Modern China by Rana Mitter

Author:Rana Mitter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: China
ISBN: 9789085241522
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 2007-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

A modern politics?

A popular characterization of China’s leaders of the 20th century, particularly Mao, is that they have sought to become new emperors in their own right. Although it is a colourful shorthand, such a comparison is misleading. It highlights the exotic element of Chinese politics and conceals the reality that many of the assumptions and models that have shaped Chinese political thinking in the present century are profoundly modern, and indeed, similar to those in the West.

Chinese politics since the late Qing has been dependent on nationalism, an idea that derived its legitimacy from the people as a body in their own right, and an idea that a strong state would be a rational arbiter of power. It was based on mass politics where there was a social contract between government and citizen. While the Confucian mode of governance did also embody a sort of social contract between emperor and subject, it did not think it seemly that the people should be empowered in their own right – a profoundly non-modern way of thought. This does not mean that the Confucian past simply disappeared with the arrival of modern politics. For instance, assumptions that came from a modernized Confucianism did remain, such as ideas of hierarchy and mutual obligation. But these ideas have become adapted through contact with the assumptions of modernity about mass participation and legitimacy derived from the people, as well as the importance of the individuated self.

There is a final irony that has been implied, but not stated, in the way in which this chapter has portrayed politics since 1928 as a changing of the baton in a wider, consistent, politics of modernity. For the political form of China today – a one-party state that does still allow a significant amount of individual autonomy, a powerful state with a cooperative role in the international order, and a highly successful semi-capitalist economy in which the state and party still play a significant, embedded role – means that the Communist Party of today has essentially created the state sought by the progressive wing of the Nationalists in the 1930s rather than the dominant, radical Communists of the 1960s. One can imagine Chiang Kaishek’s ghost wandering round China today nodding in approval, while Mao’s ghost follows behind him, moaning at the destruction of his vision. The intellectual assumptions behind both the Nationalists and the Communists in the last century were similar in many important ways, making this seeming paradox perfectly comprehensible if examined in a somewhat longue durée that extends back before 1978 or 1949.

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