 Hello, everyone. Welcome. What's that ol' reggae thing face-to-face belly-to-belly? That's kind of how we are in here today. And spring is coming. Don't you feel it? Oh, thank heavens. I think we're in for a cold one tomorrow, though. Two things. Please turn your cell phones off. And I want to remind you, and I know we have some new faces, we'll go into a question and answer period around quarter of three. So at that time, if you have a question, please raise your hand, and we'll get a microphone to you so that everyone can hear your question, and then Eric will try to answer them. Okay. Let me give you a brief introduction of Eric. This is a topic that I think we're all interested in. Eric Esselstrom is Professor of East Asian History and Director of the Asian Studies Program at the University of Vermont. He's the author of Crossing Empire's Edge, Foreign Ministry, Police, and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia, which he wrote in 2008, and that distant country next door, popular Japanese perceptions of males, right? Mao. Mao. I knew that was wrong. Mao's China, which he wrote in 2019. Please give a warm welcome to Eric Esselstrom. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming out for this event. On an afternoon like this, what are you doing here? Wouldn't we all rather be enjoying this glorious afternoon? Well, thank you very much for choosing to be here with me instead. I appreciate it, and I hope that you find it to be a worthwhile decision. So when the organizers asked me to talk in the series, they said, well, you know, the members are interested in China. Can you talk about China? Everybody wants to know about China today. And I said, well, yeah, sure. I can put something together on China. But I'm a historian. I'm not a political scientist. I'm not an economist. I'm not a policy analyst. I'm a historian. So my approach is to say, kind of reflect who I am as a historian. I'm someone who believes, obviously, that you can't understand the world that we live in today without properly developed historical consciousness, right? This is why we study history is to understand why our world looks the way that it does. So that's sort of my approach today is to say, well, if you want to understand China and the position that it's in today and today's world, you've got to look back a little bit. Sort of focus on China's modern historical experience. So that's what I'm going to do is give you sort of a crash course in some themes and events and important issues in modern Chinese history in a way that I hope will have you by the end walking out, feeling like, yeah, you know, I think I have a better perception of what's going on there with China today, and especially the theme of China and the West. And it's my title, Historical Lessons for the Present. I'm not going to talk about Kentucky Fried Chicken at all. It just seems like an appropriate image on which to begin. So let me start with a couple of images. One is from a book cover and the other is a magazine cover. I get sent books all the time from publishers because they want me to adopt books in my classes. And I usually don't use them, but I collect them because of the great covers and the language and the imagery that's used in covers. And something like this, the title here is China Shakes the World, A Titan's Rise in Troubled Future and the Challenge for America. It makes you want to dive right in and start reading that, right? This other one is a more recent issue. This is from Time Magazine. Right about the time that Xi Jinping was coming into power in China, the leader of the unfree world. These two images capture a lot, I think, about what we commonly see, how we hear China represented and discussed in popular media these days. And what I think is going on here, I think there's two kind of key issues that are embedded in language like this and imagery like this that are very, very common in the way that people think about China today. What are those two issues? One is that China's system, whatever you want that to mean, China's political system, social system, whatever, the Chinese system is inherently anti-Western. There's this confrontational dimension here, right? There's an antagonism. There's the Chinese system and the Western system, and these things are not compatible. This is why this is the source of a lot of this tension, a lot of this difficulty between China and the world. China's system is anti-Western. The other idea that I think is embedded in some of these kind of rhetoric is that China's rise is a threat to the West. So what I want you to do today as I talk about some of these things is just think about these two ideas. What I'm going to try and do is lay out to you a portrait, like I said, a crash course in modern Chinese history that'll make you start to question this and start to wonder, is this really the best way to think about it? I just want to sort of take these notions and problematize them a little. Maybe by the end, we'll sort of come back to it and ask, is this really what's going on? Is this the best way to think about it, the best way to talk about it? That's sort of my strategy today, the organizational logic behind my presentation. So this is the starting point. I said a crash course in Chinese history. Okay, that's a big ask. Chinese history is thousands and thousands of years. So we're not going all the way back to the Shang dynasty. Okay, don't worry about that. But we're going to start in the 15th century. So 1400s, right? And I want to start with an image here. This is a mock-up of basically the silhouette of the sort of European ship that's sailing the Atlantic world in the 1400s, the ships that are coming to the New World in the 15th century. China at this time is ruled by something called the Ming dynasty. Ming China was also a society that was very engaged in exploration and in discovery and sailing ships around the world in the 15th century. But Chinese ships at that time were a little bit more advanced and a lot bigger. This is actually a mock-up of part of the Chinese navy in the early 1400s that was sailing around the Indian Ocean and used around Asia for promoting the power of the Ming dynasty to their region neighbors. I start with this just as a way to think about the relative position of China and the Western world in the 15th century. China under the Ming dynasty was a very, very sophisticated, very advanced, very well-developed place in many ways much more so than the Western world. We talked about technology, the size of cities, urbanization, commercialization of the economy, all these kinds of things. China was a very developed society here in the 15th century. When we get to the next century, so the 16th century, this is really the first time that Westerners start to really engage China in a direct way. Not the first time there had been Westerners in China previously, right? We've all heard about Marco Polo right at the 13th century, other European adventurers who traveled in China under the Mongols during that time. But it's in the 16th century when you have people like this man. This is Matteo Ricci, Jesuit missionary who went to China around this time, 1500s. He was one of many Jesuits who traveled into China in this particular period. This is one that Jesuit mission was expanding quite a bit on the East Asian world. Matteo Ricci is a fascinating individual. How does he connect to this issue about China being a very advanced society at this time? Matteo Ricci and Jesuits like him understood that China was a place ruled by a very sophisticated advanced scholarly class of officials. The men who ruled China in this age were men who had earned their credentials, earned their power through the examination system for scholar officials. I guess there's emperors and there's governors and things like this, but the real power in the Chinese world were the scholar official class. Matteo Ricci, men like him understood this. Before they come to China, they know they're going to have to learn Chinese, study Chinese language, study the classic, study Confucianism. If you're familiar with Chinese culture, if you're going to have any success in converting anybody in China to Christianity, this is their approach. They had some success in the 16th century, even actually into the early 17th century. By the 1630s, 1640s or so, the Jesuits had more or less left. However, their legacy is very important. For the next generation of European intellectuals, someone like Voltaire, a prominent Enlightenment-era intellectual and European world in the late 17th, early 18th century. People like Voltaire, Enlightenment period scholars, starting to think about Europe and how Europe fits into the rest of the world and comparing European nations to other places around the world. They want to learn about China. They want to know about China. How do they learn about it? They learned about it primarily by reading the accounts, reading the books written by people like Matteo Ricci and Jesuits of this age. So they started drinking in this knowledge, understanding what this place is like, what China is like. People like Voltaire in the 18th century had a very positive view of China. They were quite amazed by it. Primarily, when you think about someone like Voltaire, if you don't think about the Enlightenment in Europe, you know Voltaire is someone who is very critical of many things in European society. In particular, if you look at Voltaire's work, he's someone who said, what's kind of the worst thing about Europe in the 18th century? Europe is dominated by the church and Europe is dominated by hereditary aristocrats. These are the things that Voltaire and other Enlightenment scholars started to do away with. They look at China and say, wow, this is amazing. This is a place that doesn't have neither of those things. The church plays no role really in Chinese politics. China is not ruled by hereditary aristocrats. It's ruled by scholars. So they look at China and think, wow, this is amazing. This is a place that really has a lot of the stuff that I wish we had Voltaire. So my point is to say there's a very positive image of the Chinese world in Europe through the 18th century. China is seen as a very advanced and very sophisticated place. Chinese also see themselves that way. This is a Chinese map of the world from around this time, late 18th century. Now again, the cartographic accuracy is not all there. This isn't exactly what the world looks like in the 18th century. But what you see, what you notice is the shaded area here represents, this is the next dynasty, the Qing Dynasty, the Qing Empire. Very massive, very expansive, which indeed it was. But this map, if you read it as a cultural artifact, shows that the Chinese themselves had a very confident view of themselves and the position they occupy in a lot of ways rightly so. So we're getting up to 18th century. In that time, in the 18th century, China as I said, very advanced, very developed, and largely self-sufficient. China's economy basically operated on its own energy. It didn't really need foreign trade, it didn't need foreign commerce. There's nothing really produced in the European world that anybody in China wants in the 18th century. They basically take care of themselves. But the 18th century is also a time when the Europeans are getting more and more interested in China, and the British in particular are expanding more and more in this part of the world in the 18th century. And this brings us to a very pivotal moment here, a turning point moment in the 1790s where the British sent, this man, his name is George McCartney, sent him to China to try and establish modern diplomatic and commercial relations with the Qing Empire. This is the emperor at the time, named Qianlong. An interesting important dimension of this Qing period in particular is that Qianlong, he is the emperor of China, not Chinese. China was not ruled by Chinese in the 18th century. China was ruled by the Manchus. In all of Chinese history, there are two dynasties where China was ruled by people who were not Chinese. One is the Mongol period in the 13th century, and there's this Ming dynasty, the Paulus, which is a native Chinese dynasty. Then there's the Qing, which is the Manchu period. The Manchus are a non-Chinese group from the northern frontiers who conquered the Ming dynasty in the 17th century. So there's a reason I'm mentioning that. We're going to come back to what happens to the Manchus later on. In the 1790s, England comes and says, hey, we want to have these modern relations, we want to set up trade, we want to exchange ambassadors, we want to have residence for English merchants in China. This is how we do things, this is how we build relations with other nations. We want to do the same thing we do. Chinese emperor in this moment, 1790s, basically said, no one. Not interested. This isn't how we deal with barbarian peoples from overseas. If you want to be a tributary state like all the others, then that's fine, come and bow down and participate in our diplomacy, and you can do that, but no special treatment, special favors. They dismiss these requests from the British to establish these kinds of modern diplomatic economic relations. It's easy to look at that and say, what is this guy thinking? How can he be so dismissive of English in this particular moment, 18th century? England's a rising power on the planet. How can they be so easily just kind of brushed aside? Let's look at a map. This is a map, kind of logically we're talking about around 1500 to 1800, and it's showing the flow of silver around the world. Between the 16th and let's say the beginning of the 19th century, 1500 to 1800. Silver is the lifeblood of the global economy in this modern era, right? So just look for a second, and I'll help you out what's most important about the map. In these 300 years, where is most of the silver on planet Earth going, it's going to China, right? China was the center of the global economy for a very, very long time. Lots of things made in China that other people want, but not a lot of stuff being made outside of China that anybody in China wants. So lots of money coming in, lots of Chinese products coming out. It's very unequal trade balance, really favoring the Chinese side. So this is sort of the big picture. You're 1800, China very powerful, and you're trying to kind of get in on that scene, take advantage of that or become a part of that action. What ultimately turns this around? Nearly 19th century. The British need something to deal with this trade problem, right? They're buying all this stuff from the Chinese, they're paying for it in cash. They want to sell stuff to the Chinese instead of just paying for it with cold money, right? They want to have an equal trade relationship with the Chinese. The problem is there's nothing made in Britain that anybody in China wants. You need a product. You need something that's going to help you balance the trade. What did the English hit upon? Opium. Opium becomes the center of this. Opium is the difference. Not just the English, it's the Americans involved in the opium trade. Opium becomes the most widely circulated product of the 19th century. This changes the game. This changes the balance. China starts to be very much weakened by this opium trade, in England and the other Western powers card to gain from it. So much so that by the 1840s, this is what leads to a major clash between the two sides. This issue of opium. The Chinese are upset about the opium trade. They want to shut it down. The British are making money on it. They refuse. This leads to these so-called opium moors of the 1840s. These open military clashes between the British and the British. Long story short, this is a disaster for the Chinese side on a couple of levels. One, obviously it's a military defeat. They don't have the military technology to deal with the British at this stage, right? So they're militarily smashed. It's a completely unmitigated disaster on that front. But on top of that, there's a series of treaties that come out of this, between the Qing Empire and the British and the French and the British, everybody else. Treaty structures of the 19th century that are very much unequal, meaning treaties that are meant to give the Western powers all the advantages and just to extract more and more concessions out of the Chinese side. So it's the beginning of a very different kind of relationship. We've gone from an era of the 18th century when China's here and the West is here. Now it's starting to shift. Now China's getting weaker and the West is getting stronger, right? This is all happening in the first half of the 19th century. Now, don't worry about the names. There's no quiz later. Just when I say these names sometimes people like to know what's actually saying there because you're not familiar with these words. And just some of the people I'm going to talk about, I'm going to tell you their names. This is a man named Zeng Guofan. He was a very bright guy, an official, a scholar in the Chinese world in the 1860s. And he is associated with something that historians refer to as so-called self-strengthening movement in China in the late 19th century. What does this refer to? People like Zeng look around in the 1860s and say, look, obviously we've got some problems here in China, right? The Westerners now have more power than we do. Our economy now is weakening because of opium. We're not the same power we used to be. We're going to have to make some changes, make some transformations here. We have to engage in some reforms. We want China to survive in this modern world. So the movement that he is involved in is something called, as I said, the self-strengthening movement. That name is quite revealing, right? People like Zeng don't say, hey, let's engage in the great revolutionary transformation of the 19th century. They say, let's engage in the self-strengthening movement. What does that really mean? It's basically he's saying this became sort of his slogan. Many men like him in the late 19th century. The slogan that animated this reform movement was this, Eastern ethics, Western technology. What does that mean? It means from their worldview, they said, look, there's nothing wrong with our values. Chinese values are perfectly fine. Chinese culture is ethical and moral principles. All this is fine. What we lack is technology. We want to survive. We need to bring the technology in from the West. That's where the value is. So let's find a way to blend this. We can keep our Chinese tradition, but we can bring in that Western technology. This becomes the motivating energy of reform in the 19th century in China. People like Zeng and others follow this basic path. Goes on 1860s through the 1890s. This is the period of his great age of self-strengthening reforms in the Chinese world. These reforms are put to the test. Interesting. They're not against the Westerners primarily. It's against the war with Japan in the 1890s. There had been other wars with the West, right? There were multiple wars with the British and with the French in the 1850s. Another war with the French in the 1880s over influence in China. But it was this war in the 1890s, this 30 years into this self-strengthening movement, where now this late Qing empire is facing Japan, Meiji, Japan, late 19th century Japan. Japanese in this period have also been undergoing a period of reform, nation and changing, their own system, similar experiences. They come to clashes in this war in the mid 1890s over influence in Korea. Korea had often, had for centuries been a junior partner in the Chinese world order and the Chinese saw Korea as a tributary state for a long while. Japanese are looking to sort of replace the Chinese role. They come to this battle in the mid 1890s, and it's a total disaster as this Western cartoon, yes. And smashed the Qing military in this war. Complete utter disaster. Terrible impact for the Chinese side. Hands on our subject today, but I'll come back later and talk about Japan if you want. Because it has the opposite effect for the Japanese. For them, this is like, hey, this is, we've done it, right? We've just defeated the Chinese society we've been modeling ourselves after for centuries. That's the opposite effect on the Chinese side. They're like, well, wait a minute. Is that enough to lose wars to the British and the French? Now we're losing to the Japanese? Really? It's a very psychologically shocking moment for the Chinese world. What happens in the wake of this, then, to sort of follow this path of reform and ideas about how to change China? You get sort of a next generation of Chinese intellectuals, reformers. These are two guys, Hang Yawei, man named Liang Qichao. Liang was actually one of the students. These are reformers of the late 1890s. So kind of coming to prominence after this defeat to Japan. And these men start to look at reform in a different way. Sort of take that viewpoint of Zeng Guofan, who said Eastern Ethics, Western Technology, and they say, basically that wasn't good enough. We just lost this war. We've been doing this for 30 years and we just lost a war to the Japanese. Maybe we need to do even more, go even further with it. They basically adopt this notion of, well, the West actually is not just technology. Maybe there's more to it. Maybe it's Eastern ideas with Western technology is not enough. Maybe the West actually has ideas and institutions beyond just technological material stuff. We also need to. The much broader way of sort of looking at the West as a model of what China needs to become to survive in the modern world. There's a couple of moments in the late 1890s or the 1900s where there's some attempts to try this out, but ultimately these more bold, radical kind of reform ideas don't really take root. They don't have much of a chance at success. And we end up, unfortunately, for the Chinese side in a situation here in the early 20th century where the opportunity to really reform and to save the Qing Empire is lost. As there are these officials trying to find ways to preserve it, to correct it, make it something better, because at the same time revolutionary movement taking shape in the late 19th, early 20th century. This is the man most associated with that. You might know him as Sun Yat-sen. It's the Cantonese rendering of his name. This is how he's specifically known. He was the leader of the anti-Manshu movement of the early 20th century. And this is why I mentioned that the Qing dynasty was not a Chinese dynasty, it was a Manchu dynasty. It's a foreign dynasty. People like Sun start thinking early 19th... Maybe the problem here is that we're ruled by people who aren't Chinese. Maybe that's another part of the puzzle here. We need to create a system, create a nation of China for the Chinese people. This sort of energizes this more sort of directly anti-Manshu revolutionary position. This takes shape early 1900s, as I said. The Manchu dynasty actually does come to an end between the fall of 1911, spring of 1912, that final Chinese dynasty collapses, which is a pretty spectacular thing when you think about it. The Manchus came to power in China in the 1640s. They ruled until 1912. Pretty good run for a non-Chinese group to govern this massive empire for so long. But it ends in the early 20th century. What's so important about that is that it's not just the end of that dynasty. This was the end of imperial Chinese history itself. China had gone through many, many dynastic periods from the 3rd century BC. The Han dynasty is where it all starts. In 2000 years, many, many different dynasties rising and falling, each one out to 250, 200 years or so. This is the end of that. There is no next dynasty. So what's China going to be from this point forward? This is a massive problem in the early 20th century. What is this new China going to look like? There was a brief building of Republican China under Sun's leadership. For a lot of reasons we can't get too much into today. It was unsuccessful in this. This is in the mid-1910s. And China tragically descended into a period of its early 20th century from the mid, let's say, 1915, 1916 through the early 1920s into a period of warlordism. There's really no effective central government at all. No one has enough power to really hold this mass together. So the cartoon here illustrates northern and southern warlords sort of battling out with each other while the people sort of suffer underneath. It's a very chaotic and very violent, tumultuous time in China. The end of one system, no one's really sure what the new system looks like. In that context, in that moment, late 19... another movement takes shape. I mentioned the self-strengthening movement in 1860. In the late 1910s, something called the New Culture Movement. Also led by young intellectuals in the same ways that the 1860s movement was. But this has a very different focus. These are the two men that are often associated with its founding, Li Dajiao and Chen Duxiao. These were both intellectuals at Beijing University. What was this New Culture movement all about? And sort of boiled it all down to a simple idea. These men looked at Chinese society and said, well, look, we thought it was the Manchu's problem. We got rid of the Manchu's. That didn't solve it. We're still a mess. We still can't hold ourselves together. We still can't find a way to unify ourselves. We blame the Westerners in the Boxer Rebellion. We blame the Manchu's. We blame everybody else. But maybe the problem is us. Maybe Chinese culture itself is incompatible with the modern world. Maybe we need to do something completely different. Maybe we need to completely abandon everything that we think of as traditional elements of Chinese civilization. Maybe that's the problem. That's what I mean by the New Culture movement. This is very, very bold revolutionary kind of thinking. And this was a very dynamic intellectual movement in the late teens. And it's worth pointing out this is a big dramatic deal. These two guys, Li Dajiao and Chen Duxiao, not only figures in this New Culture movement, these are the two co-founders of the Chinese Communist Party, the Party that rules China today. A point, gas, tell me it worked. The dramatic reveal there. China's Communist Party itself was born from this movement of really a time when people are saying, let's abandon what's Chinese and embrace everything that's not Chinese. Embrace everything that's part of the West. That's the future. Become more like the West. That's the only way to move forward. So it's a very exciting and interesting sort of time. Some of the other people involved in this, there were many young Chinese students who traveled abroad in the wake of this movement in the early 1920s. These are some photographs of young Chinese students of that day in Europe. Some of these men go on to become very, very influential people. This young man here, this is Deng Xiaoping. This is the man who will be the most powerful man in China by the 1980s. We'll talk about him a little bit here. So this is him in 1916. Many students, again, this is in Europe. So in line. Who's going to be teaching Richard Nixon how to do chopsticks in 1972, right? 50 years later, almost exactly 50 years later. So this is the future of the Chinese Communist Party. It's all part of this movement. Even, although he never went overseas, even the young Mao Zedong was a part of this movement. He was a student at Beijing University. He mentioned Li Dajiao, one of these co-founders. He was the librarian at Beijing University. Mao was his... University in the early 1920s. So all these men that become the core leadership of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1920s are all a part of this movement. And the emphasis is what these are guys who are saying. Everything about the Chinese past, everything about Chinese culture is wrong. Being compatible with modern world, we have to become more... Let's sort of keep the narrative flowing along. We get to the 1920s, 1930s, and this new culture movement I just spoke a little bit about started to sort of fracture it. It started to split in two different directions. And you start to see in Chinese politics at this time one faction, let's see it with... Nationalist Party in China from the early 1920s on into the 1930s. The other is the Chinese Communist Party. Ultimately it's under Mao's leadership, although Mao doesn't really emerge as the leader of the party in the 1930s. He's not the central figure in the first decade or so of the party's existence. But in the Chinese world between the 1920s and the 1930s, this is sort of the struggle now. You've got the Nationalist Party under Chiang Kai-shek, the Communist, eventually under Mao, battling it out for China's future. They both come from the same origins, remember. They're both part of that new culture movement. That's where it all starts. But here they have different views. What is the difference? The best way to summarize this by the late 1900s. Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists say, yeah, China's got problems, but our problems are political. Meaning the problem is we don't have a strong functioning centralized national government. Strong centralized political control. China is fractured, China is weak. This is why Western powers can bully us about. That's why the Japanese are doing better than us. They have a strong central political problem. How Chinese communists say, it's bigger than that. Much bigger than politics. It's cultural, it's social. What China needs is a complete overall. When you total social revolution, this is the economy. You want China to be successful in the 20th century. It's complete, social and cultural. So these are incompatible views, right? You've got one party saying, our problem's just political. The other saying, these can't be reconciled. The struggle between these two parties in the 20s and 30s in China is incredibly violent. They're consistently trying to destroy one another through this entire period. So it's a very, again, a very difficult, violent, tumultuous time. That's even worse, the invasion. Again, another war with Japan. Wars with Japan have huge impacts on history in the 19th century. The Japanese invade again in the context of this war in 1957-1955. Important for so many reasons. It does play a central role in kind of shaping the struggle between the nationalists and the communists in China. I just said that they were fighting a lot with each other in the 20s and 30s. They actually came back together and formed sort of a united front in 1936 to face the Japanese enemy, right? This is usually the only thing that can bring two parties that hate each other together. If somebody else, they hate more, right? And that's typically what happened here. These two guys, they're both fighting to control the Chinese world, but they both have this common enemy in Japan that's trying to destroy them all. So it does bring them together, and they're able to sort of fight in a very, very delicate sort of truce for a big part of the war. Sort of bring the West back into the story. Remember, too, that China was allied with the Western powers in the war with Japan, right? We've got Chiang Kai-shek and Western Churchill, the Cairo Conference, so they're all allies because, again, it's the same kind of situation. China has been bullied about by American imperialist powers forever. But why are they allied now? Because all three of them have the same enemy in Japan, so the Japanese war sort of brings them up. So this alliance works well enough. There's also, and this is sort of a lesser known part of the story, Americans were not completely averse to dealing with the Chinese Communists even during the war. There were efforts in 1944 into 1945 of an American army officer, David Barrett, who went to see Mao and the Communists in their base in Yanan and said, let's find out about these guys. And they're fighting the Japanese, too. Let's see what they're about. This is before the hard lines of the Cold War have been drawn, right? That's post-war. Later days of the Second World War, there was still some interest on the American side in the Chinese Communists. So the relationship is sort of entering a new stage here in America. But alas, it did not survive. A photograph here of Mao, and I love this photograph, these two guys have been trying to kill each other for 20 years. And here they are, crossing each other at dinner after the Japanese surrender, saying, hey, job well done. The Japanese are finished, the war is over. They're both smiling, and it looks like a very cordial scene, but you know in the back of their minds you're thinking, you're next. The Japanese are out, and so that means our alliance is done. I'm coming for you. And that's exactly what happens. There are some attempts. There's a chance in the fall of 1945, early 46, the Americans actually are involved in this, trying to broker some sort of settlement, a coalition government, nothing really comes of it. Because again, these guys have been at each other for 20 years by this point. There is full scale civil war between them, the nationalists of the communists in 46 to 49 until finally the Chinese communist victory. This is the establishment of the PRC, the Republic of China, October 1st, 1949. A very famous photograph of Mao giving clarion. Important point in that speech, Mao made it clear as he was talking about how monumental this event was. There's a famous line in the speech, that on this day, with this moment, the Chinese people have stood up. This line sort of has reverberated through the decades. What do they mean by that? I think it sort of speaks to the importance of this moment, the founding of the PRC. It's not just the end of the civil war. It's not just the end of this long period of struggle against Japan in the 30s. It's from the Chinese view, this is the end of what they refer to as the century of humiliation. 1840s to the 1940s. You look at the opium wars all the way to the Second World War. And for them, it's 100 years of China struggling against Western powers, Japanese powers, imperialists beating them about and trying to find ways to strengthen themselves and get back on top. The century of humiliation. In Mao's view, this is sort of the end of it. This is the succeeding, crowning moment of that century of struggle. But the struggle did not end there for post-war China. And the relations with the United States, you can imagine, and we've just talked about, relations with the Nationalists got worse. And relations with the US got much, much worse. The US made it clear in the Civil War that they would favor the Nationalists. And that's where they threw in their support. That sort of made it immediately. And the Chinese Communist Party. And then it got much, much worse in the Korean War. Not only was this very weak alliance or this somewhat interest between the Chinese Communists and the Americans gone, now it's the exact opposite. Now the Chinese see the Americans as their greatest enemy because they're helping the South Koreans, the Chinese are back to the North Koreans. They're more as unified struggle of East Asian peoples against, in their view, American military imperialism trying to impose their power over East Asia. So relations with the US get very, very bad, again. They don't get any better for quite a while. This is the 1950s. 60s were not better. In the context of the Vietnam War, this is another Chinese propaganda posted in 1965. American imperialism is circled ring upon ring by anti-colonial, anti-imperial struggle around the planet. What's the message again? China is leading, helping the people in Vietnam, helping people in Africa and Latin America. Anywhere there's anti-colonial struggle in the world, in the 60s, China's there helping support there. So relations with the US still quite bad and also we've got to bring, at least for a moment, bring the Soviet Union to this. A major part of our story, but it's worth mentioning. There had been good relations with the Soviets in the 50s. The Soviet Union had provided a lot of support to the PRC in their first seven, eight years, like a fairly quick year. This also is a relationship that you generated quite a bit through the late 1950s especially. By 1960, it had also completely fallen apart. So in the 60s, mixed with this, China really had no major friends to sort of rely upon. Both the other major global powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were completely estranged. So how long? How on earth did we get here by 1972? Nixon, February of 1972, is in Beijing, having dinner with, meeting Mao, having dinner with John Lai. How on earth is this possible? Right, again, think about this message. Two people don't like each other. One can bring them together, somebody they like. By the early 70s, as much as China and the United States have problems between them, they both see the Soviet Union as a far greater enemy. So this is what brings them together, right? It sort of starts to rebuild this relationship common thread in the Soviet Union. So it's a new age, a new sort of stage in this development of the 1970s, the normalization of relations again. We've come through quite a number of different stages for these years. Brings us back to Deng Xiaoping. This is the man, Mao Zedong died in 1976. Deng Xiaoping emerges as a successor by the late 70s. He's really the main man in control by the 1980s. And remember Deng's background, right? He was this young man in Paris in 1919. He had a long history with the party. And he was also a member of the Chinese Communist Party who, for most of his career, had represented a more kind of moderate developmentalist kind of side of the party. The Chinese Communist Party had long been divided between hardcore, radical, ideologues, people like Mao, people like Deng who were like, yeah, okay, revolution, I get it, but we're trying to build a strong country too. We need to do things that actually work. Not just do things because they sound ideologically proper to do. Let's actually pursue policies that don't. And he finally had his chance to do this once he's in power in the 1980s. Summarize this really quickly with great illustration that I think sort of captures Deng's reforms of the 1980s, the Chinese version of the monopoly guy. Long story short, what does Deng Xiaoping do in the 80s? Basically takes all of the economic policies of the Maoist years, tosses them all out the window. None of that stuff worked. It was all a total disaster. We're going to embrace market capitalism. We're going to embrace industrial capitalism along the lines of the West. We're going to get rid of all the sort of controls that we used to have with the economy, open things up, change the way we do things, and we're also going to invite in foreign investors to come in and sort of infuse the Chinese world with the money we need to grow and develop. Essentially meaning what? Communism dies in the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping. It's the People's Republic of China by the Chinese Communist Party referred to China as a communist state. There is nothing communist at all about the Chinese economy from the 1980s up until now. So complete transformation under Deng in that sense, in the economic sense, embracing again the western model, economic development because he sees that's the effective way to go. We want results. We want to build a strong state. That's how we're going to do it, market capitalism. There are limits of course to Deng's reforms. Embraces full on western liberal capitalism but not western liberal political theory and political participation. This is the limit, right? Basically says, we'll get you rich. We're going to make money but it's going to be under the party's leadership. And if anybody stands up and resists that, you're going to be crushed. This is what political science come to call authoritarian capitalism. Right? It's western-style capitalism in the economic sense but it's old communist-style authoritarian politics in that sense. And this is what happens in Chenanmen, like the students demonstrating for democracy and it's put down quite brutally. There was a great, of course, wave of criticism against this from the west. Much sympathy for the students and rightly so, it was a terrible moment. But what you see in the 1980s or into the 1990s is that the outreach didn't continue all that long. Because in the 90s it's really, it's about money. There's just too much money to be made in China. You can, you know, sympathize with the students, you can support the dissidents but it's about investment capitalism, global economic growth in the 90s. Western investment came back and Chinese economy continued. If Deng laid the foundations in the 80s things start to really take off in the 90s then in the past 20 years yourself 20 years of the 21st century that's what you see. That's the Chinese see today. Just fantastic amounts of growth year after year. Of course today that's slowing down a little bit, right? It's not quite as dynamic as it used to be. But this kind of gets us to, or explains how we get to this point that way. So, bring us back and I'm right on schedule here. Come close to the end here with this photograph. Middle class, upper middle class, their posh Beijing condo from just a couple of years ago. Living a life today that's not all that different from the life of a affluent posh condo dwelling person in Paris or China today is all that different in most everyday sort of ways from the sort of life that was here. So that circle all the way back to the start come back to these two images where I began today and ask you, well what do you think? I started out by saying we have these two functions that are dominant in the way about China today. Chinese system is anti-western, right? And the China's rise is a threat to the West. Think anything different about those? Now I'm just sort of taking the deeper historical view. Let me just suggest maybe some way consider it. Instead of saying China's system is anti-western. Is China's system anti-western? Is that really the best way to understand it? Is it that simple? Is it that one-dimensional? Not really, right? If you look at the long term, you see that Chinese attitudes about the West have gone through lots of different transformations. Some points, yes, China has been very, very critical of the West and has attacked the Western system, but in other points there have been people in China who have said our society is a mess. We need to be more like the West if we're going to survive. There's an ambivalence there and it evolves and it changes over time. In a lot of situations the attitudes Chinese people have about the West and the Chinese government has about the West. It's a reflection more of what's going on within China than it is actually anything having to do with the Western world. So just to change the wording and it looks a little bit different. Is China's system anti-western? The other, I said China's rise is a threat to the West. China's rise? Or China's return? From the Chinese perspective, there's no rise of China. When you call it the rise of China, you're taking a Western perspective from the year 1800 now. From the Chinese perspective that goes back thousands and thousands of years, China's not on the rise. There's nothing new about China becoming global power. From the Chinese viewpoint, China is just returning to a position that they have historically always held. It's a center of global economy. It's a major world power. Maybe some of that is more persuasive than others. We'll see. You can talk about it with your families later tonight. That's my pitch. Thanks very much for listening. Right on time. 244. Beautiful. Okay. So we have some time for... Hold on. I'll get it right here. Hi. If Emperor Qin Long in the late 1700s had agreed with the British proposal to sort of open themselves up to international trade and all the things that you mentioned before, what do you think would have been the consequence for China? Would the opium war have happened, or would China have really taken a very different path? Had Qin Long not taken that approach by the British out of hand the way that he did? Yeah, this is the thing. Asking these counterfactual speculative questions for historians, it's always a dicey thing because historians' job is to understand why did things that happened, why did they happen that way? Although the question is a good one to ask because it makes you wonder, well, what are the really processes that work here? What are the factors shaping these outcomes and certainly would have been different if there had been sort of an easier way to merge into kind of mutually beneficial trade instead of making it a more sort of antagonistic clash in the 1830s, 1840s, the way that it became. So I think it certainly would have been different. I don't know if we could say it would have necessarily been a long-term a better outcome. There's so many other factors that shaped relations in the 19th century. But it is an interesting question to ponder how significant was that decision in sort of changing dynamics. Bert, I'm coming. So I'm wondering about the issue of Taiwan and how are those factors in? Yeah. How Taiwan factors in? Yeah, I mean, I didn't sort of go deeply into that, but at the end of the Civil War, obviously you're familiar with this. This is why Taiwan is what it is now, right? The Nationalist Retreat to Taiwan. And throughout that period of the Cold War, the U.S. backs the regime on Taiwan against the PRC in the 50s and so forth. How does it factor in? I mean, I guess maybe one connection we can draw in terms of the themes I'm trying to develop in the presentation today is this notion of China's return rather than China's rise. When we talk about China today, and the assertions sometimes made by the government to reclaim different territories, whether it's to reclaim Taiwan, or there's all sorts of issues too, territorial issues with the Philippines and different islands in South China to see things like this. There are arguments that historically we've been present in these places, we've had control of these regions. It makes the same case in Central Asia, right? They're opposing their control over ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang and the far western provinces. I mean, historically this is the world we've always had. And the issue with Taiwan, this is what makes it such a dangerous one today, right? The state still makes these claims that hey, Taiwan, this is a renegade province, this was not a legitimate state and eventually it will become a proper part of China again. What's interesting about that to me is that Taiwan historically is not before the 20th century, Taiwan wasn't really that important to China at all. I mean, it wasn't really a central part of the Qing Empire. But we've heard that the Ming dynasty, the Ming didn't really care at all about Taiwan. It was a place that had its own indigenous people, its own indigenous language and native cultures that had relations with people in Japan, with people in Southeast Asia. It's an independent country basically, an independent civilization. It wasn't really that politically important to anybody in China until the nationalists evacuated there after the war. Of course, Taiwan had also been a Japanese colony from mid-1890s until 1945, because the Japanese had colonized it as well. So yeah, Taiwan's history is also quite fascinating, but maybe it can kind of tie into the whole historical perspective question in this way. I have three questions for you. I'd like to understand what your interpretation would be. First, the negotiations between Great Britain and China over Hong Kong, which in Hong Kong was supposed to have its status until 2048, which in 20 years is gone. Second thing is they were admittance into the WTO and how they have participated in that. And the third one is what's your interpretation of taking these small islands in the South China Sea which are essentially nothing and essentially making military bases of them? Okay, let's see. One, two, and three. I'm going to pass on number two just for the moment, because it's a World Trade Organization. I'm not an economist. The first one about Hong Kong, this is also a sort of ties in similarly to the Taiwan issue, right? If you think about Hong Kong's history, Hong Kong was British territory from the 1840s. Hong Kong was seated to the British as part of the First Opium Wars. It was under British control until the 1990s, converted to the Chinese control at that point. But in the system of, you know, one country, two systems kind of thing, we let the Hong Kong continue to be what it is. This was the agreement made in the 90s. But yeah, but that's quickly sort of falling apart. There's a desire of the mainland to impose more strict control over Hong Kong. And especially clamped down on political dissent that happens there. So yeah, I think that definitely sort of fits the pattern in terms of the Chinese state, the Chinese Communist Party, using history to sort of bolster its claims of reasserting itself. It's not aggression, but as returning back to the way things are supposed to be, the way things they were historically. Now obviously that's a self-serving rhetorical approach. Clearly. But it's also, it is grounded in some kind of historical reality at the same time. So that's why it can be effective, because it's not just making that stuff up out of nowhere. It is a part of that imperial history. The third, skip number two, I went back to number one, and the third one was about, that remind me. Oh, the islands, yeah. That, yeah, to me, that's more sort of a matter of just sort of root politics. There's not really any strong historical claims to those islands. That's really just a desire for strategic control of that part of the oceans in that region, because these are very, very vital trade routes, right? You need to send ships from the Indian Ocean. They need to go through the streets of Malacca. They need to get up to China, the China coast. That kind of, that water, those waterways are very, very strategically important. So it's not surprising that the Chinese Communist Party wants to have military presence in that region to back up their interests and protect their interests there. Yeah, but there's not the same kind of historical claim they could make to that that they can make in Taiwan. How do you think the Chinese feel about their opium issue and our ethanol issue? Does it influence them at all? Well, I mean, opium these days is not not the problem that it used to be. It's different kinds of drugs and how that better to plague the world than opium. But there's certainly those, these are issues, and this is actually one of the things, one of the sort of the social consequences of Deng Xiaoping's reforms in the eighties and nineties was that people who were a little bit reluctant to kind of open China up commercially and economically to Western investment and Western trade, thought that it would bring these kinds of social bills, things like drugs and things like this into Chinese society. So there were critics of that in the eighties and nineties as a part of that process of reform, but today I don't think China's problems with drug use are more or less disastrous as they are. Here, I mean it's a problem anywhere you go in the world. My question is a broad one, but I'm curious about the relations between the USSR, now Russia, no longer you know the big panoply of countries that it was with China, Russia and China relations. I'm just curious about say starting with a demise of the USSR into separatist kind of movements leading up to the present I'm curious about your thoughts about the relations between the two countries. Okay. This is the first time we got. Okay, seven minutes. Okay, seven minutes. It's also, I mean I talked most about today about sort of China, the Pierson relations with the USA, but I mentioned a little bit about the Soviet Union, but that's also a very, very interesting story because the Chinese Communist Party is founded in the early 1920s largely sort of with the direction, with the support of the Soviet Union. There were common turn communist international agents from the Soviet leader Zhao and Chengdu show and helping create the Chinese Communist Party and there was support between from Moscow to the Chinese Communists through the 1920s into the early 1930s. Mao and the Communists kind of go their own way from Moscow in the 1930s and sort of break a little bit out of that control, so there's a little bit more autonomy there, but then it sort of comes back in the Civil War period because the Soviet Union has an interest in supporting the Chinese Communists and taking over China rather than the US backed nationalists. I'll come back closer together there in the late 40s. I mentioned there's cooperation, there's assistance in the probably from 1950 until 57 and 58 or so because the Soviets again have an interest in supporting Chinese development and the Chinese need Soviet support in that period. It starts to collapse and to fall apart in the late 50s, early 60s for a lot of different reasons, but primarily it's because as Mao gets stronger and stronger as China's leader, he likes less being viewed as sort of some sort of junior partner to the Soviet system. He wants China to be its own leader, he doesn't want to be sort of second fiddle the Soviet Union anymore. This is what contributes to their break of their relations in the 60s. Then as we talked about today, right in the 70s it gets even worse because now the Chinese hate the Soviet so much they're willing to have Nixon come to dinner, right? I mean that's really saying something. So I guess my quick sort of conclusion that would be when you think about China's relationship with Russia today yeah they have a lot of things maybe common strategic interests geopolitical interests, but there's also a history there too of times when they come together for certain reasons, but it's just as easy to pull China and Russia apart when their interests diverge as it is to bring them together. So I'm not someone who sees China and Russia as sort of these natural partners. There's something to gain, enough to gain from working together they'll do it, but historically they'll be just as quick to sort of stab each other in the back. A question about the 21st century and technology would you say a little bit about are we at war or what relative to China and the West in technology? Are we at war? Boy that's a provocative question. I wouldn't say we're at war, I wouldn't take it quite that far. Certainly there is I know in my presentation today I was sort of trying to problematize this way that China gets viewed as this antagonistic rival this enemy and we have to be worried about it. I'm not trying to minimize that, I'm not saying China is not any sort of threat I'm just saying I think there's equal danger in looking at things in very one-dimensional superficial kind of ways we need to appreciate the complexity of motivations and why states do the things that they do and again I'm a historian, I'm not a policy guy so I can't really speak to specific things about China's technology policy today but I can tell you that when you look at the recent history between China and the United States just to be precise about it. The economic interests are so tight they need each other so much economically and money talks. Money makes the world go around sometimes the rhetoric and the chirping and the criticism that's on the surface level that's more for the domestic constituents than it is for Chinese need to look tough on the west not to westerners but to Chinese and the same here US politicians need to be tough on China because that's what Americans want from here so you're sort of saying you're talking on one side of your mouth to your domestic constituency but what you're actually going to do and the relationship you want to build can often be something different because there's a different interest at stake so it sets my evasive way of dealing with that question I'm going to pass the mic because you just answered the question I was going to bring up I think when they decided to reduce the population of China that was a huge step I feel that if the whole world would do that we'd be much better off now and I don't know how they were able to carry that off there's been bad results but it's a wonderful thing that they did and I don't know how they had the power to do that well it's created a demographic crisis of sorts in China and in lots of parts of East Asia there's demographic problems there was such population growth in Japan in South Korea and China the post war period and now it's just crashing because there's not enough the fertility rates are very low I mean people aren't having kids the way they used to have six or seven kids in the fifties now are having maybe one if any this is a real problem over the next 30 or 40 years you're going to have huge numbers of people over the age 65 and almost not nearly enough under the age of 5 and 30 to sort of be the labor force that supports that population so this is a real problem that they're going to have to find a way to do it if you're talking about expansion as sort of 19th, 20th century colonial occupation of places and making foreign territories a part of your colonial empire yeah China never really followed that path although if you were to ask folks from Vietnam or Korea if China expansionists they'd say well yes they are if you look at Chinese Dynastic History I always joke about this with my students one of the things you see more or less every time a Chinese dynasty comes together so this is about every 250, 300 years or so solidate power at home with tax reduction and things like this and once next invade Vietnam it just happens again and again and again you exert your power by showing your hegemonic influence on your borders and one way to do that is to invade Vietnam or occupy military campaigns into the west so there are kind of expansionist impulses but not the same way sort of building colonial empires that expand the globe historically so you're right about that this is our last question it's been about 60 years since China occupied Tibet have they succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of the Tibetan people or are they just occupying for us trying to make them Chinese quick answer no they have not won the hearts and minds of the Tibetan people that's the quick answer of course there's you can't make a blanket statement about that you might find some folks in Tibet who just sort of come to terms with the nature of the situation and they kind of find the way to get by as best they can but there's certainly plenty of who don't so that's still very contentious you saw a lot of this a few years ago when the Beijing Olympics were in 2008 lots of protests related to Taiwan criticism of the president of Taiwan or not Taiwan sorry Tibet so yeah these are things even though as you said 60 years ago 70 years ago still yeah it's a very contentious and difficult Eric thank you so so much thank you