The China Story : A Matter of Facts

Geremie R Barmé is an historian, cultural critic, filmmaker, translator and web-journal editor who works on Chinese cultural and intellectual history from the early modern period (1600s) to the present. Currently, he is Australian Research Council Federation Fellow in the ANU College of Asia & the Pacific, The Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, where he also edits the online e-journal China Heritage Quarterly. On Tuesday 28 August, Geremie R Barmé addressed The Sydney Institute to reveal something of the China Story project, an internet-based undertaking that features: a yearbook, lexicon, blog, archive, essays on New Sinology, and material related to Thinking China.

THE CHINA STORY: A MATTER OF FACTS

GEREMIE R BARMÉ

 The following talk is based on a longer essay, “Telling Chinese Stories”, available online at: http://www.thechinastory.org/2012/08/telling-chinese-stories/

 “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

 This is the famous opening line of Joan Didion’s 1979 The White Album, a series of autobiographical essays about the 1960s. Individuals create narratives related to their own lives, as do groups, societies, political parties and nations. From the dying days of the Qing dynasty in the late-nineteenth century, the thinker and reformist Liang Qichao wrote about the need for China to have a new history, one that would both reflect its changed realities and help make it a modern nation.

History and national narratives express aspirations as well as political agendas. Australia too is a country that tells itself stories. At around the time that the Chinese Communist Party’s General Secretary Hu Jintao announced the “Eight Glories Eight Shames” (ba rong ba chi八荣八耻) as part of the new socialist values strategy in 2006, you may recall that the then Liberal Coalition Australian Prime Minister John Howard and his Education Minister Brendan Nelson championed a list of nine “Values for Australian Schooling”. They were part of a response to our local “history wars”.

Many of those who engage with the Chinese world today encounter the stories that are told about China – there is the narrative of the monolithic party-state, stories of economic boom and government repression, accounts of the China Model and of the fragile one-party dictatorship among others. Then there are the multiple stories of individuals, companies, communities, as well as an array of other accounts told about China. Some of these attempt to deepen an understanding of the Chinese world and the perspectives that Chinese citizens, thinkers, business people have on the rise of China and the world at large; and then there are the accounts that evoke familiar stereotypes and make it harder, rather than easier to appreciate the complex realities of contemporary China.

For its part, since the Beijing Olympic year of 2008, the People’s Republic of China has increasingly focused on “telling The China Story”, as the former ambassador of the People’s Republic of China to Australia Fu Ying put it. Understanding the official “China Story” as well as some crucial variations of it – “telling Chinese stories” – is, I would argue, crucial to a broad-based engagement with the contemporary Chinese world.

The four disconnects

Since the Cultural Revolution came to an end in the late 1970s, there have been what I think of as four major “disconnects” between China’s official account of itself, and international perceptions of Chinese reality. An initial “disconnect” between China’s self-narrative and international perceptions of the country’s new era occurred at the outset of the reform and opening up policies launched in late 1978.

Around the time of the plenary session of the Chinese Communist Party that would see China turn away from the radical politics of class struggle and concentrate instead on economic reform and modernisation, public protest found a voice by posting complaints about Party rule on at the Xidan intersection of Chang’an Boulevard in central Beijing. The “Beijing Spring” of 1978-1979 saw people from disparate backgrounds put up “big-character posters” to express their complaints.

Some were prosaic and practical, others employed the lyricism of poetry and fiction to call for change. Among the posters one in particular gained local and international fame; it was that written by a young man by the name of Wei Jingsheng that called for the modernization of China’s political system and democratization. In 1979, “Democracy Wall” as it came to be known was shut down, and eventually bulldozed. Wei Jingsheng had been detained and he was gaoled for fifteen years. International (mostly Western, but also Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japanese) hopes for China to move away from authoritarian government were frustrated, but the newly launched economic policies of the Communist Party promised gradual transformation and greater openness, if not political change.

The year 1989 saw another bifurcation in the understanding of China and its trajectory since the inauguration of the reforms. For some the events of 3-4 June 1989 represented a split in perception as well as the basic understanding of China’s post-Cultural Revolution reform era.

For many observers and commentators the formal disavowal of radical Maoism in the early 1980s and the gradual introduction of economic reforms that undid much of the socialized economy of China presaged more dramatic change. In the 1980s, China experienced for the first time in nearly four decades economic, cultural and social change that for many would inevitably lead to major political renovation, if not an end to one-party rule and draconian control over the media. Agitation for change took various guises, the most famous and clamorous being a nation-wide protest movement sparked by the death of the former Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang in mid April 1989.

Those protests in Tiananmen Square and public spaces in dozens of other Chinese cities gave voice to a range of inchoate frustrations: there were demands for greater freedoms, calls for an open press, demands for an end to corruption and nepotism, and opposition to China’s involvement with the global economy. In short, the protests challenged the Party’s monopoly on power and its style of rule.

These hopes were brought to an end by the murderous events of 4 June 1989.

In retrospect, in particular following the dismemberment of the Eastern Bloc and the collapse of the Soviet Union, China’s 1989 mass protests seemed like a lost opportunity for the country to become a modern, progressive westernized state, to fulfill the promise for prosperity, democracy and pluralism that had first been envisaged by the 1911 Revolution, one that had brought an end to millennia of dynastic rule.

For China’s leaders under Deng Xiaoping and for the Party propaganda apparatus, 1989 was something else entirely.

The protests were neither spontaneous nor patriotic. They were part of a canny plot hatched by local malcontents and inimical global forces, in particular the Americans. The struggle of 1989 was, in fact, a continuation of the anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist struggle that China had been embroiled in since the first Opium War of 1840, a struggle that had only intensified with the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949.

The former Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong had clearly identified the nature of the struggle against Western domination and exploitation thirty years earlier, in 1959. Speaking to Party leaders in the southern city of Hangzhou he had warned that there was a long-term American-led international capitalist plot aimed at both the Soviet Union and at China. It was a strategy concocted by the US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that employed economics, the media, culture and ideas to corrupt socialism. Over time this capitalist-imperialist plot would see countries like China transformed into liberal market democracies. Through a gradual process of social, economic and political change, the Americans and their allies hoped that China would go through a “peaceful evolution” to become a pliant western-style state.[1]

Shortly after 4 June 1989, Deng Xiaoping reiterated Mao Zedong’s warning about peaceful evolution. He declared that people had been misled by intellectuals and agents into protesting against the government and the Party. Political education had slackened off during the boom years of the 1980s and the Party had been too soft on arrant ideas and activists. It was now necessary to silence these dangerous liberal elements and to re-educate the country, to teach people Chinese history and about China’s unique situation and the challenges that it faced in its long search for wealth and power.

A third disconnect in China’s official account and international reports and perceptions occurred in 1999. First there was the mass protest of Falungong practitioners at the party-state compound of Zhongnanhai in Beijing in April that year, followed by the repression of the meditative sect as an “evil cult”. Then, later in the year, the supposedly ‘accidental’ bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade by US-led NATO forces led to an outpouring of nationalist outrage. The fourth dissonance in perceptions about contemporary China occurred came nearly a decade later, in 2008, on the eve of the Beijing Olympics.

Re-entering history

The 1990s re-education campaign built on efforts launched in the late 1970s to emphasised the spiritual civilization of China, something that thought to have been imperiled by the nihilism and anarchy of the Cultural Revolution period.

In 1979, as the party prepared for the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic on 1 October that year, Ye Jianying, the Minister of Defence declared that a revolution-weary society scarred by years of relentless political campaigns, crises and conflict needed to pursue not only economic reform and material welfare but to pay attention to building “spiritual civilisation” (jingshen wenming 精神文明).

What started as a speech and a concern was in the following years codified into a formal program, one aimed at building a Chinese “spiritual civilization” that was based on the Party’s understanding of the nature of China, its history and its particularities.

Over half a century before Ye Jianying made his speech in 1979, the famous late-Qing thinker and historian Liang Qichao (梁启超, 1873-1929) had first spoken of the need for China to embrace a modern world view, one that ‘included both “material culture’ (human instruments and general conditions of existence) and ‘spiritual culture’ (language, ethics, politics, religion, aesthetics, and scholarship) that constitute that ‘valuable accumulation created by the energy of the human mind.’”[2]

Liang Qichao was initially an advisor to the Guangxu Emperor whose attempts to reform the Qing dynasty government in 1898 failed, later he became a monarchist reformer, agitator, publisher and writer. He was one of the first Chinese thinkers to argue that modern-style history writing was intimately bound up with the creation of a modern country.

Having been forced into exile following the failed 1898 reforms, Liang travelled to raise money and awareness about China’s dire predicament. In 1900 to 1901, Liang visited Australia at a unique moment in this country’s modern history. It was the year of Australian federation. Liang even attended a gala function at the Sydney Town Hall on 12 January 1901 held to celebrate the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia. The first prime minister of the nascent country, Edmund Barton, was also present.[3]

It was a foundational period for this country, but it was also one linked profoundly with the story of the Chinese in Australia, and Australia’s engagement with China. For, as Gloria Davies has noted, “[t]he formation of the Australian Federation in 1901 introduced further restrictions to Chinese migration when the Immigration Restriction Act became the first major piece of legislation to be passed by the new federal parliament in December that same year.”[4]

Ironically, as a White Australia was created, thinkers like Liang Qichao were trying to imagine an expansive and progressive future for China, in particular by reconsidering its past. During his time in Australia national attention had also been focused on China, in no small part due to the reporting of the Australian-born former British subject George E. Morrison for The Times. Morrison wrote from the front-line on the dramatic Boxer rebellion in the Qing dynastic capital of Beijing and the flight of the court to Xi’an. This was then followed by the repression of the Boxers (or the relief of the embattled foreign embassy district, depending on how one saw the conflict) and protracted peace negotiations that involved an international invading force, including Australian troops under British command.

For his part, Liang continued to raise funds for political activities and reform in China. He was interested in trade and the wealth it could generate to support the Chinese manufacturing industry. Like so many others, he saw economic might as being the path to China’s self-strengthening and as a key to the Chinese no longer suffering the humiliations, individual and national, that they had experienced at the hand of foreigners.

It was in the pages of the New Citizen Journal (Xinmin bao 新民报) which appeared in Tokyo eight months after he left Australia in May 1901 that, among other things, Liang Qichao issued his famous 1902 tract called ‘On New Historiography’ (Xin shixue 新史学). In it he declared that history was “the most vital discipline of all knowledge. It is the mirror reflecting the nation; it is also the source of patriotism”.[5]

There is not time in this short lecture to recount the ways that historical discussions and debate, many of which had a profound impact on how the Qing empire was moulded into a modern Republican nation-state and then, eventually into a socialist People’s Republic. It must suffice to say that after Ye Jianying’s 1979 call for China to construct spiritual, as well as material civilisation, constant efforts have been made by the Chinese party-state to codify and narrate the elements, ideas, personalities and forces that have led to China’s present.

This is hardly unique to China. For years we ourselves had seen governments or cultural authorities (elected or self-appointed) energetically engaged in defining or articulating cultural nationhood and boundaries. This search for national selfhood may be relatively benign in the eyes of some, but attempts to codify and delimit the national essence of a territory, a people, or a linguistic realm, is invariably fraught not only with difficulties but also dangers. For to define what culture is, to define the essence of what is in constant flux, something that is a co-creation of numerous individuals, groups or collectives can be a deadening activity.

Stories and accounts of bloodshed and loss, warfare and adversity, the forging of national identity in the blood of martyrs are common items in the cultural repertoire of many modern nation-states.

On the anniversary of the disastrous Gallipoli landing on 25 April this year 2012, speaking at the dawn service in Turkey the Prime Minister Julia Gillard remarked that Anzac Day has organically grown into something of significance for all Australians. Corporal Roberts-Smith, awarded the Victoria Cross in Afghanistan and a soldier who had four relatives at Gallipoli in 1915, said that Gallipoli is “about the founding of our Australian values and our Aussie spirit”.[6]

Julia Gillard went one step further when she told us that Gallipoli was even more significant that the creation of an independent nation at the time of Federation in 1901. Daresay, the famous polemicist Liang Qichao, a man appalled by the havoc of World War I and the moral bankruptcy that it signified for the West may well have chosen to take Gillard to task, although that would be the last thing an embattled prime minister needs right now: a feisty Chinese thinker giving her a history lesson.

China and Australia are by no means alone in this recent obsession for codifying what it is to be but ourselves. Many other polities faced with real and perceived threats in this age of heightened nation-statism are doing the same. What is particular is not the actual content of the values, but the political will to undermine the civic and the civil, to cavil and create what political power-holders regard as being acceptable norms and standards for society as a whole in consultation with themselves. This is a process that has unfolded at the other end of economic reforms that have seen the rapid privatization, or one could argue re-privatisation, of social life and community.[7]

A conflict of caricatures

As I remarked earlier, time was rebooted in 1978 with the launching of the Communist Party’s New Era Open Door and Reform policies, China’s “second liberation”.

In China the story of the reforms was one about how history was being realised; how the struggle for a strong, wealthy and modern country dating back to the Qing era was now possible under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. Mistakes had been made, lessons had been learnt. China was back on track.

In the 1990s, outside China (and including in Hong Kong and Taiwan) popular characterizations of the mainland readily invoked a grand narrative that told another story, one about how following the disasters of Maoism the last bastion of recalcitrant one-party rule would inevitably be undermined by economic reforms and the liberating pressures of technology, social change and global markets. It was a view that presented us with an inexorable logic: market diversity will result in increased commercialisation and embourgeoisement; the growth of new social forces as well as of a general liberalization will in turn engender political, social and cultural pluralism.

In China reasoned and self-reflexive analysis among popular writers and academics is all too often stymied not only by the fiat of publishers, but also by mass sentiment. Perhaps that is why the West, that is Euro-America, often doesn’t appear to have much of a chance in China. For as the script there goes, the United States is the sole surviving global hegemon in a unipolar world; it is the policeman of the planet that is in cahoots with NATO and the European Economic Union. The monolithic power of US Inc., even in its present enfeebled state, will go to any lengths to impose its will on others, especially those who would dare challenge its international “droit de signeur” In the name of national security it succours a commercial empire and, even in decline, it furthers the imperial domination pursued by its multi-national companies and regional minions.

This is what I call a “conflict of caricatures”, be it found in China or the United States, Asia or Euramerica, and it infiltrates and mediates the mainstream and streamlined “China story” at every turn.[8]

The storyline that all too often has China, not to mention the US, in its grip is one of Manichaean simplicity. The Communist apparatus of China (both in its bureaucratic machinations and ideological pronouncements) is readily cast as being hide-bound, out-of-touch, in decay and incapable of adjusting to the fast-pace of economic change, or the unsettling and pluralistic realities of its own society. How can the creaky Marxism-Leninism of early modernism cope with the frenetic pastiche of the post-modern age, it is asked. “China on the verge” is a conceit that feeds off narratives determined by the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union, a country of permanent political and economic stagnation that was the yesterday of Russia’s today. In this view of the Far East, the notion of an unchanged and challenged autocracy that is conflated neatly with abiding mythologies about oriental despotism, eternal Cathay, and political Chinoiserie. For China, no matter how one makes concessions to its rapid transformation, complex social reality and restive economy, is a country caught up in over two centuries of stereotypes.

Zhengyou诤友

In the year leading up to August 2008, widespread hopes were expressed internationally that with the global spotlight focussed on China in an unprecedented fashion, and given that the Olympics would be celebrated as that country’s “coming out party”, surely it was inevitable that we would witness a period of greater openness, increased freedom and an expression of the best that the Chinese system had to offer. Such hopeful views brought to mind the optimism regarding the potential for openness and change in China that had been abroad first in the late 1970s, and again in the late 1980s. Once more such views were underpinned by a near axiomatic belief that great economic liberalisation and market freedom would invariably enhance political and personal freedoms and indeed hasten systemic changes to China’s authoritarian system. If history wasn’t bunk, at least it would be shoved aside by the invisible hand of the market.

The murderous events in Tibetan China in March-April 2008 dashed these hopes. Protests and then violence first in Lhasa, then throughout parts of the People’s Republic with large Tibetan populations threatened to become the main focus for China’s Olympic year. For the international community human rights in China were once again a major concern, and for the fourth time in thirty years an “us versus them” clash in reporting and understanding contemporary China erupted.

An interesting chapter was added to the story of Australia’s involvement with China shortly after the suppression of the Tibetan riots. In April 2008, on his first formal visit to the People’s Republic, our then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd caused something of a stir when, in addressing a Peking University audience, he voiced concerns about China’s human rights record and the situation in Tibet. Although his speech was predominantly concerned with the numerous positive dimensions of the bilateral relationship, he was the first foreign leader to address an audience in Chinese, and to pointedly, if politely dare to disagree with official China over a matter of internal politics and international concern. Ever the diplomat, Rudd couched his comments in terms of trying to be a zhengyou 诤友 to China. Using this ancient term, he said his comments were part of an effort to be ‘a partner who sees beyond immediate benefit to the broader and firm basis for continuing, profound and sincere friendship.’

The China Story

Despite the hopes and fears surrounding the XXIXth Olympiad, the Beijing games went on. It was just after that opening ceremony that I was invited on 9 August 2008 by Kevin Rudd to join him in conversation with a number of Chinese officials and individuals. They included a leading propagandist who emphasised how the events of 2008 had demonstrated how important it was for China to tell more efficaciously what he called Zhongguode gushi 中国的故事, that is “The China Story”.

As is so often the case with such encounters, the party bureaucrat was interested in using the foreign to serve China. Indeed, he enjoined us in the tired language of friendship diplomacy so incisively studied by the scholar Anne-Marie Brady, to act as bridge between China and the world. Having spent my professional career as an historian attempting to understand, translate and related “Chinese stories” and not just a monolithic “China Story” I remarked that it was the plurality of Chinese stories, be they in the People’s Republic or globally, that form the natural bridge to understanding.

But the creation of a national narrative for China is not recent invention of the Communist Party. Telling national stories has been part of the creation of nation-states since the nineteenth century, and many history projects have been devised as part of, or at least under the umbrella of creating narratives for political purposes.

The China Story, Zhongguode gushi, has in recent years become part of the official narrative of the Chinese party-state, part of China’s “propaganda state”.

It is important to understand the officially engineered “Chinese world view”, just as we need to be mindful of how the guided Chinese media (from print to electronic) and educational practice have created what I have elsewhere called “China’s Flat Earth”. As people engaged intellectually with China, we particularly need to understand both the official discourse and its historical and ideological underpinnings…. But to get a grip on larger Chinese realities, possibilities, uncertainties and to gain insights into how the past and the present will sculpt the future, it’s necessary to go well beyond simply a developing an ability to grasp party-state programs and formulations.

In approaching The China Story today our role as scholars and educators is complex. It behoves us to bring an empathetic understanding to the task. That is we are alert to a scholastic pursuit for facts and contextualisation as well as being sensitive to understanding how the often-raw emotions generated by history and the uses of history today function in creating perceptions, and responses in current affairs. We are also aware of the nature of our own stories, individual, scholastic, social and national. For our engagement with The China Story is underpinned by and refers constantly back to all of these.

As academics, we have a different perspective – or range of perspectives – from more narrow-bore pragmatists, focus-group-driven politicians, or even effective business people and judicious diplomats. As I have remarked before my own vision of our work is one that is driven by humanistic thought, by, to quote Clive James, “its hunger, its scope, its vitality and its inner light – an inner light produced by all the aspects of life illuminating one another, in a honeycomb of understanding”.[9]

It is the environment of the university, where contending ideas are expressed, discussed and debated, that properly provides a free forum in which received beliefs and attitudes are subjected to rational analysis and discussion. Our relationships with colleagues, with students, with the various intellectual traditions of which we are custodians, and to which we are contributors, are in their essence often that of the zhengyou. We expect to be challenged: it is integral to learning and to the cultivation of the engaged, scholastic mind.

Following the establishment of our Australian Centre on China in the World we began preparing a way to account for The China Story. This Internet-based initiative is part of our effort to engage with The China Story, to reflect on discussions of China’s Guoqing and various aspects of that country’s realities. We hope that ‘The China Story’ site (www.thechinastory.org), launched in at ANU in Canberra on 10 August this year by Dr Ken Henry, will provide an easily accessible source for researchers, students, journalists, diplomats, business people and the interested public to the key words and concepts that generally define China today. It also features a China Story Yearbook, and an Archive of related research materials.

The mirror of history

 Shortly after Kevin Rudd had the temerity to speak of a relationship with China built not on simple friendship, but rather on the basis of being a zhengyou, I observed that:

The most famous zhengyou was Wei Zheng, a friend and critic of the Emperor Taizong of the seventh-century Tang dynasty. Wei told the ruler that ‘if you listen to wise counsel all is brightness; if, however, you give in to bias darkness falls.’ When Wei died, some years later, the emperor bitterly mourned his passing. He offered this tribute: ‘One looks at a reflection in a mirror to see if one’s dress is in order. One studies history to understand the changing fortunes of time. And one seeks wise counsel to avoid mistakes. Wei Zheng has died, and I have lost my mirror. To have a zhengyou is to be fortunate indeed.’ The metaphor is used by China’s leaders and the media even today. One can only hope that when they look in the mirror they do not do so with eyes wide shut.[10]

 When writing about the need for a new practice of history 110 years ago, the thinker Liang Qichao also referred to mirrors. He said:

What is history? It is that which records both the subjects and objects of the continuous activities of human society, assesses their general achievement, seeks the relationship of causality therein, and serves as an auxiliary mirror for the general public in modern times. That which specialises in narrating the activities of ancient Chinese to provide the modern Chinese nation with an auxiliary mirror is called Chinese history.[11]

The China Story project aims at provided a series of such mirrors that reflect not only what the party-state hopes to see when it gazes into the mirror of its carefully constructed history, but also through various refractions to provide those who see Chinese history as part of the broader global enterprise of humanity with the dimensions that allow for a nuanced, informed and complex understanding of China’s telling stories.