The Roots of Communist China

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The Roots of Communist China

      To say that the Chinese Communist revolution is a non-Western

revolution is more than a clich‚. That revolution has been primarily

directed, not like the French Revolution but against alien Western

influences that approached the level of domination and drastically

altered China's traditional relationship with the world. Hence the

Chinese Communist attitude toward China's traditional past is

selectively critical, but by no means totally hostile. The Chinese

Communist revolution, and the foreign policy of the regime to which it

has given rise, have several roots, each of which is embedded in the

past more deeply than one would tend to expect of a movement seemingly

so convulsive.

      The Chinese superiority complex institutionalized in their

tributary system was justified by any standards less advanced or

efficient than those of the modern West. China developed an elaborate

and effective political system resting on a remarkable cultural

unity, the latter in turn being due mainly to the general acceptance

of a common, although difficult, written language and a common set of

ethical and social values, known as Confucianism. Traditional china

had neither the knowledge nor the power that would have been necessary

to cope with the superior science, technology, economic organization,

and military force that expanding West brought to bear on it. The

general sense of national weakness and humiliation was rendered still

keener by a unique phenomenon, the modernization of Japan and its rise

to great power status. Japan's success threw China's failure into

sharp remission.

      The Japanese performance contributed to the discrediting and

collapse of China's imperial system, but it did little to make things

easier for the subsequent successor. The Republic was never able to

achieve territorial and national unity in the face of bad

communications and the widespread diffusion of modern arms throughout

the country. Lacking internal authority, it did not carry much weight

in its foreign relations. As it struggled awkwardly, there arose two

more radical political forces, the relatively powerful Kuomintang of

Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, and the younger and weaker

Communist Party of China (CPC ). With indispensable support from the

CPC and the Third International, the Kuomintang achieved sufficient

success so it felt justified in proclaiming a new government,

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controlled by itself, for the whole of China. For a time the

Kuomintang made a valiant effort to tackle China's numerous and

colossal problems, including those that had ruined its predecessor :

poor communications and the wide distribution of arms. It also took a

strongly anti-Western course in its foreign relations, with some

success. It is impossible to say whether the Kuomintang's regime would

ultimately have proven viable and successful if it had not been ruined

by an external enemy, as the Republic had been by its internal

opponents. The more the ...

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