Understanding China: Its Traditions and History

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Understanding China Its Traditions and History
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Basic Information on China

• Population 1.3 Billion (UN census, 2003)
• Territory 3,705,386 square miles (a bit smaller
  than the United States)
• Year of Independence 21 B.C.E.
• Year of Current Constitution 1982
• Languages Mandarin (official language),
  Cantonese, Shanghaiese, other dialects, and
  minority languages
• Religion Officially Atheist, Taoist, Buddhism,
  Muslim (2-3), Christian (1).

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Basic Chinese Philosophies

• Confucianism - Ethical system that teaches the
  proper way for people to behave in society.
• Confucius is the Latinized version of
  K'ung-fu-tzu, meaning Master K'ung
• State teaching from the beginning of the Han
  Dynasty in 202 BCE to 1911 AD
• Believed in extended family, authority rested
  with elder male family member, and filial piety
• Hierarchical order to society - inferior vs.
  superior must demonstrate respect/deference to
  superiors.
• Works included
• Classic of Poetry ? I Ching
• Classic of History ? Analects (see packet)
• Spring and Autumn Annals

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The Analects

• XVII.2 The Master said, "By nature, men are
  nearly alike by practice, they get to be wide
  apart."
• XVI.9 Confucius said, "Those who are born with
  the possession of knowledge are the highest class
  of men. Those who learn, and so readily get
  possession of knowledge, are the next. Those who
  are dull and stupid, and yet compass the learning
  are another class next to these. As to those who
  are dull and stupid and yet do not learn--they
  are the lowest of the people."
• VII.8 The Master said, "I do not open up the
  truth to one who is not eager to get knowledge,
  nor help out any one who is not anxious to
  explain himself. When I have presented one corner
  of a subject to any one, and he cannot from it
  learn the other three, I do not repeat my
  lesson."

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Basic Chinese Philosophies

• Taoism - Tao means "way" - indicating a way of
  thought or life spiritual in nature.
• 6th century B.C.E. - philosopher Lao-tzu is
  believed to have started the practice and study
  of Taoism
• The Tao is considered unnamed and unknowable, the
  essential unifying element of all that is.
• Everything is part of a whole
• Yin (the female element)/ Yang (the male element)
• Lao-tzu is believed to be the author of the
  Tao-te-Ching (Classic of the Way of Power).
• Wu Wei"non-doing." Wu-wei refers to behavior
  that arises from a sense of oneself as connected
  to others and to one's environment.

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The Tao that can be spoken of is not the eternal
Tao.The name that can be named is not the
eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of
heaven and earth.The name is the mother of the
ten thousand things.Send your desires away and
you will see the mystery.Be filled with desire
and you will see only the manifestation.As
these two come forth they differ in name.Yet at
their source they are the same.This source is
called a mystery.Darkness within darkness, the
gateway to all mystery.
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Very Old Civilization

• Chinese civilization emerged more than six
  thousand years ago.
• Imperial China was the longest-lived major system
  of governance in world history. Imperial China
  ruled for more than 2000 years until the fall of
  the Qing Dynasty in 1911.

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Imperial China

• Centralized state power that was based on the
  political philosophy of Confucianism.
• Confucianism philosophy Considered society and
  state in terms of an ordered hierarchy of
  harmonious relationships.
• Emperor was at the top of the hierarchy and
  maintained social order through his conduct as a
  moral model.
• Loyalty to the Emperor was the highest principle
  in the hierarchy of relationships in society.

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The Struggle for China

• The Imperial began to crumble in the mid-19th
  century as a result of the struggle for national
  sovereignty and peasant livelihood.
• 1920s - The Nationalist Party and army emerged as
  a popular force in urban areas and sought to
  regain Chinese territories from Western Powers
  and Japan.
• The Communist Party was founded in 1921 and
  sought to aid the worsening living conditions of
  peasants.
• Although there was a brief truce between the two
  factions, China experienced a major civil war in
  the late 1920s between the communists and the
  nationalists.

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Rise of Mao Zedong

• Communists retreated to the countryside.
• Mao Zedong emerged as the leader of the Communist
  Party in the mid 1930s.
• Mao believed that Communists could win power by
  organizing a rural revolution
• His plan was to build a guerilla Red Army to
  surround cities with the countryside.
• When the Japanese invaded in 1937, a truce was
  called between the Nationalists and the
  Communists.

Young Mao Zedong, mobilizing the masses in 1940s.
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Rise of Mao

• The Communists grew from 40,000 to more than 1
  million members between 1937-1945.
• The Japanese defeat in WWII ended the truce
  between the Nationalists and the Communists.
• Once in power, the Communists established the
  Peoples Republic of China (PRC) and turned their
  energies to making China a socialist state.

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Mao Years (1949-1976)

• The Peoples Republic of China looked up to the
  USSR to build their socialist system. Mao based
  the Chinese political system on three principles
• Guardianship (Lenin) describes the relationship
  between party and society.
• Hierarchy (Lenin) describes the relationship
  within the party.
• Mass Line (Mao) complements guardianship and
  provides some line between party and society.

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Thought Reform

• Mao believed that potential regime opponents
  (intellectuals and capitalists) were capable of
  being politically transformed through practices
  such as thought reform.

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Maos Model of Communism

• Mao began to reconsider his view of the Soviet
  Union and developed his own radical model of
  Communism. His major campaigns
• Great Leap Forward - gigantic farms were
  established with thousands of households in hopes
  of decreasing the food shortage.
• Cultural Revolution - Mao saw a new class of
  economic managers and political officials with
  interests in economic growth and individual
  prosperity emerging within his own Communist
  Party. For Mao, the enemy of socialism could be
  found within the Communist Party.

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Cultural Revolution

• In 1966, Mao argued that the new class of
  communist party people were corrupt capitalists
  opposing socialism and that the new class had to
  be thrown out of power.
• Unable to rely on the Communist party to correct
  its own mistakes, Mao instructed secondary school
  and university students to overturn this
  bourgeoisie culture.
• The Communist Party became a powerless
  organization.
• Unrestrained by the party, the Chinese engaged in
  political action which they legitimized by their
  own interpretations of Mao Zedong Thought.

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Cultural Revolution

• Students formed radical Red Guard groups to
  criticize and persecute people that had power in
  schools, factories, government agencies, etc.
• Maos hope for China was to be free of the four
  oldstraditional habits, ideas, customs and
  beliefswhich were thought to lie at the heart of
  Chinas debilitation, and which Maos Red Guards
  sought to destroy. The national interest was
  meant to replace narrow, selfish concerns.
• Physical persecution for victims Held in
  prisons, forced to do manual harsh labor,
  tortured to make them confess their crimes,
  etc.
• In 1967, schools were shut down, most party and
  government offices no longer functioned,
  transportation and communications were disrupted.

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Reeducation

• Re-education programs Mao suggested setting up
  farms, later called cadre schools, where cadres
  and intellectuals, "sent down" from the cities,
  would perform manual labor and undergo
  ideological reeducation. Cadres would take turns
  going to the villages or grass-roots levels to
  gain first-hand experience in productive work.
• During the Cultural Revolution, "transferring
  cadres to lower levels" became a favored method
  to remove unyielding intellectuals from the
  cities.

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End of Maoist Era

• In the 1970s, conflict arose within the Communist
  Part between two major political groups Radicals
  who supported Mao and Economic Modernizers
• Mao died in 1976.
• In two years following Maos death, Economic
  Modernizers took power in China.
• Leaders of the Communist Party officially and
  publicly reject most of the strategies of Maos
  revolutionary project and declared Maos work a
  failure.
• They launched a new period of socialist reform
  still going today.