What shaped modern China

Let’s take one of the most famous examples: the Opium Wars, particularly the first Opium War, from 1839 to 1842. This war was fought by the British as a means of opening up the China market through violence. Essentially, they wanted to sell more opium and other goods into the huge internal Chinese market of the late 19th century. They were denied access. They chose to use gunboats to open up that market by force.

The memory of that experience – the memory of China’s imperial dynasty of the time, the Qing dynasty, being told that they did not have the right of saying “yes” or “no” within their own country, and that they were forced to concede to a power, Britain, which had superior technology and a very different way of thinking about markets and the use of force – all of these stuck in a very long-standing way in official minds and more popular minds within China itself.

Then, in the early 20th century, you see a succession of civil wars of one form or another. There was the Boxer War of 1900, which actually brought foreign powers in as there was an uprising within China itself, and in the 1910s and 1920s there was a series of internal battles between militarist leaders vying for power. China had overthrown its last emperor in 1911, but it didn’t really become a stable republic in the legacy of that; it was still a very split, very violent country.

The Second World War period has a particular resonance for the Chinese today. In the words of many Chinese leaders, when they talk about that World War II experience, it was the first war when China had a complete victory against a foreign invader: in this case, Japan, with which China fought for eight years, from 1937 to 1945.

Now, historians would point out that China was not a victor against Japan on its own because it had a tremendous alliance with the United States and the British Empire after Pearl Harbor. But it is fair to say that the huge sacrifices of millions of deaths and the efforts of Chinese soldiers did contribute to that victory in the war that eventually came about in 1945.

The reason why that war has become so important symbolically is that unlike the Opium Wars, which were essentially a defeat for China, and unlike the civil wars, which were essentially a very unhappy spectacle of Chinese fighting other Chinese, in the Second World War against Japan, China was invaded; it fought back; it resisted and eventually, in alliance, won a victory. In that sense, it has become a much more inspiring story as the Chinese of today think about what their modern history really means to them.

The Long March is one of the recent events in modern Chinese history that Westerners tend to at least know the name of, if not necessarily the details. From 1934 to 1935, different groupings of Chinese Communists who were essentially on the run from their opponents, the Chinese Nationalists under the then leader Chiang Kai-shek, made not just one but several marches through the western remote parts of China to finally end up in various small cities in northwest China. The most famous is a city called Yan’an, which became the Red base, you might say, between the mid-1930s and mid-1940s.

But it was the legend of that Long March that lasted: it started out with thousands and thousands of Chinese soldiers and ended up with just a few thousand making their way to Bao’an and Yan’an, the cities at the end of the march. The suffering that they undertook, the many people who dropped out and the few who remained all became part of a legend about the right of the Chinese Communist Party to rule. Among the first generation of rulers during the era of Chairman Mao, many of his closest companions, including Mao himself, gained their legitimacy from the fact that they had been on that Long March. That stage in the revolutionary development of China became very important.

Then there was the first phase after 1949, the actual victory of the Chinese Communists on the mainland, which really transformed Chinese society both through social reform and change. For instance, traditional landholdings were divided up and handed out in many cases to farmers who didn’t have land of their own. This was combined with policies of tremendous violence; huge numbers, millions in many accounts, of landlords were shot and killed or beaten to death during the social revolution of that time.

These days, the Party does not tend to dwell on the immense violence of that early period of Chinese Communist rule. They tend to talk more about the legal reforms and other changes of that era. But it’s important to understand that the revolutionary tradition of the Chinese Communist Party, which is still very much in the minds of leaders today, stems from both of those elements: a real commitment to social reform – often unsuccessful but, I think, genuine in intention – but also an absolute unabashed commitment to violent overthrow, which comes in part from the Marxist-Leninist tradition drawn partly from the Soviet Union. You cannot understand the Chinese Revolution and its influence today without understanding that it’s about control and about coercion, but also about social change. All of those things are true at the same time.