What is included with this book?
Acknowledgements | p. xi |
Note on Transliteration and Currency | p. xiii |
List of Illustrations | p. xv |
List of Maps | p. xix |
Introduction | p. xxxi |
End of Empire | |
Sons of Heaven | p. 3 |
Upheavals | p. 17 |
Strength and Weakness | p. 34 |
Reform and Reaction | p. 56 |
On the Ropes | p. 79 |
Final Act | p. 95 |
Revolution and Republic | |
A Very Young Baby | p. 119 |
Warlords | p. 139 |
Ice and Ancient Charcoal | p. 157 |
Divided We Stand | p. 183 |
Wars Without End | |
Enemy of the Heart | p. 217 |
Enemy of the Skin | p. 230 |
Mao's March | p. 252 |
Total War | p. 265 |
The Great Retreat | p. 277 |
Tangled Alliance | p. 304 |
The Last Battle | p. 329 |
The Rule of Mao | |
The Winner | p. 353 |
Plots and Plans | p. 376 |
Leaping to Disaster | p. 396 |
Famine and Retreat | p. 415 |
Demons and Monsters | p. 440 |
All-Out Civil War | p. 472 |
American Interlude | p. 496 |
Only Heaven Knows | p. 508 |
The Age of Deng | |
Little Peace Plays His Trumps | p. 531 |
To Get Rich is No Sin | p. 552 |
Gathering Storm | p. 574 |
Beijing Spring | p. 588 |
Three Weeks in May | p. 602 |
Massacre in Beijing | p. 618 |
Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao | |
The New-Old Generations | p. 641 |
Epilogue | p. 674 |
Notes | p. 683 |
Bibliography | p. 715 |
Appendices | |
Who's Who in Modern China | p. 736 |
The Late-Qing Emperors | p. 741 |
China's Growth 1976-2006 | p. 741 |
China's Population | p. 741 |
Communist Party Leaders in the People's Republic | p. 741 |
Communist Party Organization at the Centre | p. 742 |
Index | p. 743 |
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Chapter One
Sons of Heaven
Sitting on the Dragon Throne in the Forbidden City in Beijing,* China's emperors personified a system based on Confucian teachings which exalted the harmony of society and the planet, and demanded awe from all. Expressing their majesty and power through elaborate ceremonials and art, the dynasties which ruled China claimed semi-divine status. The ruler was set apart, rarely appearing in public apart from such symbolic occasions as his procession to the great circular Temple of Heaven in the south of the capital to offer prayers to the gods. He usually ate alone, choosing from a lavish array of dishes brought by eunuchs. At night, his chosen concubine was brought into his chamber wrapped in a red silk gown and laid naked at the foot of his bed.
Imperial mythology and Confucian tradition gave social and administrative glue to a country which covered only 7 per cent of the surface of the globe but contained around a fifth of its population. Dynasties operated on the basis of filial piety, the cornerstone of old values. In return for unquestioning allegiance, the sovereigns promised to be benevolent, caring for the welfare of their people and invoking divine protection on their behalf. A master-servant relationship ran from the court down to rural villages. Every man, it was said, regarded those above him as tigers to be feared, and those below him as dogs to be kicked. The empire reached back to 221 BC, when the First Emperor established himself in Xi'an after his kingdom of Qin had won out over warring states. His dynasty was one of the shortest-lived, enduring only until its fall under his son in 207 BC. Ruling houses came and went in cycle of rise and fall that would become engraved on the national psyche as they won and lost the Mandate of Heaven granted by the gods. Chinese civilization reached apogees under the Tang and Ming dynasties and prospered under less-remembered sovereigns. But there were constant threats from the nomads of the steppes, and two major invasions from the north by the Mongols in the late thirteenth century, and the Manchus, in the mid sixteenth century. Yet the idea of unifying rule from the centre had been implanted by the First Emperor and remained the foundation for the country, while the Mandate of Heaven contained the idea—however imperfectly implemented—that the rulers had a duty to care for the people.
China was rarely as cut off from the world as subsequent history pretended. The Silk Road linked it with Central Asia, the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Sailors and traders went to south-east Asia, India and Africa. But China believed it was special, and the Qing expansion of the empire under the Three Great Emperors from 1166 11 to 1795 marked a high point. The realm reached westwards into Central Asia, and other neighbours were brought under control. This was a Manchu construction, in which the Middle Kingdom, for all its importance, stood alongside the other domains to the north, where the ruling house was most at home. Still, China was bound to predominate, so its customs became the public face of the Sons of Heaven from distant lands.
In a society arranged by strict and elaborate stratification, princes, mandarins and gentry figures of the Manchu Qing dynasty, which had seized the throne in 1644 to rule over the far more numerous Han Chinese, had specific ranks, denoted by robes and badges. Proper behaviour and sincerity were held to be all. As the classic text the Daxue ('Great Learning') put it: 'Thoughts being sincere, hearts are rectified. Hearts being rectified, persons are cultivated. Persons being cultivated, families are regulated. Families being regulated, states are rightly governed. States being rightly governed, the whole kingdom is made tranquil and happy. '1
In such a culture, it was only natural that the capital was laid out to exalt the regime and its ruler. The Forbidden City sat at the heart of the metropolis, which, after some false starts, became the centre of the empire. The Sons of Heaven resided behind a 5z-metre-wide moat and 52-metre-high walls that ran for two and a quarter miles round what was known as 'the Great Within'. Halls and gates were set on marble platforms amid huge courtyards. Symbolism was everywhere - power expressed through carved dragons, longevity by phoenixes in the inner palace. Imperial edicts were carried on ornate trays under umbrellas of imperial yellow to the balcony over the Tiananmen Gate to be read out before being lowered and distributed round the country.
Emperors might be quasi-divine, but it was not assumed that dynasties were for ever. The cycle of rise and fall had run through China's history. The Mandate of Heaven was, itself, eternal; but who held it was a very different matter. When the gods showed their displeasure, for instance by permitting major revolts or visiting particularly severe natural disasters on the country, it was time for change. Ambitious military commanders or rebel leaders could claim that they were the ones now qualified to mount the throne. Thus, the eternal melded with the temporal in a system which preserved itself by being able to accommodate fresh blood at the top without bringing fundamental verities intoquestion.
A backward-looking concept of existence predominated, along with the proclamation of imperial authority over the whole realm which did not always accord with reality; the early decades of Qing rule had seen recurrent revolts, including one that stretched over ten provinces. Preserving stability rather than considering change was the watchword. The regime's view of its mission 'seems to be to keep records of past occurrences, legalise faits accomplis, and strangle whatever comes before it in embryo,' wrote the acute Western observer of the later nineteenth century, the British Customs chief, Robert Hart. The Confucian Great Learning enjoined 'keeping the state in order' as the path to universal peace. 'Generation after generation has upheld Confucian teachings, stressing proper human relationships, between ruler and minister, father and son, superiors and subordinates, the high and the low,' wrote a leading scholar-general of the mid nineteenth century. 'All in the proper place, just as hats and shoes are not interchangeable.'
Modern China
Excerpted from Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850 to the Present by Jonathan Fenby
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