The Rest Is History - 20. China

Episode Date: February 4, 2021

Broadcaster and historian Michael Wood joins Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook to discuss the world’s oldest civilisation. What were the great moments in Chinese history and why do the Opium Wars still feature so prominently in the modern Chinese school syllabus? The birth of the Chinese Communist Party and the complicated legacy of Chairman Mao all feature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello and welcome to The Rest is History, the podcast that's not afraid to tackle the really big themes in under an hour. And today's theme is a truly massive one. The history of China, 4,000 years old, an empire as much as it is a nation state, and today returning inexorably, it would seem, to the status it enjoyed for centuries in the past as the greatest power on the face of the planet. And yet for all its fascination, its brilliance, its importance, it's a story that we in the West tend not to know much about. With me here is my co-conspirator Dominic Sandbrook. And Dominic, you and I, we did an

interview for GQ, didn't we, about this podcast. And you were asked the question, what is the field of history you know least about? And you said China. So obviously, we've got to do an episode on this. It's extraordinary though, isn't it? I was thinking today just before doing this, you know, I know Mao, and I have some vague sense of the 20th century. But before that, I'm not convinced I could name a single Chinese ruler or politician. I think that's true of a lot of people. It's just a sort of blur. So we needed somebody top dollar, didn't we, Tom, to help us? We absolutely did. And I think one of my favourite lockdown reads in the first lockdown was a book called The Story of China,

a Portrait of Civilisation and Its People by one of my all time heroes, Michael Wood. So I got on to Michael, asked him if he would come on and help us deal with this huge topic. And I'm delighted to say that he he said yes. So, Michael, thanks so much for joining us. It's a real pleasure to be with you. Such a great podcast you do. I hope I can help. As you know, the more that you discover about China, the more you realise, the less you know.

Well, you know more, definitely know more about it than either of us. So could we, we've got a very interesting question i think to kick off with um because obviously we are all of us um european um so we're from the far end of the world but we've got a question here from gregory doyle and he asks what is the historical event in their history that is most important to the chinese themselves and then he also says what dominic and I've been saying, I'm amazed at my own ignorance of their history, except for Mongol invasions and communism. So do you have a sense of that? Wow. Well, that is a fantastic question.

Thanks, Gregory. I actually did a Vox Pops in the middle of a big exhibition at the Shanghai Expo, just asking ordinary Chinese tourists this question a few years ago. And it was really, really interesting. I mean, not least because nobody said the Chinese Revolution of 1949. I couldn't believe that. Everybody, you ask them about their favorite time or dynasty in Chinese history, and most people said the Tang Dynasty, which is like the age of Beowulf in Britain, you know, from the 600s to the 900s. And you say, why? And they go, well, you know, it's the culture, it's the civilization, it's our poetry. We still love the poetry of that time. They're our favorite poets. And it's also when China went out to the world. We were a great civilization, but we went out to the world,

and the world came to China. So in terms of a time, that's the favorite thing. But when you ask them, but what about an event? The most interesting answers were the opium wars and the beginning yeah now i think this i think this is influenced by what they learn at school because then what's called national studies at school in china still has this narrative but um you know the opium war ham the the wicked foreigners laid the nation low, the century of humiliation, the unequal treaties, all of which was redeemed by the Communist Party.

And now the China dream and the recovery of China sort of comes out of that. So coupled with that, a lot of people said, well, the Opium Wars and the Center of Humiliation were the events that triggered it. But what we all think now is the China dream, you know, that we've recovered. We've become the great nation again in the world and that there's food on our tables. And I actually phoned a friend of mine to ask her about her mom, who still lives in rural Hunan. And the mom said, you don't understand what it was like for us as children during the Great Famine and everything else. If you understood that, you'd understand why we feel the way we do.

And that leads on to the final thing that comes out of all this is the opening up 40 years ago under Deng Xiaoping. And all of them say that that was the key that triggered the growth of modern China, everything that's happened since. And I asked the same question when I was doing some interviews a couple of years ago to one or two great American experts in this. People who'd been through it all, you know, the revolution and everything else, and looking back as older people. And the answer from them was that the greatest event in Chinese history was the opening up of 1978-79.

Wow. And it's one of the greatest events in the history of the world. So that was the, so that's the matrix of ideas. Nobody picks on 1949, interestingly enough. That is true. And in my frustration, finally, you know, in response to what Tom said, you know, you're going to come on, guys, you know, we've got 4,000 years of history here.

We can't be, you know, come on, guys, you know, we've got 4,000 years of history here. We can't be, you know, 1978. And my Chinese friend, Tina, said, well, I said, there must be something else. And she said, well, all right, Qin Shi Huangdi and the unification of China in the third century BC. Yes. So there's your spread of ideas. Impossible to give you give you one mike have you seen have you seen the film hero you must have seen it yeah yeah fantastic fantastic but but kind of a sinister as well in a way dominic have you seen it no i haven't tell me

about it it's about a team of assassins who are sent to kill the emperor of chin um and then it turns out that they've recognised that destiny requires the Emperor of Qin to live so that he can found China and it will become a great power. But I think, Michael, the point of that was very fairly squarely aimed at Taiwan and Tibet and separatists generally. And that kind of sense of a nexus that the beginnings of China and China's status now are kind of bound up. And I just wonder when we talk about China, are we talking about a continuum? Or are we talking actually about a succession of different empires, different states that just happen to occupy the same geographical space, do you think?

Yeah, it's a really interesting question. And it is a continuum, really. Somebody once said that when history in the West, people view history as being the succession of different empires and different civilizations from Rome and Greece and, you know, Assyria and Egypt and the Carolingian, different. Whereas in China, it's the succession of, it's the rhythm of one civilization. Whereas in the West, it's a cycle of many different civilizations. I mean, you could argue, and reading your book, Tom, you could argue that Western Latin Christendom constitutes a civilization. Don't encourage it, Michael.

A single civilization which has risen and fallen and whatever. But in China, it's a continuum. And they're very conscious of that. You know, you get these guys in the terrible breakdown after the Tang Dynasty in the 10th century saying, you know, a new China will arise. Will we reconstitute the kingdom? The beginning of the most famous, one of the most famous novels in China, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, begins with a line which roughly says, it is a truth universally acknowledged that every empire

that falls apart will come together again, and that every empire that is united will fall apart you know so so so it's a it's a continuum and just just to pick up on what you said about today i mean it's a really key part plank of the president she's um regime you know they've got to deliver growth if you look at the planks they've got to deliver growth because public opinion will only stick with them with what they're doing. So that's an important aspect of it. But national studies are really important to them now. And President Xi is constantly harping on about the greatness of the Chinese past. And when you look at Qin Shi Huangdi, the first emperor in the third century, I mean, the Qin Empire only lasted about 10 years and was overthrown because it was

so hated by the people, you know. But the legacy of it is emblematic to the Chinese. And the ideas that underwrote the Qin Empire were legalist ideas by this political philosopher called Lord Shang, who wrote this book of Lord Shang. And it argues for an absolutely repressive, clamped-down state where every person is itemised in the kind of population lists and where cruel punishments are. It's a really strict legalist order without Confucian humanism. And actually, President Xi not long ago did a speech in which he dropped in one of the legalist philosophers as being, you know, these ideas are still part of our being. Let me just ask you a question following up what you were saying about, you know, dynasties rising and falling and stuff. Why is China so big and why has it always been so big so why have successive dynasties been able to

impose their rule on such an enormous territory and such a huge number of people compared with the fragmentation of you know you mentioned tom's idea about western christendom that western christendom has been impossible to unite why Why has China survived as such an enormous entity? Yeah, it's such an interesting question, isn't it? Because there's plenty of points in Chinese history, like in the 10th century, where China broke apart. There were 16 different dynasties during that early part of the 10th century, including five major kingdoms with civil services and everything else.

But the drive was to come back to this concept of unity and that lies very deep in you know confucius's idea about this culture of ours we're defending han speech handwriting and customs and and that um that that's the difference with with europe i think i mean when you look at the size of China, though, if you look at the maps, it expands and then it contracts, almost like a living organism. And you look at the Song Dynasty, for example, 10th, 11th centuries, one of the greatest civilizations that had ever existed

on the face of the earth, probably the greatest and most advanced till that point in terms of science technology literature printing everything you know and but it's only the heartland of china you know that kind of circular land that is encompassed by the two rivers in the plain you know and then you get other periods for instance the qin dynasty from the well let's take the qing dynasty as the one that's closest to us in the from the 17th century to 1911 and they conquer mongolia xinjiang and tibet and that that picture that we have in our minds of the map of today's china is really the product of that. You know, the Ming, the Song, they ruled the heartland of China, you know, China proper.

And the Chinese today, of course, with their very aggressive nationalistic policies, they really don't like the idea that what is now China was the product of imperial expansion over peoples who are not Chinese. And American academics who've recently written a couple of books on Xinjiang and on the Chinese expansion under the Qing, they were barred from doing public events in China, book events, even after their books had been in a cut form, printed in China, because the Chinese like to insist that these are an inviolable part of the motherland, when of course

they're not. You know, Tibet had been an independent kingdom for most of its existence. So why is it so big is an interesting question. They went out under the Han dynasty in the time of the Roman Republican Empire into Xinjiang with the Silk Road and forts going out west to link up with Central Asia and beyond. They went out the same time in the late 600s under the Tang dynasty. But the essential core of Chinese civilization is much, much smaller. And what you look at today is really the aftermath of imperial expansion over non-Chinese peoples. And those non-Chinese peoples are still aggrieved at that, hence the terrible suppression happening at the moment in Xinjiang.

And those heartlands are based around rivers. Yeah. Essentially. So it's like you have an amazing, one of my favourite sentences in your book, I've copied it out here, when you're talking about Qing China, so 18th century,

it was as if pharaonic Egypt had come through to the 18th century, still worshipping Amun, its bureaucracy still skilled in hieroglyphs, while having invented the steam engine and Euclidean mathematics centuries before Europe. And I love it because it does convey that sense of an ancient civilization lasting into the present day. It's kind of like the computer game Civilization where

the Romans invent skyscrapers and things. So what are the features of Chinese civilization that we can trace through the centuries that enable us to talk about there being continuity despite the kind of bust ups and barbarian invasions and so on? Is it the sense of an emperor? Is it Confucianism? And how far back does that reach? Does it reach back before the time of the first emperor? Well, I think most experts would say it's very interesting when you read scholars writing in the 1950s, Western scholars looking at what was happening under Mao, and all of them, these distinguished sinologists are saying that it's eerily, uncannily replicating the centralized authoritarian bureaucracies that you saw in the imperial period, you know, under the Ming and the Qing,

you know, that the communists actually going back to a Chinese template. And I mean, they're trying to reform, they're trying to change the countryside and have, you know, agricultural communes and all that. But essentially, it's that all-controlling authoritarian bureaucracy. So a centralized bureaucratic empire is a key thing. The position of the emperor is very interesting. There's been a lot of work by scholars at the moment on this idea of the sage emperor and this figure who ultimately power and authority goes back to him. And the emperor must

be wise and all seeing. And when you look at how that was transferred to the cult of Mao and how Mao was adulated, as you know, all rivers flow to the sea and all the Chinese people flow to you, great leader, you know, as the sun shines you, this, you're ineffable, you know, the publicity, the peaking radio, you listen to all this stuff. It's unbelievable. So Mao really took on board that cult of the emperor. So there's that. There's the Confucian ethic, of course, which really was,

Confucius lived about 500 BC, you know, same time as a Buddha and the great figures in Greece. And his ethos, he was a total failure in his lifetime. But his ethos was adopted by later dynasties. And there's always a balance in Chinese history between the authoritarian, legalist, punishment-based, pretty ferocious bureaucracy and the humanist ideas of Confucius, which are very conformist in their ways. I mean, a lot of people in the 20th century republic were saying, we've got to get rid of all this stuff because it's cannibalising our children. It's still in hock to this subservient, ritual-based, you know. But in the best periods of Chinese history, this humanist idea was capable of great reinvention, you know. So what is the humanist idea?

When you say humanist, what's the essence of it? Well, you know, these are complicated things, and I think I'm probably not qualified to talk about them but but um uh you know the works which purport to be those confucius which are written down by his pupils uh contain all kinds of ideas about uh you know justice and um all people being equal or men being brothers, that we have to have a society where the actions of the ruler are based on virtue and civility, and great rulership must adhere to these principles. And if a ruler is tyrannical,

then the people have a right to rise against him. So it's a system of civil order. He's not interested in gods. He's not interested in the afterlife. He never talks about the afterlife. He's interested in how we have a balanced civil life on earth. He didn't doubt, of course, the figure of the great ruler, but the great ruler must act according to virtue.

But that sense of civility and the way you are and deference and all that, you talk about what survived until the present day. On another dimension, anybody who's travelled in China and actually spent time with the Chinese people, we have a funny idea of the Chinese people. Everybody thinks there's a rather cool attitude to them and frosty at the moment, and the Chinese people. Everybody thinks there's a rather cool attitude to them and frosty at the moment, and the Chinese people are caught up in all this.

But actually, anybody who travels in China, you know how affable and sociable Chinese people are. They love being in society. They love eating together. They have to rub along together because there's so many of them. In the heartland of China, it's very, very densely populated. So you have to have a sense of the collective. And I think the sense of the collective is very, very important to China.

You look at their response to the COVID outbreaks and the way that people, obviously, they were told by the government they had to obey the rules, but people obeyed the rules and helped their neighbours and set up neighbourhood committees and everything else. It's not just the Communist Party running it. There's a deep sense of the collective. So I would say there's the big political picture and there's the social picture of how Chinese people are together. And that solidarity is a very, very powerful thing. Michael, we need to get in some of the questions from the public, from the punters. And one of the big ones is this question about what happened to China. So why didn't China become a world power earlier? So Alan Allport asks, why after the

voyages of Zheng He, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, to China give up its global exploratory advantage over the West. And Mark Woodhouse says, how capable were China of imperial expansion? So China was so preeminent for so long. And then what went wrong? Why did they turn inwards? Well, if you'd ask that of a Confucian bureaucrat in the 15th century, when they cancelled any more voyages after the Zheng He seven voyages, you know, when they'd gone to East Africa and the Persian Gulf. I mean, it wasn't the first time the Chinese ships had been out there.

They would have said, what do you mean capable of expansion? That's not the goal of our civilization. The goal of our civilization is to cultivate the soil of China, to maintain a just order for this enormous population, to make sure that everybody's fed, and for the bureaucracy and the leadership and the scholarly world to cultivate the inner world and the sciences and everything else. It is not our aim as a civilization to go out and conquer other people.

And there's a fantastically interesting passage in the diary of the Jesuit, Matteo Ricci, who went in the 1580s to China and lived the rest of his life in China. And his diary survives. And Ricci says there are very interesting comparisons to be made between East and West, between the countries of Europe and the countries of China. But in the West, they are never, they are restless, and never satisfied with what they've got and have to go out and seize the lands of other people. Whereas this is not the goal of Chinese civilization at all. And I think, I think that's a very interesting historical fact, although, of course, empires like the Tang and the Han

had gone out along the Silk Road and established their bases, but they hadn't gone out to conquer other countries. Is that because they were too rich? Is that because there's this talk of the high-level equilibrium trap, that they were sort of too comfortable? So you compare that. I mean, you did a series about the conquistadors. They were coming from scrubby, you know,

towns in sort of Western Spain where there wasn't much money to make their fortune. Were the Chinese just too well off to do the same? Well, it probably didn't occur to them to, you know, when their ships went to East Africa and places like that, they probably thought, well, you know, do it. But it wasn't in their mindset to do that. Although the jungle voyages are slightly misunderstood, I think.

I was listening to David Abelafia's book about the oceans the other week, and he still slightly hung on to the idea that the Chinese were just showing the flag in these great expeditions. Whereas I think all the modern scholarships suggest that what they were trying to do was really pin down and protect trade routes and establish bases in Palembang and places like that in Indonesia. And there was a purpose behind these, just as there was a purpose to the Ming Dynasty diplomatic expeditions into Central Asia. So, you know, they were more practically minded, I think, than we think. But it wasn't their goal to go out and conquer other nations. That's the first thing in answer to this very interesting question. And if you look back at the 10th, 11th, 12th century under the Song, quite, you know, clearly they were the most advanced civilization in terms of science and technology.

So that's gunpowder, streetlights, all that. Naval technology. Printing. They were further ahead than anyone else, you see. But it wasn't in their mindset to go and conquer other countries. In fact, they shared the landmass of China, what is today the landmass of China, with other powerful kingdoms in the 11th century, like the Georgian, but they established an equilibrium by careful diplomacy and establishing good relations

and having regular visits to the courts of their neighbours and all that sort of stuff. So they were, and actually the Song dynasty by the 1100s was in many ways poised you would have said to become the first modern nation because in terms of political organization you know economic and financial policy and all this they were they were much more advanced i mean the time william the conquerors devastating northumbria in the aftermath of 1066, Wang Anxue and the Chinese council are sitting there thinking about, you know, taxation levels and evening the evening up the leveling up the equality gap. You know, what are we going to do with, you know, and they're getting this all theuses in and they're saying, we've got to have an economic policy for these regions that lifts the people up, you know.

We can't have a society where a lot of people are really poor and barely hang on. So they were so modern in many ways. And I think, you know, the big argument about this historiographically, it started with a famous book by Kenneth Pomerantz called The Great Divergence, in which he argued there were certain material facts that happened, and especially the use of coal. He's very hot on the use of coal. Chinese had invented all these processes centuries before, but the use of coal in the West pushed world development of technologies of technologies. And suddenly, we made a leap

forward. And that leap was helped by the fact that for the first time in history, these small, mobile, aggressive maritime commercial powers in Western Europe could go out across the world, conquer the entire new world, dispossess its population, most of whom died of disease, plunder its natural resources. And it's a sudden historical happenstance in some ways, isn't it? And the Chinese, who were still maintaining this careful, well-governed order, suddenly found themselves with these new people. I think that's a brilliant note on which to take a break, but just as kind of setting up the idea

that China has this incredible cultural self-confidence, I guess, it's the Middle Kingdom when Lord McCartney, George III's emissary turns up, bury all the fruits of the Industrial Revolution. The Chinese aren't interested because who's a barbarian? Who's interested in what barbarians are bringing? But I guess that the history of the 19th and 20th centuries, which we'll look at after the break, is really the history of how the Chinese wake up

to the fact that the outside world does have things that it needs to learn and how it has dealt with that. So we will come to that after the break. For more episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History with me, Dominic Sandbrook, and Tom Holland, and our guest today, the great Michael Wood. Tom, the shaming thing about all this is, as Michael's been talking, I'm conscious of just how little I know about all of this kind of stuff. Are you more clued up? I'm very interested in the first emperor, predictably, and about possible links between early China and Hellenistic kingdoms and then with Rome and then the Silk Roads.

But modern Chinese history, I know very little about. I did have to study about the Jesuits going to China when I wrote Dominion. And what we were talking about just before the break about just how stupefying Chinese civilization was compared to what the Jesuits had seen coming from Rome or from Spain or whatever. And they go there and they say, you know, this is a place like nowhere else. And they're writing back to their superiors and saying, you know, we can't treat the Chinese like we treated the Indians.

Or, you know, these are the most sophisticated people on the face of the planet. And we need to tread very, very carefully, which, to be be fair to the Jesuits they did with kind of remarkable effect um and I guess that the difference between that and the 19th century is that when the British come blundering in with their gunboats yeah um they are in a position to scorn what they see as kind of backwardness although I think even in the 18th century they're really touching the way that Dr Johnson who you think of as kind of backwardness. Although I think even in the 18th century, they're really touching the way that Dr. Johnson, who you think of as kind of the embodiment of John Bull, you know, the man who lives in London most of his life, it's his great dream to see the Great Wall of China.

And he urges Boswell to take a trip. He says, yes, you must go. And when you come back, you will be known as the man who saw the Great Wall of China. Maybe he wasn't just desperate to get rid of Boswell. But all the philistines, you know, Voltaire and everybody, they're obsessed with China. They see China as the kind of the archetype of how to run a modern, sophisticated, liberal, enlightened state. So it's kind of such a contrast with what then happens in the 19th century. So Michael, can we just talk about the Opium Wars? So for people who don't know,

the Opium Wars were in the 1830s, 40s and then 1850s, 60s. It was British gunboats sort of blasting the Chinese in an attempt to open up China to our merchant ships, basically selling opium. We want to sell them dope and we're going to pummel them until they agree to do it. And that's something that really has left this legacy in China, hasn't it? This very divisive legacy. Am I right in thinking that we're basically, I mean, people perceive us as the baddies. Is that right? We were the bad guys and they were the victims? Well, it's how they tell it in China.

But the number of Chinese friends of mine, including scholars, are exasperated by this. And they go, oh, God, this victim narrative. The Chinese government are just going to drop it. Can't we revise the bloody curriculum? You know, this victim stuff is just so out of date. Every dynasty rises and falls. And when at the moment the dynasty is starting to come apart, there's a catalyst for the next period of rebirth.

Right. And the Brits were the catalyst. And the new China starts to be made in Shanghai in the 1860s when they're building the HSBC and all that. But it is a brutal time. I mean, if you just backtrack a slight, just a few moments before the Opium War, Tom mentioned the McCartney expedition of 1793. And China had had 100 years of amazing achievements in civilization and governance. I think three great rulers, all of them long-lived and long-ruling.

They ruled between them for about 130 years. I can't remember the exact number. And the old Qianlong was still on the throne when the Brits came. And when you look at McCartney's diary of that expedition, the Brits are very impressed by many of the things that they see. And they can see that this is a great polity which has existed for a very, very long time. You've got to remember in the British mind, there are geopolitics which the Chinese don't really understand.

A lot of Chinese writers at that time say, we just don't know enough of what's going on. The Brits had lost their colonies in America. The Brits at almost the same time had won their victories in South India and Bengal, and with the, you know, the likes of Clive of India. And so suddenly, the Brits have an international empire. And at the very moment that they've lost their purchase in the Americas to a degree, they find this extraordinary new wealth in India, all of which is protected by small amounts of British troops

and large amounts of Indian troops. And the trade with China has started to grow up. It's another of those triangles, like the slave triangle. And the British economy, by the 1790s, had started to become dependent on China through the triangle with India. And they're selling opium to China and they get it bringing textiles. Is that because opium is the only thing that the Chinese are interested in buying off the British? Well, I think there was a long trade in it. Opium's grown in India especially, and it was one of those things

that these freelance merchants, you know, because this is the same East India company that's been doing its best in India, you know. So it's one of the things that they realise they can extract a lot out of China with. And McCartney, but McCartney goes in order to open up official trade. What they want to do is regularize the trade. They want to establish an island base, as Hong Kong would eventually be, from which they could trade year-round rather than go on these very, very limited and highly controlled contacts around Macau and stuff like that.

So they want full ambassador status in Beijing. So these are the things they want, the trade, the ambassador, the island offshore. That's what they're looking for. And as you say, they take with them all the great achievements of modern British manufacture, you know, Birmingham astronomical equipment, astrolabes and horariums, and along with, you know, Birmingham arms manufacturers stuff as well. And although when Qianlong looks at it, he does that famous line,

you know, these kind of things would not be of interest to a child. You know, we are, as you can see, we are China. We are self-sufficient in everything. We do not need your Western toys. But actually, they were really interested in the military stuff. And you could see that they could see that the Westerners had a real edge on this. So McCartney is very, he's a bit deflated by the failure to get what he'd hoped for, because he sees China as a really great civilization. And he sees the British with their

open mindedness, their sense of fairness and justice and legality. He thinks the proper trading relationships between the two countries will be of great advantage to China, because he understands that this guy, McCartney, had been, you know, he'd been governor in South India, he'd been ambassador extraordinary to Russia, he'd been in the Caribbean. He's the guy who invents the phrase, the empire on which the sun never sets. This guy, among all the diplomats of the world, had a sense of the future. And he understood that China needed to modernize. And he thought the Brits could be that catalyst. So they're not patronizing, even though, of course, when he writes up in his diary later,

he says, the thing about China is, it's like a crazy old man of war, like a huge ancient three-decked galleon that a succession of gifted captains have managed to keep afloat for all this time. But the fact is it's in trouble now. It's going to be in trouble. It cannot be rebuilt on the same keel and and you it's these breezy nautical metaphors that the brits use you know and and and eventually if it doesn't change it will despite the gifted captains who have steered it it will end up on the rocks

so it's a it's a fantastically brilliant moment. And when the Chinese, but of course the Chinese rebuff him, and that's what leads to the Opium War, because the Brits carry on trading illegally with the dealers on the shores of China, the lonely ports along the coast of Fujian, and it gets worse and worse until the Chinese in the 1830s say, we can't have this anymore and we're stopping the trade. And that's when the Brits take action because, as McCartney said,

if the trade were to stop, the blow to the textile industries in the north of England and indeed to our whole national economy would be so great that the nation would be rocked by it. Michael, this idea of China as a kind of fortress, you know, the Great Wall of China is the emblem of that, keeping ambassadors, traders, whatever, absolutely on the periphery. That's the place for them. There's also a sense of anxiety about ideological infection, isn't there? So the Jesuits, when they go, a kind of, you know, constant process of negotiation.

There's an anxiety about what the effect of Christian missionaries might be, which brings us to a question from William Ritchie, who asks, is it possible to think that if the Taiping Rebellion had succeeded, China would have had a better and more peaceful transition to modernity. Because basically, have I got this right? The Taiping Rebellion is the customary Chinese breakdown, but with Christian millennial fantasies. And also incredibly, incredibly bloody. So the Taiping Rebellion, more people died in the Taiping Rebellion in World War One. Isn't that right, Michael? Some people think. Yeah. So Michael, is the Taiping Rebellion the result of a fusion of traditional kind of Chinese splintering of an empire, which happens periodically, with these new Christian ideas? Or is it something that just kind of blows up? So we're talking, what, 1840s?

Through the 40s, 50s to the mid-60s. Yeah, 16 years. 16 years, the Taiping. And it's an unbelievable story, like so many in the story of China. You know, this rebel ex-student who'd been a failure in life, who believes he is the chosen of the Christian God and he's God's Chinese son, and recruits an army of the disaffected in the south, takes the capital, the great Ming capital of Nanjing,

the southern capital, and institutes a reign of terror in some ways. And in some ways it's similar to the communists in the communist era, terrifying social laws and punishments. It's a really grim moment, but it's an absolutely crucial moment in the story of China. I don't think China's transition to modernity would have been helped if the Taiping had won. But it's one of those forecasts.

I mean, really, I was looking it up, actually, and between the Opium War in 1911, there are major peasant uprisings every single year in China. So the disaffection starts to grow once the government has lost its control over the center. The center will not hold. That's what you can see the period of dissolution, dissolution, which starts then. The opium war kind of triggers it. And the Taiping comes after the opium war and lasts for 16 years.

And from then on, the ruling classes in China are on the back foot. And many great thinkers are arguing we have to modernize now. We have to adopt Western technology. We have to build Western naval dockyards. They start to talk about introducing the railways. But at the center of this was the imperial system, and essentially the imperial system was still descended from the Ming and the Qing, and the emperor is still going on the midwinter solstice to the altar of heaven in the south of Beijing, and performing effectively Bronze Age rituals to the cosmos. And while people, increasingly Western educated intellectuals are saying, we need to change all this. You know, can we have a constitutional monarchy? We should have

regional assemblies. We should have this. We should have that. By the 1880s, you got feminists starting to emerge by the same time as the suffragettes, manifestos on women's liberation. When did any of us know about any of this? Extraordinary. So it's a ferment, an absolute ferment of ideas. But the overthrow of the imperial system is going to be the first thing. And then the question is, how do we truly modernize? And that's where the communists come in and the many other movements

who were after the reform of society at the lower level where 80, 90% of the people still worked in the fields and the rural problem becomes absolutely central in the 20th century. But that's a rough trajectory.

It feels as if the world starts to change in the 1830s and then the opium wars and what happens afterwards intensify it at the same time there's a wonderful account of china written in the 1840s by a french traveler a jesuit who um sorry, not a Jesuit. I think he was Francis. Anyway, he's a Catholic priest, Père Gabé, who spoke Chinese. And he writes an account of China saying this is still the most, the greatest civilization on earth. It's still the best governed.

They still have systems of local governance, local charity, and he talks about all these things, which would, you know, surpass anything we've got in the West. We Westerners shouldn't patronize this civilization. It may have come down with these archaic forms of rule, but its effectiveness, when you travel through China, you see the standard of living in the villages. So, you know, I suspect there's a lot more to be learned about these struggles in the 19th century. So, Michael, to fast forward for a bit, you then have this period, which is just a complete nightmare of warlords and occupation by the Japanese, obviously, and sort of rival groups and millions of people dying.

And the big winners are the communists, 1949, the revolution, obviously, and sort of rival groups and millions of people dying. And the big winners are the communists, 1949, the revolution, Mao, and then the rest of the story is probably more familiar to a lot of our listeners. Why is it that the communists won? Is it because they were offering, is it a bit like the Russian Civil War after the First World War where the communists won because the other warlords were just offering sort of warlordism? Obviously, the communists were offering land reform. We had a question from Stephen Clark saying,

is it all about land reform? Is that their positive vision that explains it, or is it aid from Russia or just contingency or what? Yeah, in some ways it's contingency. There's a famous story of Chairman Mao after the revolution talking to the Japanese ambassador who actually apologized for the Japanese act during the invasion and occupation and from the 36 37 through to the end of the war and Mao said don't apologize I wouldn't be here today without you

and you know so the Japanese invasion was a major, major intrusion. You know, if you remember what had happened, that the communists had been attacked by the nationalist government of China in their heartland in the south in Hunan, and they had to escape the encirclement, where thousands of people have been killed by the nationalists, they embarked on this 6,000-mile great curving journey up to the north to Yan'an called the Long March. And there they established their base, and they got their base right at the moment the Japanese invade. And so for the next few years, they controlled that zone around Yan'an. And they

instituted land reforms and all sorts of changes there. And won quite, at that stage, won quite a lot of credit in the eyes of the ordinary population. There's a wonderful diary published fairly recently by an ordinary bloke, a kind of schoolteacher, mine manager, two-bit farmer living in a dismal coal mining town not far from Beijing, Taiwan. And he's having these conversations with his friend who's a Buddhist monk up in the hills. Oh, the communist guerrillas have done this to the Japanese. And there's a feeling that the communists are patriots.

But essentially we support what they're doing, even though their ideology is alien to either the Buddhist monk friend or the old mine manager who's still a Confucian. He still believes in the old values of imperial China. So they got a lot of support then. And I think after the horrors of the Japanese invasion and the Second World War, and you think of the losses, Chinese losses in the Second World War, we forget they were our ally. You know, they're the fourth ally.

And Chinese resistance against Japan was a massive factor in victory in the Pacific War. And so I think the moment came when the communists could gather huge support at the end of the Second World War as a patriotic liberation front. And they swept down the country and achieved their victory. October 1949, the republics declared. And in a sense, it's a historical chance. And what happened afterwards is still highly contested,

and the Chinese government at the moment is being very tight-arsed about any criticism of Mao. You know, President Xi recently made a speech saying it has been accustomed to divide the period between pre-1976, the death of Mao, and post. But we say there is no division. It is an organic kind of whole, you know. And any discussion of historic mistakes we no longer want, you know, because the Communist Party after Mao's death had actually said that Chairman Mao was a great leader, but he made massive historical mistakes.

And he mistook the people for the enemy and right from wrong. And therein lies his tragedy. This is a Communist Party, said he in 1981. And President Xi is now saying, we do not accept that. So what happened in the 1950s as things gradually turned, the assault on the landowning landlord classes, then the Great Leap Forward, then the Cultural Revolution, all that the Chinese government is now trying to really play down.

There actually was an attempt pushed under President Xi to have a commemoration of the Cultural Revolution. Oh, my word. And leading people within the Communist Party stamped on it and said, we can't be doing that. And hence you get this fantastic verdict by one party insider who said if chairman ma had died in 1956 he would be seen as an immortal if he died in 1966 we would still see him as a great man if flawed and having made some terrible decisions but he died in 1976 alas

what is there to say wow just i think i think that our ambition to cover the whole sweep of chinese history in under an hour is doomed to fail so i think we need to could i just have one one question which will which will tie in with, try and bundle this in, the communist period with everything that's gone before. What is Xi's attitude to the pre-communist state, to the emperors? In China now, the Communist Party,

is there pride in that? Is there a sense of continuity? Yeah, there absolutely is. President Xi has made a plank, one of the planks of the current regime's stance in the world as the greatness of Chinese civilization. He's actually been quoted in a wraparound for a new version of Confucius, you know, saying, you know, we should all read this text. It's absolutely essential to Chinese history. And he is a great reader of history. And, I mean, we had an interesting thing on this. You know, my book comes out of a series of films we made called The Story of China.

And these films were within hours available online in China with Chinese translations of them, even though there's stuff at the end of Tiananmen Square and all that, which fairly rapidly got cut out. And we got a really big response. And we were interviewed by, you know, I was interviewed by China Daily and Xinhua News, People's Daily, all this sort of stuff. And President Xi, in a big conference about the media and television

and history, talked about our films and said, I'm not sure this is something I particularly want to advertise, Dominic, in the interest of history on a great historical podcast. And he said that these Brits had done this series called The Story of China. And it was very interesting and they did a very good job, he said. But we need to tell the story of china and they and it was very interesting and they did a very good job he said uh but we need to tell the story of china better we need to tell it better so we must we must learn from these these filmmakers and um that's been a real working as some somebody works in film that's been a really interesting dimension to this they're they're pretty obsessive about their history i did a film last year about the great poet dufu um fabulous

film batang dynasty poet and friends in friend again it went online within hours in china and friends in beijing phoned me up on a monday morning saying you're not going to believe this but the central commission for discipline of Communist Party, which is the most powerful commission in the communist government. They run the ruthless anti-corruption campaign that President Xi is doing. You know, they're the people who do Bo Xilai and all these people and lock them up. And they've got an editorial page on their website saying there's been this very about Dufu. And, you know, the questions that arise from it are about Confucian ethics and Dufu's loyalty to the state and Dufu's this, that, and the other. And the question we have to ask is, why have we failed

in our anti-corruption drive? Why? And the answer is that unlike D doofoo our party cadres have not internalized these essential confusion virtues of civility and blah blah you know and loyalty to the state and uh and and our friends in beijing were just thought this was hilarious you know that uh that even the party themselves were saying you know what do we learn from history? Because there are great dangers in Chinese history. You will be pleased on your podcast, of course, that history, as you know, is potent. The first emperor buried the historians alive

and burned the history books for fear that the past might discredit the present. It's great, isn't it? It's a terrifying precedent. The past discredredit the present. It's great, isn't it? It's a terrifying precedent. The past discrediting the present, yeah. And, of course, that's the case all through Chinese history. And anybody you talk to, anybody you read, they say, well, of course, when you look back to Taizong's blah, blah, blah,

everybody knows what you mean. You tell a story of gross corruption or of injustice, and everybody knows what you mean. You tell a story of gross corruption or of injustice and everybody knows what you mean. It's about a thousand years ago, but it's about now. Michael, that is an absolutely perfect note on which to end. I'm disappointed we haven't had time really to cover the communist period in Dominic. Maybe we could do another episode.

Yeah. communist period and dominate maybe we could do it have it back have another episode yeah i've some focus on on um cultural revolution deng chao ping modern period all of that um but michael i can't thank you enough we we had when we announced that um we were having you as a guest we had a brilliant tweet from someone called son of york who said do you have to limit michael to china can't you get him back to talk about Anglo-Saxon England, Alexander, Troy, and so on? So, yeah, of course we could. But if we could save you up for communist China,

yes, of course. Come on. Of course, of course. Let's get it real quick. But actually, were you to think about this in a while, the Deng Xiaoping opening up, the idea that the most eminent American sinologist said it was the greatest event in the history of the world, in modern history at least. It's something that I looked at.

I had a chance to go two years ago back there and talk to a lot of people involved in it, including Deng Xiaoping's translator. I went to the village where the peasants first broke with the communist system at risk of lives, and interviewed two of the guys, the peasants who did it. I talked to a lot of people who had been working in the farm fields on manual labour in 78, 79, and sat the exams for the first time. And so I've got a real sense of it from the inside of what happened. Can we book you then? Yeah, you're talking yourself into more work, into more work I'd be very game to do that The question about Nixon

is really interesting but I'd say that it was Deng's visit to the state that was such an impact because Was that when he wore the cowboy hat? He wore the cowboy hat Deng Xiaoping not only went west, he went western and he goes to the rodeo. And it's all over American TV.

And it's on Chinese TV because CCTV has just started. And you've got diaries of people saying, we've seen Deng Xiaoping on TV in America. So that is a really great story. Save it. Please save it. And we'll do the whole sweep of of post-communist well not post-communist communist china and um dan chow ping and the current state

i can't thank you enough for this tour de raison and reminder we're bringing out pods twice a week at the moment mondays and thursdays um so the next one on monday um thanks so much michael thanks dominic we will see you again next week. Thanks, Michael. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.