China: A State-Socialist Route to the Modern World

Abstract

China, it might be said, has made a number of attempts to join the modern world; where these include the late nineteenth-century elite top-down reforms that were organized by a decaying pre-modern empire, an early twentieth-century republican revolution engineered by groups looking to examples outside the country, the confusions and progress of the 1930s Nanjing Decade and then, via warfare and revolution, a period of peasant-centred state socialism, and now, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a species of developmental state turned towards the formal goal of peaceful rising has been constructed. The dazzling and ambiguous achievements of this last noted period were celebrated, as the legatee of earlier efforts, particularly those associated with the Communist Party, at the 2008 Beijing Olympics: tagged by observers as ‘China’s coming out party’. However, a cursory acquaintance with the long trajectory of the shift to the modern world in China reveals the difficulties—the violence, the setbacks and the abrupt changes of policy and direction—with the current configuration able to be read as simultaneously successful, disfigured and less than entirely convincing in respect of the solidity of its future. The success is clear, the problems, such as corruption and pollution, routinely noted, and so too the tricky demands of the inevitable reform. Here, with enquiry operating at a macro-scale, the unfolding historical trajectory of the shift to the modern world will be considered. The process is open-ended, and the general direction of travel likely inevitable, and it is also thoroughly contingent as neither the past nor current elite declarations are a clear guide to the future.

Some of this material is taken from earlier texts, P.W. Preston 2010 National Pasts in Europe and East Asia, London, Routledge and P.W. Preston 2014 After the Empires, London, Palgrave; it has been reworked and updated; for more on this topic in this general vein, see S. Luk and P.W. Preston 2016 The Logic of Chinese Politics: Cores, Peripheries and Peaceful Rising, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar.