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One of my distinguished co-bloggers at Chicago Boyz, John Jay, penned a truly outstanding post on China, incorporating history, culture, economics and linguistics, using the famous  Manchurian warlord and opium addict, ” the Young Marshal ” Chang Hsüeh-liang, as a springboard:

“ Household Armies”

“….China has historically allowed certain social forces to compete with loyalty to the state. Linguistic (and in the cases of the Hui and Uyghur, religious) groups have always retained a large amount of autonomy through the provincial governments, and in some cases provinces such as Guandong can almost be thought of as a separate country within China due to their linguistic (non-Mandarin) identity and economic self sufficiency. But Guandong gets little voice in Beijing relative to the economic might of the Pearl  River Delta. Cantonese don’t care, as long as the kleptocracy in Beijing leaves them alone (after they make their formal obeisance) most of the time, and does not attempt to steal too much wealth. That may change as peasants out West mobilize and force the central government to send more goodies their way. China never hit upon the Anglosphere’s solution of a Republican governmental federation of competing interests akin to either Great Britain or the competing American states – the Imperial authorities always wished to pretend that they were in complete control, while ceding a lot of practical authority to the provinces.  

Conflicts between the linguistic periphery and the Mandarin-speaking center have contributed to the ebb and flow of centralized power in China since even before the Ten kingdoms of the South broke away from the Five Dynasties that succeeded the Tang. The Chinese have historically seen history as cyclical, rather than linear. I think that this at least in part stems from the fact that since the fall of the Tang Dynasty, China has never bitten the bullet to reform itself by completely rethinking its social system. Systems have arisen as kludges to deal with a particular problem, but have never dealt with the fundamental flaws in society, only with their surface manifestations. As James Sheridan wrote in “Chinese Warlord: The Career of Feng Yu-hsiang” :  

Read in full here.

BARNETT ON EURO-AMERICAN -SINO COMPARATIVE HISTORY

Dr. Barnett had a post that used an WSJ op-ed as a launching pad for some big picture historical analysis:

“Message in a bottle“

In turn, I want to use Tom’s post in much the same manner. Here are a couple of quotes and my kibbutzing:

“But first the Euros need to catch up with history: they are not the first multinational state or economic union. They did not invent the first unified currency. They were not the first continent to experience insane civil war and thereupon reason their way to a Kantian peace of transparency, free markets, free trade and collective security. “

Very true. Tom is pointing to America here but Europe itself experienced much the same process during the late Roman Republic. Roman citizenship was once so tightly guarded that it was denied even to the traditional Italian allies of Rome ( who played a role in the Republican empire of akin to that of the Scots in Britain’s first great expansion during the 18th century – businessmen, colonial soldiers, in rare instances, minor officials) until after the Social Wars and the civil wars of Julius and then Augustus Caesar. After that, one could find Roman citizens who were Gauls, Iberians, Greeks, Germans, Jews, Arabs and peoples more obscure. The empire in many ways proved to be more a meritocratic, ” open system” than did the insular city-state republic beloved by Cato.

China too went through not one but many periods of unification and renewal. Had the Ming dynasty and their Q’ing successors not turned toward resolutely inward, we might be talking today about the legacy of Chinese colonization of the Mideast, Africa and the Pacific rim of the Americas ( disconnection imposes heavy costs).

“America made that journey in the latter half of the 19th century, thanks to our Civil War and the bloody build-out of the American West (actually, most of the blood spilled long earlier). We got to our emergent point (much like China’s today, but along a very different path) around 1890, following a 25-year healing period after the Civil War (China reaches its emergent point around 2000, 25 years of healing after the Cultural Revolution).”

There’s a great number of historical tangents buried in this paragraph. One can draw a comparison between American dollars flowing to China today and the postbellum surge of British and Dutch investment in American railroads and corporations. Or you can look at America as the Not Quite United States from 1787-1865; not unlike China from 1911 – 1989. Or you can compare the administrations of McKinley-Roosevelt with Jiang Zemin-Hu Jintao. Are there modern Chinese intellectual equivalents to the influential role played by Frederick Jackson Turner, Brooks Adams and Alfred T. Mahan ?

“Europe had a far longer healing point, reflecting the depths to which it sank in its massive civil wars of 1914-1945. It’s main problem is that its healing occurred in a very artificial sort of civilizational separateness, which is no longer tenable due to demographics”

Underneath its culture and civilization, Europe remains atavistic. While France has a different and more open tradition because of the French Revolution, many Europeans view their national citizenship primarily in terms of ” blood and soil”. Third generation Arab and North African citizens are still considered to be “immigrants” as are Turkish descended “gast arbeiters” in Germany.

Historically, China has taken a similar ethnocentric view of citizenship ( it is rare though not impossible, for a foreigner not of Chinese ancestry to become a citizen of China); Beijing’s ability to change this and welcome Indians, Americans, Japanese, Koreans and Latins as future “Chinese” will in part, determine China’s future role in world affairs.

THE NIXONIAN CENTURY = CAPITALISM WITH A CHINESE FACE!

President Carter, Fmr. President Nixon and Chinese General-Secretary Deng Xiaoping at a State reception for Deng at the White House.

“Barnett: Nixon and Deng: architects of our globalized world ” by Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett .

As someone who did extensive – verging on the tedious – research in grad school into the heart of darkness called the Nixon administration, I really enjoyed this piece; Tom wraps up some excellent historical analysis in the very limited (in terms of word count) format of a newspaper column. An excerpt:

“Nixon’s reaching out to both the Soviet Union and China in the early 1970s could not have been more surprising, given his pre-presidential history as a vicious anti-communist. But, by doing so, Nixon effectively ended the Cold War by the start of his second, deeply troubled term in 1973.

In disassembling Maoism, Deng chose the latter route, validating both Nixon’s previous strategy and discrediting Gorbachev’s later decision to pursue political glasnost before economic perestroika in the now-defunct Soviet Union.”

The story of Deng Xiapoing’s political career is far less well-known to Americans than is Richard Nixon’s, obscured as it is by partisan feelings stretching all the way back to the Hiss Case. Like Nixon, Deng was highly placed in politics for a half century ( more actually as Deng was a veteran of the Long March) and like Nixon, Deng suffered political disgrace and manuvered his way back to the apex of power. Unlike Nixon, the stakes for Deng were much higher; he could have easily met his death at the fickle hand of Mao as did numerous top leaders of the CCP. In the struggle to succeed Mao, the sinister Gang of Four certainly sought Deng’s death and Hua Goufeng his permanent retirement (or worse) from politics.

Another parallel with Nixon would be Deng’s pragmatic, if brutal, realism which expressed itself both in Deng’s relative indifference to Marxist dogma and a willingness to use force to preserve national “face” ( Nixon would have said ” credibility”). Deng’s punishment campaign against Vietnam in 1979 and his crushing of incipient Chinese democracy in 1989 flowed from the same line of reasoning. Moreover, unlike the Soviet Communist Party leadership where the Red Army was separate and subordinate to the Party, China’s Maoist guerilla legacy meant that for the first two generations of leaders that the Party was the Army and the Army the Party. Deng was a famous military leader and commanded the moral authority within the CCP to act as a “commander-in-chief” figure in a way only a few other aging seniors could match.

Naturally, the parallels are less significant than the differences between the two men. Richard Nixon was a master politician who loved power and had an enemies list but Nixon operated in a democratic system and an open society. Deng did not need to make any lists and his relatively benevolent treatment of fallen party rivals in his later years should not ( as with Nikita Khrushchev’s career under Stalin) be allowed to erase the bloody history of his service to the CCP under Mao ZeDong.

That being said, I believe Dr. Barnett has weighed both men on the scales of history with rough justice; Nixon and Deng had a global impact that was more to the good than to the bad.

THE STRONG MEN OF ASIA

Having spent a great deal of time considering creativity and insight, I’m generally convinced that we benefit cognitively and on an emotive-psychological level from novelty, even if that novelty is to a small degree. Sort of like garnering measurable aerobic benefits from modest daily walking, every little bit helps. You don’t have to go from a microbiology lab one day to spelunking the next in order to give your brain some stimulus.

Therefore, I decided to shift my usual reading attention from matters of Western history and military affairs to read in succession, the biographies of three seminal 20th century dictators, all of whom ruled Asian nations but impacted the history of the world. It is a good shifting of gears for me, as the last heavy fare of reading Asian history and politics was back in the early nineties.

First up, is Chiang Kai-Shek: China’s Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost by Jonathan Fenby, who gives a critical reappraisal. While we are all accustomed to the standard scholarly historical criticism of Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang which is heavily influenced by the politics of academic Marxism, Fenby, a British journalist who is a longtime writer and editor for The Economist magazine and The Observer, (so far as I have read) gives a hard-eyed, pragmatic, thoroughly detailed, flavor that Alan Schom gave to his masterful deconstruction of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Number two will be the critically acclaimed The Unknown Story of Mao by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, which like the Fenby book is an act of idol-smashing. All the moreso since Mao ZeDong, unlike his rival Chiang, retains an aging cadre of Leftist admirers both at home and in the West.

I intend to finish with the highly regarded Ho Chi Minh: A Life by former diplomat and Penn State historian William J. Duiker.Duiker himself, served in the American embassy in Saigon during the Vietnam war, which adds a poignant edge to his historical research.

Anyone out there who has read any or all of these books, feel free to chime in.

GADDIS ON NIXON AND MAO

In a Sunday New York Times book review, eminent diplomatic historian, John Lewis Gaddis examined Nixon and Mao by Margaret MacMillian. Gaddis writes:

“A professor of history at the University of Toronto, soon to move to Oxford as warden of St. Antony’s College, MacMillan in her earlier book defended the peacemakers of 1919 against the charge that they had failed. The outbreak of a new world war two decades later, she argued, resulted not from their mistakes but from those of their successors. She has little need, in “Nixon and Mao,” to defend the peacemakers of 1972, for in the three and a half decades since they met, regrets have been remarkably few. An event that seemed inconceivable before it happened was instantly regarded by almost everyone after it happened as having made perfect sense. Rarely has foresight been so at odds with hindsight.

When Nixon took office in 1969, he inherited a war in Vietnam that was costing the United States far more in lives, money and reputation than is the current war in Iraq. The strategic arms balance had shifted in favor of the Soviet Union, whose leaders had crushed dissent in Czechoslovakia and were promising to do so elsewhere. Meanwhile race riots, antiwar protests and an emerging culture of youthful rebellion were making the United States, in the eyes of its new president, almost ungovernable: the nation, Nixon worried, was on the verge of going “down the drain as a great power.”

Playing the “China card” did not resolve these difficulties, but it did regain the initiative. With this single act, Nixon and Kissinger dazzled their domestic critics, rattled the Soviet Union, impressed allies (despite their exasperation at not having been consulted) and set up an exit strategy for a war that had become unwinnable: the United States might indeed “lose” South Vietnam, but it would “gain” China. Despite its implications for the unfortunate Vietnamese, this was an outcome with which it was hard to argue. “

Read the whole review here.

Yet there are those who would. H-Diplo is running a thread on Nixon and Mao as well as having an upcoming roundtable planned. I intend to put my two cents in as the debate develops.