Clean sweep
DENNIS J. DUNCANSON
British Policy in China, 1895-1902 L. K. Young (out. 70s) China: The Roots of Madness Theodore H. White (Bac 35s) The Transformation of the Chinese Earth Keith Buchanan (Bell 65s)
Nobody today would question that the Com- munist revolution in China had roots in the bullying to which Western powers subjected the Manchu state all through the nineteenth century. China did not lack intellectuals, from the 1850s onwards, who appreciated that she had somehow to adjust, at least technologic- ally, to the modernising world, even if fewer admitted that social or political adjustments were called for too. Evidence that these were called for came in the upheavals of the Taip- ings (1850s), the Boxers (1-900), and finally the petering-out of Manchu rule altogether (1911) from its own effeteness. The ultimate cause— or one of the ultimate causes—and the ulti- mate effect are well established; but what was the connection between them? How did foreign pressures actually work to break up the Manchu state? The readiest explanation is that patriotic resentment provided the link : the humiliation manifested by Chinese intellectuals at the time of the May 4 Move- ment in 1919 (student riots against the draft Versailles Treaty) had already fired the peasants at a much earlier date; it reached its climax during the Japanese invasion after 1931, in the end 'sweeping' the Communist party to power as the nationally-acclaimed leader of all classes.
All these books 'try to throw light on this succession of events. Unquestionably, for the short period it deals with—the high noon of European imperialism—British Policy in China throws the most light of the three. Those of us in the habit, as the Confucians put it, of washing our hands in rose water before taking up any book published by the Clarendon Press, are not disappointed. Diplomatic history cold4 showers the great-sweep, single-cause philo4 sophies of history: here are the bit-by-bit situations which decision-makers found themselves in from moment to moment.
Purblind greed and jealousies in Europe (the roots of a Western madness perhaps?) were fanned through the mixed merits of the new-fangled diplomatic telegraph, all too often undecipherable to the addressee because tampered with in transmission by helping hands at Tokyo or St Petersburg.
One feels like cheering the underdog when the Chinese government shows the keenness of wit to grant concession-hunters from rival countries what they ask for, but de- liberately on each other's doorstep, and then sitting back to watch the fur fly.
Ironically, that was what undermined the Manchu state, however: concessions, not only to build railways and otherwise supply a new demand for technical modernisation, but concessions to Christian missions as well. Wherever social tensions existed in the villages—frequently exacerbated by the overcrowding of land, by natural disasters, or by famine—Western enterprises, mater- ial or spiritual, held out a new form of patronage which 'rice Christians' and rice coolies (those peasants supposedly moved by patriotism) were quick to profit from, thereby saddling foreign consuls with an unforeseen extension of extraterritoriality to be administered and squabbled over. At one stage, the Manchu court was even per-
suaded to give bishops the rank of vice-
governors in the mandarinate, the better to champion their fickle but wily flocks. Small wonder that those who could not find a fashionable patron joined lawless secret societies and manned the rank and file of the Boxers, hoping literally for a stab at the top foreigners in the legation quarter. An the same, the foreigners were not the source of these feuds: they aggravated dis- sensions already there. The truth that modern Chinese events have basically Chinese causes comes out strongly in the
BBC'S reproduction, from Theodore White's recent television documentary, of a kalei- doscope of the most vivid photographs of those events. They range from the Manchus to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolu- tion, from the ridiculous to the bloodcurd- ling (but, alas, never include the sublime). The accompanying narrative offers many a home truth: for example, the post-1945 inflation owed more to the war unleashed by Mao Tse-tung than to any corruption in Chiang Kai-shek's ranks. One is not surprised if their recent history has driven some Chinese mad.
Professor Buchanan (chair of geography at Wellington) restates it all in 'materialist' terms. Foreign capitalists imposed 'a semi- colonial status' on Manchu China, wilfully impeding the industrialisation which her ex- panding population would have achieved if left to its own devices at the time. Chinese peasants, driven by this deprivation into spontaneous revolt, have led the Party more than they were led by it: even the com- munes were nothing to do with the Party, but a spontaneous outlet for the peasants' wish to substitute 'moral incentives' for material ones—the Cultural Revolution a necessary prior reform in the education system, no more. Defying economics and rampaging through offices with crowbars may seem mad to Europeans, but it adds up in China to the 'materialist' sanity under- lying this wish for 'moral incentives'. One wonders whether Mao Tse-tung would re- cognise his China in the text of this book; regular overseas readers of the Peking People's Daily will not,
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