“Here begins our tale. The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.”
So begins the beloved 14th-century classical Chinese novel, Three Kingdoms, about warring states at the end of the Han dynasty (206BC — AD220). Unity, division and reconstitution are central to the cycles of Chinese history. Hegel’s dictum that all great world-historical facts and personages occur twice is multiplied in Chinese history, as is Marx’s rider to that — “He [Hegel] has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
Given the immense span of human activity in China — from the Xia in 2200BC to the present — how does the modern reader with English as mother tongue get to grips with the story of China? Even that name presents problems. China is derived from Qin Shihuang, the first emperor and founder of the Qin Dynasty (not to be confused with the much later Qing). But for the Chinese, their country is Zhongguó or, more ancient and evocative, Tianxià(“the world”, or, less prosaic, “all under heaven”).
Nonetheless, non-Chinese readers have never been as well supplied with books on China.
Those below succeed admirably in understanding and explaining China’s past and present, and how these might affect its future and the world’s.
The Great Wall: China Against the World 1000 BC — AD 2000 (Atlantic Books) by Julia Lovell is a superb introduction to the ebbs and flows of Chinese history and the Chinese mindset. It takes as its organising metaphor the so-called Great Wall of China and shows how that resonates with expansionism, insecurity and an ancient Chinese superiority complex.
Lovell — who teaches Chinese history and literature at Cambridge — crucially points out that the Great Wall is, in fact, a long wall, changchen (“long frontier wall”), and that its greatness stems from early British and European apostrophising: “Between the 18th and 20th centuries the colossal physical reality of the wall combined with its powerful visual symbolism to transform the Great Wall into the all-defining emblem of China in the Western imagination.”
As significantly, Lovell shows that, far from being solely a protective barrier, the Wall marks the continual battle between the nomadic, horse-borne, non-Chinese cultures north of it and the settled, agrarian, Chinese culture to its south. South of the Wall, those in “China” used it alternately for protection and annexation. To the north, the Wall was viewed as a barrier that could be circumvented by riding far enough westwards and then turning south into the agricultural heartland of the Han (Chinese) for plunder and conquest.
Tragedy and farce succeed each other with metronomic and incomprehensible regularity. Successive dynasties fail to learn the lesson of the Wall: that it is ineffectual against highly mobile foes. Often those very dynasties are riders from the north grown comfortable after adopting the ways of the Chinese they have conquered: food, dress, customs, lifestyle and administrative system.
Chinese dynasties are no different. The Ming begin with a global outlook, with Zhu Di, the Yong Le emperor, dispatching the great admiral Zheng He with treasure fleets on exploratory voyages into the Indian Ocean, beginning in 1405. But Zhu Di falls and the later Ming ban seagoing, destroy the fleet (the treasure ships were almost five times the length of Columbus’s Santa Maria), burn much of the knowledge gathered on the journeys — and resume wall building. In 1644 the Ming are swept away by a new force from beyond the Wall: the Manchu, who found the Qing Dynasty.
Wall-building most often betokens inward-looking low points in dynasties, when they are both complacent and fear invasion by “barbarians”, though it can also indicate aggressive attempts to seize good land for mixed agriculture — and as a buffer zone — immediately north of the Wall.
Lovell persuasively extends the Wall metaphor to current attempts by the government of the People’s Republic of China to construct and maintain a great firewall on the internet. In the context of her cogent analysis of the Chinese mind, it is difficult to disagree with her conclusion that China will always have its walls, whether real or virtual.
Lovell does not touch much on Mao Zedong, chiefly because his defining myth was not the Great Wall but the Long March — the founding myth of communist China. (Though, as she points out, Mao rallied his marchers with the cry: “You’re not a real man if you’ve not got to the Great Wall.”)
The story of the March is movingly and intimately retold in The Long March (Harper Perennial) by Sun Shuyun. To evade Chiang Kai-shek’s armies in 1935, the 200 000-strong communist army marched 12 800km. By the time the Red Army reached the inhospitable plateau of north-west China, only 40 000 had survived. Sun estimates that of those, about 500 are still living, all in their 80s and 90s. Of these, she found and interviewed more than 40 veterans, and their stories comprise the book.
Here is living proof that history is made not only by individuals in power, but also by the collective effort of many so-called ordinary people. Transmitted through Sun are intensely affecting tales of bravery and sacrifice for the principle and possibility of a better China, purged of feudalism, warlords, the corrupt reign of Chiang Kai-shek and the Japanese occupiers.
The veterans who spoke to Sun were inspired by a noble socialist ideal that seemed to come into being in October 1949 when Mao declared a New China. Half a century later, that ideal has been entirely abandoned in contemporary China. To understand why and how you can do no better than read The Changing Face of China: From Mao to Market (Oxford) by John Gittings.
Gittings incisively chronicles how China moved from state socialism to state capitalism, and wonderfully illuminates the Communist Party’s astonishing metamorphosis into the “ruling party” that guarantees the economic well-being of “the people” — there being, of course, no “proletariat” remaining in this brave new world.