The Modernization of China

Since 1963, Zhou EnLai has called for Chinese professionals to help China realize what has been called the Four Modernizations viz. that in agriculture, industry, national defence and science and technology. Some 15 years later, in December, 1978 Deng Xiaoping was finally able to enshrine that into a government policy at the 3rd Plemum of the 11th Central Committee. The aim of the  Four Modernizations was to realize that dream which has eluded China since the 19th Century and hopefully to turn China into a great economic power by early 21st century. The way forward was thought to be through the introduction of foreign trade and investment, the implementation of controlled market economy in the form of a kind of mixed economy dominated by certain state-controlled and initially subsidised industries considered to be strategic like communications, telecommunications, heavy industries, huge building programs, currency reform and the importation of of advanced technologies and management skills from the West and the concomittant reform of the institutions of higher learning and a corresponding relaxation of the strict control of the flow of ideas and the gradual replacement of purely adminstrative measures by the legitimation of government policies through rule by law (note: not rule of law). But the tiger's butt which cannot be touched is the rigid control of the state legislature, the judiciary and the military apparatus. The results of the implementation of such a policy can now be seen through the Expo in Shanghai this year  and the staging of the Olympics in Beijing last year. Yet conspicuously absent in the four modernizations is the modernization China's political structure, which remains staunchly and stubbornly under the rigid control the CCP. China's doors were first opened in 1839 when Captain Elliot used British battleships to force China to import opium and to export tea and silk. In about 1845, Commodore Perry of America opened the door of Tokugawa Japan. Since then the fates of Japan and China had been very very different. Japan rapidly modernized by establishing factories, trade, a modern system of education, government and armies and navies and after some 30 years was able to win a war against imperial China in 1894 over the control of the Korean peninsula  and about a decade later defeated the Russians over the control of Manchuria in north eastern China in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905. China however tottered along, remaining weak and divided and had to give extraterrorial rights to England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan etc which had the right to control customs taken over by 8 European nations following the defeat of the so-called Boxer Uprising in 1900. The success of the 1911 Nationalist Revolution did not substantially improve China's ability to modernise itself. Why? Why did it take nearly more than a century and a half before China can take serious steps to get its modernization into full swing? The causes are complex. So I looked up an article by Hung in his book The Cultural Moment of Philosophy I mentioned in an earlier blog. There he introduced a study edited by Gilbert  Rozman and Thomas P Bernstein both of  Princeton University and which appeared in 1981 on "The Modernaization of China". Four of contributing  authors of that book had also done a similar study on the modernization of Russia and Japan.

The authors of the book studied the earlier failure of the modernization in China by concentrating on three different stages of its history: 1. the pre-modernization condition. 2 the transition from traditional society to a modern society which in Japan lasted from the mid-17th Century to the period of the Meiji Restoration in the 1860s and in China, according to Hung,  lasted from 1905 to the end of 1990s and 3. the advanced stage of modernization which China has just begun. They studied China's earlier modernization from 5 perspectives: international environment, political structure, economic growth and structure and growth, social integration and education. To the authors, for modernization to be successful, a country must have the guts to accept new ideas, the energetic leadership of a strong central government, with strong support by the elites of various sectors of soceity , the effective mobilization of all the resources of the government for  technological and industrial development and corresponding changes in the economic structures, opportunites for upward social mobility and finally widespread educational reforms. 

As far as China is concerned, when the Western merchants and battleships arrived at the shores of southern China in the 19th century, it was not the first time that China had to think of ways of dealing with such foreign intrusion. China had already been been introduced to foreign thoughts on how life should be run in the Tsui and Tang dynasties when Buddhist thoughts entered China through India and for a second time in the 8th and 9th centuries, when Islam entered China and then again in the 15th and 16th centuries, when Christianity entered China. But in all such cases, such introductions were peaceful and their influences had to a greater and lesser extent all been sinicized and absorbed into Chinese culture. Even when there had been military invasions of China by Mongolia from the west  and Manchuria from its north east,  once such foreign races entered China, for the sake of maintaining political stability, such foregn races had to adapt to Chinese civilization and so there had not been any serious disturbance of Chinese culture as a whole. Perhaps it was precisely the success China encountered in its response to foreign culture and invasion in the past that now became an impediment to China's modernization. It was this success which explains its reluctance to engage in the kind of radical change in all sectors of Chinese society required by modernization when China faced the West in the 19th century. Its previous success fostered the illusion that China did not need to radically alter its ways and would still be able to successfuly accomodate such new ideas and new foreign powers. But this time the Chinese political leaders could not have made a more serious misjudgement. They did not realize until too late that the Western challenge this time was different in kind from all the previous.challenges. They misjudged the importance and the seriousness of the naval, political and cultural threat in southern China and concentrated its defence in the north: it was still trying to expand westward into Tibet, Sinkiang and Mongolia. It was therefore a shock that China was defeated in the so-called Opium War after which the Treaty of Nanking was signed in 1841. That was when Hong Kong was "ceded in perpetuity" and the northern tip of the Kowloon peninsula was "leased" to Great Britain intially for a term until 1898 . When the British ambassador tried to persuade the Imperial court to open up its ports for trade, it was met with the response that China already had everything it needed and those goods which the merchants wanted to sell to China were gadgets and trinkets which China had little need of. China thought of itself as an exporter of culture and fine products, not an importer of foreign culture and its artificats! It was thus a most serious shock to the Imperial leaders that China could be defeated by a small island state at the fringe of Europe. Nonetheless, following this slap in the face, there were some serious re-thinking which resulted in the policy of "using the barbarian to control the barbarians" and "Chinese culture as the body and Western learning for utility" which therefore culminated in some minimal efforts to modernize, confined merely to military and related technology: the training up of an army using German style weapons and system of training by Li HungCheung and shipbuilding in Fuchow but not much else. However, its enthusiasm was half-hearted because of political factors. The limited modernization of its military and shipbuilding technology was in the hands of the Han people and not in the hands the Manchus, who understandably would view such development with not a little suspicion because of its fear of the rise of regional power against those of the central government.  But according to Rozman etc. the power of the central government was decreasing during this period because whilst the population of China rose from 250 million to about 400 million during the Tsing dynasty up to mid-19th century, the number of government officials remained approximately the same, hence the ability of the central government over the provinces were not as strong as it might have liked and there was constant fear of the further rise of regional centres of power not under the control of the ruling Manchus. .

From the point of view of political structure, China certainly had the necessary central government structure required for modernization. China was the first country in the world to have a strong central government with a system of professional bureaucratic civil service whose officials were selected on the basis of their ability. We had a central government from Chin and an examination system for selection of court officials since the Han dynasty through testing their knowledge of the Confucian Chinese classsics.  Again, it was the very success of this system which paradoxically prevented China from successfully modernizing itself in mid-19th century when Japan underwent the Meiji Restoration in the face of the challenge from the West. It was not in the interest of those in power to change. Change involved new knowledge of the principles of international trade, the principles of industrial organization, the principles of modern warfare, principles of international diplomacy not possessed by those in power, something which their training in the traditional Chinese classics did not equip them for. They had no training on the need for independent thinking according to the principles of science and the rigorous use of logic and observation, free from reliance upon authority or tradition inconsistent with such empirical observation and testing of hypothesis. Nor had they any training on the principles of modern political economy. They therefore resisted for as long as possible and dragged their feet over the necessary transformation of Chinese economy and educational and social strutures.  It was against the vested interest of those who still thought that it was possible to run China along Confucian principles of a hierarchical social order, with the emperor at its apex and which had served China reasonably well for nearly 2000 years and which was more fitted to a stable agricultural economy supplemented by cottage or handicraft industry than a modern economy with emphasis on creativity, constant technological innovation, industrial manufacture for a mass market based upon such technological innovations and the vagaries of the the market forces in domestic and international trade..Their existing knowledge was geared to an inward looking stable agricultural political economy and not an open market economy subject to constant changes and where success depended on the quickness and flexibility of one's response.

Even in the 19th century, China already had a long established system of currency, a well developed system of contracts and trading routes within the country,which to some extent were the pre-requsites of rapid modernization required by a modern capitalist market economy. China also had other elements required for the development of a market economy ie. land and labor in abundance. It also had private entrepreneurial capital but such capital was not under the effective control of the imperial government. The Tsing Emperors had decided long ago that for the sake of promoting prosperity of the people, it would never raise taxes! Hence the ability of the Government to garner sufficient capital for a government directed effort at promoting industrial development was severely hampered. This is in stark contrast to the situation in Meiji Japan, where Mitsui and the other saibatsus were actively encouraged by the Government. The net result of this government policy was that whilst population rose dramatically, agricultural and industrial production did not rise correspondingly. All industrial productions were confined to a few port cities in southern, central and northern China forced to be open to trade by treaty. There was thus huge differences between the port cities and the greater part of Chinese cities in the interior of China. The Government was simply unable to effectively intervene in the economy as a matter of policy to actively promote the modernization of its manufacture. Industries in the greater part of Chinese cities remained at the cottage industry level so that they could not promote the type of rapid urbanization through the establishment of mass production factories which would in turn contribute to the generation of demand by the rising population concentration favourable to the further development of market economy. These factors were not favourable to the rapid accumulation of capital by the Government required for a directed modernizaion effort, nor the growth of the relevant market to fuel such rapid industrialization, conditions which existed in Russia at the time of Peter the Great and Meiji Japan..

It is interesting to note that Rozman's analysis differ very substantially from the traditional analysis of the causes for the failure of China to modernize its economy in the 19th and early 20th centuries which  emphasized the political and ideological factors in terms of differences of values and the unfair treatment which China got from the Western powers through the activities of Western  capitalists and merchants actively assisted by their imperialistic governments. After the "success" of the Communist revolution, explanations took a Marxist turn according to which Confucianism was an impediment to modernization because it was the ideology of a petty bourgeois class suitable to a feudal agricultural economy but that its pernicious influences continued to plague China long after it had served its historical purpose. Rozman's  analysis certainly is less ideologically motivated and seems much more balanced. It is certainly arguable whether or not all the points of their analysis are right and whether they have or have not made errors on individual points but there can be little doubt that modernization is an extremely complex process involving all kinds of radical changes through all sectors of Chinese society. For that reason, we can be pretty sure that no single interpretation can be expected to have covered all the relevant factors.