Part V Introduction to Chinese Society, Culture, and Politics

Part V Introduction to Chinese Society, Culture, and Politics Dingxin Zhao and Jeffrey Broadbent China is of course the most ancient continuous civilization in East Asia, and indeed in the world. As a result, its culture and institutions have attained a palpable reality in the minds of its people, even as its institutions were variously twisted and overturned in the course of many historical events. The contemporary effect of these legacies must be considered when studying movements in contemporary China (Wasserstrom and Perry 1994; Zhao 2010). China s guiding Confucian philosophy developed from around 500 BCE through various retrenchments, reforms and revisions until the modernizing and revolutionary changes of the 20th century (Bol 1992; De Bary 1983, 1988). The same may be said for other traditional Chinese orientations, such as Taoism and Buddhism (e.g., Ch en 1973; Hymes 1986; Welch 1957; Wright 1967). Politically, over these millennia, China developed through kingdoms conquering each other, gradually forming a central Imperial state (Zhao 2006). As the Imperial State expanded it incorporated different ethnic groups, making China the multi-ethnic society it is today. Imperial control over the periphery waxed and waned, allowing for the rise of protest movements, rebellions and invaders that sometimes conquered the center and formed their own ruling dynasties. Thus, though seeing long periods of peace and prosperity, social turmoil, heterodox ideologies and religions, and resistance to the Imperial center have also always been recognized parts of Chinese civilization (Fairbank and Goldman 2006). When the British arrived in the mid-1800s, the Manchu Qing Dynasty (1644 1911) was already in a decline. The British was thus able to take the advantage to establish a colony in Hong Kong and forced the Chinese to accept opium in exchange for silk and tea. Other European countries soon established their own trading concessions in port cities. These abrasive encounters deeply affronted the Chinese sense of Confucian ethics and centrality, pushed Chinese first to implement limited reforms without undermining the Confucian order, and then after China s fiasco defeat by the Japanese in 1894, to stage more and more radical reforms that ended in the 1911 Revolution (Esherick 1998; Gray 1990). The Revolution ended the Qing Dynasty but did not save China. China was as weak as before and Japanese aggression was pending. This triggered the 1919

380 D. Zhao and J. Broadbent May 4th Movement and the rise of the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) and Communist Party (CCP) (Chow 1967; Benjamin 1972). While the members of both parties were nationalistic, they had different attitudes toward the Chinese culture and different visions of a good society. While the nationalists believed that the Confucian-centered Chinese culture was still valuable for modern China, the communists were much more critical toward Chinese culture and saw Communism as the future for China (even though their understanding of Communism and their mentality were still strongly molded by the Chinese culture). The two parties were united in the early 1920s in fighting with the warlords and again between 1936 and 1945 against the Japanese during which the CCP growing stronger (Chen 1986; Johnson 1962; Selden 1971). Japan s defeat in 1945 left the two Chinese sides to battle it out, resulting in the 1949 Communist victory on the mainland, and the Nationalist Party, under Chiang Kai-Shek, fleeing to Taiwan. The Chinese Communist Party thoroughly reorganized and transformed Chinese society, culture, economy and political institutions based on communist ideologies. In rural areas, the CCP redistributed land and then organized Chinese villages into commune systems with collective ownership of land. In cities, the CCP ended the private ownership of firms, constructed many staterun factories and initiated the state-led industrialization. In social control, the CCP set up a nation-wide Communist Party apparatus that penetrated all local organizations to ensure ideological conformity (Whyte 1974). Mao and the CCP enjoyed tremendous support from the Chinese people in the 1950; faith in Communism attained wide-spread quasi-religious fervor and inspired heroic dedication. But as the CCP pushed forward policies with devastating consequences, uncertainty and dissention arose. The most devastating policies were the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957 (over half million intellectuals were labeled as rightists and had their lives ruined), the Great Leap Forward between 1958 and 1960 (ending in a 3-year famine and over thirty million deaths), and the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976 (which induced regional civil wars, endemic factionalism and prolonged succession crisis) (Lee 1978; Teiwes and Sun 1999). By the time of Mao s death in 1976, China s economy was on the verge of collapse, Chinese lived in poverty, and grievances mounted. Amidst these crises in 1978 the new leader Deng Xiaoping adopted a policy of economic reform that allowed more capitalist initiative, while trying to exercise tight political control. During the Mao era, what mass social movements existed were stateinitiated political campaigns. Sometimes those campaigns, such as the Cultural Revolution, ran out of control and acquired the characteristics of social movements. In post-mao China, declining popular belief in communism reduced the effectiveness of state political control and made social movements possible. The development of social movements in post-mao China is closely correlated with the changing state-society relationship and can be roughly divided into three periods. Most social movements during the first period between

Introduction to Chinese Society, Culture, and Politics 381 1976 and 1989 were large scale and expressed grievances against the state (Schell 1988; Seymour 1980; Zhao 2001). They were reactions against unpopular Maoist policies that affected an entire category of the population. Students sent to the countryside wanted to go home; cadres dismissed during the Cultural Revolution and intellectuals who were labeled as rightists demanded rehabilitation. These complaints among the educated led to calls and protests for greater democracy, culminating in the 1989 student democracy movement protest in Tiananmen Square (Calhoun 1994; Zhao 2001). After considerable hesitation, the Chinese state violently suppressed this movement and tried to wipe it from popular historical memory. After 1989, the CCP refused to implement an Eastern European style glasnost political reform. However, it nevertheless pushed forward marketoriented economic reform with great success. The growth of capitalist and quasi-capitalist firms brought about new social problems ranging from corruption, growing inequality, massive worker layoffs, over-taxation of farmers and environmental degradation. New types of protests slowly gained momentum in the mid-1990s (Hurst 2004). During this second period, protests tended to be of smaller scale, focus on economic issues, and target local businesses and local government. When the central government was involved, it often acted as an arbiter instead of providing the target as in the 1980s. If the state acted properly, the protests actually enhanced rather than undermined the state legitimacy among the populace. This second period lasted into the early 21 st century and gradually faded into the third period. Several new developments facilitated the rise of the third period. The Chinese government, especially the Hu Jintao administration, placed more restrictions on local government use of violence against protests and adopted policies favoring China s disadvantaged populations. These policies created opportunities for local activism. The rights consciousness of the Chinese people has grown rapidly in recent years (O Brien et al. 2006). Facilitated by the growing use of Internet, cell phone text messages, and other technologies in communication and mobilization, proactive social movements and middle class movements have quickly developed, and populist movements have also gained momentum. Local religions and cults are also coming back and sometimes stage protest movements (Aminzade and Perry 2001), the most well known being the Fa Lun Gong protests (Tong 2002). In addition, since the mid-1990s, Chinese protests have taken the form of riots. A rumor or a minor incident will trigger a riot with tens of thousands of participants, resulting in huge damage to public and private property. The protests and riots have not turned revolutionary due to three factors: lack of an overarching anti-establishment ideology, strength of the state s social control apparatus, and third, the booming economy has allowed the state to mitigate social conflicts by money. On the other hand, the regime s authoritarian nature has hindered it from channeling protests into highly institutionalized associations that could be easily controlled. Large-scale turmoil and revolution remains a possibility in China (Zhao 2009).

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