Diana Lary

Regions and Nation: The Present Situation in China in Historical Context

THERE ARE TWO SACRED CREDOS about the Chinese state. The first is that China has been unified for more than two thousand years. The second is that weakness at the centre leads to chaos. Both credos are held with passionate intensity by the present leaders of the Chinese state, as they have been by central governments since the first unification of China. The actual history of China explains the intensity of devotion: these credos tell us not about literal historical truth, but about the two greatest threats to any central government of China, disunity and chaos. The first credo is misleading; it is actually both true and false. China has been unified under the imperial system since 221 B.C., but unified control has not been a constant of Chinese history; China has been divided for long periods, and has had even longer periods of weak central power (see table 1). When it came to power in 1949, the present government was the first to exercise unquestioned control over the state since 1911, and the first strong regime since the Qianlong reign in the eighteenth century. Even so, it still did not control significant parts of the country. The second credo is equally misleading. Central weakness may cause disunity and devolution, but not the breakup of the state. When the centre has to accommodate regional power, the outcome may be less chaos than creative balancing. The Song (960-1279) was a weak dynasty, in terms of political control, but it was the high point of intellectual and economic achievement, the pinnacle of Chinas artistic history, the period when the finest porcelain, painting and poetry were produced, and the period when the greatest Neoconfucian philosophers were at work. Even periods of virtually no central government have seen major achievements in areas other than the political arena. The recent warlord period (1916-37) was a period of great energy and creativity in writing and painting, and in economic development. It was then that the framework of Chinas modern economy was laid, in the coastal regions (Guangdong,Jiangnan, Liaodong) in which Chinas present economy flourishes. Chaos is not a direct corollary of central weakness, though central weakness can lead to the chaos

Faith and War Eyewitnesses to the Japanese invasion of China: Quebec's Jesuit priests

My thanks for help in writing this paper go to the Jesuit priests whose letters and diaries I have used; to Fathers Rosario Renaud and Jacques Langlais, the historians of the Quebec Mission in China; to Madame Isabelle Content, archivist of the Jesuit Order in St. Jerome, Quebec; and to my mother, M.M.E. Lainson, who helped me to understand the religious life of Roman Catholics in the 1930s.