John K. Fairbank

Tributary Trade and China's Relations with the West

Until a century ago, Chinas foreign relations were suzerain-vassal relations conducted through the ancient forms of the tributary system. This traditional Chinese basis for diplomacy was finally turned upside down by the “unequal” treaties of the period 1842–1858, but vestiges of the old Chinese way of dealing with the barbarians survived much longer and today still form a considerable though latent portion of the heritage of Chinese diplomats. It is of course a truism that tribute was not exactly what it seemed, and that both diplomacy and international trade were conducted within the tributary framework. The following essay offers a preliminary interpretation of the origin, function, and significance of this great Chinese institution.

China's economic policy and performance

Few really new economic ideas or policies were put forward during the Cultural Revolution decade, 1966-76. Chinas economic strategy emphasizing machinery and steel was virtually a carbon copy of Stalins development strategy for Russia in the 1930s. Before turning to Chinas development strategy in the Cultural Revolution period, one must first deal with the argument that China had no coherent strategy in the period, because the country was in continual chaos. Politics, of course, was frequently chaotic, but the question here is whether politics regularly spilled over into the economy, causing work stoppages and worse. Chinas basic industrial development strategy was set in the 1st Five-Year Plan, of 1953-57. In terms of sectoral growth strategies, China had made a significant move in the direction of the strategy that had proved so successful among its East Asian neighbors.

John Fairbank and the American understanding of modern China

Part biography, part intellectual history, this book explores the emergence of 20th-century China as a political force and the rise of US-China relations through the life of one of the most celebrated American intellectual figures of modern time, John King Fairbank. The author reconstructs the central events of Fairbanks life and times, concentrating especially on his role as a scholar and shaper of public opinion and policy. He explores the policy issues and cultural upheavals that accompanied the rise of modern China and US-China relations by examining Fairbanks role in this historic period. He describes the young Fairbanks awakening, during the 1930s, to the realities of Chinese political culture, his advocacy of a liberal response to the Chinese Revolution, his reluctant conversion to the Cold War orthodoxy, his emergence as a belated critic of the Vietnam War, and his self-vindicatory trips to China after the rapprochement of the 1970s. The growth of 20th-century Western knowledge of China, beginning with the writings and activities of a small group of British and American sinologists, developed largely as a result of Fairbanks leadership into a broad and vigorous transnational intellectual community. In rounding out his portrait of Fairbank as scholar-activist and academic entrepreneur, Evans explicates the political and theoretical struggles which have shaped Western understanding of the emergent China.

The foreign presence in China

The foreign establishment in early republican China had many facets: territory, people, rights established by treaty or unilaterally asserted, armed force, diplomacy, religion, commerce, journalism, freebooting adventure, racial attitudes. This chapter describes briefly the dimensions of each of the principal guises in which the foreigner impinged upon the polity, economy, society and mind of China. In the absence of modern financial institutions in China, the early foreign merchant houses undertook to provide for themselves many of the auxiliary services such as banking, foreign exchange and insurance essential to their import-export businesses. However, by the second decade of the twentieth century, 12 foreign banks were operating in China. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, 85 to 90 per cent of Chinas foreign trade by value was carried in foreign flag vessels. The foreign presence was highly visible in three departments of the central government: the Maritime Customs Service, the Post Office and the Salt Administration.

The Great Leap Forward and the split in the Yenan leadership

During the spring and summer of 1958 Mao Tse-tung and his colleagues pushed the Great Leap Forward (GLF) idea as an alternative to the development strategy that had been imported from the Soviet Union for the first Five-Year Plan (FYP). Needing some way to overcome bottlenecks that appeared to preclude a simple repetition of the first FYP strategy, the Chinese leaders settled on an approach that utilized the mass mobilization skills they had honed to a fine edge during the Anti-Japanese War years in Yenan. Mao began to take the fateful steps that led to unleashing the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Factors such as weather and the industrial sector produced a rising crescendo of support for the GLF, both within the Chinese Communist Party and among the general populace. The split in the Yenan leadership has focused on the different components that came together to launch the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

Mao Tse-tung's thought from 1949 to 1976

Like Lenin, Mao Tse-tung, on coming to power, continued to develop his ideas in a context different from that within which he had operated while in opposition. One important constant in the development of Mao Tse-tungs thought was his concern to adapt Marxism, or Marxism-Leninism, to the economic and social reality of a backward agrarian country, and to the heritage of the Chinese past, which for Mao was no less real. This chapter first quotes a passage about Stalins propensity to exterminate his critics. Following on from this, Mao developed, under the heading of eliminating counterrevolutionaries, a comparison between China and the Soviet Union as regarded the use and abuse of revolutionary violence. Mao drastically changed his position regarding the nature of the contradictions in Chinese society during the summer of 1957. The consequences of this shift for economic policy have already been explored, and some of its implications in the philosophic domain have also been evoked.

The Nationalist Revolution: from Canton to Nanking, 1923–28

The Nationalist Revolution of the 1920s succeeded because of a remarkable mobilization of human energy and material resources in the service of patriotic and revolutionary goals. This chapter discusses the rejuvenating the Kuomintang, creation of a revolutionary military force, conflict in the Kwangtung base, and the Russian financing of Chinese revolutionary activities. The patriotic purposes of the Northern Expedition was to liberate China from the warlords and win its rightful place of equality among the nations, with friendship for all. The disastrous Canton uprising, engineered by a small group of daring Chinese communist leaders to carry out general instructions of the new Provisional Politburo in Shanghai, marked a low point in the Communist Partys long struggle for power. Now the country had five main agglomerations of regional military power: the group proclaiming itself the Nationalist government, the Kwangsi faction, Feng Yii-hsiangs Kuominchiin, Yen Hsi-shan of Shansi, and Chang Hsuehliang and other Manchurian generals controlling domestic affairs in the North-east.

The reunification of China

Journalism as the chief mode for understanding the Chinese revolution has had a fruitful growth throughout the twentieth century. Television can bring the Chinese revolution into the home of every Westerner. Through the revolution of 1911, then the revolution of the 1920s under the Kuomintang Party in its first united front with the Chinese Communist Party, the reporting of the current scene in China has continued to progress in technique and expand in coverage. A turning point in the social-scientific approach was inaugurated during World War II by the growth of area studies, which focus the various disciplines on China. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Chinese scholars noted increasing difficulties in administration, the decline of morale, and the rise of rebellion. These phenomena, from the late eighteenth century to about the 1870s, were slotted into the traditional cubbyholes of the dynastic cycle theory. The Industrial Revolution of the early nineteenth century had obviously outgrown the sphere of industry.

The Chinese Communist Movement to 1927

Before the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) there were even special magazines for or about the working man which provided information on workers and peasants, fostered a new attitude towards labour, and drew attention to some of the most serious social problems. In the case of China between 1917 and 1921 the conversion to Marxism involved the perception of Chinese reality on the part of the converts, their personal temperament and traits, and their understanding of the doctrine itself. Lenins theses on the agrarian and national and colonial questions presented before and at the Second Congress of the Communist International (CI) in July 1920 probably remained unknown to the early Chinese Marxists. The Boxer uprising and Russias role in it drew Lenins attention to China, but it was the Chinese and other Asian revolutions. Towards the end of the first united front, the party could perhaps influence some three million factory, mining and railway workers.

Mao Tse-tung's thought to 1949

Mao Tse-tungs thought, as it had found expression prior to the establishment of the Chinese Peoples Republic, was at once the synthesis of his experience down to 1949, and the matrix out of which many of his later policies were to grow. Part I seeks to document and interpret the development of Maos thought during the first three decades of his active political life. It also tries to prepare the reader better to understand what came after the conquest of power. While stressing those concerns which were uppermost in Maos own mind in the earlier years, it also devotes attention to ideas of which the implications were fully spelled out only in the 1950s and 1960s. As regards the context in which Maos ideas evolved, the period from 1912 (when Mao, at the age of 18½, returned to his studies after half a year as a soldier in the revolutionary army) to 1949 (when he became the titular and effective ruler of a united China) was one of ceaseless and far-reaching political, social and cultural change. Mao lived, in effect, through several distinct eras in the history of his country during the first half-century of his life, and the experience which shaped his perception of Chinas problems, and his ideas of what to do about them, therefore varied radically not only from decade to decade, but in many cases from year to year.