Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Communist China

Nothing could be more different from the experience of Japan than that of Japan’s greatest neighbor, mainland China. On Taiwan, the Nationalist Government of China has combined a typical Chiang Kai-shek political despotism with an economic program, including agrarian reform, somewhat similar to Japan’s, but Red China, as far as we can discern, has passed through one great crisis after another in a desperate and tyrannical effort to follow the Stalinist model of Soviet Russia’s experience. Like the Soviet Union, Red China may be able to organize itself into a powerful and expanding society, but the problems in China are much greater and more intractable than they were in Russia.

For one thing, China’s huge population has been placing heavy pressure on limited resources, while Russia has always been an underpopulated country with enormous untapped resources capable of extensive exploitation. Under the czar, Russia produced great surpluses, especially of food, which were exported abroad. In a sense the Communist problem in Russia was to reestablish these surpluses (which had been destroyed in the Civil War period of 1917-1921) and divert them, along with surplus peasants, to the city to provide capital and labor for the industrialization process. In China there was no surplus food, so that the problem, from the beginning, was how to increase the production of food, not how to reestablish it and rechannel it. Moreover, in Russia, a centralized despotic state capable of enforcing these changes was part of the country’s past experience; the direct authority of the state in the form of the recruiting officer, the tax collector, and the priest had impinged on the lowest peasant, at least since the abolition of serfdom, and on most of the society for over a thousand years. In China, as we have seen, the state’s authority was remote and separated from the peasants by many layers of semiautonomous gentry. In China the authority that impinged on the peasant was social rather than political; the enveloping influence of his family and clan formed the real social unit of the society, which was structured on these units and not on the individual, as in Russia or the West.

Moreover, in China, the authority that impinged on the ordinary individual was not only social; it was static. Based on custom and tradition rather than on law or political power, its whole tendency was to resist change. In Russia, on the other hand, the absence of such a binding social nexus, the fact that the basic social and metaphysical reality there was the individual, the fact that the state’s power impinged on that individual and that that power, for centuries, had been seeking change (as it had under Peter or Catherine, under Alexander I and II), all these things assisted the establishment of a Communist dictatorship in the Soviet Union. Moreover, almost constant internal migration in Russia from its earliest days, and the constant threat and reality of war and invasion, gave Russia an ability to accept changing personal conditions. This was in the sharpest possible contrast with Chinese conditions, where the heaviest obligation on each family was to maintain its fixed ancestral shrines, an obligation that tied the family to its traditional village.

Nowhere was the contrast between Russian and Chinese conditions more emphatic than in religion and general outlook. The Chinese were pragmatic, while the Russians were dualistic, and the West was pluralistic. In both the West and in Russia, belief in personal salvation in the hereafter and the need to work or to suffer for such future reward had given the prevailing outlooks a powerful impression of “future preference.” Moreover, in Russia the close association of Church and State, and the teaching of the former that the latter was an essential element in reality and that submission to the czar’s authority was part of the process of future salvation, prepared the way for the future Communist system. The dualistic and messianic outlook of Russia prepared Russian minds to accept any kind of uncompromising, intolerant, and painful authority as the only mechanism by which man could be shifted from this level of materialistic deprivation to the other level of Salvationist future reward, since man, by his own power, could not cross the metaphysical gap, the no-man’s land of almost unbridgeable distance, between the two levels of Russian dualism. In the West, man could, by his own activity, contribute to his rise to a high level of value and reward because, to the West, reality was not dualistic but pluralistic, with an infinite variety of steps and paths formed by the mutual interpenetra-tion of spirit and matter in all the intermediate levels between their two extremes.

China had none of this. There all reality was on the same mundane level; human activity sought to survive, that is, to retain the existing situation, by pragmatic adaptation and flexible response to shifting pressures. In China both philosophy and religion were largely ethics, and this ethics was both pragmatic and conservative. In such an environment the messianic, Salvationist, dynamic, future-oriented, state-dominated, abstract, and doctrinaire nature of Marxist-Leninism was utterly alien.

Nevertheless, Marxist-Leninism came to China and took control of it. This could not have occurred if the Old China had not been almost totally destroyed by the intrusion of the West, by the destruction of Chinese confidence in their way of life in the face of Western power, wealth, and ideology, and by the sixty years of turmoil and war extending from the Japanese attack on China of 1894 to the final Communist pacification in 1954.

Of course, no people lose their culture completely, no matter how it may disintegrate, and many of the fragments of Chinese cultural patterns continue to persist. One obvious example of this is in foreign policy, where China’s patterns were remote from those of the traditional sovereign states, equals in international law, found in modern Europe. The Chinese system was always very ethnocentric in that they not only saw themselves as the center of the world, but saw themselves as the only civilized unit in their world picture in a planetary arrangement in which lesser peoples encircled them and lived in increasingly dark barbarism, depending on their distance from Peking. In the traditional view of China by the Chinese, there was, outside the three planetary rings of China itself (the imperial system, the provincial gentry, and the Chinese peasantry), increasingly remote peoples who were dependent upon China for cultural guidance, civilized example, and economic stimulation and were, in many cases (such as Indochina, Tibet, Mongolia, or Korea), in a tribute-paying relationship. This whole relationship, which was quite alien to Europe’s idea in the nineteenth century of the balanced powers of equally sovereign states, was, on the contrary, very similar to the modern Communist idea of satellite states.

It seems likely that the Chinese, in spite of the many good reasons they had to be resentful of the Russians, were willing to be a satellite to the Russian sun until about 1955, when they became increasingly impatient with Khrushchev’s efforts to relax the Cold War.

These relationships can be seen most clearly in military assistance and economic aid. The Chinese Communists triumphed over Chiang Kai-shek in the civil war with only limited Soviet assistance, since Stalin apparently wanted China to be controlled by a Nationalist coalition government in which the Communists would participate. Stalin wanted China weak rather than Communist, and all his actions seem to have been consistent with this aim. The Russians allowed some of the captured Japanese military equipment to go to the Communists in 1945, but this was small in amount compared to that which the Communists obtained by capture or purchase from the Nationalist forces, and the Soviet Union gave no military aid to the Communists during the last four years of the civil war (1945-1949).