Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium
Appendix XVIII
雙十
The following essay originally appeared on 5 October 2019. As we preciously observed:
‘The 5th October marks the half way point between the 1 October National Day of the People’s Republic on the Chinese mainland and the 10 October celebration of Taiwan’s Republic of China. Separated by only ten days and the Taiwan Strait, in political time a century wide chasm divides the two national days.’
— ‘For’ برای — in Memory of Lee Yee, China Heritage, 5 October 2022
Duncan Campbell is an historian and scholar of the literary and material culture of late-imperial China. His most recent book is The Dumbarton Oaks Anthology of Chinese Garden Literature (Harvard University Press, 2020), edited with Alison Hardie. His work also frequently appeared in China Heritage Quarterly (see, for example, Black Tigers 黑老虎, Literary Representations of the Orchid Pavilion and The Heritage of Books, Collecting and Libraries), as well as in China Heritage (see On Idleness 閒). Duncan was a founding member of the Wairarapa Academy for New Sinology.
This essay is included as an appendix to Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium. The typographical style of the original has been retained.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
10 October 2022
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Related Material:
- October 1 & October 10 — Two Chinas, Whose Fatherland?, China Heritage, 1 October 2022
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The People’s Republic of China at Seventy
Duncan Campbell
“At seventy, I follow all the desires of my heart without breaking any rule.”
— Analects, 2.6
Famously, when asked sometime in the 1970s about the impact of the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai 周恩來 (1898-1976), the then premier of the People’s Republic of China, was recorded as having replied that it was still “Too early to say.” The remark is somewhat less profound than it is often held to be; we now know that Zhou (once labelled, unforgettably, “an empty boat” by the Belgian Sinologist Simon Leys, whose translation of the Analects of Confucius serves here as epigraph) was thinking about the failed student revolution of 1968, not that of 1789.
At seventy this year, the People’s Republic of China has outlasted two previous unifying dynasties of what was to become China, the first of them, the Qin (221-206 BCE), that lasted only a short fifteen years but which lent the region the name it was to become known as throughout much of the world, and the Sui (581-618) that brought under single rule a China that had long been disunited but which lasted only slightly over double that number of years. As conventionally dated, another decade needs to go by before it outlasts another of the great unifying dynasties of China, the Yuan (1279-1368), the only time that the Chinese empire has been part of a larger and global empire. On the other hand, it has now outlasted the Soviet Union (1922-1991), its problematic model, just.
The Republic of China, by contrast, also to celebrate its anniversary at a slightly later date this October and sadly now a decreasing presence on the international stage, having been established in the ruins of the all-but-accidental collapse of the last dynasty of China, the Qing (1644-1911), has lasted over a century. On average, the major dynasties of China since that first unification have lasted approximately 140 years each, which, depending on one’s perspective on the matter, in both cases is either good news or bad. I suspect that a verdict can already be arrived at in the case of the Republic, that remarkable and unique entity, however much longer it might remain a member of the family of nations. Over the decades since its retreat to the island of Taiwan, and by dint of hard work and self-sacrifice on the part of its some 20 million or so inhabitants, the Republic has transformed itself into a prosperous and vibrant democracy in which asymmetries of wealth are amongst the narrowest in the world. Culturally, Taiwan (like Hong Kong, and in stark contrast to the state-sponsored manipulation of a plastic past that characterizes the mainland of recent years) is at once both a bastion of confident and intelligent traditional Chinese culture and, excitingly and in a way that has particular resonances for us as New Zealanders, a place that is becoming increasingly interested in and knowledgeable about the nature of its specifically Taiwanese history and identity. In a word, it is a decent society.
Whatever else might be said about the People’s Republic, on the other hand, decent is not a word that leaps immediately into mind, something that after a more than forty-year-long engagement with the place one admits to oneself only reluctantly. Writing some forty years ago about the desecration of Peking, Leys suggested that: “It is not easy to foresee how future centuries will judge the Maoist rule;” very much the same remains true. Neither the economic successes of the past three decades nor its political failures are sustainable. Now a fragile superpower, seemingly incapable of any authentic dialogue with either its own past or its present and future responsibilities, domestically it has become a society characterized by a catastrophic collapse in trust, whilst externally, the People’s Republic increasingly acts with the swagger of the playground bully, its rhetoric marked by vainglory and bombast.
Why is it that the 1.4 billion people who inhabit the People’s Republic of China continue to be denied that modicum of agency over their own lives that democracy, for all its manifest flaws, provides? Why is it that the People’s Republic needs to continue to expend more on ensuring domestic order, as defined by the Party-State, than it does on external defence? Why is it that that Party-State is so anxious about its own legitimacy that it needs to incarcerate over a million Uyghur people in Xinjiang, for instance, or to impose increasing levels of repression (over art and literature, religion and dissenting views, over any language other than Mandarin) and surveillance over its own ordinary citizens? It is surely a sobering reflection that perhaps the twentieth-century’s most recognizable image of China, tank man as he became known, standing there alone with his shopping bags in hand as he sought to halt the march of the tanks into his capital, is an image that is banned in the People’s Republic itself and which, increasingly, would not be recognized by most young Chinese.
If China, understood as the repository of a civilisation that might have important contributions still to make to the wellbeing of humankind rather than continuing to be simply another one-party nation-state, then one suspects that that alternative future is to be found somewhere amongst the many alternative pasts that characterize the grand arc of its historical trajectory. At seventy, the People’s Republic of China seems all too ready to “follow all the desires of [its] heart” (從心所欲) whilst forever “breaking the rules” (踰矩) of humane and righteous governance.
October, 2019
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Source:
- Duncan Campbell, Taking stock of China at 70 years, Taipei Times, 5 October 2019