Conducted by Margaret Goodlander

Jonathan Spence, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, teaches in the field of Chinese history from 1600 to the present and on Western images of China since the Middle Ages. He is a past president of the American Historical Association. His books include The Search for Modern China. 

Despite unprecedented changes in China today, what would you, as a historian, point to as China’s most notable echoes of the past?

One can answer that by looking at these areas of change, the biggest of which today might be the ending of the population dominance in the countryside and the ending of farm work as the stable occupation of most Chinese. Where you had about ninety percent of the population living in rural areas at the beginning of the Revolution in the 1930s and into the 1940s, that figure has dropped dramatically, to just above fifty percent today. We see now in China infinitely more mobility, infinitely more urbanization, less reality of people being tied to the land.

Another huge area of change is the internationalization of China as a force in the world. Everything from all the various trade agreements to its active role in regional organizational structures to the Chinese interest in the Middle East and in Latin American products and China’s search for resources—all of this is recent.
With that as a kind of preamble, the elements of the past that are still very much with China include a very concentrated and secretive leadership without any particularly valid broad-based rationality to the political system. You also get complicated interpretation of the law when the law is still very much dominated by the feeling and practices of the central government, which as I said is very much a closed system. So the attempt to create legal structures is slow and difficult in China, with the additional difficulty of creating constitutional structures.

We quite often point to the effects of the family structure in China as we try to work out the effects of single-child policy in a system that historically has been geared to larger families and the possibility of family businesses. There is still in financial institutions and banking a lack of real independence. It is very much tied to controls from the center, though a new aspect is a growth in Chinese entrepreneurs who attempt to make their own way in a new system, so that’s an area of growth and change.

You view history from a unique lens, considering not only pervasive trends, but also individuals and their impact on the course of events. In a nation as large and diverse as China, to which individuals would you point as the most influential figures in the nation’s twentieth century history?

One would have to include Mao. But Mao is some ways was influenced by early leaders like Sun Yat-sen. Though in some ways Sun Yat-sen was seen as not entirely effective as an individual leader, I think ideologically he set a pattern for different types of growth in China. With the formation of the Untied Front and attempts alliances, there’s no doubt that he had a very formative impact.

One tends to answer such a question with political figures, but that isn’t necessarily the key factor. You could argue that Qian Sanquiang, by developing atomic bomb potential in China, meant that the nuclear physicists had an extraordinary impact on the society. He represents someone who is college-trained in China itself but then deepens his study and comes back to transform the country. So who’s to say that in one hundred years’ time someone like Qian might not seem more important than someone like Sun Yat-sen?

If we look for rival figures within the Communist Party, we would nowadays look at someone like Deng Xiaoping, who certainly had influence over the last thirty years of the twentieth century. His policies were similar in some ways to those of Mao’s, or an offshoot from them.

Some people might mention Zhou Enlai; some might mention Chiang Kai-shek. Had Chiang Kai-shek been a rather different person China’s history might have been considerably different as well. But that’s the trouble—we can never know. Had there not been a Mao, would there have been someone else doing the same thing? It’s hard to see exactly the same person emerging because people are unique. We could take people in terms of saving lives—there may well have been agricultural experts who developed certain strains of rice that are much more resistant to disease and actually helped more Chinese with their livelihood than we’d ever known before. And hydraulic engineers—for instance, the people who put the Yalu River back in its channel after it flooded—and those generals who were dominant in the Korean War and in Manchuria who stood up to Mao. Deng was willing to criticize the Great Leap when hardly anyone else was willing to join him.

In creative arts, I don’t think we’d have anyone as powerful as Lu Xun, whose fiction stands as a testament to the power of the pen. He believed he could transform the Chinese people, and—whether or not he actually could—certainly many thousands of people were moved by his writings.

In light of Western influences on the nation, in your view, has China maintained its traditional roots and Confucian values? In what ways has the country remained true to its own character, and in what ways has it adopted Western values?

That’s a very hard question. We truly don’t know. The government is seeking some kind of ideological bonding so that the central administration can relate to intellectuals. I would think that for many, many people Confucianism is more or less a rather empty term, although there is amazingly brilliant study of Confucian text in China right now. Some very bright Chinese scholars are deeply interested in their early history and philosophy. And they see the different values that dominate Confucianism rather than, for instance, Christian or Muslim or Marxist traditions. There is a possibility that China has certain core values that somehow can be reincorporated into the political system. In a way this was attempted in Taiwan, where we saw more overtly—or at least allegedly—Confucian education. Chiang Kai-shek claimed to have strong Confucian influences through his family and teachers.

On the mainland, I think people—including the government—are anxious to find a sort of ideological anchor, but I don’t think they feel they have found it, and I don’t think Deng felt that he’d found it. But he did believe he could release national energies in the economic sphere. But nobody since Mao in Yan’an has had a vision of letting all the Chinese think it all through for themselves. In fact, the Hundred Flowers Movement is probably as close as that has come. When you add Tianamen in 1980, many tens of thousands of people did try to express themselves in a critical way. Whether they really had a strong alternative values system is not so clear. They obviously had elements of democracy that Americans and Europeans would relate to.

But, again, how to integrate the idea of democracy with China’s needs is not an easy thing to do at all because we’re guessing which aspects of these ideologies will work, and nobody’s had a democracy with so many people in one country before. India, of course, has done very well, and it is a better model than the West for looking at China. To try to understand how India has survived and allowed individual freedoms to grow is perhaps a key model that China should be thinking about.

From a historical standpoint, how do you assess the relationship between China and Taiwan? What is your take on the One China Policy? Should we see China and Taiwan as two distinct nations?

Again, given the historical background, my feeling is that in something like international law, it’s rather a mixed record. I don’t believe that China really dominated Taiwan until the 1680s. In a sense, as part of the warfare settlement, China yielded Taiwan to Japan in 1895 because of international agreements among the Americans, the Nationalists, and the Russians. China regained Taiwan in 1945 after the Japanese surrender. The Communists, of course, never occupied it so it became Nationalist so that the Chinese state has twice had occupation. The first time, the Manchus were from outside China, so I suppose you could say it was a Manchu imposition of order on Taiwan. And then Chiang Kai-shek was on the losing side of the Civil War, but he happened to gain the occupation.

So, did China yield Taiwan at the Shimonoseki Treaty? Did the Nationalists legally take over Taiwan in 1945? Or has the People’s Republic had a valid claim since 1949 because of the unification of the rest of China? I don’t think anyone has an absolutely firm answer to any of these hypothetical situations. People have strong views, but I don’t think in terms of law you have any easy solution. China and Taiwan have certainly evolved into two very different societies, but with a rather similar ethnic base, each with a strong Han Chinese presence, but also other indigenous peoples as well. I’m inclined to think they were two separate societies, but two separate societies can eventually make one federal system or one kind of united political entity. It’s hard to say that they’re two countries, but they’re certainly two societies.

What lessons from history can we draw from China’s relationship with North Korea that might help current efforts to negotiate this very complicated and potentially dangerous international crisis? Will China play a role in diplomatic negotiations and a potential peace settlement?

My feeling is that what we learn from the history between China and North Korea is that China will not tolerate—if it’s able—the influx of a major power into the Korean peninsula. They will try to stop that at all costs. That’s precisely what they did in the late Ming Dynasty, when the Japanese invaded Korea and the Chinese then helped the Koreans get rid of the Japanese in the 1590s. In the 1890s, when Japan began to put a lot of pressure on the royal family in Korea, the Chinese again tried to help expel and weaken the Japanese. That was disastrous, but they did try, and the result was that they lost control of Taiwan and also Japan colonized Korea. But when the Japanese colonized Korea in 1910, the Chinese were too weak to do anything about it, and so that’s a different tragedy. But then in 1950, we have the decision I see as ultimately Mao’s, but with some sense of history behind it, for China to come in to stop the defeat of North Korea as the United Nations forces approached the Chinese border.

So in the current negotiations with North Korea, I think China is very wary of Korean nuclear capacity but feels that it has a much stronger nuclear capacity and much stronger ground and air forces. I think China’s dominant feeling about the current Korean negotiations is that it has more at stake than the Americans or other international entities such as SEATO or the European Union. So China, without having any kind of occupation of Korea since very early periods of time, has still been very watchful about a need to control the North Korean border, if it can, to keep it as a kind of safety zone. China will be careful about who holds power North Korea. I think it will stay that way—it’s absolutely their backyard. I think China should have a very strong say. Korea is strategically crucial to China—it gives access to the whole of Manchuria and the whole of the North China plane. China’s got to be watchful about Korea.

Despite recent advances in the realm of individual land ownership, authentic political liberalization seems a distant hope in China. Why does China remain politically authoritarian as its economy becomes more open? How will this issue play out in years to come?

Well, it could and might change quite rapidly. And changes in land policy would be one example, I think. Certainly the attempt to stop compulsory purchase of one’s land or home or farm is a major step forward. But there hasn’t been any automatic connection between greater prosperity and greater urbanization.

There hasn’t, as of yet, been a correlation with greater democracy. That could change with the government’s policy. Local elections that are held at the rural township level have sometimes had write-in candidates but are usually dominated by Communist-nominated candidates. So though there has been a kind of display of distributive justice, it’s not very well established. That will take time, and it might be very chaotic.

I think the Chinese are particularly watchful about the former Soviet Union and trying to see how they might avoid the kind of crisis the latter fell into when everything disintegrates at once. I’m not particularly optimistic about that—I don’t know how it will transform itself. China hasn’t had a true mass election since 1912—that’s a very long time. And so it depends on the public’s sense of party legitimacy and how much of that spills over into a meaningful constitution that has some force to it.

So, the search for modern China continues?

If you see part of modernity as some kind of constitutional democratic structure, the search goes on—I’d agree to that.
 

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