芦笛
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作者：芦笛 在 驴鸣镇 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
顷见网友站内短信，说找不到我过去贴的China ABC了，我自己用文章搜索找了一下也没有，兹再度贴出，谢谢那位网友的垂青：）
China ABC: A living fossil for centuries
Early this century, a Western traveler visited China and found that everything he saw there was opposite to the West: when the Chinese greeted each other, they shook their own hands instead of each others' (which is more hygienic, incidentally); when they felt hot, they drank hot tea rather than cold drinks to cool themselves; they bore family names before given names; the time order they used was of year-month-date-time; similarly, their addresses were in the order of country-province-city-street; they wrote from right to left; and finally, they avenged their enemies not by killing them, as a more impulsive and less tactical Westerner would do, but by hanging themselves at the doorsteps of their enemies' houses. As for the last point, I will save the explanation for the moment.
Actually, a similar discovery had already been made several decades earlier by the first Chinese diplomat to England, a Mr. Liu. He observed that in England, political decisions were made by the people, not by the monarch; wives were more respected than husbands; meat was cut after, not before, being cooked; and a book was read from the last not the first page (Apparently, Mr. Liu did not know that a Western book was opened from the wrong side). Furthermore, Mr. Liu tried to give a scientific explanation for all these differences. All these phenomena, he concluded, resulted from the fact that England and China were located in the two opposite poles of the globe and thus everything here in England, from the sky to the earth, was upside down.
To these observations (some of which have become obsolete), I would add two more based on my own painful experience. First, when the Chinese laugh, it does not always mean that they are amused. Therefore, please do not get mad if you see your Chinese friends smiling or laughing when they have just caused big trouble. By laughing, they just want to ease the atmosphere and conceal their embarrassment or feelings of guilt. Second, what greatly appeals to Westerners does not necessarily apply to an Oriental mind. Thus, a promise for eternal life may well scare away a Chinese audience, since lots of them believe that life is suffering and happiness is just a delusion. Therefore, the Jehovah Witness people should think of something better to preach to them.
In essence, the Western and the Chinese civilizations are opposite to each other. While the former is active, outward and aggressive, the latter is passive, inward and withering (but never dying). While the Western society is ever changing and developing, always driven by unlimited desires for more material comforts and curiosity for the unknown, the Chinese society, until the last century, had been a living fossil without fundamental change in its political system since 221 BC, maintained by a complex network of philosophical and religious doctrines which have become the eternal mentality of the nation. An European always looks forward and outward, believing life is fun. To make his life real fun, he is ready to embrace any innovation, to sail to the other side of the globe and to invade remote countries, rob the local people and convert them to his own values and his way of life. This attitude eventually leads to the Big Bang of Western civilization all over the world. But to the Chinese, life is a painful duty predetermined by their families and society. An individual lives his life not for himself, but for others. Success can only be achieved through existing channels and any active attempt to break away from the stereotype will be stopped and punished by the whole society. Consequently, creativity and originality can hardly find a place in the society.
Now let us see how such an attitude was formed and what trouble it has got us into in modern times.
The country and the people
The word "China" does not exist in the Chinese dictionary. We never call our country China, though there was a dynasty named "Qin" (pronounced as "chin", 221-206 BC) and some scholars believe that China got her Western name because of this. Anyway, for thousands of years, we had names for dynasties but not a formal name for our country, as China always considered herself to be the whole world and the centre of the universe. Not until 1911 was our country formally named "Zhong Guo", meaning "the Middle Kingdom" as generally translated, or more precisely, the Central State.
This cliché can be found in any book about China, although our Sinologists might not know that in 725 AD, a great Chinese astronomer had actually directed a field investigation to determine the precise location of the very centre of the universe in China. Although the team he led measured in the process the length of longitude for the first time in history, I do not know whether they achieved their original objective satisfactorily. But I do know that the ancient Chinese used to believe that Luoyang, one of the capitals of ancient China, was the centre of the universe. This was an important reason for emperors to choose that city as their capital so that tributes from governors and kings could cover equal distances and thus the emperor could show his fairness to his subjects.
The overwhelming majority of Chinese people who live in China proper (including Taiwan and other islands) call themselves Han, after the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD). This ethnic group represents the Western concept of Chinese people. The Han people believe that they are all descendants of the legendary Emperors Yan and Huang, although they have actually been mixed up with invading nomads from the north quite a few times. The northern and southern Han people are separated roughly by the Yangtze River and the difference between them is quite conspicuous (not to Westerners, of course). In general, Northerners are bigger and fairer and Southerners shorter and darker. The language is also different between the north and south. While the Northerners speak less varied dialects and can understand each other, the Southerners speak a great variety of dialects, understanding each other only through learnt Mandarin, the "standard" Chinese based on Beijing dialect. Their diets are different, too, with the Northerners eating flour products such as steamed-bread and noodles with no chilli in them and the Southerners rice and spicy dishes. More importantly, the Northerners tend to be simpler, braver and more honest and the Southerners more sophisticated and shrewder. Perhaps for this reason, the north always conquered the south with only two exceptions in history.
Despite all these differences, however, there are some physical features shared by both the Northerners and Southerners. Apart from slit eyes, yellow skin, flat faces, dark hair and eyes, they have subcutaneous fatty tissue in their eyelids, front teeth which are spade-shaped with both sides bent slightly inwards and a blue birth mark like a bruise on the buttocks which fades when they grow up. Some of these features are unique to the Chinese.
Some Sinologists argue that both a single Han people and a single Chinese language are just a myth made up by the communists. This seems to be a conclusion based on superficial observations. True, the Han people are not ethnically pure and the difference between their spoken languages can be greater than that between Spanish and Italian. However, they are culturally identical. They share an almost identical mentality and they believe they come from the same ancestors and identify themselves as a single nationality. In fact, I do not know of any other nation like the Han people who would put the unification of the country above anything else, including individual freedom and prosperity. As for the language, Chinese, with its all dialects, is a monosyllabic language. It can only be written using the existing Chinese characters which are a complicated set of visual symbols which cannot be replaced by any alphabet. The dependence on vision rather than sound means that like Arabian numbers, Chinese characters can be pronounced with far greater flexibility than a spelled language. This explains how the Vietnamese, Koreans and Japanese could use them as their own written language. Thus, the Han people are bound together not only by their historical inheritance and mentality, but also by their written language.
Apart from China proper, the Chinese empire includes Xinjiang in the northwest inhabited mainly by Muslims, Inner Mongolia in the north and Tibet in the southwest. These areas, contrary to the general belief in the West, were not conquered by the Communist troops. In fact, they were incorporated into the Chinese empire by the Manchus, after this ethnic group rose from Manchuria (now Northeast China) and conquered China proper in 1644 AD. Until then, their historical links with China proper had been negligible. Consequently, compared with the Vietnamese, Koreans and even the Japanese, the ethnic groups living in these areas have very little to do with the Han culture known as the Chinese civilization. Nevertheless, because of the obsession of the Han people for a united and powerful China, which was stimulated and cultivated by the humiliating loss of territory to the Western invaders in the last century, it would appear unlikely that any Chinese government would dare to allow independence of these areas in the foreseeable future.
Ancient China and its making
The first dynasty of the Han people, the Xia Dynasty, is said to have been founded in the 21st century BC, though there is no direct evidence for its genuine existence. In contrast, the existence of the second dynasty, Shang (16th-11th century BC), has been demonstrated by many unearthed relics including elegant bronze containers and historical records engraved on animal bones and tortoise shells. From the late Zhou Dynasty (the third one, 1066-221 BC) onwards, there has been uninterrupted written history which is the most distinguishable feature of Chinese civilization. In 221 BC, the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang (beside whose tomb the Terracotta Army was unearthed), unified the Han people and expanded the empire to the whole of China proper then set up a highly centralized authoritarian regime to rule this grand empire. Since then, China has never really gone beyond the state framework established by Qin Shi Huang. Even her territory would not have reached today's range had the invading nomads not expanded it twice for their Han successors. In other words, China was effectively frozen for almost two millennia.
This was made possible by our ancestors' clever designs in the political and cultural system. Politically, the state was highly centralized with the emperor in the centre of the web, being the paramount power. The emperor appointed all the central and local officials from prime minister down to county administrators. All the people were organized into household communities and were spied on not only by the community heads but also by their neighbors. If a crime occurred, the whole community would be held responsible. The county administrator ran all public affairs in that county, from collecting taxes and calling up local people to serve in public projects to arbitrating cases ranging from domestic disputes to murders. When handling criminal cases, he alone would play the role of detective, prosecutor, judge and jury, convicting the accused mainly on the basis of confessions extracted by torture. The whole system was checked by only one special advisory group whose responsibility was to detect corruption and power abuse and report them to the emperor. Needless to say, this system gave emperors and their officials enormous power over the people who did not have any say whatsoever in any matters concerning them. Whenever an emperor felt like it, he could call up hundreds of thousands of people and drive them to build the Great Wall, the Grand Canal, the Forbidden City, the Ming Tombs etc. Furthermore, this system actually institutionalized corruption. Quite often, it went so rotten that any case that fell into a county administrator's hands would become his opportunity to make a killing. Thus, if you hanged yourself at your enemy's doorstep, his whole family, along with his neighbors, would be arrested and tortured to extract money until they died or went completely bankrupt.
To ensure the system remained unchallenged, emperors formed a solid alliance with the gentry-intelligentsia class and turned the latter into the ruling class. China was perhaps the first country to introduce the civil service system and invent exams for personnel selection. Ultimate importance was attached to education and the intellectuals enjoyed privileges and respect unseen in any other country. The main subjects of education were not science and technology, but the Four Books and Five Scriptures, all written by Confucius and his followers. These scriptures were of extreme importance as how pupils grasped them would decide their fate in the civil service exams. History was also an important subject as the lessons drawn from the rise and fall of previous dynasties served as a compass for the would-be officials. An educated man was also expected to be good at calligraphy and be able to compose couplets (two symmetrical lines of poetry which could be seen on the two sides of a door in any traditional Chinese house) and poems to show off his style and taste. For that matter, some painting skills would also have been helpful, but music, drama, sculpture, novels and other forms of art were entirely out of the question as they were deemed indecent.
In short, the sole purpose of education was to foster a cadet class whose aspiration was to be selected to serve the emperor one day. The selection of officials by exams was free, fair and incorrupt. So much so that a man with any class background, excepting involvement in prostitution, show business or crime, could become an official and eventually the prime minister, provided that he was clever and lucky enough to master the Sages' doctrines and pass three levels of exams. Those who failed would always have another chance and they could keep trying until their death. Even if they failed for their lifetime, as long as they passed the first or the second level of exams and earned scholarly titles, they would still enjoy privileges such as exemption from public labor service and taxes. They wore special clothes and were highly respected by all walks of life. When they met the county administrator, they did not have to kneel down and kowtow (touching the ground with forehead to show respect) to him as other classes had to do. They could not be arrested and tortured until their scholarly titles had been stripped off. More importantly, they could make full use of their political influence upon local officials and make themselves local bullies and landlords. For these reasons, the education system was not only a brain-washing instrument, but also a type of political lottery which effectively caged all the capable and ambitious youngsters and turned them into loyal and enthusiastic supporters of the status quo.
Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, the eternal Chinese mentality
Behind and above all the political institutions was the official ideology, Confucianism. This theory regards virtues, but not the law, as the cornerstone of society. Such a society is supported by three pillars: emperors and their officials, fathers and their sons, and husbands and their wives. The relations between these pairs of concepts mirror yang and yin, one dominant and the other submissive. Therefore, wives, sons and officials should unconditionally obey their husbands, fathers and emperors. Thus, the society is in fact an enlargement of a family where the emperor, the head of the greater family, has absolute power over his subjects. On the other hand, all the members of society, including the emperor himself, should constantly improve their morality, consciously restrain themselves and behave exactly as their social status and position in the family require. Only through this could one obtain the mandate and capacity to rule a family, an area and the whole country. If emperors behaved wisely and kindly like real emperors, fathers like real fathers and husbands real husbands, then the society could reach its ultimate goal: perpetual harmony. Only this, not wealth or any other material achievement, was something one should really care about.
Out of this basic doctrine, Confucius' followers developed a complex series of ethic norms and social manners. These are best summarized in a famous Confucian's quotation: "extinguish desires and uphold the Heavenly Principles". For example, a gentleman should aim at as high an official post as possible, not for his greed for power, but to use this opportunity to put the Sages' ideas into practice. Also, although sex was a taboo subject in public, it would still be alright to have sex with your wife, provided that you did it not for your own distasteful pleasure, but to fulfill your duty as a son and produce male offspring to pass down your family name. For this lofty purpose, you could marry more wives if your first wife failed to bear sons for you.
For the frustrated intellectuals, there was another philosophy, Taoism, for escape. Established by Lao Tsu in around 600 BC, this school argues that if one tries to do everything, one would achieve nothing. Conversely, if you do absolutely nothing, then you can accomplish everything. To a logical Western mind, the second piece of the argument makes no sense. Ironically, it did make a great deal of sense to us. For example, the Taoists advocate that the best government must not try to do anything but should leave the people alone. Indeed, this kind of government has proven the best we could possibly expect. Most of the time we just had ambitious governments from Qin Shi Huang's to Chairman Mao's, which always tried hard in vain to accomplish so many things and made the peoples suffering all the worse. For individual life, Taoism believes that there is absolutely no difference between an emperor and a beggar once they both have turned into a bundle of bones. So what is the point in pursuing fame, power and wealth, exhausting yourself with endless calculation, anticipation, anxiety, worries and depression? Similarly, since it is impossible for man to grasp all knowledge, studying is absolutely senseless. The more knowledgeable a man becomes, the more puzzles and sorrow he will encounter. Ignorance is bliss and desires are the very source of suffering. The more eagerly you want something, the less likely you are to get it and the more heartbroken you will feel. Therefore, the wise way of life is to maintain the peace of mind and enjoy your short life under existing circumstances.
For all walks of life, Buddhism offered almost everything that anyone might be looking for. The educated people indulged in its most complex and refined philosophy. But for the oppressed and exploited, the reincarnation theory was the real comfort as it provided an answer to the important questions ignored by Confucianism, Taoism or Christianity. Not only does it explain where souls come from and where they go, but it has also designed a rational way to recycle souls so as to save the labor of creating them and reduce the risk of overpopulation in graves or in hell. Moreover, it explains the cause of social unfairness and injustice: Wealth, power, poverty and helplessness all come as rewards or punishments for people's deeds in their previous life and will be changed in their next life according to their deeds in this life. Unlike Christianity which leaves everything to the final trial on an uncertain date when billions of billions of the dead will be raised and tried, it provides not only an explanation for unpleasant reality and a promise for a better future for the poor, but also a more immediate and hence more effective deterrent to evil doing by the rich.
With shrewdness, the ancient Chinese managed to reconcile Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism and blend them together to form the perpetual Chinese mentality. Normally, an ambitious youngster would start as a Confucian and spend all his energy and intelligence trying to climb the only ladder leading to the top of the social pyramid. If he failed repeatedly, he would turn to Taoism or Buddhism for comfort. Alternatively, a retired official facing approaching reincarnation would become a faithful Buddhist trying to make amends for the lives he sacrificed for his fame and fortune. The mentality molded by combination of the three faiths made the Chinese society most stable. Dynasties came and went, but the Chinese way of life always remained the same. Everyone existed only as a social being, not as a biological creature, leading a life programmed by society. A man, the first and the last, was a son, a husband and a father, who was bound to the family-social web by countless obligations and behavior patterns and whose fulfillment of his family and social roles was constantly monitored and evaluated by the whole society. It would have taken extraordinary courage to break away from the existing model. Usually, the only way to do this was to either escape to a monastery or become a bandit.
Inevitably, this system allowed human nature to exhibit itself only in a twisted way, making double standards of morality a necessity of life and hypocrisy an everyday reality. Furthermore, it made the whole society look inward and backward. Instead of grabbing treasures from nature or from other countries, as the Europeans did, we always tried to make our fortune by re-distributing the existing wealth. The price was that the development of society was held still. From the first imperial dynasty, Qin Dynasty, to the last Qing (Manchu) Dynasty (221 BC-1911 AD), China always went in cycles. When the social wealth was too concentrated in the ruling class and the population burden reached its upper limit, chaos would break out, peasants would revolt with egalitarian slogans and wars would follow. After more than half of the population was wiped out and most of the property obliterated, a strong man (a warlord or just an ordinary rogue) would emerge, defeat all rivals and found a new Dynasty. With land now in surplus and a much smaller population, new order would easily be established and land re-distributed. Then good times would start all over again, social wealth would be recreated which would trickle into the gentry-intelligentsia class and the population would keep growing for a few hundred years until the next round of chaos.
In the meantime, science and technology were retarded. In his pioneering research, Joseph Needham identified an enormous number of inventions and discoveries made by the Chinese and concluded that until the 14th century, China had been far more advanced than the West in technology. Sadly, it is also true that science and technology never became the mainstream of our culture. Like novels, drama, music and sculpture, they were looked upon by the gentry-intelligentsia with disdain and left to the ill-educated people and intellectual outcasts, because they had nothing to do with moral improvement. When new inventions emerged, they were invariably ignored or condemned for the fear that they would stimulate more human desires and cause social disorder. Trade was also treated with the same attitude because it alone could not produce food or cloth but only lured people to material indulgence. Of the four classes (gentry-intelligentsia, peasants, workers and businessmen), businessmen were the lowest and were frequently targets of extortion and harassment by corrupt officials or warlords. For a long period in the Ming Dynasty (14th century AD), even sailing had been banned.
Western visitors to modern China, unaware of these facts, would frequently feel at a loss. For example, a Western visitor was shown the remains of a ship made several thousand years before. As his Chinese hosts expected, he was duly impressed by the size of the ship as well as by the complicated technology employed in building that jumbo. However, he was even more impressed a few days later when he saw another ship built a thousand years later. The technology, he noticed in horror, had not been improved at all during such a long period. On the contrary, in quite a few respects, the design of the second ship was even more backward than the first!
Today, every educated Chinese person takes tremendous pride in the Four Great Inventions by our ancestors, that is, paper, printing, the compass and gun powder (If you want to please your Chinese friends, remember to mention these to them). But it would be too much for us to agree with a cynical Chinese thinker's observations that we invented the compass to locate the auspicious spots for our ancestors' tombs while Columbus used it to discover America; that we invented paper and printing to print Confucius' doctrines while the West used them to propagate science and technology; and that we invented gun powder for fireworks while the Western powers used it to beat us into submission.
Collision with Western civilization, the cause of endless trouble
The Westerners came to China with compasses and loads of dry gun-powder in 1840 and endless trouble ensued. Before the British came, we had every reason to believe that we were at the centre of all known civilization. We had been self-sufficient both spiritually and materially for two millennia and the Chinese way of life had proven the fittest. We did have trouble from time to time with the savage herdsmen from the north and were even conquered twice, first by Mongols in 1279 AD and later by Manchus in 1644. But each time we softened, trapped and finally transformed our conquerors with our brilliant and corruptive culture. Naturally, when the British turned up, they were regarded as just another tribe from some remote "corner of the earth" to pay tribute to the emperor. Everybody knew that as there was only one sun in the sky, there was only one emperor and his "Celestial Court". Like the Korean and Vietnamese kings, Queen Victoria could be nothing but another obedient subordinate.
Besides, unlike the Koreans, Vietnamese, Japanese or Burmese, these barbarians looked so odd: the color of their eyes and hair was wrong, their noses were too big and their bodies covered all over by so much hair. People started calling them "Ocean Devils" as no other words seemed better in describing these sea monsters. Even the educated people could not figure out what gave these creatures such strange looks. A Confucian scholar who happened to notice that these "devils" had a different diet then made an educated guess. Based on the traditional Chinese medical theory that "you are what you eat", he concluded that it was all because they ate beef and drank milk and this in turn gave them the look of a cow.
At any rate, the British were certainly no angels and they came to punish China. Initially, they had been fascinated by the potential of a Chinese market. As a British businessman then noted, all the factories in Manchester would have been kept busy for a whole year had every Chinaman's shirt been one inch longer. But this great expectation soon turned sour as it turned out that the Chinese did not want anything from the outside world. On the contrary, Britain found herself in trade deficit, having bought too much Chinese silk, tea and porcelain (all being Chinese inventions, incidentally) and sold very little. To remedy the situation, the resourceful East India Company found a secret weapon: opium. With opium now flowing in, and silver out, of China, the balance was soon reversed.
The Manchu government soon found out what was going on, and was horrified to see what misery the addicts were reduced to. An upright envoy, Lin Zexu (who has been hailed as our national hero ever since), was sent to Canton (Guangzhou), the only port then open to the foreigners. Opium trade was completely banned and tons of opium confiscated and publicly destroyed. Furthermore, to punish the unlawful barbarians, the emperor decided to break off diplomatic relations with Britain and ban normal trade with her altogether. Feeling humiliated, Britain decided to teach China a lesson in how to treat others as equals. Troops were sent to fulfill this task which proved so easy. Far from an unconquerable country like Russia, against a tiny British expedition army, China the giant acted no better than a scarecrow. The show was most disgraceful for both sides in the "Battle" of Canton, when the British threatened that they would shell the city unless a large ransom was paid. No sooner did the British fire one or two shells than the "defenders" gave in. Thus, the Opium War soon concluded with Britain as the victor. China had to make several concessions including paying a large reparation and opening five ports for foreign trade.
The Opium War was the turning point of Chinese history. It marked the beginning of the end of the ever-lasting Chinese way of life. For the first time, China was confronted with a more powerful civilization which she could neither assimilate nor buy off. Knocked out of her own orbit for ever, she has been unable to readjust, resume her position in the world and come to terms with the foreign way of life. Like a bankrupt man thrown out of his own house and unable to find a shelter and settle down, the Chinese have been wandering in a desert between two civilizations and swaying between peaceful reform and violent revolution, while being tormented all the time by the memory of lost glory.
Soon the other European powers followed suit and competition between these scavengers was intensified. Wars with Anglo-France, France and Japan broke out one after another, each time ending with more humiliation and concessions. Within a few decades after the Opium War, the "Supreme Empire of Celestial Court" found herself reduced to a sub-colony serving many masters, with vast areas of land taken by Russia and Japan, foreign "influential zones" all over the country and "international settlements" in the major cities and with railways, the post office, customs etc all run by foreign masters. The catastrophe went on for a century and continuously delivered fatal blows to the society. In order for readers to perceive the extent of the suffering of the Chinese people, it suffices to see only two figures: after the Sino-Japan War in 1894, China had to pay 200 million liang (one liang is about 50 gram) of silver in reparation; after the Boxers Rebellion and the resultant invasion of Eight Powers in 1900, she had to pay 450 million liang (one liang per head) of silver, not to mention the fact that she lost to Russia a piece of territory larger than Germany and France put together.
The disaster culminated in the anti-Japanese War in 1937-1945, in which inestimable properties were destroyed and 40 million people killed, many perishing in atrocities under the Japanese war policy of "kill all, loot all and burn all". But to most intellectuals, the most unbearable humiliation was symbolized by a sign at the gate of a park in the "International Settlement" in Shanghai, which reads "Chinamen and dogs not allowed". As long as China exists, I believe that this sign will never be removed from the Chinese history textbook which tells pupils how great we used to be and what kind of insults we have recently suffered. Perhaps only against this background, could one understand why xenophobia breaks out in Chinese society from time to time.
Attempts to catch up
With their historical burdens, it was most difficult for our ancestors to open their eyes to see the outside world as it really was. During the Opium War, a hot-blooded patriot seriously suggested to a general that the magic weapon for handling those "Ocean Devils" should be gou lian qiang, a spear with a hook on it. The beauty of this strategy lay in its simple logic: Since the British soldiers could not bend their knees (or they did not have knees that enabled their legs to bend), all one had to do was to pull their legs (literally, not metaphorically) with the hooks to make them fall over. Once they fell, they would never be able to get up by themselves and would be at the mercy of our spears. (I have no idea where this respectable patriot got inspiration for his anatomical discovery. I can only guess that he must have watched some sort of British military parade intended to intimidate the local people. The flaw in my explanation is that British soldiers do not parade in goose step, which is said to be a Prussian tradition. But at that time, the Germans had not yet come.)
Even in the thick of crisis, when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Qing Dynasty was subjected to daily extortion by foreign powers for more concessions, the Celestial Court still refused to face reality. A minister of the court offhandedly rejected the very existence of Spain and Portugal, which are translated in Chinese as xi ban ya and pu tao ya, respectively. As every Chinese character has its own meaning, and it happens that pu tao in Chinese means grape and ya means tooth, his argument was most persuasive: "Whoever has heard that a grape or xi ban (God knows what it is) has teeth?! Are the English devils considering us such half-wits as to buy this outrageous lie that there are really two countries with such ridiculous names? This is but another dirty trick played by the English and French devils so that they can extort us for more concessions in the name of fictional countries."
The response of the intelligentsia was no better. In their opinion, the foreigners, with their guns and other inventions, could be nothing but barbarians since they knew nothing about Confucius and his doctrines. Even those who were better informed and had more open minds could only see Western material achievements but nothing behind them. The most radical slogans of the time were "adhere to the framework of Confucianism while utilizing Western technology" and "learn the barbarians' techniques to beat them". What we needed, they argued, was an army armed with Western weapons.
So we had such an army. However, in the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, the whole North Sea Fleet with its modern warships purchased from the West was sunken or neutralized in no time by the Japanese fleet of similar might. The war ended with China surrendering Taiwan to Japan, in addition to a huge reparation. To the most liberal intellectuals, this was the last straw. Now they started to see something beyond foreign weaponry. Unlike the "Ocean Devils", yesterday Japan was just a tiny island submitting to the glory of the Central Empire, now she turned herself into a new power almost overnight, simply by copying the Western civilization as she used to copy ours. If the "Little Japs" can, why not us indeed?
Hence, a reform campaign was formally launched in 1898 to Westernize China by Emperor Guang Xu and his advisors. The emperor issued a series of orders demanding radical changes in political, economical, military and educational systems following Western models. Furthermore, he even considered the possibility of starting a parliament with a Constitution so that China could gradually evolve into a constitutional monarchic state. For an emperor, his far-reaching foresight and courage were certainly unprecedented and perhaps could be found only in a Manchu court which had a more superficial root in the Han culture and thus was less corrupt and inflexible.
Unfortunately, the campaign got involved in the power struggle between the emperor and his adopted mother, Empress Dowager Ci Xi. Only three months after the reform started, Ci Xi launched a coup, put the emperor under house arrest, made him a complete puppet, and arrested and executed some of his radical advisors who failed to escape abroad. Nonetheless, the reform policies were not abandoned but were put into practice in a less abrupt way: students were sent abroad to learn modern science and technology; banks were set up, railways were built and industry took shape. By the first decade of this century, all the measures were successfully under way. The court again considered a constitutional monarchic system and even sent a large delegation abroad to learn how to run a parliamentary government.
From bad to worse: the age of revolution
While the reform carried on promisingly, one of the Chinese traditions, namely, having senseless rebellions, fought back. A Dr. Sun Yat-sen emerged on the scene. He had received a medical education in Hong Kong where he got some vague ideas about Western democracy. Ignorant of both the West and his own country, hidden safely abroad, he started his crusade to save his motherland. All the trouble, he argued, came from the Manchus who, after all, were foreign barbarians and should be kicked out of China. All we needed was a revolution to create a republic. That, he promised, would definitely make our country as powerful and glorious as before.
Unfortunately, Sun's propaganda sowed seeds in the newly-reformed army, especially among some middle-ranking officers who had been trained abroad. To make things worse, Emperor Guang Xu and Empress Dowager Ci Xi both died suddenly in 1909, leaving the court in the incapable hands of Guang Xu's brother. In 1911, a mutiny led by a few revolutionary officers in Wuchang spread into several other cities. Although the revolution never got massive support and was not at all a serious threat, the court was paralyzed by the lack of strong leadership. Worse still, the commander-in-chief, Marshal Yuan Shikai, was plotting to steal the throne. He had earned his position by betraying Emperor Guang Xi to his adopted mother and was now manipulating the court and the revolutionaries to scare each other. At first he attacked the revolutionaries and severely beat them. When they started panicking, however, he halted his troops and started bargaining with them. In the mean time, he terrified the court with an assassination in the name of the revolutionaries and with rumors that the situation was beyond hope. In the end, both the court and the revolutionaries gave in. The last emperor, then 6 years old, resigned his throne and was replaced by Yuan as the first President of the Republic of China. Now Pandora's Box was thrown wide open.
From the very beginning, the republic was a sheer disaster. For thousands of years, the Chinese had been used to emperors. Living without an emperor was just like living under the sky without the sun. Now all of a sudden, here was "the people's state" which did not even have an emperor! The only winner in the whole business was President Yuan Shikai, but even he could not hold his catch very long. As soon as he was sworn to the office, he started to assassinate and outlaw all the revolutionaries and Dr Sun and his comrades soon found themselves once again in flight. Then Yuan proceeded to take the throne formally. However, this proved too much for the public to swallow. Yuan was forced to give up the "emperor" title and soon died of depression. Now without anybody with enough authority in charge, China quickly broke up into many areas, each ruled by a warlord (often a former revolutionary officer) whose only business was waging wars against neighboring warlords to expand his own kingdom. The whole country became a battlefield for a decade.
Meanwhile, Dr Sun had been trying to bungle things even further. Sheltered by a former disciple who was now a powerful warlord based in Canton, he tried to ally other revolutionary-turned warlords to overthrow the Beijing government which was controlled by the major warlords. Despite all the impressive titles such as Extraordinary President and Generalissimo that he generously granted himself, he achieved nothing and came to the bitter conclusion that all his allies were just using his name to gain more territory for themselves. In desperation, "to quench thirst by drinking poison", he turned to the red Russians for help.
The Russians had good reason to embrace Dr. Sun. They had lost all hope for proletarian revolutions in more advanced European countries and found themselves encircled by a hostile capitalist world. Thus, Lenin switched his attention to the underdeveloped countries. If those countries rose up and got rid of their imperialist masters, he predicted, the industrialized countries would lose cheap labor, raw materials and markets and would soon collapse. China was an ideal guinea pig for trying out his ideas and thus Russian secret agents were sent to China to stir things up. In 1921, with Mao Zedong and 12 other Chinese delegates participating, the Russians set up the Chinese Communist Party. However, the prospect of the CCP becoming a force carrying any weight appeared extremely remote since there had never been a decent proletarian class in China.
Now the Russians had Dr Sun to start with. Arms were shipped to his base along with Russian advisors and gold roubles. With Russian help, Dr Sun reorganized his Kuomintang (the Nationalist Party) based on the model of the Russian Communist Party and allowed Chinese communists to take many important posts. The reform not only turned the Kuomingtang into a powerful device for seizing power, but also gave the CCP tremendous opportunity to expand itself in the name of the Kuomintang. The number of communists soon increased from hundreds to tens of thousands, many having infiltrated into critical branches of the Kuomintang, especially the newly-created Nationalist Revolution Army.
The Chinese Communists might have taken power decades sooner had Dr. Sun not died in 1924. After his death, General Chiang Kai-shek emerged as the outstanding successor. Unlike Sun, he had more common sense and knew what danger Sun had put his party in. Despite the strong opposition from his Russian advisors who also had secret deals with northern warlords, he launched the North Expedition campaign in 1926. Starting from its base in Guangdong, the Nationalist Revolution Army commanded by Chiang conquered most of southern China in one year. Shortly after Chiang entered Shanghai victoriously, he turned on his communist allies, arresting and shooting them in their hundreds. The honeymoon between the KMT and CCP was over and the communists went into hiding. Then Chiang resumed his march northwards, defeating or allying warlords on his way. In 1928, the whole country was once again nominally unified.
Under Chiang's leadership, the modernization campaign started again and was even more successful than the previous one. Apart from many economic and cultural achievements made in this "Golden Decade" (1928-1937), perhaps the best feature of Chiang's rule was his efforts to combine good Chinese traditions with Western ideas. For example, he filled the government offices with scholars, as emperors used to do. On the other hand, these scholars were selected because they had been trained abroad. With their help, Chiang was trying to lay down cornerstones for a modern nation which would be ruled by law as well as cemented with traditional ethics. Given time, Chiang's cause would certainly have succeeded, as it did succeed many years later in Taiwan.
Sadly, fate intervened once again: this time it was the Japanese. By now Japan had built herself into a powerful imperialist country with Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria as her colonies. Aspiring to rule the whole of Asia and kick the whites out, the Japanese invaded China in 1937 and thus triggered the eight-year Resistance War which was later to become part of WWII.
The Japanese invasion saved the communists from destruction. Split from their KMT ally, they had gone underground and launched a few disastrous uprisings. Finally, inspired by ancient peasant outlaws, Mao Zedong took his few remaining troops to the mountains in the middle south and started a guerrilla war there. Taking advantage of the conflicts between Chiang and the warlords, he managed to expand his base to several counties and set up a Soviet Republic with himself as chairman. However, after Chiang had dealt with the warlords and thrown in his crack troops, the Reds were defeated and had to break out and retreat six thousand miles to the northwest (the so-called Long March). With an army of only twenty thousand encircled tightly in the most barren area, the communist cause had come to a dead end.
Now the situation changed overnight. For almost a century, the foreign powers had been shaking China out of her delusions and nurturing Chinese nationalism. The Japanese invasion completed the last stroke. Driven by the new-born patriotism, the public now demanded that all Chinese troops stop fighting each other and use their weapons against the Japanese. Under this pressure, General Chiang stopped his campaigns against the communists on the conditions that the communists should abolish their Soviet Republic and that like all other remnant warlords, they should hand over their troops to the Chinese National Army to fight the Japanese. However, he was outmaneuvered by his rival. As a cunning strategist, Mao saw the formation of the Anti-Japanese United Front as a Heaven-sent opportunity for him to seize power. Openly, he promised Chiang everything and the communists painted themselves as the most devoted patriots. In reality, he was not going to let the central government touch his troops. Instead, he secretly allocated 70% of his force to self-expansion, 20% to fighting Chiang's troops and 10% to dealing with the Japanese.
This strategy worked out beautifully. Thousands of communist agents released from Kuomingtang's jails went straight to the nearby countryside, taking over local governments and recruiting peasants, young patriots and even bandits to form guerrilla troops. In only a few months, the communists were no longer a tiny local force trapped hopelessly in the most impoverished and sparsely-populated area. Their troops were now active just outside Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan and other large cities. Furthermore, Mao split his troops into small units and sent them to infiltrate the front line to take over vast rural areas left behind by the Japanese army. Carefully avoiding exposing their real might, and having had only one major battle with the Japanese during the whole period of eight years, the communists managed to grow into a giant under the noses of the Japanese, commanding an army of one million and ruling a population of a hundred million.
In contrast to the communists' success, the Anti-Japanese War destroyed Chiang's regime. Confronted with the grimmest modern war machinery in human history, without any aid from international society until Pearl Harbor, Chiang had to fight on his own. Unlike the communists, Chiang knew nothing about "people's war" and could only conduct conventional warfare. The Chinese National Army suffered enormous casualties. Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Nanjing, and Canton fell one by one. After the Japanese took over Nanjing (Nanking, then the Capital), they started to loot, rape and round up local residents, mowing them down with machine guns, killing them with bayonets, swords and grenades, burning them alive with petrol and forcing them to walk into the Yangtze River to drown. Three hundred thousand civilians and POWs are believed to have been murdered in the Rape of Nanking alone, not to mention the tens of millions who perished in the war. Yet, while everyone in the West knows a great deal about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, almost no one has heard of the Rape of Nanking. Neither has the current Beijing regime ever made any effort to let the world know. On the contrary, Chairman Mao expressed his gratitude more than once to his Japanese guests, including the former Prime Minister Tanaka, for the decisive role that the Japanese invasion played in helping him rise to power.
The catastrophe was complete. The crack troops of the National Army were wiped out or routed. Vast territories, especially the more developed coast areas, were lost and the Republic shrank to only a few provinces in the southwestern backyard. To run the war, the government had to squeeze the people for money and call them up by force to substitute the casualties. The morale was low as soldiers were barely fed and sometimes even had to fight with swords. Worse still, unable to sustain the hardship, the Kuomingtang quickly became corrupt, no longer being reformers themselves. Yet Chiang hung on and rejected peace offers from the Japanese. He even considered replacing the corrupt Kuomingtang with a more vigorous youth organization to carry on his cause.
Although final victory came in 1945 and rewarded China handsomely with the recovery of Manchuria and Taiwan and a permanent seat in the UN Security Council, Chiang's regime never recovered from the devastation. However, Chiang failed to face reality and made a fatal mistake in underestimating the communists. On the other hand, after the Russian Red Army handed over to them the whole arsenal of Japanese weapons surrendered in Manchuria at the end of the war, the communists were now ready for a showdown with Chiang. Thus a new civil war soon broke out and further ruined the economy. Inflation went wild and Chiang's regime became generally resented. Only four years after Japanese surrender, Chiang's army was destroyed by the communist troops. He had to flee to Taiwan with the remains of his army, while Mao declared in Beijing on Oct 1, 1949 the birth of the People's Republic of China.
作者：芦笛 在 驴鸣镇 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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应网友要求重贴旧作：China ABC
