China [antikvár]

If you asked the informed tourist or Western newspaper reader to describe the People's Republic of Chinatoday in just a few words, his response would probably be something like this: China is a vast and crowded country that has been through a decade or more of very difTicult times, including civil war and serious political chaos. But in the past couple of years it has gone a long way toward putting its problems behind it. China these days is a peaceful, orderly place with a stable, if very authoritarian political leadership that is devoting all its energies to the task of modernising and enriching a backward economy.There is much that is true in this characterisation. Indeed, the image of the average person interested in China these days, may well correspond to the image most Chinese have of their own vast country. China, the Chinese may well feel, faces the decade of the 1980's with its house in far better political order than it has been in at least 15 years. Its top leadership seems stable and, with a few exceptions, united on sensible policies aimed at achieving what the Chinese call "The Four Modernisations," the economic programme with which it plans to accomplish enormous advances in industry, agriculture, military power and science and technology. At the same time, the Beijing government is making efforts to restore an essential element of government that, during the bad times of the recent past, had all but disappeared from China — namely, a degree of predictability, a confidence that what the leaders say is good today will still be considered good tomorrow. At the same time, after several years of a very cooperative, non-irtterventionist, outward looking foreign policy, one with a distinctive bias in favour of good relations with the advanced free market world,China has emerged, in the eyes of the West, as a basically benign and friendly force that constitutes a crucial counter-weight to the menace of the Soviet Union.But while much of this characterisation of China today is certainly true, there is something troubling about its easy simplicity. Indeed, there have been many times in the past, even in certain periods before the Communists took power, when many of the same images of China held sway both in China itself and abroad. And yet, each time, just when it seemed that China was finally about to shed its chronic backwardness and disunity, the country would be plunged into another period of shocking and costly disorder.Moreover, in the latest phase of Chinese history, the image of China as peaceful and moderate, has implanted itself in the foreign mind so quickly that one almost forgets what China was like only a few short years ago. During much of the late 1960's and early 1970's China was not offering up olive branches to the capitalist West; it was preaching in unequivocal terms the glories of the world revolution, withdrawing all but one of its ambassadors from its foreign missions and even burning down the British Embassy in Beijing. Domestically, the entire nation seemed caught up in one of the century's most sanguinary upheavals, the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.It was then that some of today's top leaders were paradedin disgrace before howling mobs of Red Guards and the Communist Party itself and most of the government ministries were under an assault provoked and encouraged by the late party leader Mao Tse-tung. Even more recently than that, when the Cultural Revolution itself faded away, China remained mired in the midst of a relentless power struggle that saw so many abrupt changes, so many Inexplicable twists and turns that analysts in the West could barely keep up with it all. Even today, the Chinese official press admits that the country for several years lived "on the brink of chaos." There is no question that very recently in its history, China was very neariy swept away by disorder and madness.What is the reason for this near schizophrenic Chinese political personality? And which is the real China — the stable, outward looking moderate entity of today or the place of uncontrollable mobs tearing themselves and their country apart as they scream for the proletarian revolution to engulf the world? In fact, both Chinas are the real China, both political personalities have competed with one another for the last hundred years and more as China, the country that practically invented stable political order, has struggled for a way to cope with and prosper in the modern world.Indeed, the principal challenge that has faced China over the past century and a bit more is not very different from that facing China today — namely, to reverse a long period ofdecline and, using modern methods, to rebuild the nation's historic greatness. Similariy, that challenge has produced political turmoil in China not only in recent times but in decades past as well. In the 19th century, for example, there was a sharp division among Chinese leaders between those who wanted to adopt science and technology from the West to help remake the Chinese economy and others, hewing to a very conservative tradition, who wanted to reassert old Chinese values and traditions and saw borrowing from the West as a pernicious threat to China's spiritual superiority.