Topic Essay Question on East Asia 3 pages

China: A Land of Upheaval

Let us begin our study of East Asia with China, one of the longest surviving civilizations in human history with many accomplishments and legacies, including its architecture, arts, government bureaucracies, and scientific inventions. Yet, when we think about China, instead of the legacies of its long civilization, we often think of its huge population and so many things made in China that we buy at the stores.

China, indeed, is a populous country. China’s population is about 1.3 billion, nearly five times the American population. This massive population lives on the land the size of the U.S. China’s population problem is exacerbated by the fact that most of its population is concentrated on the eastern seaboard region as shown to the left. As our textbook makes it clear, the western half of the country is not agriculturally productive. Because of this massive population, China’s GNP per capita is relatively low. That does not mean that China is a poor country. Its economy is the fastest growing economy in the world; its products are sold all over the world. Let us now embark on our journey of

understanding this challenging country with long and proud history, massive population, and a society where development and backwardness coexist.

Our textbook starts out by pointing to China’s historical convulsion during the 19th and 20th centuries. The word convulsion means a violent shaking that leaves an individual utterly disoriented. China as a nation was more than disoriented during much of its modern history. As matter of fact, this land and people were called a sleeping giant. However, an interesting fact is that, during the last two decades, China has come of out of that convulsion and continuously risen to become a powerful nation whose consumer products flood markets all over the world. So, my lecture on China is divided into two parts: China’s historic upheaval and its rise back to a dominant power.

The Chinese civilization is nearly 5,000 years old. And it has had glorious achievements. I am sure that you are familiar with some of them. Chinese inventions included papermaking, printing, paper currency, gunpowder, porcelains and more. Also, how could we not mention China’s endlessly fascinating cuisine? What about architectural wonders such as the Great Wall (6,000 miles long) and Grand Canal (1,400 miles long)? What about Confucianism, a philosophical system that espouses moral authority or “benevolence,” rather than divine rights or material possession, as the foundation political authority? China by 1000 AD was the wealthiest and most advanced nation in the world. Then what happened? One geographer has an interesting comment on China’s metal making technology (metallurgy): “as early as 1078, people in north China were producing twice as much iron as people in England did 700 years later, in 1778.” (The figure to the right is that of Emperor Qian Long of the Qing Dynasty. There is an unmistakable sense of dignity and superiority China’s emperors possessed coming from the belief (or illusion to some) that China was the most developed and sophisticated society in the world. The painting at the top is rather emblematic of Chinese art, simple, understated, but an unique view of the universe that all creatures are meant to live in

harmony.)

But in the 19th Century, China began to decline. It was defeated and dominated by Western imperialist powers who carved China like, as Chinese themselves say, a melon. Imperialism indeed was the culprit of China’s convulsion. In the 18th century the West had achieved a revolution in material production known as the Industrial Revolution. The Western economies began to produce goods using machines, whose productivity could not be matched by human hands. What resulted from a rapid

industrialization was a surplus, the production of goods that were beyond what a nation could consume. Surplus had to be sold and European industrialized nations found China as the best possible outlet for their overproduced goods. Guess why? The answer is rather obvious. China always has had the largest population in the world, which means, the largest number of potential consumers. (To you left is an example of how the Chinese to the western eyes.)

When China (or more specifically the Qing Dynasty) refused open China’s markets for foreigners, Great Britain took the leading role in “opening” China by force. So came the so-called “Opium Wars” that was precipitated by Britain’s export of Opium to China, and the Qing government’s attempt to stop it. China lost, and thereafter, carving up of China into spheres of interest and extraterritorialities (places in China “leased” to foreign governments where the Chinese government could not exercise its authority.) One precious and profitable booty of the Opium Wars was Hong Kong, which Great Britain held as a colony until 1997, nearly one and a half centuries. (To the right is what Hong Kong looked like when it was turned into a British colony.)

Take a look at the figure down below. The four major European colonial powers, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Russia established their respective spheres of influence and exploited China.

In the 1930s, Japan joined the imperial conquest of China and began to fight the Chinese and occupy their land, staring from Manchuria to the north. In 1937, a full-blown war broke out

between China and Japan that would lead to death of an uncountable number of human lives.

In the middle of war against the Japanese imperialists, a civil war broke out within China between two forces: the Nationalists and Communists. The Communists led by Mao Tse-tung challenged China’s Nationalist government that replaced the Qing Dynasty. To make a long story short, again, millions died in the civil war, which ended only in 1949 with the victory of the Communists. We are talking about a twenty years-long warfare.

China uses 1949 as beginning of a New China. In conversation, when a Chinese person says, “after the liberation,” that means he or she is talking about an event that took place after 1949.

Yes, China was “liberated” from western imperialism. But, was China also “liberated” from material deprivation too? Not really. Mao, who by now was the supreme leader of China, resembled every bit an emperor. And he wanted to transform China into an industrialized and egalitarian society virtually over night. What followed was not very different from what had happened in the Soviet Union. Property confiscation, collectivization, purge and persecution of critics of the government, and human-made disasters like famine. Uncountable millions died again. (The post to your left shows how the Chinese rulers interpreted the meaning of China’s communist revolution.)

As if these are not enough, in the middle of the 1960s, Mao launched the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution. During this particular historical upheaval, young people, mostly high school students, were encouraged to attack the elders of China, including family members, in order to live up to Mao’s injunction that they should completely get rid of the old, backward, traditional, and decedent cultures from Chinese society. I probably don’t have to tell you that it is difficult, if not impossible, to force people to get rid of what they believe in and the way that had lived with for centuries. One way to do it is to torment, torture, and ultimately kill the person. And nearly ten years of the Cultural Revolution did exactly that in the name of creating a new proletarian culture. This particular convulsion in Chinese history ended in the middle of the 1970s only after Mao’s death. (It is rather obvious that Mao was more than a human being to his followers, as shown in the post to the right.)

Now we are in the middle of the 1970s. Finally, China was not in a state of convulsion for the first time in nearly one and a half centuries. However, nearly 150 years of unending crises left China utterly impoverished, with an exhausted population. (It should also be noted that some major accomplishments were achieved by the Communist rulers of China. For example, the CCP (the Chinese Communist Party) ended many forms of feudal exploitation, including traditional gender oppression and exploitation symbolized by foot-binding. Also, land distribution, public education, and health care for the masses should be included in the CCP’s accomplishments. (The People’s Republic of China and the U.S. did not establish a diplomatic relations until late 1970s. Until then, China’s attitude towards the U.S., which it viewed as the leading

imperialist power in the world, was rather hostile, as show in the post to your left. That was partially because of the experience in the Korean War where U.S. and China fought against each

other on the Korean Peninsula.)

In any event, China post-Mao leaders came to the conclusion that there was only one solution to China’s backwardness and material deprivation. In the late 1970s, China embarked on modernization by opening itself to the west (or capitalist economy) that has taken China to the point where it has become the fastest growing economy in the world. (Once of the first changes that came to China with economic modernization process was, of course, Coca

Cola. We will discussion China’s market socialism in the next lecture.)

I want to end this lecture on China’s geographical handicaps and historic upheavals with a question for your thought. Why did China fall in the 19th century? How was it possible for China, one of the greatest human civilizations, to be brought down by western imperialists so easily? I said in the beginning of the lecture what kind of glorious civilization the Chinese had created. I mentioned great inventions of the Chinese civilization that influenced and benefited the rest of the world. What went wrong? How should we answer this question? You many add your response to this question in your essay on China.