Modern China. A Very Short Introduction (15 page)

Women’s Conference. Finally, in 2000–1, Beijing once again
put itself forward as a candidate city. This time, it started
as the favourite and never lost the position. By the time the
Games started, the killings in Tian’anmen Square would be
almost 20 years in the past. The China that had been given
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the Games was no longer a shell-shocked society recovering
from an internal social crisis, but a confi dent regional power
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with a global reach.

For many countries, such as Italy, Germany, South Korea,
and Spain, the holding of the Olympic Games was a symbolic

‘coming out’ from a dictatorial past. The message of Beijing
2008 will be more ambiguous, however. Certainly, the Games
symbolize China opening itself up to the outside world, a
welcoming host to the family of nations. Yet Beijing 2008 will
be the fi rst Olympics held since Moscow 1980 in a country
that is not democratic. The Beijing Olympics certainly
symbolize China’s arrival in the international community;
what is more, they do so largely on China’s terms.

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16. Beijing geared up for Olympic fever after being awarded the
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Games in 2001. Here a worker carries an Olympic Rings decoration
made of waste tyres from a car-wash

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which attempted to drill the Chinese population into regulating their behaviour (see Chapter 3). However, despite its failure in the 1930s, there are strong and ever-more-explicit echoes of the New Life Movement in contemporary China, where points are given by local committees to residents who throw away their garbage and put out plants to decorate their houses. In the run-up to the Olympics, Beijing residents were told of a new

‘morality evaluation index’ which would give credit for ‘displays of patriotism, large book collections, and balconies full of potted plants’ and lower grades for ‘alcohol abuse, noise complaints, pollution, or a violation of licences covering internet cafes and karaoke parlours’. Public toilets in tourist areas are also being upgraded and star-rated.

The idea of
suzhi
has also taken hold in recent years, a word hard to translate but usually rendered as ‘population quality’.

To some, it has a faintly eugenic air: educated Chinese will 95

often claim that peasant
suzhi
is lower than that of people in the cities. Yet an individual or group’s
suzhi
is not permanently fi xed, and education is one means to improve it. The legacy of
xiushen
can be seen even through the pseudo-scientifi c language that surrounds
suzhi
. This debate also refl ects a wider disparity developing in China. During Mao’s period of rule, his policies (in particular, the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution) were designed to attack, with great violence, the traditional air of superiority that urban-dwellers, and educated Chinese in particular, displayed towards the rural population. (Mao’s introduction of a household registration system to prevent farmers from migration to the cities undercut this intention, of course.) However, the trend has been fi rmly in the other direction in recent years.

The other Chinas

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This book has mostly been concerned with events on the mainland. However, the main landmass that we know as China
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has always been affected, and continues to be so today, by Chinese societies well beyond its own borders.

Taiwan remains the major piece of ‘unfi nished business’ from the Cold War, in the eyes of the Beijing leadership. After the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997, reunifi cation with Taiwan moved much further up the political agenda in the rhetoric of the mainland. At the same time, movements within Taiwan itself have given fuel to the idea that the island should declare independence. It remains a commonly held point of view among mainland Chinese that the country will only have full territorial integrity when Taiwan is part of the ‘motherland’ once more, and that all means, including war, are acceptable to bring about this aim. China’s claim to Taiwan dates from imperial times, when the island came under the control of the Qing dynasty. Yet this interpretation of history hides complications. The Qing empire also contained what is now Outer Mongolia, yet there are no 96

calls for that country to be reabsorbed into China. More crucially, Chinese rhetoric does not call attention to the fact that, since the late 19th century, Taiwan has only been part of a united Chinese state for four years (from 1945 to 1949).

Taiwan’s history is a complex one. Its earliest inhabitants were Malayo-Polynesian aboriginals, and ethnic Chinese settlers arrived there in signifi cant numbers only from the 16th century. The Qing dynasty did incorporate Taiwan into its territory, but as late as the 19th century, the island was regarded even by the Chinese as a remote, frontier place.

The island did not have long to develop under the Qing. The dynasty, having lost the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–5, was forced to cede the island to Japan, making it the fi rst formal
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Japanese colony in Asia. For the next half-century, Taiwanese
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grew up under Japanese colonial governance. While that rule was patronizing and often harsh, particularly during the war
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years of the 1930s and 1940s, it was not marked by the brutality seen on the mainland. The Japanese succeeded in creating an indigenous colonial elite, who spoke Japanese as easily (or more so) than Mandarin or Taiwanese Chinese, and who even today, regard their former colonial rulers with ambivalence or even tolerant approval. Former president Lee Teng-hui once declared that he ‘was a Japanese before the age of 22’ (that is, until 1945).

What is also notable is that the turbulent history of China’s Republican period – the 1911 revolution, May Fourth Movement, the Nationalist government, and above all, the rise of a powerful Communist Party – had little relevance for the island. Even the most traumatic event of all, the war against Japan, happened off-island, and some Taiwanese fought on the Japanese side, outraging their mainland compatriots.

Japan’s defeat in 1945 also saw the island handed back to Chinese (Nationalist) control, and the islanders’ view of their colonial experience became rosier in retrospect because of the harsh 97

nature of what followed. The Nationalists treated Taiwan as if they were an occupying power, rather than liberators. As the Civil War raged on the mainland, the government clamped down yet further on dissent in Taiwan. On 28 February 1947, an altercation between the police and an old woman selling contraband cigarettes spiralled into mass protests by the island’s indigenous population against Nationalist rule. The reaction was swift and brutal, with thousands of Taiwanese being killed or imprisoned.

Any discussion of the event was banned, particularly after Chiang Kaishek fl ed to the island in 1949, and ‘2-28’, as the events became known, lay under the surface of the island’s memories for decades.

After 1949, the island lived in a state increasingly detached from reality as the ‘Republic of China’ in exile, waiting to take the mainland back from the Communist rebels and bandits.

Military rule was declared, and the Nationalist rulers continued to
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commit human rights abuses well into the 1980s: for instance, the government was strongly suspected of having hired the truck that
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in 1985 hit and paralysed Wu Shu-chen, the wife of opposition activist Chen Shui-bian. Yet although political dissent was strongly repressed in Taiwan, a very successful economic model was being laid out at the same time. The Nationalists tackled one of their great failures on the mainland, the reform of land ownership, a project heavily encouraged by American advisers.

They also used governmental power to create an economy driven by exports, in particular consumer goods, leather, wood, and paper. During the 1960s, Taiwan’s exports rose by around 20%

each year, and the economy as a whole grew by 9.2% annually.

Most notably, Taiwan moved fi rmly towards democracy. The 1970s saw new interest groups emerge, including the
Tang-wai
(‘outside the Party’) movement on behalf of which Chen Shui-bian had stood for offi ce, many of them advocating more power for the local population of the island, whose interests had been subsumed by the agenda of the ‘mainlanders’ who had fl ed to Taiwan in 98

1949. Chiang died in 1975 and was succeeded by his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, who eventually took the decision to legalize dissent. By the 1990s, Taiwan had a genuine liberal democracy: in 2000, for the fi rst time, the presidency was won by a representative of the opposition, the former dissident, Chen Shui-bian.

Taiwan’s system diverged from that of China at the same time that the relationship across the Straits was strengthened in a variety of ways. As China opened up under Deng, ‘Taiwan compatriots’ were encouraged to visit the mainland and invest in it. At the same time, the CCP became ever more concerned by the number of Taiwanese who no longer considered reunifi cation with China desirable or even relevant, and the mainland made threatening noises about its right to invade Taiwan in the event of a declaration of independence.

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Yet China has been highly successful in convincing the world of its own position on Taiwan: that Taiwan independence is
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unthinkable. This is in some ways odd, because Taiwan has not always been such a polarizing issue: it was not central to the territorial rhetoric of the Republican governments, or during much of Mao’s period in power. Nor is reunifi cation necessary for China’s continued economic growth or political infl uence. Nor, any longer, does the mainland demand that Taiwan become like China: the terms offered for reunifi cation since 1978 have become something like a reunifi cation in name only, involving Taiwan maintaining its own political system and even military.

In the 1980s, it was Hong Kong that was more prominent in the news. In 1898, the British had forced China to grant a 99-year lease on the New Territories that bordered Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, which had been seized after the Opium Wars. As the lease began to end, Deng Xiaoping’s government made it clear that they were determined to take Hong Kong back, but also gave assurances that the colony’s way of life would not be altered for at least 50 years. In 1984, a Chinese-British accord formalized 99

the agreement for handover, but two events made the fi nal days before the handover in 1997 much less calm than anticipated: the Tian’anmen Square demonstrations of 1989 and the appointment of a democratic politician, Chris Patten, rather than a civil servant, as the last governor of the territory. Patten introduced much wider voting rights in Hong Kong’s highly limited elections, infuriating Beijing, who regarded the act as a breach of the spirit if not the letter of the handover agreement. There was much speculation within Hong Kong as well as from business and political circles in Britain that the reforms would harm Sino-British relations for years to come.

In fact, although the wider franchise was abolished as soon as the Chinese took over, neither Chinese rule nor Patten’s reforms have had the dire effects that some feared. Hong Kong continues to have a strongly international feel, a free business environment, and to remain economically successful despite
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the Asian fi nancial crisis of 1997–8. Furthermore, it continues to have a lively, free press, and democratic involvement in its
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government has slowly grown since 1998. Most notably, there is a strong popular interest in politics. Attempts by the government to introduce stronger censorship laws have been halted by mass peaceful demonstrations on the streets, contradicting received wisdom that ‘Hong Kong people are interested only in business and money’. And for its part, Beijing has mostly left its appointees in Hong Kong (who are from the city itself ) to get on with governing, with only an occasional rumble of disapproval. For the moment, it remains an anomaly as a place that is free but undemocratic.

The ‘overseas Chinese’, that is, the ethnic Chinese diaspora living outside the boundaries of China itself, have always been an important part of the story of China’s development. There are distinct communities: in the 19th and early 20th centuries, coastal Chinese moved to California, to South Africa, and to Britain. In the post-1945 period, there was a new infl ux of Hong Kongers to 100

Britain, and after 1965, when racial quotas were lifted, of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asian Chinese to the United States.

From the late 1970s, it once again became possible to emigrate from mainland China, and in the decades that have followed, it has become straightforward for those who wish to emigrate, and can afford it, to do so. Migration has now become truly global and is a commercialized entity with agencies including local governments and (often illegal) ‘snakehead’ gangmasters all playing a role in the diffusion of Chinese to North America, Europe, Australasia, Africa, and Latin America. Migrants also seek education, no longer being content to remain in relatively low-skilled industries (such as restauranteuring) that distinguished them in the 1960s and 1970s.