China and Awareness of the West - Essay Example

China and Awareness of the West Table of Content I. Introduction II. Early History III. Religious History of China IV. Buddhism in China V. NEO-CONFUCIANISM VI. Western Powers in China VII. The Boxer Uprising VIII. China after WWII IX. New Status of China in the World X. China in 21st Century XI. Works Cited I. Introduction China is an isolated civilization because of its geography. China is bounded to the east and south by the Pacific Ocean, to the southwest and west by the massive Himalaya and Pamir mountain ranges, and to the north by steppe lands and the desolate terrains of Siberia. Despite these geographical hindrances people could and did travel to China through various routes, such as the famous Silk Road, and on the seas. The North China Plain is, in fact, the birthplace of Chinese civilization. (Dietrich 1998) The traditional demarcation between northern and southern China is the Qinling mountain range, equivalent to the Continental Divide in North America. The Qinling divides much of China into two great drainage systems. Water in northern China eventually flows into the Yellow River, whereas rivers and streams in southern China eventually flow into the Yangtze River. The Qinling range also demarcates important climatic and ecological differences between northern and southern China. Some areas of southern China are so warm and receive so much rainfall that two and even three crops a year are common. Even so, however, crops grown in southern China cannot usually rely on rainfall alone. It is important to remember that even though it has a much smaller population than southern China has today, northern China is where it all began. The north, and not the south, is the cradle of Chinese civilization. (Dietrich 1998) II. Early History Earliest historical records written in the second century B.C. tell us that about the Shang dynasty came to end because of extreme tyranny of the kings. King Wen from Zhou emerged as the new leader of the country, but he did not live long enough to see the Shang completely overthrown, his mission was completed by King Wu, King Wen’s son. The triumphant King Wu then returned to his own region of Zhou, and his new dynasty eventually ruled over all Chinese civilization. The Zhou rulers formulated a justification or explanation for their actions called the Mandate of Heaven. This was a new and revolutionary concept; it meant that no government could ever claim the right to eternal rule. “Heaven,” a Zhou term for the supernatural order, would approve and sustain a government only as long as it ruled righteously and did not oppress its people. After the Zhou’s conquest of the Shang there were, in fact, about a dozen major changes of dynasty until the entire dynastic system was overthrown in A.D. 1911. (Dietrich 1998) III. Religious History of China During the Period of Division, two foreign cultural influences began percolating into China: pastoral nomadic and Buddhistic. Buddhism, from India, was from a unique and manifestly non-Chinese civilization, and the northern barbarian dynasties were run by pastoral nomads, who were different in language, culture, and ecology. Some Chinese feared that these twin cultural influences would dilute or completely overwhelm Chinese civilization, but it never happened. When China was reunified in the 580s, it emerged with its civilization intact. Buddhism and the material culture of the barbarians (musical instruments, chairs, and cuisine) added to the fabric of Chinese culture but did not fundamentally alter it. China was still China after the long and bitter nightmare of the Period of Division had ended. (Chan 1963) IV. Buddhism in China Buddhism first gained a foothold in China during the Period of Division. It came in not directly from India but from Central Asian Buddhist kingdoms that had converted to Buddhism a few centuries earlier. The religion had been known in China since Han times, but it never flourished during that dynasty. This is probably because the basic message of Buddhism, that life is suffering, did not resonate with the Han Chinese. Life was fairly good in Han China, and the majority of Chinese seem to have had little if any desire to alleviate the pain of life with a palliative religion. (Chan 1963) Mahayana Buddhism was, a type of saviour religion, and it appealed deeply to the Chinese of the Period of Division. Life in China at this time was rough and entailed much suffering. Buddhism had great appeal in both northern and southern China, among the elite and commoners alike. The rulers of the barbarian conquest dynasties in northern China found the religion attractive precisely because it was not Chinese (Chan 1963) V. Neo-Confucianism During the late Tang period, a reaction against Buddhism was developing among China’s intellectual elite. An essay written by the late Tang scholar Han Yu (768–824), encouraging a Tang emperor not to receive a reputed finger bone of the Buddha as a sacred relic, is widely regarded as the opening salvo against Buddhism and the beginning of a Confucian revival that flourished during the subsequent Song period and beyond. (Waldron 1990) Neo-Confucianism was a rediscovery or reassertion of China’s Confucian past, often seemingly at the expense of the Buddhist heritage from India. The Song dynasty framers of neo-Confucianism attempted to show that authentic Confucian thought could address many of the profound cosmological and metaphysical concerns dealt with by Buddhism. Neo-Confucianists argued that a Confucian cosmology could be abstracted from some of the most ancient Chinese texts, and they eventually identified a corpus of these texts to serve as an authoritative statement of Confucius’s ideology and the very ancient thought to which they argued he subscribed. Their purpose seems to have been to show that the secular and this-worldly concerns of Confucian thought could be expanded or conflated into a more comprehensive consideration of the universe. Buddhism was not the only cosmological game in town; Confucianism too could be shown to be profound and cosmological. (Waldron 1990) By Song times, Buddhism was no longer the intellectual darling of the elite. Elites during the Song and subsequent dynasties were more explicitly Confucian in their public and ideological lives than their Tang predecessors had been, but many of them retained, like Han Yu himself. VI. Western Powers in China During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the British, having failed to persuade China to alter its business and diplomatic practices to their own liking, and aghast that the Chinese would dare attempt to interdict British narcotics trafficking, simply bullied their way into China and imposed their will on the hapless nation through brute force. The Opium War, fought between the two nations from 1840 to 1841, ended with British victory and the Treaty of Nanking, which compelled Qing China to cede the island of Hong Kong to the British crown in perpetuity, pay Britain an enormous war indemnity, and open several coastal cities to British residence and trade. The Opium War and its aftermath inaugurated China’s “Century of Humiliation,” which endured until 1949 and the final victory of the Chinese Communist revolution. During this long and challenging century, the British, and also other foreign powers following at their heels, dominated but never quite subjugated the Chinese. China did manage to escape the utter ignominy of India, which was completely conquered and incorporated into the British empire. (Hsü 1990) VII. The Boxer Uprising At the dawn of the twentieth century a xenophobic and superstitious popular movement was sweeping through northern and central China. Known in English as the Boxer Rebellion or the Boxer Uprising and initially in Chinese as yihequan (more or less Righteous and Harmonious Fists), by the summer of 1900 its followers had surrounded foreign legations in Peking and were poised for the wholesale slaughter of foreign diplomats, businessmen, and missionaries. The Boxers, as they were called by Westerners, were practitioners of traditional Chinese martial arts who sought to eliminate foreigners and foreign influence in China. The movement was quelled in August 1900 when an allied force of almost 20,000 troops from several Western nations and Japan arrived in Peking and put the Boxers to flight, but not before 231 foreigners in several areas of northern China had been killed by the insurgents, including two medical missionaries educated at Princeton. (Hsü 1990) A good portion of the Boxers’ anger was originally directed at the Manchus and their Qing government, which they perceived as incom-petent to resist the inroads the foreigners had made into China. A native Chinese government, they believed, would have been better able and better equipped to cope with the Western challenge. The Boxers’ xenophobia focused particularly on Protestant and Catholic missionaries, who were, especially in the countryside, the most visible reminder of China’s semicolonial subjugation. Chinese everywhere were acutely aware that the missionaries had entered China in the wakes of their nations’ gunboats, and popular resentment against them festered because of their occasionally haughty attitudes and the presumptuousness of some of their converts. There was also considerable animosity toward Christianity as a religion. Economic difficulties and urban unemployment caused by the influx of cheap European textiles contributed to popular restlessness, as did frequent floods and other natural disasters in China in the late nineteenth century, all of which seemed to suggest a pending loss of the Mandate of Heaven for the Qing government. (Hsü 1990) One major center of Boxer activity was Shandong province, an area devastated by floodwaters in 1898 when the dikes of the Yellow River burst. By 1899 Boxing was a craze in Shandong, and thousands of people began believing Boxer claims that mental and physical discipline through martial arts training would make them impervious to foreign bullets and bayonets. Even the governor of Shandong was impressed with the Boxers, and in 1899 he changed their name to the more flattering and official-sounding Righteous and Harmonious Militia (Yihetuan). Foreigners in Shandong were horrified by the increasingly bold and public displays of Boxer xenophobia, and their governments pressured the Qing into dismissing the governor for his unseemly support of the movement. In April 1900, however, Empress Dowager Cixi became more or less converted to the Boxer cause, and she approved of Boxer militia organization efforts in several northern Chinese provinces. By May, Boxing had become a craze, and the foreign legations in Peking were becoming increasingly alarmed by news of foreigners being murdered in the provinces and by the obviously hostile intentions of the Boxers in Peking who constantly paraded and protested outside legation compounds. Several legations got word to their governments that the situation might well become critical and require military assistance. (Hsü 1990) VIII. China after WWII The use of two atomic bombs by the Americans against Japan in August 1945 ended the war sooner than anyone in China expected. Chiang Kaishek returned in triumph to Nanjing in the fall of 1945, but soon the ebullient mood in China was muted by what everyone knew was on the horizon: the final showdown between the Nationalists and the Communists. For some time the Americans tried to mediate in China and prevent civil war. This, however, turned out to be an impossibility because each side was determined to defeat the other and was not sincerely interested in any sort of reconciliation. At the same time, however, both sides attempted to curry favour with the United States and tried to humour the idealistic American diplomats who sought to reconcile the Nationalists and the Communists. The U.S. government was sympathetic with the Nationalists for the simple reason that Chiang Kai-shek’s regime was almost universally recognized as China’s government at the time. (Hsü 1990) Immediately after Japan’s surrender, American diplomats tried to get the two sides together to conduct discussions. But their efforts could not succeed. Civil war flared up in Manchuria. But by late 1947 Chiang‘s armies in Manchuria had been largely wiped out, and in December 1948 Beijing (then still called Beiping) fell to the Communists. Nanjing itself fell to the Communists in April 1949, and on October 1, 1949, Mao was confident enough in the Communists’ ultimate victory that he proclaimed in Beiping (now renamed Beijing) the liberation of China and the founding of the new People’s Republic of China to jubilant throngs of celebrants in Tiananmen Square. He announced to China and the world that China had stood up. (Hsü 1990) Mao, a fine revolutionary, a brilliant theorist, and an important national symbol, made most of his contributions to China prior to liberation in 1949. After that he proved to be largely an impediment to peacetime growth and development in China. After his death in 1976 his mistakes were openly recognized, and the Chinese people in their innately good sense decided that China would never again allow the disruptive national movements and class struggle he so treasured. In today’s China, Mao is indeed a “dead ancestor,” both literally and figuratively. China has outgrown him. After the death of a national leader Hua Guofeng was the nominally designated successor, but he knew that his base of support was limited and that he would probably not prevail in a protracted power struggle. (Hsü 1990) Deng Xiaoping made a comeback and in early 1977 he was allowed to go back to Beijing, and he quickly emerged as the party’s dominant personality, effectively shunting Hua Guofeng aside. It simply did not matter any more that Mao had apparently designated Hua as his successor; people were fed up with Mao and his antics. Deng was soon leading the charge against the radicals and moved, along with the fellow moderate Hu Yaobang, to purge the party of its extremists. Deng detested the personality cult that Mao and his devotees had fostered, and he quickly dismantled it. Huge statues of Mao were pulled down all over China, and Deng rejected all attempts to create a similar personality cult around himself. Deng wanted to change China. IX. New Status of China in the World The visit of President Nixon to Beijing in 1972 opened the way for several of America's Asian allies to follow suit. By the time full diplomatic relations were established between Washington and Beijing, Japan had signed a Treaty of Peace and Friendship with China. The 1970s were a crucial decade for China-Southeast Asia relations. Throughout the 1980s Southeast Asia was deeply divided, with the ‘Indochina Bloc’ of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia on one side, backed by the Soviet Union, and the ASEAN countries on the other, supported by China and the United States. The issue was resolved through Moscow's change of direction towards reconciliation with China, reduction in its global commitments, and internal reform (leading in 1991—92 to the collapse of communism and dismemberment of the Soviet Union). Vietnam's withdrawal of its forces from Cambodia and Laos in 1989 was followed by normalisation of relations with China. In these events, insofar as they pertained to Southeast Asia, Beijing played a key role, which saw its political influence in the region increase dramatically. In the 1990s, as globalisation gained momentum, economics replaced politics as the principal focus of attention. China's ‘four modernisations’ (in agriculture, industry, science and technology, and the military), inaugurated in the early 1980s, bore fruit in the form of double-digit economic growth. Projections even suggested that China would pass the United States as the world's largest economy early in the twenty-first century. This rapid economic development was fuelled by massive foreign investment. X. China in 21st Century The rise of China and how to accommodate this will be one of the major international relations challenges of the twenty-first century. Whether or not this can be achieved peacefully is of particular importance for China's neighbours, and none more so than for the countries of Southeast Asia. Any attempt to foresee events is fraught with uncertainty. All we can do is sketch possible alternative scenarios, and suggest how these might play out given strategic interests, culturally embedded values and historical precedent. Of course, foreign policy decisions are made in response to contingent situations, both external due to the actions of other powers and internal in relation to the play of political forces. They are, in this sense, tactical. But behind these tactical responses lie broad strategic goals conceived in the context of the international relations and strategic cultures of the states in question. Not all tactical decisions will advance long-term strategic goals. But the two are connected, nonetheless, especially in the case of China, given its determination to regain great power status. (Lieberthal 1995) The historic shift in economic importance from the Silk Road to maritime trade took place from the Tang through the Song dynasties. Thereafter Central Asia was usually more significant in terms of security than trade. The arrival of the West both intensified this economic shift, which today is overwhelming, and redirected the focus of China's security concerns. For now and into the future, the coastal provinces of central and southern China are where the country's economic development is, and will be, focused, not Xinjiang. Even given competition from the US and Japan, Southeast Asia offers far more inviting opportunities for Chinese political and economic ambitions than does Central Asia. The point I am making is simply that if China seeks to project political power beyond its borders, Southeast Asia is the prime target. For centuries the region has been seen by China as its ‘natural’ sphere of influence, and it still is, however unpalatable this might be to regional powers. (Lieberthal 1995) In the longer term, the countries of Southeast Asia must face the challenge of developing bilateral relations regimes with China that both protect their own interests and security and accommodate those of China, as the de facto regional hegemony and great power. It would hardly be surprising if in doing so they draw upon the cultural presuppositions and historical precedents that, as I have shown, lie buried deep within their respective international relations cultures. (Lieberthal 1995) Works Cited Bernstein, Richard, and Ross H. Munro. The Coming Conflict with China. New York: Knopf, 1997. de Bary, William, et al., eds. Sources of Chinese Tradition, vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press, 1960. Chan, Wing-tsit. A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963. Dietrich, Craig. People’s China: A Brief History, 3d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Hsü, Immanuel C. Y. The Rise of Modern China, 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Li, Zhisui. The Private Life of Chairman Mao. New York: Random House, 1994. Lieberthal, Kenneth. Governing China: From Revolution through Reform. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. Lin, Mohan, and Wei Wei, eds. Women tuoqi nazhong Zhongguoren: “jingying” zai haiwai. Gansu: Gansu Renmin Chubanshe, 1999. Waldron, Arthur. The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Read More