Modern China. A Very Short Introduction (13 page)

Most notable of all, the era saw the arrival of the ‘one-child policy’. Worried about the exploding population growth rate, in 1979 the government placed severe restrictions on the number of children that a family could have. Although the rules have changed somewhat since they were fi rst initiated, the general rule has been that one child is permitted to an urban family, and that rural families may have a second child if the fi rst is a girl.

80

The policy has been justifi ed on demographic grounds. Yet it also puts a severe question mark over the government’s commitment to equality. First, the onus is put squarely (if not explicitly) on women to prevent pregnancy, making it a personal, biological responsibility from which wider society, and men in general, are excused. Then, permission for rural families to try again if the fi rst child is a girl effectively admits that the old, Confucian hierarchies in the countryside are unchangeable, and that the desire for a boy fi rst and foremost should be indulged. Yet the policy is having another effect that will only be seen in future decades: China is rapidly aging. Around 140 million Chinese are elderly (that is, about 10% of the population) in the early 21st century; by 2025, UN estimates suggest that there will be 326 million Chinese over 50 and fewer than 278 million under 20.

Is C

The mixture of old attitudes and new technology in China has
hinese soc

led to unforeseen and potentially damaging effects. The use of ultrasound to fi nd out a child’s sex before birth has led to large
iet

y modern?

numbers of abortions of female foetuses, leading to a severe gender imbalance in parts of China. In Henan province in 2007, over-the-counter sales of abortifacient pills were heavily restricted when it became clear that they were being used to abort female foetuses. Yet this type of regulation has been hard to enforce in reform-era China, and the longer-term solution to this problem is still unclear.

War and society

Confucian norms stressed the importance of harmony and order.

This was an understandable reaction to the times that Confucius lived in, the era of the Warring States when kingdoms wrestled with each other for supremacy. The terrain of China has been marked, since the 19th century, by war and confl ict, the literal battles often shaping the metaphorical ones which have infl uenced the wider society. The experience of almost constant warfare shaped China from the Taiping Wars of the 1850s and 1860s until 81

the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. Even then, Chinese society was not truly at peace for decades.

The Qing dynasty, from its foundation in 1644 to its zenith in the 18th century, took part in massive expansion of Chinese territory to the west and south. These were wars of conquest, however, rather than being internally disruptive civil wars or foreign invasions. Just as Britain fought abroad for colonies in the 19th century while its metropolitan societies remained peaceful and prosperous, the High Qing era did not see conquest linked with domestic collapse.

The wars of the mid-19th century onwards were very different.

Late Qing China had a variety of problems that would have come to prominence anyway, such as a major agricultural crisis and an outstripping of the state’s ability to collect revenue. However, the impact of war hastened the state’s collapse. The famous
hina

fi rst Opium War (1839–42) did not in fact cause much social instability in its own right, as it was fought mostly on the coast
Modern C

and at sea: its importance was in demonstrating the reversal of power between the Qing empire and the British. A series of later wars caused much greater direct impact, however, such as the Taiping War of 1856–64. Warfare did a great deal to corrode Qing authority. In physical terms, it destroyed the agricultural base in some of China’s richest areas, further reducing the state’s ability to generate revenue. In psychological terms, it enforced the idea that central state authority was no longer strong enough to protect people from attack. Local elites, many of whom had been instrumental in forming local militias which had eventually helped defeat the Taiping, became a new source of power that became an alternative to the government in Beijing. Eventually, that local power would undermine the Qing fatally in 1911.

In fact, the dynasty’s downfall in 1911 was not very bloody, although there were notable atrocities such as the murder of Manchus by Han Chinese revolutionaries in cities such as 82

Nanjing. However, China’s new republic was wracked by war throughout its existence, so much so that many reformers summarized the country’s troubles as ‘imperialism from outside, warlordism from within’. Civil wars wracked the country from 1916 onwards. The establishment of the Nationalist government in 1928 was supposed to bring the period of warfare to an end. But in practice, Chiang Kaishek’s government was still at war through most of the following years: with the Communists, with rival militarists, and then with the Japanese. These wars were not just passing phenomena: peasants found their crops confi scated or destroyed, and faith in central authority remained scanty.

It did seem possible by the mid-1930s that Chiang’s government was on the way to consolidating its power. The Communists were on the run after the Long March, and Chiang had managed to
Is C

establish an uneasy truce with most of the regional militarists who
hinese soc

had acted against him. But the outbreak of war with Japan in 1937

put paid to any hope of modernization under a centralized, stable
iet

y modern?

state. Reform required peace, stability, a reliable tax revenue stream, and access to international and domestic markets. The Nationalist government had none of these. The result was a state that turned in on itself. Corruption, black marketeering, and runaway infl ation in the Nationalist zone led to a collapse of trust in the government, paving the way for the Communist victory in the Civil War which followed in 1946–9. The poor record of the Nationalist government in the last years of the war has rightly been blamed for the loss of support from the Chinese public. However, this explanation cannot stand alone without an understanding of quite how thoroughly the war against Japan had destroyed the basis of the society which the Nationalists governed.

On the other hand, one undeniable change did happen in both Nationalist and Communist areas as a result of the war: the state became entwined with society much more inextricably. The political parties demanded that their people support them in their struggle against Japan; in turn, refugees demanded food, and ordinary citizens expected protection from air-raids, and more 83

widely, the establishment of a society that would reward them for the sacrifi ces they had made during the long years of war.

Mao’s victory in 1949 has generally been regarded as the end of the period of war in China, as the country was fi nally united under a single government. Yet the organization of Maoist China was, in signifi cant ways, ‘war by other means’. The Cultural Revolution saw pitched battles in the streets of cities such as Shanghai and Chengdu, and the feud with the USSR saw society and economy placed on a war footing in case of invasion. Not until the reform era did society return to something genuinely like peacetime as understood in the West. It is understandable why so many Chinese live in fear, above all else, of
luan
(chaos).

The war against Japan has come back to haunt China in recent years. Since the 1980s, the search for a new nationalism that can help to boost the CCP’s legitimacy as a party representing
hina

all Chinese, as well as promote reunifi cation with Taiwan, has led to a new emphasis on the history of the war years. During
Modern C

Mao’s period in power, the war against Japan was downplayed in history books: the Nationalist contribution to victory could not be mentioned, China had little interest in provoking a now pacifi ed Japan, and therefore little public attention was paid to Japanese war crimes in China. From the 1980s, however, the post-Mao regime has stressed that the war against Japan was a moment of great suffering but also of renewal for China. A museum commemorating the Nanjing Massacre was opened in that city in 1985 (nearly half a century after the event itself ), and fi lms and books began to give a more balanced and thoughtful account of the contribution made by the Nationalists to the defence of China. At the same time, anti-Japanese feeling within China began to fi nd public expression; there are regular discussions among bloggers about the supposed rise in Japanese militarism, and in March 2005, offi cial sanction was given for student demonstrations in Shanghai against a new Japanese textbook that was said to have glossed over war crimes. It seems unlikely that 84

the government would allow anti-Japanese feeling related to the war genuinely to harm relations between the two countries long term, but it is clear that issue has the power to create real emotion among the population.

Is China a richer society than under Mao?

Signifi cant progress in poverty reduction has taken place in China during the reform era. In 2001, infant mortality rates in China were 31 per 1,000 live births (as opposed to 7 in the US and 67 in India); life expectancy was 70.6 years (compared to 76.9 in the US

and 63.3 in India). In the same year, 93% of primary-school-age children were attending school (95% in the US, 83% in India).

There are complexities beyond the headline fi gures, of course.

Is C

From 1990 to 2001, 46.6% of China’s income was in the hands
hinese soc

of the richest 20% of the population, and only 4.7% in the hands of the poorest 20%. Between 2000 and 2006, the disparity
iet

between urban and rural incomes increased from 2.8:1 to 3.3:1,
y modern?

and continues to rise, and in one poor province, Guizhou, in 2005, the average rural-dweller had an income just 23% that of one of the province’s city-dwellers. In the same year, the average daily income for rural-dwellers across China was just US $ 1.09 per day. Nonetheless, the Chinese achievement is impressive and has done a great deal to create personal, if not political, freedoms that come from greater economic opportunity and well-being. The government’s aim is a ‘moderately prosperous’ (
xiaokang
) society by 2020, with an average per capita income of around $1,000.

Much of the countryside has, of course, become richer between the mid-1980s and mid-2000s: during that time, urban incomes increased by 14.1% whereas rural incomes increased 11%. But the fastest-growing group in society is the urban middle class: in 2007, the National Bureau of Statistics declared that some 80 million Chinese (6.15% of the population) were middle class, defi ned as having a household income of between Y60,000 and 85

Y500,000. Furthermore, popular aspirations are phrased in terms that make it clear that the old, agricultural China is regarded as the past, not the future: a college education, a pleasant city apartment with running water and fl ush lavatory, consumer goods (electronic equipment, white goods, a car), and services (leisure travel, cable television). In the countryside, in contrast, the only widespread consumer goods are television sets, leading to the bizarre sight of remote villages with open toilets and no running water, but with a television constantly switched on, usually at top volume. There have been extensive tax cuts and subsidies to the rural areas, but in 2005, rural families were still spending over 52% of their incomes on essentials (food and health care), as opposed to around 43% for urban families, suggesting that it will be some time before they have much spare cash to buy consumer goods. A new phenomenon is the huge, largely illegal, movement of migrant labourers within China (perhaps 150–200 million
hina

Modern C

15. Despite signifi cant spending on science and technology, traditional
agricultural techniques are still widely found in the Chinese
countryside

86

in 2007) from areas of poverty to richer regions, where they seek work in under-regulated industries such as construction.

China is undeniably a richer society in per capita terms than it was under Mao (see also Chapter 5). However, it is also much more unequal. Services such as free health care, education, and guaranteed employment that were part of the Maoist social contract were abandoned during the reform era, and increased cash incomes have still often not been enough to compensate for the new, free-market costs of hospital treatment, medicines, or local school fees. (Under Hu Jintao, the government has become alarmed at the level of rural distress caused by the loss of cheap health care and has pledged a signifi cant subsidy programme.)
Is C

Is China free?

hinese soc

China is often portrayed, in the present day, as the most prominent example of a society that is not free. When the internet
iet

search engine Google launched a special version in early 2006