein noted after quoting Borel, in a space of a mere fifty years, after hitting rock bottom of national humiliation, China has re-emerged as an autonomous power.
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ResponderExcluir"Behind the rebellious Boxers, with their primitive swords, loomed, as in Chinese shadow theater, the gigantic figure of Sun Yat-sen; behind him loomed that of Marshal Chiang Kai-shek; and behind the marshal, that of Mao Tzu." To this we must add that, behind the two great transitions of this Chinese shadow theater play---from the Boxers to Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek to Mao----the shadow of Japan was far greater than that of any Western country. Behind Sun's rise was the shadow of Japan's victory over Russia in 1905---the same year that Sun became head of the Revolutionary Alliance, at a meeting of Chinese students in Tokyo. Behind Mao's rise lay the shadow of the Japanese seizure of Manchuria in 1931-32, the expansion of its sphere of influence into northern China in 1934, and its seizure of China's coastal regions in 1937-38. In the period between Sun's rise and Mao's, there was the era of military despots in China (1916-1927) and the transformation of Japan from the principal foreign champion of Chinese nationalism—as it still was on the eve of the 1911 Revolution—to its greatest enemy.
Thus, the changing relationship between China and Japan, under the impact of their incorporation into the Eurocentric interstate system, paved the way for the evolution of the Chinese national liberation movement. But this very evolution—the nature of the movement's responses to the challenges posed by the rise of Japanese imperialism and the effectiveness of these responses in achieving the movement's goals—was determined primarily by the movement's relationship to Chinese society, on the one hand, and to world politics, on the other. As for the movement's relationship to world politics, the most important influence, without a shadow of a doubt, was that exerted by Marxism-Leninism, as instituted by the Russian Revolution of 1917. In its original Soviet form, Marxism-Leninism probably played a greater role in reinvigorating Sun's Guomindang in the 1920s than in aiding the subsequent rise to power of Mao's Chinese Communist Party. By 1922, when he joined forces with the Comintern and began reorganizing the Guomindang along Soviet lines, Sun had demonstrated his preeminence as China's nationalist leader, but he had also demonstrated his incompetence to complete the Revolution.
ResponderExcluirAccording to Fairbank: "The Guomindang ideology, much needed to inspire student activists, consisted nominally of Sun Yat-sen's Three People's Principles (nationalism, people's rights or democracy, and people's livelihood), but these were actually more of a party platform (a set of goals) than an ideology (a theory of history). The Guomindang achieved no more than regional military despotism in Guangzhou until, in 1923, it allied with the Soviet Union, reorganized along Soviet lines, created an indoctrinated party army, and formed a United Front with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The four years of Soviet aid and CCP collaboration, together with Marxist-Leninist patriotic animosity toward the domestic "feudalism" of the military despots and the "imperialism" of foreign nations, contributed to bringing the Guomindang to power. Sun did not live to see the fruits of the Guomindang's reorganization along Leninist lines or the United Front policy with the CCP.
ResponderExcluirIn a bloody act of betrayal, in April 1927, Chiang Kai-shek attacked and decimated the trade unions of the communist leadership that had seized control of Shanghai, and then proceeded to expel the Chinese communists from his newly formed Nanking government and institute terror against communists nationwide. This reversal of Sun's United Front policy led to the recognition of Chiang Kai-shek's Nanking government by the imperialist nations in 1928, but "tended to eliminate the revolutionary spirit of the Guomindang. It soon realized that it was on the defensive against both the CCP and Japan" (Fairbank). The Japanese offensive was not long in coming. But before the CCP could effectively replace the Guomindang as the leader of the national liberation movements, its ideology and organization had to become an organic expression of the revolutionary forces within Chinese society itself.
ResponderExcluirThis transformation produced a distinctive Chinese brand of Marxism-Leninism and eventually brought the CCP to power. It began with the formation of the Red Army, soon after Chinag Kai-shek's break with the CCP, but only reached its full potential after Japan seized China's coastal regions. This transformation had two related aspects. First, although the Leninist principle of the vanguard party was preserved, the insurrectionary impulse of Leninist theory was abandoned. In the deeply fragmented state structure of the China of military despots and the Guomindang, there was no "Winter Palace" to be stormed (as we have seen elsewhere), or rather, there were too many such palaces for any insurrectionary strategy to succeed. Thus, the insurrectionary aspects of Leninist theory were replaced by what Mao later theorized as ''the line of the masses''---the idea that the vanguard Party should be not only the Master but also the disciple of the masses.
ResponderExcluir"This concept of the masses for the masses" (Fairbank notes) "was, in fact, a kind of democracy adapted to the Chinese tradition, in which the representative of the upper class governed best when he held the true interests of the local population at heart and thus governed in their name." Second, and more important, in seeking a social base, the CCP prioritized the peasantry rather than Marx and Lenin's "revolutionary class" (the urban proletariat). The communist-led massacre of workers in Shanghai in 1927 had demonstrated that the coastal regions, where the bulk of the urban proletariat was concentrated, were too treacherous a terrain for challenging foreign domination and the Guomindang's hegemony over the rapidly expanding Chinese bourgeoisie. The recognition of the Guomindang government by foreign nations the following year made the situation in these regions even more dire for the CCP than before. Driven away from the headquarters of capitalist expansion by the Guomindang armies, trained and equipped by the West, the CCP and the Red Army were left with little alternative but to establish their bases among the peasants of poor and remote areas.
ResponderExcluirThe result, in Mark Selden's famous characterization, was "a two-way socialization process," by which the party-army molded the lower classes of rural Chinese society into a powerful revolutionary force and, in turn, was shaped by the aspirations and values of these classes. The war with Japan gave a powerful impetus to this two-way socialization process, transforming it from a merely local force into one of global significance. By the time of Japan's surrender in 1945, Mao's party-army dominated nearly 100 million people and was in a position to win the subsequent civil war, which ended with the defeat of the Guomindang. The challenge to Western domination that arose from the CCP's dual victory—against Japan and the Guomindang—was fundamentally different from the Japanese military challenge that had just been ended by the United States' strategic nuclear bombings. The Japanese challenge had been based on Wei Yuan's idea of using Western military technology against the West. As noted earlier, it failed primarily because Japanese advances in this technology failed to keep pace with new advances from the West.
ResponderExcluirBut it also failed because it aroused counterforces in East Asia that were as firmly opposed to Japanese military supremacy as they were to Western supremacy. When the Japanese challenge collapsed, these counterforces stood firm to prevent the reestablishment of Western dominance under American hegemony. This new challenge was not based on Wei Yuan's idea of using Western military technology to control the West. Although a minimum of proficiency in the use of these technologies was essential for its success, the new challenge was based predominantly on Hong Xiuquan's idea of using Western ideology to control the West. Hong had attempted this with a Chineseized version of Christianity and had failed. Mao, following in Sun's footsteps, tried with a Chineseized version of Marxism-Leninism and succeeded.
ResponderExcluirBetween Hong Kong's failure and Mao's success, a century passed, during which the West besieged the former center of the East Asian world system, forcibly imposed a major reorganization on it, but never managed to become hegemonic, except in the narrow and contradictory sense of having drawn Japan onto the path of industrialized warfare and China onto the path of socialist revolution. This type of leadership is what we call leadership against the leader's will, because, over time, it tends to intensify the competition for power and, thus, tends to reduce rather than increase the power of the hegemonic nation. Japanese advances in acquiring Western military technology intensified the competition, and the declining Western hegemon was the first to fail.
ResponderExcluirBy the 1930s, for all practical purposes, Japan had eclipsed Britain as the dominant power in the East Asian region. In the intensified competition that resulted from China's advances in acquiring Western revolutionary ideology, it was Japan itself that failed. This left the rising Western hegemon (the United States) and a new China face to face, in a struggle for centrality in East Asia that has shaped trends and events in that region ever since.
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