Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping

Abstract

In Making China Modern, Klaus Mühlhahn provides an institutional explanation of what happened in China during the past 270 years. Mühlhahn seeks to maintain a consistent and systematic account of China's modern history from the fall of imperial China, the Chinese revolutions, and the new People's Republic of China (PRC) and its transformations to the ongoing rise of China on the world stage. For any China specialist, it is a daunting task to cover such an extended period. It is equally challenging to describe each section of this long period with a judicial temperament and to provide an adequate amount of information in each part of the book. It is an intimidating task for historians to cover the recent decades of PRC history because political scientists, sociologists, policy wonks, and journalists have claimed them extensively. On top of the social scientific expertise, historians are unsure whether the current unfolding events are part of future patterns or whether instead something unexpected might overtake such trends and drastically alter the future course of events. Surmounting all of the above difficulties, Mühlhahn has written a relevant and timely book to account for how the rise of China has irreversibly changed the world's perception of China and its past. Today the transformed Chinese landscape and cityscape are there for the world to see. With an extensive network of highspeed rail lines crisscrossing the nation and sprawling megacities across coastal China, few would doubt that China has now made it.China will overtake the United States as the world's largest economy soon. By 2050, Goldman Sachs economists predict, the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries' contributions to the world economy may reach 40 percent, while the broader set of emerging markets will account for 73 percent of the world economy. Goldman Sachs's predictions tell a story of the rise of non-Western economic power. China and Russia in the global North have become the primary threats to US supremacy. The increasing prominence of the non-West on the worldwide stage has gradually found its way into everyday life. So has the surge of the West's petulant reaction to the rise of the non-West. The recent wave of China scaremongering in the United States, as Fareed Zakaria perceptively analyzes in his article in Foreign Affairs, demonstrates that China today remains as misunderstood as ever. China has clearly emerged as the sole great-power competitor of the United States on the world stage, and yet we have no idea how China has become so big, so fast. About three decades ago, foreign policymakers were still speaking of the imminent collapse of the PRC. Two decades ago they were predicting the implosion of China's credit and housing markets. As late as ten years ago, many China specialists still insisted that political change would inevitably follow China's capitalist development. Now we seem to have no choice but to coexist and cope with the growth of the Chinese leviathan. The mainstream narratives of the COVID-19 crisis in China, as Ian Johnson noted in the New York Times, demonstrate a bizarre sense of “what happened in China could not happen here” attitude in the West. Now that the pandemic is everywhere, Euroamerican hostility toward China has taken off and continues to accelerate at an alarming rate. The blame game and conspiracy theories go back and forth between the United States and China. The worst combination of bigotry and fear toward Chinese and Asian Americans in the United States inexorably continues to metastasize as the pandemic rages through the Western world.If cooler heads wish to prevail, they should sit down and read Making China Modern. The main text of this book consists of more than six hundred pages of clear explanation, not sophisticated stories and plots. Mühlhahn has written in lucid prose free of academic jargon and unnecessary detours into literature reviews. This book is, however, not for those impatient politicians who demand the ten-minute gist of a long explanation. It requires scholars, students, journalists, and policymakers to go over these pages by taking notes and to appreciate how Chinese minds and institutions painstakingly evolved and transformed themselves, collectively adapted to the external conditions, and seized opportunities available to them as they moved along with the world. It is clear that Mühlhahn aimed at a wider readership than professional historians and scholars who specialize in China or East Asia. In my judgment, however, Mühlhahn's goal is not to promote the adoption of Making China Modern as a textbook on college campuses, although that could become the case. Instead he aims for a broader public readership, such as policymakers and professional journalists, to be informed by his analysis. Like many European scholars, Mühlhahn is also relatively detached from many of the unhelpful entanglements between the United States and China that have plagued policymakers and China observers based in the United States.Mühlhahn knows he is walking a fine line between a serious piece of historical scholarship and engaged writing in public history. This kind of comprehensive history of China is, however, not entirely without precedents. Compared with similar monographs in the West, including Jonathan Spence's Search for Modern China, Immanuel Hsu's The Rise of Modern China, Jonathan Fengy's The Penguin History of Modern China, or Rana Mitter's A Bitter Revolution, Mühlhahn's book stands out in the following three ways.First, Mühlhahn's explanation is compelling because it accounts for the rise of China by focusing on the continuity and discontinuity of China's institutional logic over an extensive period, mostly about the planned and market economy; political, social, and cultural policy; and legal and military change. China's path into the modern world appears to be filled with radical ruptures and reversals, such as revolutions and monarchical restoration. It went through two world wars, and it surprised the world by going head-to-head with the technologically superior US army on the Korean peninsula. It seems to have no compunction in negating many of its hoary traditions. It has been searching for wisdom from the outside world, at least periodically. During the Cold War, China invited an enormous number of Soviet advisers to staff almost every level of their governmental offices. After China turned to capitalism in 1978, it continued to learn from the Euroamerican system to reform its tax system and property leasing and create a market system relatively shielded by the political protection of the CCP to ensure the stability of the domestic market and accumulation of capital.China's road to capitalism has been reasonably smooth. Unlike most Latin American countries, which have suffered from the fickle and abrupt flows of American capital at the cost of losing the stability of their domestic markets, China seems to have weathered these wild storms quite well in recent decades. The underlying reason for China's security and institutional resilience is historical. Mühlhahn argues that Western intervention was the essence of China's acute crisis in the nineteenth century. Its early modern imperial state not only survived the crisis but also maintained its territorial integrity and emerged out of the Japanese occupation as one unified state. The ensuing civil war drove the nationalist power to establish a client state in Taiwan, protected by the US navy. With the American protection of Taiwan in mind, the PRC struggled to rebuild itself largely isolated from the world, in an environmentally devastated land. Mao's vision turned out to be utopian, and his developmental strategies too radical. The socialist transformation of China was, however, positive from an institutional perspective. Focusing on institutions has two substantial advantages. During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, China became the spiritual leader of the newly formed “Third World.” Many of the state-controlled industries survived and, at times, thrived after 1978. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) has continued to grow and succeed from 1950 to the present. More important, the PRC has retained its institutional memory of Western imperialism to the present day. It is China's institutional resiliency that ensures that no foreign intervention would succeed in China, and the transition from planned to market economy has proceeded as independently as possible. The collapse of the Soviet model, and many Eastern European countries along with it, also served as a warning for China.Second, China's constant remaking and expansion of its state apparatus had to do with exigent circumstances that have always been largely outside of China's control. Mühlhahn describes how China responded, followed, or resonated with what happened elsewhere in the world. Chinese history in the past three hundred years has always shown a connection to global politics and the environmental conditions of the planet. At times China has seized and taken advantage of opportunities to its benefit. But most times China had been merely trying to cope. These exigent circumstances generally fall into two categories: international politics and environmental conditions, both of which can hardly be under the control of any Chinese institutions. Mühlhahn never falls into the conventional American trope of attributing ecological disasters to the failure of the PRC policy during the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution. The precise distinction between institutional resilience and exigent circumstance, however, does not imply that Mühlhahn is blindly uncritical of the PRC policies. Quite the contrary: for instance he evaluates China's one-child policy and concludes that it is the worst policy in China's modern history on two solid grounds. First, the PRC attempted to flatten the demographic curve that probably would have come down anyway without any significant state intervention. Second, and more important, the human suffering resulting from the one-child policy was incalculable.Mühlhahn's analysis avoids the circular links of social and cultural causes from both international and domestic institutions. His reconceptualization of institutions as explicit and implicit rules of operation dissolves the issues of the mutual determination between society and culture. It also allows him to explain how institutional agency worked its way through difficult times and mutated into something entirely different. Although Mühlhahn's scope of analysis includes culture, society, economy, politics, military power, and the environment, he has woven these threads reasonably well by following his timeline (1644 to 2017) at the very beginning of his book. I reread the historical timeline after I finished reading the entire book, and I think the book is well periodized, balanced, and coherent throughout. I do not feel Mühlhahn's six-hundred-page book is lumpy or lopsided in any way. I am quite impressed by the organization and production of the book, and I will surely keep it on my desk for a long time to come. Moreover, I also have an ebook version provided by my library, which allows me to conduct a full-text search of the book. Given its length as well as its breadth of coverage, the ebook version will be quite handy for looking something up quickly.Third, Mühlhahn's explanation comes from his careful reading of well-received scholarship on China. As a China specialist myself, I cannot help but flip to the end of the book and read the footnotes as I proceed. As I went back and forth between the main text and references, I gradually and surely developed an admiration for Mühlhahn's erudition not only in China but also in what we call global history. Moreover, as most China scholars have experienced, following the references of a comprehensive book like this one is like going down a rabbit hole. I have had strange, problematic, complicated feelings and sometimes pleasant surprises in tracing references of the book. To address my feelings while tracing the references of Mühlhahn's book, I must first acknowledge, as I have stated in the previous paragraphs, that Mühlhahn wrote an original, synthetic, comprehensive, and even a somewhat less than impartial new book on China. It would not be fair to pick a bone with him on evidentiary grounds here, and those disputes belong to the scholarship cited in Mühlhahn's extensive bibliography. All in all, the historical patterns and explanations presented in Mühlhahn's book are both convincing, accurate, and, more important, up to date.Mühlhahn is critically aware of the timeliness of his new book. And he must have worked at breakneck speed to bring it out to the public. In the acknowledgment at the end of the book, he writes: “We live in a time of unsettling and violent global dislodgment, similar to the ones that accompanied Europe's transition to modernity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the same time, the authority, attractiveness, and credibility of what used to be called the West have declined” (695). Here comes Mühlhahn's sense of directionlessness in our time. Is he exploring something like the “China Model,” advocated by Daniel A. Bell as an alternative to the decline of the West? Mühlhahn's answer, as he provides at the end of the book, is a resounding no. His prescription is for all of us in the West to understand China and its past. For him there are no better alternatives than collaborating with China for the future of humanity and our planet.