- Email: [email protected]
Chinese Revolutions: Twentieth Century
Chinese Reolutions: Twentieth Century accession of China to the World Trade Organization would impose on China international obligations to increase the transparency of government and the reach of legal institutions. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and other agreements that are implemented by the WTO require all member nations to adopt and implement their laws relating to trade in a manner consistent with the rule of law as it is understood in the West, and China will have to adjust its legal institutions to comply with WTO standards. The deepening of legal reform most depends, however, on political reform. Legal institutions will be hobbled by political constraints as long as any Chinese leadership, Communist or post-Communist, maintains an instrumental view of law, remains ambivalent about the rule of law, and inhibits the growth of an active civil society. For law to grow more meaningful, leadership policy and official ideology must enlarge the domain of the law, end or greatly dilute one-party domination, and remedy institutional weaknesses in the structure of the Chinese state. Even the strongest political commitment will require considerable time to implement further reform, overcome the serious limits on state capacity that make the governance of China difficult under any circumstances, and inspire popular confidence in institutions. The processes of institutional change that have begun can only work slowly at best. See also: China: Sociocultural Aspects; East Asian Studies: Economics; East Asian Studies: Politics; East Asian Studies: Society; Globalization: Legal Aspects; Law and Society: Sociolegal Studies; Law as an Instrument of Social Change; Legal Culture and Legal Consciousness; Mediation, Arbitration, and Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR)
Lawyers Committee for Human Rights 1998a Wrongs and Rights: A Human Rights Analysis of China’s Reised Criminal Law. Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, New York Lawyers Committee for Human Rights 1998b Lawyers in China: Obstacles to Independence and the Defense of Rights. Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, New York Lubman S (ed.) 1997 China’s Legal Reforms. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK Lubman S 1999 Bird in a Cage: Legal Reform in China After Mao. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA Turner K G, Feinerman J V, Guy R K (eds.) 2000 The Limits of the Rule of Law in China. University of Washington, Seattle, DC Van der Sprenkel S 1962 Legal Institutions in Manchu China: A Sociological Analysis. Athlone, London Xia Y (ed.) 1995 Zouxiang quanli de shidai: Zhongguo gongmin quanli fazhan yanjiu [Toward a Time of Rights: A Perspectie of the Ciil Rights Deelopment in China]. China University of Politics and Law Press, Beijing, People’s Republic of China
S. B. Lubman
Chinese Revolutions: Twentieth Century In the 1800s, a leading Sinologist claimed the Chinese were the ‘most rebellious’ but ‘least revolutionary’ of peoples and Karl Marx, along with other Western social theorists, argued that peasants would never be the driving force in radical movements for change. The twentieth century would prove both the Sinologist and the theorists wrong—many times over. Nearly every decade of it saw a revolutionary event of one kind or another break out in China. In many of these, peasants played central roles.
Bibliography
1. Key Eents
Bodde D, Morris C 1967 Law in Imperial China. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Chen J 1999 Chinese Law: Toward an Understanding of Chinese Law, Its Nature and Deelopment. Kluwer Law International, The Hague, The Netherlands Corne P H 1996 Foreign Inestment in China: The Administratie Legal System. Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong He W 1995 Tongguo sifa shixian shehui zhengyi: dui zhongguo faguan xianzhuang de yige toushi [The realization of social justice through judicature: a look at the current situation of Chinese judges]. In: Xia Y (ed.) Zou xiang quanli de shidai: Zhongguo gongmin quanli fazhan yanjiu [Toward a Time of Rights: A Perspectie of the Ciil Rights Deelopment in China]. China University of Politics and Law Press, Beijing, People’s Republic of China, pp. 209–84 Huang P C 1996 Ciil Justice in China: Representation and Practice in the Qing. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA Keller P 1994 Sources of order in Chinese law. American Journal of Comparatie Law 42: 711–59 Lawyers Committee for Human Rights 1996 Opening to Reform?: An Analysis of China’s Reised Criminal Procedure Law. Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, New York
The first quarter of the twentieth century witnessed a series of inter-related insurrections that toppled the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911). Known collectively as the 1911 Revolution, these paved the way for the establishment of the Republic of China (ROC) on January 1, 1912, which was also when a revolutionary activist, Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), was inaugurated as this new country’s first President. A path breaking student-led mass struggle also took place in the century’s first quarter. This was the May 4th Movement of 1919, which ended with the dismissal from office of three high-ranking officials. In addition, two revolutionary organizations were formed in this period: the Nationalist Party or Guomingdang (GMD), which was led initially by Sun and then after his death by Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975); and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997). The second quarter of the century began with the GMD and CCP working together in a United Front 1743
Chinese Reolutions: Twentieth Century (1924–1927) orchestrated by Sun and his Soviet advisor Borodin. The alliance’s goal was to defeat warlordism and imperialism and thus get the Geming (a Chinese term for revolution whose shades of meaning are returned to below) back on track. In 1927, however, Chiang turned on his erstwhile allies, who had just helped him reunify the country through the military campaigns and mass movements known as the Northern Expedition. He launched a White Terror against members of the CCP and left-wing rivals within the GMD. Seven years later, after persistent GMD extermination campaigns, the CCP set out on its epic Long March (1934–1935) to safety in isolated northern base areas. The two organizations, each tightly disciplined and Leninist in structure, allied again from 1937 to 1945 in a Second United Front against Japan. The 1925–1950 period concluded, however, with a Civil War (1945–1949). This ended with the GMD’s retreat to Taiwan and Mao’s proclamation, on October 1, 1949, of the establishment of a new People’s Republic of China (PRC)—something that this son of a relatively well-to-do farmer was only able to do because his party had won so much peasant support. The CCP then launched a series of radical initiatives, including a partially successful effort to gain adherence to a new Marriage Law (1950) that gave women equal rights in family matters and strove to minimize the power of patriarchal kin-groups. The century’s third quarter began with Mao taking the lead in further campaigns, some of which caused enormous misery. The most notorious included the ‘Anti-Rightist Campaign’ (a Red Terror directed largely against intellectuals) and the ‘Great Leap Forward’ (a bizarre experiment in irrational utopianism that contributed to a famine of horrendous proportions). Later in this quarter-century, Mao, angered by his post-Great Leap marginalization within the CCP hierarchy, rallied young loyalists (Red Guards) to challenge the Party bureaucracy. Thus began the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Mao’s charge, soon echoed by the Gang of Four (a clique that included Jiang Qing, his wife), was that high officials had lost their revolutionary zeal and become corrupt. The Cultural Revolution spiraled into a chaotic war of all against all that continued into the first year of the century’s final quarter. This period also witnessed the abortive revolution of 1989, during which giant demonstrations took place in Beijing and other cities. In the ROC (as Taiwan was re-baptized in 1949), a major breakthrough came with the lifting of a decades old policy of martial law. This laid the groundwork for an East Asian variation of the ‘Velvet Revolutions’ of Central Europe: the nonviolent transfer of power from the GMD to an opposition party early in the year 2000. By the time the 1900s ended, so many aspects of Chinese politics and society had been transformed or challenged by insurgents that it now seems strange that 1744
the first edition of this Encyclopedia included an entry on ‘The Chinese Problem’ but not ‘The Chinese Revolution.’ The rise of the CCP and the Cultural Revolution still lay in the future, but there were clear signs that the twentieth century would be a revolutionary one for China. One indication of just how revolutionary is that, by the 1990s, many Chinese were living lives that would have been unrecognizable to their great-grandparents or even their parents. Moreover, the words ‘China’ and ‘revolution’ were by then inextricably linked in the minds of many people. This linkage was particularly strong in the PRC where the term Geming continues to have a sacred patriotic meaning. This is of strategic significance to the CCP, which is still struggling, as this entry is being written, to ride out an ongoing legitimacy crisis. The regime continues to find it useful to play the revolutionary legacy card periodically. It did so, for example, in 1999 when American bombs mistakenly killed three Chinese journalists in Belgrade. The victims were quickly dubbed ‘revolutionary martyrs’ and the official media linked these new deaths to those of patriotic participants in hallowed historic events of the 1910s–1950s. In addition, even though Westerners often view the words ‘reform’ and ‘revolution’ as contrastive, in China gaige (reform) is often presented as a method for carrying forward the Geming. The policy of opening the PRC to international trade and moving away from a command economy that Deng and his successors have followed since 1979 is typically presented in English language works as a pragmatic ‘Reform Program’ and a step away from state socialism. Its PRC proponents, however, describe it as an effort to ‘build socialism with Chinese characteristics’ and an effort to keep the Revolution from ossifying. It is not just in the PRC that the words ‘China’ and ‘revolution’ go together naturally. Most of the few Chinese names and faces recognized by foreigners are those of insurgents—from Mao to the anonymous ‘man-who-stopped-the-tanks’ in 1989. And many ROC residents grew up learning history from schoolbooks that treated the story of the 1900s as an unending revolutionary struggle, which encountered a terrible setback in 1949 but did not die.
2. Categories and Definitions This brings us to a question too rarely addressed: did China experience one Revolution or several? Many official PRC histories (as well as some Marxist ones in other languages and standard GMD accounts) refer to a single ongoing Revolution with many stages. Western social theorists (such as Theda Skocpol) and comparative historians (such as Crane Brinton) sometimes prefer to think of a single great event that began in 1911 and ended in 1949. They then fit this almost 40year long event into a Great Social Revolution model
Chinese Reolutions: Twentieth Century that is also used to interpret more compact phenomena such as the French upheavals of 1789–1799. Many non-Marxist Sinologists, meanwhile, speak of three relatively discrete revolutions: a Republican one in 1911, a National one in the 1920s, and a Communist one.
2.1 The Term ‘Geming’ Complicating these questions is the term Geming, the meaning of which at times overlaps with, at others diverges from its Western equivalents. Geming literally means ‘stripping the mandate,’ that is, the successful carrying out of an upheaval that demonstrates, through its ability to overturn a ruling house and establish a new dynasty, that heaven now sides with a new regime. It was only from the 1890s on, in part because of new senses the characters had acquired in Japan, that Geming began to be linked to the creation of a new political system, not just completion of a dynastic cycle. Geming’s original linkage to dynastic cycles makes it curiously like its English and French counterparts, in which visions of return and of forward movement alike can be found. In 1789, the Janusfaced aspect of revolution was signaled by the use of classical goddesses to portray new political virtues. In the 1910s, it was signaled by anti-Qing leaders alternating between presenting themselves as avenging the legacy of the Ming (1368–1644), the ethnically Chinese ruling group the Manchus had displaced, and as struggling to create a new system. If there are overlaps between the terms ‘revolution’ and Geming, however, there is also a difference: it is never clear whether the sense of the Chinese word is singular or plural, lower or upper case, whether a text is referring to The Revolution or one of many. This is more than merely a linguistic issue: to compare events, we need to know when they began and ended. With France, for example, there is a consensus that the revolution began in 1789 and lasted about a decade, though other supplemental revolutions occurred later (1830, 1848, and 1871). With China, there are more options, including the three alluded to above.
structural terms, the Chinese one took so much longer to play out. Brinton’s ‘anatomy of revolution’ model becomes problematic because ‘terrors’ occurred at different points in the Chinese Geming. In other revolutions, he claims, this ‘fever’ hit the patient just once, then broke. A tripartite schema, finally, leaves too little room for radical developments that do not move in lockstep with the rise of governments. 1911, the late 1920s, and 1949 were key turning points in the political story but not necessarily the social and cultural ones.
3. Oerlapping Reolutions A more satisfying approach divides China’s recent past, for heuristic purposes, into four overlapping revolutions, each following its own timetable: one political, one cultural\intellectual, one diplomatic, and one socioeconomic. Let us consider each briefly.
3.1 Politics The political revolution has the clearest starting date: October 10, 1911. GMD official historians present the events that followed the Wuchang Uprising of that day (really a military mutiny) as adhering to a master plan crafted by Sun Yat-sen and carried out by members of his Revolutionary Alliance, the organization that evolved into the Nationalist Party. But many participants had no contact with the Alliance and knew little of Sun or his ideas. Only some were committed to republican ideals. Others were motivated by distrust of the Qing ‘barbarians,’ anger at particular officials, or a desire to be on the winning side of a Mandate shift. Still, the 1911 Revolution extinguished not just a dynasty but a system, hence it deserves to be thought of as politically revolutionary. The National Assembly and other republican institutions quickly proved ineffectual. But the complete failure of attempts by Yuan and later another warlord to found new dynasties demonstrated that the rules of political life had changed.
2.2 Problems with Standard Categorization Schemes There are, however, limitations to each. The continuous Revolution vision focuses too tightly on the achievements of a particular organization. It distorts the shape of twentieth-century history by downplaying struggles not guided by the particular Leninist party— the CCP or GMD—being celebrated. The 1911–1949 vision is problematic for use in comparison—even though comparativists champion it. Skocpol, for example, does not explain why, if the ‘Great Social Revolutions’ are essentially alike in
3.2 Cultural and Intellectual Change Attempts by Chinese revolutionaries to transform traditional belief structures and patterns of behavior began after the Opium War (1839–1842). The military defeat suffered then by China led some within the dominant scholar-official class to begin questioning longstanding assumptions about the inferiority of foreign cultures. The first generations of intellectuals to rethink these issues, while interested in specific things the West had to offer ( yong or techniques), 1745
Chinese Reolutions: Twentieth Century were seldom revolutionary in their approach to questions of fundamentals (ti or essences). Their belief in the superiority of traditional moral codes remained unshaken; they merely sought efficacious ways to combine Confucian ti with Western gunboats and other sorts of foreign yong. The ti\yong distinction remained at the heart of the debate for decades, until the iconoclastic New Culture Movement (1915–1923) led by intellectuals who had gone abroad, usually to Japan, or been exposed to foreign ideas at one of China’s recently formed Western-style schools. They disagreed about many things but shared three convictions. China’s weakness was due to the enduring power of entrenched ‘Confucian’ and ‘feudal’ beliefs (such as the veneration of age) and practices (such as arranged marriages). Chinese should welcome the best the West had to offer: ideas and methods of inquiry included. And intellectuals needed to educate and mobilize others. Much New Culture Movement energy was directed toward the publication of new periodicals, which were filled with articles on Social Darwinism, Pragmatism, Anarchism, Marxism, and other imported ideologies. These periodicals also attempted to serve another purpose: their articles, written in a ‘plain speech’ as opposed to a ‘classical’ style, were supposed to inform and inspire the masses. This literary move to break down the barriers between intellectuals and non-intellectuals was reinforced by public speaking campaigns on issues ranging from medicine to international affairs. An important new turn came with the May 4th Movement, when student activists with ties to the New Culture Movement actively appealed to members of other classes to join them in protesting terms of the Treaty of Versailles that transferred control of former German territories in China to Japan. After sympathy strikes by workers and merchants, the students achieved their main domestic goals: the dismissal of three corrupt officials and the release of all those arrested for protesting. But their inability to stop the Treaty of Versailles from taking effect illustrated the need for a diplomatic revolution.
3.3 Diplomatic Change No diplomatic revolution could take place until the rise of a strong central regime committed to overturning the unequal treaties forced upon the Qing by foreign powers. The Northern Expedition brought this about. After reunifying the nation, however, Chiang claimed that the spread of communism was more dangerous than the continuation of imperialism. Unlike some of his warlord predecessors, Chiang was an outspoken critic of the unequal treaties, but he insisted that China could only regain its place in the world once its house was in order. 1746
World War II precipitated a sea change, as China’s position as one of the Allies gave its leader new leverage in pushing for an end to unequal relations with the West. And, in 1943, the Allies renounced all claims to special privileges within Shanghai and other ‘treaty-port’ cities. This decision and Japan’s withdrawal in 1945 made China freer of foreign influence than it had been for a century. CCP historians argue, however, that the diplomatic revolution was still not complete—and they have a point. The GMD regime remained economically and diplomatically dependent on the USA. If credit for starting the diplomatic revolution rightly goes to Chiang, it remains true that China did not fully regain its status as an independent country until after 1949.
3.4 Socioeconomic Change The socioeconomic revolution also began long before the Communists came to power. Most notably, the late Qing and Republican (1912–1949) eras saw dramatic shifts in the types of people in control of the government and witnessed the rise within the social hierarchy of merchants. But the development of new alignments near the top, though important, did not have much effect upon the lives of the vast majority of Chinese who continued to reside in villages and work small plots of land. For them, a socioeconomic revolution did not take place until the CCP’s land reform campaigns. This socioeconomic revolution (like the others) did not hit all parts of the country at the same time but rather played itself out according to regionally distinctive timetables. By the early 1950s, however, it had affected most of China’s villages.
3.5 Unfinished Reolutions If China’s twentieth century is envisioned as a time of multiple revolutions, we need to keep in mind that most were incomplete—and that struggles for change in other spheres were pursued sporadically but never fully carried through. One important unfinished Geming, linked to but not quite the same as any of those just described, was the revolution for women. Aspects of sexual politics changed throughout the 1900s, but the dream of complete equality promoted by revolutionaries in various decades never became a reality. Much the same can be said for the democratic revolution: calls for democratization were heard often but oligarchy and one-party authoritarianism tended to prevail. Ironically, though China’s twentieth century was filled with transformations, its final two decades were strikingly similar to its first three. In Taiwan, moves to institute a system of free elections recall experiments made around 1911. On the mainland, there were May
Christian Liturgy 4th era parallels for the calls in 1989 for an end to corruption. And in the automatic weapon fire that accompanied the massacres, there were echoes of killings of the 1920s that were justified as necessary efforts to maintain order and\or protect the Geming.
4. Lessons From the Chinese Case China’s twentieth-century experience suggests the need for social scientists to pay more attention in the future to a few factors. One, already mentioned, is the revolutionary potential of villagers. Another is scale. Revolutions have often been treated as purely ‘national’ events. Recent work on China shows that local dynamics are often crucial—even in upheavals driven by nationalism. So, too, are transnational flows of people (key participants in 1911 were overseas Chinese) and ideas. This suggests that, in future, models used for comparing revolutions will need to make more room not just for revolutions of widely varying lengths but also revolutions that were influenced by local, national, and transnational impulses and actors. However, China’s recent history reinforces some important insights in the comparative and theoretical literature on revolutions. It shows that Alexis de Tocqueville was right to insist that nothing does more to inspire revolutionary activism than an inefficient authoritarian regime’s introduction of a reform program that offers too little and comes too late. The 1911 Revolution (which was preceded by unsuccessful Qing reforms) and even, in a way, the mainland’s abortive revolution of 1989 and the recent fall of the GMD in Taiwan illustrate the power of Tocqueville’s insight. These cases also illustrates the value of stressing, as Marx and Skocpol among others have, the revolutionary potential of groups at the fringe of the governing elite who have rising expectations and are frustrated by being kept away from real power. In addition, Chinese events of the third quarter of the twentieth century in particular underscore the validity of the claim made by both Tocqueville and Skocpol, again among others, that revolutions, while attempting to do other things, often end up strengthening the power of central governments. Finally, the Chinese case shows just how much truth there is in the tragic maxim that revolutions all too frequently and all too regrettably end up devouring their own children. See also: China: Sociocultural Aspects; Communism; Communist Parties; East Asian Studies: Economics; East Asian Studies: Politics; East Asian Studies: Society; Maoism; Revolutions, Sociology of; Revolutions, Theories of
Bibliography Berge' re M C 1998 [English translation by Lloyd J] Sun Yat-sen. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA
Bianco L 1971 [English translation by Bell M] Origins of the Chinese Reolution, 1915–1949. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA Brinton C 1965 Anatomy of Reolution. Vintage, New York Dirlik A 1989 The Origins of Chinese Communism. Oxford University Press, New York Duara P 1988 Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA Fairbank J K, Goldman M 1998 China: A New History, enlarged edn. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Fitzgerald J 1996 Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Reolution. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA Friedman E, Pickowicz P G, Selden M 1991 Chinese Village, Socialist State. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT Goldstone J A (ed.) 1994 Reolutions: Theoretical, Comparatie, and Historical Studies, 2nd edn. Harcourt, Fort Worth, CA Hartford K, Goldstein S (eds.) 1987 Single Sparks: China’s Rural Reolutions. Sharpe, Armonk, New York Ono K 1989 [English translation by Fogel J (ed.)] Chinese Women in a Century of Reolution, 1850–1950. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA Perry E J, Selden M (eds.) 2000 Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance. Routledge, London Skocpol T 1979 States and Social Reolutions. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Spence J D 1982 The Gate of Heaenly Peace. Penguin Books, New York Tang T 2000 Interpreting the Revolution in China: Macrohistory and micromechanisms. Modern China 26(2): 205–38 Wakeman F Jr. 1975 The Fall of Imperial China. Free Press, New York Wang Z 1999 Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA Wong R B 1997 China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of the European Experience. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY Wright M C (eds.) 1968 China in Reolution: The First Phase, 1900–1913. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT Yue D, Wakeman C 1985 To The Storm: The Odyssey of a Chinese Reolutionary Woman. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA
J. N. Wasserstrom Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Christian Liturgy The Greek word leitourgos means, literally, ‘work of the people’ and was associated in ancient Greece both with the payment of civic dues and the performance of ritual duties. In the Christian context, by contrast, it had at first a more specific connotation, concerning the performance of the Eucharistic action—although this apparent narrowing of reference in fact indicated that this action was itself the supreme collective obligation and source of collective unity. Only much later did the term come to denote the entirety of Christian ritual practice. At first, in the seventeenth century, it was used as a neutral term, covering both the Catholic ‘Mass’ and Protestant ‘Communion’; 1747
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
ISBN: 0-08-043076-7
Lawyers Committee for Human Rights 1998a Wrongs and Rights: A Human Rights Analysis of China’s Reised Criminal Law. Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, New York Lawyers Committee for Human Rights 1998b Lawyers in China: Obstacles to Independence and the Defense of Rights. Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, New York Lubman S (ed.) 1997 China’s Legal Reforms. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK Lubman S 1999 Bird in a Cage: Legal Reform in China After Mao. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA Turner K G, Feinerman J V, Guy R K (eds.) 2000 The Limits of the Rule of Law in China. University of Washington, Seattle, DC Van der Sprenkel S 1962 Legal Institutions in Manchu China: A Sociological Analysis. Athlone, London Xia Y (ed.) 1995 Zouxiang quanli de shidai: Zhongguo gongmin quanli fazhan yanjiu [Toward a Time of Rights: A Perspectie of the Ciil Rights Deelopment in China]. China University of Politics and Law Press, Beijing, People’s Republic of China
S. B. Lubman
Chinese Revolutions: Twentieth Century In the 1800s, a leading Sinologist claimed the Chinese were the ‘most rebellious’ but ‘least revolutionary’ of peoples and Karl Marx, along with other Western social theorists, argued that peasants would never be the driving force in radical movements for change. The twentieth century would prove both the Sinologist and the theorists wrong—many times over. Nearly every decade of it saw a revolutionary event of one kind or another break out in China. In many of these, peasants played central roles.
Bibliography
1. Key Eents
Bodde D, Morris C 1967 Law in Imperial China. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Chen J 1999 Chinese Law: Toward an Understanding of Chinese Law, Its Nature and Deelopment. Kluwer Law International, The Hague, The Netherlands Corne P H 1996 Foreign Inestment in China: The Administratie Legal System. Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong He W 1995 Tongguo sifa shixian shehui zhengyi: dui zhongguo faguan xianzhuang de yige toushi [The realization of social justice through judicature: a look at the current situation of Chinese judges]. In: Xia Y (ed.) Zou xiang quanli de shidai: Zhongguo gongmin quanli fazhan yanjiu [Toward a Time of Rights: A Perspectie of the Ciil Rights Deelopment in China]. China University of Politics and Law Press, Beijing, People’s Republic of China, pp. 209–84 Huang P C 1996 Ciil Justice in China: Representation and Practice in the Qing. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA Keller P 1994 Sources of order in Chinese law. American Journal of Comparatie Law 42: 711–59 Lawyers Committee for Human Rights 1996 Opening to Reform?: An Analysis of China’s Reised Criminal Procedure Law. Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, New York
The first quarter of the twentieth century witnessed a series of inter-related insurrections that toppled the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911). Known collectively as the 1911 Revolution, these paved the way for the establishment of the Republic of China (ROC) on January 1, 1912, which was also when a revolutionary activist, Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), was inaugurated as this new country’s first President. A path breaking student-led mass struggle also took place in the century’s first quarter. This was the May 4th Movement of 1919, which ended with the dismissal from office of three high-ranking officials. In addition, two revolutionary organizations were formed in this period: the Nationalist Party or Guomingdang (GMD), which was led initially by Sun and then after his death by Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975); and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997). The second quarter of the century began with the GMD and CCP working together in a United Front 1743
Chinese Reolutions: Twentieth Century (1924–1927) orchestrated by Sun and his Soviet advisor Borodin. The alliance’s goal was to defeat warlordism and imperialism and thus get the Geming (a Chinese term for revolution whose shades of meaning are returned to below) back on track. In 1927, however, Chiang turned on his erstwhile allies, who had just helped him reunify the country through the military campaigns and mass movements known as the Northern Expedition. He launched a White Terror against members of the CCP and left-wing rivals within the GMD. Seven years later, after persistent GMD extermination campaigns, the CCP set out on its epic Long March (1934–1935) to safety in isolated northern base areas. The two organizations, each tightly disciplined and Leninist in structure, allied again from 1937 to 1945 in a Second United Front against Japan. The 1925–1950 period concluded, however, with a Civil War (1945–1949). This ended with the GMD’s retreat to Taiwan and Mao’s proclamation, on October 1, 1949, of the establishment of a new People’s Republic of China (PRC)—something that this son of a relatively well-to-do farmer was only able to do because his party had won so much peasant support. The CCP then launched a series of radical initiatives, including a partially successful effort to gain adherence to a new Marriage Law (1950) that gave women equal rights in family matters and strove to minimize the power of patriarchal kin-groups. The century’s third quarter began with Mao taking the lead in further campaigns, some of which caused enormous misery. The most notorious included the ‘Anti-Rightist Campaign’ (a Red Terror directed largely against intellectuals) and the ‘Great Leap Forward’ (a bizarre experiment in irrational utopianism that contributed to a famine of horrendous proportions). Later in this quarter-century, Mao, angered by his post-Great Leap marginalization within the CCP hierarchy, rallied young loyalists (Red Guards) to challenge the Party bureaucracy. Thus began the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Mao’s charge, soon echoed by the Gang of Four (a clique that included Jiang Qing, his wife), was that high officials had lost their revolutionary zeal and become corrupt. The Cultural Revolution spiraled into a chaotic war of all against all that continued into the first year of the century’s final quarter. This period also witnessed the abortive revolution of 1989, during which giant demonstrations took place in Beijing and other cities. In the ROC (as Taiwan was re-baptized in 1949), a major breakthrough came with the lifting of a decades old policy of martial law. This laid the groundwork for an East Asian variation of the ‘Velvet Revolutions’ of Central Europe: the nonviolent transfer of power from the GMD to an opposition party early in the year 2000. By the time the 1900s ended, so many aspects of Chinese politics and society had been transformed or challenged by insurgents that it now seems strange that 1744
the first edition of this Encyclopedia included an entry on ‘The Chinese Problem’ but not ‘The Chinese Revolution.’ The rise of the CCP and the Cultural Revolution still lay in the future, but there were clear signs that the twentieth century would be a revolutionary one for China. One indication of just how revolutionary is that, by the 1990s, many Chinese were living lives that would have been unrecognizable to their great-grandparents or even their parents. Moreover, the words ‘China’ and ‘revolution’ were by then inextricably linked in the minds of many people. This linkage was particularly strong in the PRC where the term Geming continues to have a sacred patriotic meaning. This is of strategic significance to the CCP, which is still struggling, as this entry is being written, to ride out an ongoing legitimacy crisis. The regime continues to find it useful to play the revolutionary legacy card periodically. It did so, for example, in 1999 when American bombs mistakenly killed three Chinese journalists in Belgrade. The victims were quickly dubbed ‘revolutionary martyrs’ and the official media linked these new deaths to those of patriotic participants in hallowed historic events of the 1910s–1950s. In addition, even though Westerners often view the words ‘reform’ and ‘revolution’ as contrastive, in China gaige (reform) is often presented as a method for carrying forward the Geming. The policy of opening the PRC to international trade and moving away from a command economy that Deng and his successors have followed since 1979 is typically presented in English language works as a pragmatic ‘Reform Program’ and a step away from state socialism. Its PRC proponents, however, describe it as an effort to ‘build socialism with Chinese characteristics’ and an effort to keep the Revolution from ossifying. It is not just in the PRC that the words ‘China’ and ‘revolution’ go together naturally. Most of the few Chinese names and faces recognized by foreigners are those of insurgents—from Mao to the anonymous ‘man-who-stopped-the-tanks’ in 1989. And many ROC residents grew up learning history from schoolbooks that treated the story of the 1900s as an unending revolutionary struggle, which encountered a terrible setback in 1949 but did not die.
2. Categories and Definitions This brings us to a question too rarely addressed: did China experience one Revolution or several? Many official PRC histories (as well as some Marxist ones in other languages and standard GMD accounts) refer to a single ongoing Revolution with many stages. Western social theorists (such as Theda Skocpol) and comparative historians (such as Crane Brinton) sometimes prefer to think of a single great event that began in 1911 and ended in 1949. They then fit this almost 40year long event into a Great Social Revolution model
Chinese Reolutions: Twentieth Century that is also used to interpret more compact phenomena such as the French upheavals of 1789–1799. Many non-Marxist Sinologists, meanwhile, speak of three relatively discrete revolutions: a Republican one in 1911, a National one in the 1920s, and a Communist one.
2.1 The Term ‘Geming’ Complicating these questions is the term Geming, the meaning of which at times overlaps with, at others diverges from its Western equivalents. Geming literally means ‘stripping the mandate,’ that is, the successful carrying out of an upheaval that demonstrates, through its ability to overturn a ruling house and establish a new dynasty, that heaven now sides with a new regime. It was only from the 1890s on, in part because of new senses the characters had acquired in Japan, that Geming began to be linked to the creation of a new political system, not just completion of a dynastic cycle. Geming’s original linkage to dynastic cycles makes it curiously like its English and French counterparts, in which visions of return and of forward movement alike can be found. In 1789, the Janusfaced aspect of revolution was signaled by the use of classical goddesses to portray new political virtues. In the 1910s, it was signaled by anti-Qing leaders alternating between presenting themselves as avenging the legacy of the Ming (1368–1644), the ethnically Chinese ruling group the Manchus had displaced, and as struggling to create a new system. If there are overlaps between the terms ‘revolution’ and Geming, however, there is also a difference: it is never clear whether the sense of the Chinese word is singular or plural, lower or upper case, whether a text is referring to The Revolution or one of many. This is more than merely a linguistic issue: to compare events, we need to know when they began and ended. With France, for example, there is a consensus that the revolution began in 1789 and lasted about a decade, though other supplemental revolutions occurred later (1830, 1848, and 1871). With China, there are more options, including the three alluded to above.
structural terms, the Chinese one took so much longer to play out. Brinton’s ‘anatomy of revolution’ model becomes problematic because ‘terrors’ occurred at different points in the Chinese Geming. In other revolutions, he claims, this ‘fever’ hit the patient just once, then broke. A tripartite schema, finally, leaves too little room for radical developments that do not move in lockstep with the rise of governments. 1911, the late 1920s, and 1949 were key turning points in the political story but not necessarily the social and cultural ones.
3. Oerlapping Reolutions A more satisfying approach divides China’s recent past, for heuristic purposes, into four overlapping revolutions, each following its own timetable: one political, one cultural\intellectual, one diplomatic, and one socioeconomic. Let us consider each briefly.
3.1 Politics The political revolution has the clearest starting date: October 10, 1911. GMD official historians present the events that followed the Wuchang Uprising of that day (really a military mutiny) as adhering to a master plan crafted by Sun Yat-sen and carried out by members of his Revolutionary Alliance, the organization that evolved into the Nationalist Party. But many participants had no contact with the Alliance and knew little of Sun or his ideas. Only some were committed to republican ideals. Others were motivated by distrust of the Qing ‘barbarians,’ anger at particular officials, or a desire to be on the winning side of a Mandate shift. Still, the 1911 Revolution extinguished not just a dynasty but a system, hence it deserves to be thought of as politically revolutionary. The National Assembly and other republican institutions quickly proved ineffectual. But the complete failure of attempts by Yuan and later another warlord to found new dynasties demonstrated that the rules of political life had changed.
2.2 Problems with Standard Categorization Schemes There are, however, limitations to each. The continuous Revolution vision focuses too tightly on the achievements of a particular organization. It distorts the shape of twentieth-century history by downplaying struggles not guided by the particular Leninist party— the CCP or GMD—being celebrated. The 1911–1949 vision is problematic for use in comparison—even though comparativists champion it. Skocpol, for example, does not explain why, if the ‘Great Social Revolutions’ are essentially alike in
3.2 Cultural and Intellectual Change Attempts by Chinese revolutionaries to transform traditional belief structures and patterns of behavior began after the Opium War (1839–1842). The military defeat suffered then by China led some within the dominant scholar-official class to begin questioning longstanding assumptions about the inferiority of foreign cultures. The first generations of intellectuals to rethink these issues, while interested in specific things the West had to offer ( yong or techniques), 1745
Chinese Reolutions: Twentieth Century were seldom revolutionary in their approach to questions of fundamentals (ti or essences). Their belief in the superiority of traditional moral codes remained unshaken; they merely sought efficacious ways to combine Confucian ti with Western gunboats and other sorts of foreign yong. The ti\yong distinction remained at the heart of the debate for decades, until the iconoclastic New Culture Movement (1915–1923) led by intellectuals who had gone abroad, usually to Japan, or been exposed to foreign ideas at one of China’s recently formed Western-style schools. They disagreed about many things but shared three convictions. China’s weakness was due to the enduring power of entrenched ‘Confucian’ and ‘feudal’ beliefs (such as the veneration of age) and practices (such as arranged marriages). Chinese should welcome the best the West had to offer: ideas and methods of inquiry included. And intellectuals needed to educate and mobilize others. Much New Culture Movement energy was directed toward the publication of new periodicals, which were filled with articles on Social Darwinism, Pragmatism, Anarchism, Marxism, and other imported ideologies. These periodicals also attempted to serve another purpose: their articles, written in a ‘plain speech’ as opposed to a ‘classical’ style, were supposed to inform and inspire the masses. This literary move to break down the barriers between intellectuals and non-intellectuals was reinforced by public speaking campaigns on issues ranging from medicine to international affairs. An important new turn came with the May 4th Movement, when student activists with ties to the New Culture Movement actively appealed to members of other classes to join them in protesting terms of the Treaty of Versailles that transferred control of former German territories in China to Japan. After sympathy strikes by workers and merchants, the students achieved their main domestic goals: the dismissal of three corrupt officials and the release of all those arrested for protesting. But their inability to stop the Treaty of Versailles from taking effect illustrated the need for a diplomatic revolution.
3.3 Diplomatic Change No diplomatic revolution could take place until the rise of a strong central regime committed to overturning the unequal treaties forced upon the Qing by foreign powers. The Northern Expedition brought this about. After reunifying the nation, however, Chiang claimed that the spread of communism was more dangerous than the continuation of imperialism. Unlike some of his warlord predecessors, Chiang was an outspoken critic of the unequal treaties, but he insisted that China could only regain its place in the world once its house was in order. 1746
World War II precipitated a sea change, as China’s position as one of the Allies gave its leader new leverage in pushing for an end to unequal relations with the West. And, in 1943, the Allies renounced all claims to special privileges within Shanghai and other ‘treaty-port’ cities. This decision and Japan’s withdrawal in 1945 made China freer of foreign influence than it had been for a century. CCP historians argue, however, that the diplomatic revolution was still not complete—and they have a point. The GMD regime remained economically and diplomatically dependent on the USA. If credit for starting the diplomatic revolution rightly goes to Chiang, it remains true that China did not fully regain its status as an independent country until after 1949.
3.4 Socioeconomic Change The socioeconomic revolution also began long before the Communists came to power. Most notably, the late Qing and Republican (1912–1949) eras saw dramatic shifts in the types of people in control of the government and witnessed the rise within the social hierarchy of merchants. But the development of new alignments near the top, though important, did not have much effect upon the lives of the vast majority of Chinese who continued to reside in villages and work small plots of land. For them, a socioeconomic revolution did not take place until the CCP’s land reform campaigns. This socioeconomic revolution (like the others) did not hit all parts of the country at the same time but rather played itself out according to regionally distinctive timetables. By the early 1950s, however, it had affected most of China’s villages.
3.5 Unfinished Reolutions If China’s twentieth century is envisioned as a time of multiple revolutions, we need to keep in mind that most were incomplete—and that struggles for change in other spheres were pursued sporadically but never fully carried through. One important unfinished Geming, linked to but not quite the same as any of those just described, was the revolution for women. Aspects of sexual politics changed throughout the 1900s, but the dream of complete equality promoted by revolutionaries in various decades never became a reality. Much the same can be said for the democratic revolution: calls for democratization were heard often but oligarchy and one-party authoritarianism tended to prevail. Ironically, though China’s twentieth century was filled with transformations, its final two decades were strikingly similar to its first three. In Taiwan, moves to institute a system of free elections recall experiments made around 1911. On the mainland, there were May
Christian Liturgy 4th era parallels for the calls in 1989 for an end to corruption. And in the automatic weapon fire that accompanied the massacres, there were echoes of killings of the 1920s that were justified as necessary efforts to maintain order and\or protect the Geming.
4. Lessons From the Chinese Case China’s twentieth-century experience suggests the need for social scientists to pay more attention in the future to a few factors. One, already mentioned, is the revolutionary potential of villagers. Another is scale. Revolutions have often been treated as purely ‘national’ events. Recent work on China shows that local dynamics are often crucial—even in upheavals driven by nationalism. So, too, are transnational flows of people (key participants in 1911 were overseas Chinese) and ideas. This suggests that, in future, models used for comparing revolutions will need to make more room not just for revolutions of widely varying lengths but also revolutions that were influenced by local, national, and transnational impulses and actors. However, China’s recent history reinforces some important insights in the comparative and theoretical literature on revolutions. It shows that Alexis de Tocqueville was right to insist that nothing does more to inspire revolutionary activism than an inefficient authoritarian regime’s introduction of a reform program that offers too little and comes too late. The 1911 Revolution (which was preceded by unsuccessful Qing reforms) and even, in a way, the mainland’s abortive revolution of 1989 and the recent fall of the GMD in Taiwan illustrate the power of Tocqueville’s insight. These cases also illustrates the value of stressing, as Marx and Skocpol among others have, the revolutionary potential of groups at the fringe of the governing elite who have rising expectations and are frustrated by being kept away from real power. In addition, Chinese events of the third quarter of the twentieth century in particular underscore the validity of the claim made by both Tocqueville and Skocpol, again among others, that revolutions, while attempting to do other things, often end up strengthening the power of central governments. Finally, the Chinese case shows just how much truth there is in the tragic maxim that revolutions all too frequently and all too regrettably end up devouring their own children. See also: China: Sociocultural Aspects; Communism; Communist Parties; East Asian Studies: Economics; East Asian Studies: Politics; East Asian Studies: Society; Maoism; Revolutions, Sociology of; Revolutions, Theories of
Bibliography Berge' re M C 1998 [English translation by Lloyd J] Sun Yat-sen. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA
Bianco L 1971 [English translation by Bell M] Origins of the Chinese Reolution, 1915–1949. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA Brinton C 1965 Anatomy of Reolution. Vintage, New York Dirlik A 1989 The Origins of Chinese Communism. Oxford University Press, New York Duara P 1988 Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA Fairbank J K, Goldman M 1998 China: A New History, enlarged edn. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Fitzgerald J 1996 Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Reolution. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA Friedman E, Pickowicz P G, Selden M 1991 Chinese Village, Socialist State. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT Goldstone J A (ed.) 1994 Reolutions: Theoretical, Comparatie, and Historical Studies, 2nd edn. Harcourt, Fort Worth, CA Hartford K, Goldstein S (eds.) 1987 Single Sparks: China’s Rural Reolutions. Sharpe, Armonk, New York Ono K 1989 [English translation by Fogel J (ed.)] Chinese Women in a Century of Reolution, 1850–1950. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA Perry E J, Selden M (eds.) 2000 Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance. Routledge, London Skocpol T 1979 States and Social Reolutions. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Spence J D 1982 The Gate of Heaenly Peace. Penguin Books, New York Tang T 2000 Interpreting the Revolution in China: Macrohistory and micromechanisms. Modern China 26(2): 205–38 Wakeman F Jr. 1975 The Fall of Imperial China. Free Press, New York Wang Z 1999 Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA Wong R B 1997 China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of the European Experience. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY Wright M C (eds.) 1968 China in Reolution: The First Phase, 1900–1913. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT Yue D, Wakeman C 1985 To The Storm: The Odyssey of a Chinese Reolutionary Woman. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA
J. N. Wasserstrom Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Christian Liturgy The Greek word leitourgos means, literally, ‘work of the people’ and was associated in ancient Greece both with the payment of civic dues and the performance of ritual duties. In the Christian context, by contrast, it had at first a more specific connotation, concerning the performance of the Eucharistic action—although this apparent narrowing of reference in fact indicated that this action was itself the supreme collective obligation and source of collective unity. Only much later did the term come to denote the entirety of Christian ritual practice. At first, in the seventeenth century, it was used as a neutral term, covering both the Catholic ‘Mass’ and Protestant ‘Communion’; 1747
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
ISBN: 0-08-043076-7