Transcription
Summer Palace burning, all the way to the loss to Japan, even to the Boxer Uprising and the Boxer Indemnity. All those, of course, they were all humiliating, but they were humiliating to the Qing Dynasty. For most Chinese who wanted to get rid of the Manchus, it was a good thing. It shows that the Manchus are hopeless. They didn't have also made many mistakes. He went too far one way to relax and therefore he had a ten. Yes, massacre was partly because things had been a bit too lax. We were also a bit lax about decentralizing. So that later on, they had a tremendous job pulling back, tightening. And the party got corrupted by too quick a move towards capitalism. When he said that some people must get rich first before others, and so all these things misled a lot of people. And some of the corruption that followed, even even before Tiananmen, all the way down to Xi Jinping, and became worse and worse and so on.
Hello. It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to the dialogue we are going to have today with Professor Wang Gang Wu of the National University of Singapore. We'll have a discussion of the topics and themes that we covered in week one of our course on how history is influencing the course of US-China relations. And we're going to spend some time discussing the century of humiliation that we have covered in this course. So, Gang Wu, welcome to this discussion. And I'm going to begin, as I said, to ask you a question about the century of humiliation, which probably lasted from 1842 to 1949. It was clearly a searing experience for China and it left deep scars. Indeed, as recently as July 1st, 2017, President Xi Jinping said that the return of Hong Kong marked the end of the Chinese nation's hundred years of shame. And we know that many painful episodes occurred in this century of humiliation: the Opium War, the sacking of the Summer Palace, the defeat by Japan in 1895, the betrayal after World War I on German territories in China. In your view, which of these events scarred China the most and why?
It depends, I suppose, when you are addressing the question and who you're talking about. Because today, when you quote Xi Jinping, it is in the context of US-China tensions and disagreements about various things, and a sense of being threatened by the United States that the Chinese feel. At other times, it is just a general statement. It's not addressed to anybody. Right now, it is addressed very much towards how the Chinese feel about United States policy towards China. So it has a target. But before that, it was just a general statement. And then you ask how many people actually felt it. Well, it varies a lot because when it happened in the 1840s, 60s, Summer Palace burning, all the way to the loss to Japan, even to the Boxer Uprising and the Boxer Indemnity, all those, of course, they were all humiliating. But they were humiliating to the Qing Dynasty. For most Chinese who wanted to get rid of the Manchus, it was a good thing. It shows that the Manchus are hopeless. They didn't have the interests of China at heart. They justified the rebellion against the Manchus, that these people should be out. And all those mandarins, Chinese mandarins who collaborated with the Manchus, were also to be blamed because they tried to support a failed enterprise. And so these foreigners showed that the Chinese were backward, hopeless, and we are very poor because of poor governance and so on. So, in a way, all those events showed that it was time to get rid of the Manchus. So from those people's point of view, that might be humiliating to the Qing Dynasty, but it didn't affect the Chinese people in the same way. It was a good thing because it justified what they were going to do.
However, after the Manchus were overthrown, and their efforts to restore a good relationship with the West, to try and get them to, for example, renegotiate the treaties, to take away things like extraterritoriality, all the things which made the Chinese feel inferior, and the way they, the racism that was involved, to treat the Chinese as somewhat barbarous and uncivilized. These were things that were much more hurtful. Because, in other words, they continued after they got rid of the Qing. The West's attitude towards the Chinese was, "You all got to be taught how to behave, how to modernize yourself. You're so backward." And of course, the Chinese were determined to catch up. They tried to learn their science and political institutions, international law. They were trying to. But all that time, they were treated like, "You just have to learn more, you got to do better than that." It is really the deep humiliation is to be treated.
What time was that? Since from about the First World War. For example, the Treaty of Versailles was openly internationally perceived as a humiliation of the Chinese, when the Chinese had actually been allies of the West, when the West defeated the German Empire at the time. And yet, when it came to the Treaty of Versailles, they allowed the territory that the Germans had in Shandong to pass over to the Japanese. Now, that is real humiliation. Japanese and Chinese were on the same side as the allies. And yet, there, the Japanese are treated as superior to the Chinese. That, of course, you can say that was partly because the Japanese defeated the Chinese. But you can see all these are cumulative. And depending on who the target was at that time, the target would have been Britain and France, because they were the ones who won the war in Europe. Yes. And the First World War. So America was not treated in the same way at all, because America was relatively peaceful in its relations with China. So now, when this is addressed today, it is now targeted at America, because America is now the country, the only country in the world that is treating China as, you know, they're just not quite civilized. They are tyrannical. Their ruler, their party is evil, you know, all these words that are being used in the western media and by the western American politicians and so on. They're really targeting. Is it deep, deep humiliation? I find it hard to evaluate, but it is certainly politically necessary to portray the Americans in that way, because the Americans are doing to them what they consider to be totally unacceptable.
You know, I'm glad you mentioned the Japanese and how the territories returned to Japan instead of China. It's a sort of indication that the Westerners, Europeans and Americans, treated Japan with greater respect at the time. And, you know, as you know, our mutual friend Ezra Vogel, the Harvard scholar, has said that for centuries, China, with its great civilization and stronger societies, had the upper hand over Japan. Yet, when Japan woke up to the Western challenge in the Meiji Restoration and reformed itself to become stronger, China didn't pay attention. And as we know, was then humiliated by Japan in the 1895 Sino-Japanese War. Why, why didn't the Chinese pay attention to the fact that the Japanese were waking up, reforming themselves, becoming stronger? Why, why weren't they noticing that Japan was going through a great transformation while they were slipping behind?
Well, they probably underestimated the speed at which the Japanese were learning from the West. But they were themselves learning from the West. They were also trying to build a navy. They were also trying to retrain the army, modernize them, buying modern weaponry from the West and so on. They didn't expect to lose to the Japanese. But when they lost to Japan in 1894 to 1895, frankly, it's a question of the Japanese were more maritime anyway. They were a maritime nation. And learning from Britain, the greatest maritime nation in the world at the time, made them very superior. Whereas the Chinese, when they asked the British to help them build a navy, the British turned them down. The British had decided for China to have a strong navy would be a threat to their interests. For Japan to have a strong navy, it was all right because Japan was just a small group of little islands. And they chose to train the Japanese but refused to train the Chinese. So the Chinese had to turn to the French. And frankly, in comparison, the French navy is nothing, nothing like the British Navy. And so, in a way, some people joke about it a little, that the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 was a battle between the British Navy against the French Navy, and the French Navy lost. But that's putting aside that part. The key part is that military power was everything. The fact the Japanese defeated China, and a few years later, defeated Russia. The Russian fleet went out, and what did the British do? They, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. They allied with Japan because they didn't want to keep an eye on Japan. But at the same time, they respected Japan's military and naval power in particular. So the British alliance with Japan raised the Japanese to the same level as the British. They had no alliance with any other Asian nation. The others were all under the empire. So, given that, the Japanese took upon themselves as being not equal to the West, treated as civilized people worthy of respect, whereas the Chinese weren't.
And in the First World War, the Japanese took the side of the British, who were the allies, and they took Shandong from the Germans in the course of that. The Chinese joined the allies, but a bit later. But nevertheless, expected at the end of the war to be treated at least the same as Japan, as equals. But in the Treaty of Versailles, they didn't. Because the Japanese were allies of the British, the British favored the Japanese, and the Japanese insisted that they were, they took the German control of Shandong, they deserved to have it. And to their shock, that was humiliation to the Chinese, that the British accepted that argument and handed it over to the Germans. And that was a real, the first real break. But there were some other early little things, but I won't go into the details. But all that leading up to the fact that the Japanese had destroyed the Chinese tributary system. They took Korea. But by that time, they had already taken, in fact, before that, they had already taken Taiwan after the First World War. They lost the first war. They took over Korea. They had entered into Manchuria after defeating the Russians. They actually took over Manchuria, part of Manchuria, the southern Manchuria. All that was already built even before the First World War. And then after, during the after the First World War, after the Treaty of Versailles, the Japanese pushed further ahead to take over Manchuria as a whole and eventually created the monarchy of Manchukuo. All that, of course, the West protesting in the League of Nations, but to no avail. In the end, the Japanese got their way more or less. And so all that, I think, was genuinely humiliating. And to end all that with the Japanese invasion of China, to actually try to take Chinese territory, more and more Chinese territory, and being defeated by the Japanese again and again. Now, you can say that all that was cumulative, a really heavy, heavy sense of humiliation.
After that, you know, when the Japanese, right, as Ezra Vogel said, traditionally used to look up to the Chinese. Progressively, as the Japanese could see that they were becoming stronger and stronger than the Chinese, you know, defeating them in 1895, as you said, and then taking over more and more of the territory. How, what were the Japanese attitudes towards, how were the Japanese attitudes towards the Chinese evolving around that time? Were their perceptions of China changing significantly?
I think there were a lot of differences within Japan itself. There were those, of course, I mean, the military, of course, who despised the Chinese military as being hopelessly incompetent and backward, and they were right. They were not wrong. For a lot of Japanese scholars, they remained very respectful of Chinese civilization. But among the scholars, they were divided. Because a new group, a new generation of post-Meiji scholars, who saw the Western standards of modern civilization as far superior to what the traditional Chinese had to offer. So while they respected traditional China, they felt that China had been corrupted, had been completely weakened by having lost many wars. They after they lost to the Mongols, they lost to the Manchus, to the Japanese. The Chinese people are hopeless. They are just not capable of running themselves. So that group of Japanese scholars too began to look down on the civilization as being really passed it. It really missed the boat. And it's completely rejected. And you had the famous, some famous intellectuals in Meiji Japan who then said, "We must turn to the West. Forget about China." Fukuzawa Yukichi, just forget about it. Return to the West. And of course, when he said that, he was alone. But after that, the whole generations of those Japanese who studied in the West went along with that. That forget about Chinese civilization. That was all in the past. That may have helped us shape our early centuries of development for Japan. But today, we turn to the West and we become as strong as the West, if not stronger. And then they developed the next generation of Japanese who said that, "Why should we allow the West to dominate us in Asia? Asia should get together. Asians get together and kick the West out. Asia for the Asians." It's just they moved even further. And they wanted the Chinese to join in. And some of the Chinese were tempted by that. So it's not true to say that all Japanese are anti-Japanese, all Chinese were anti-Japanese. Chinese were persuaded by some Chinese were persuaded by the Japanese that we should all get together in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. And Wang Jingwei and some of his other colleagues actually went along with that. But there was a small, defiant group led by Chiang Kai-shek and so on. And Chiang Kai-shek, because he knew the Japanese very well, he had studied with the Japanese military. He knew that they were not really talking about chasing the West out, chasing the West out so that they can take over. So that is understanding. And therefore, he said, "We cannot allow that. That's not the real story." And so he insisted on fighting to the end. And that is how they came together with the Communists. They were fighting a civil war. But they decided to put aside their differences because this is a greater threat to us in the long run, and they combined successfully.
As you know, Gang Wu, this course is focused on US-China relations, and we have to address the question as to what basically was the role of the United States in this century of humiliation that the Chinese talk about. And as you know, until the Boxer Rebellion, American troops didn't really fight in China. But at the same time, the US insisted on most-favored-nation treatment and joined the settlements in Shanghai and so on and so forth. So, how is the US role regarded by Chinese historians when they look at the century of humiliation? Because at the same time, as you know, the US was also very generous and contributed money for the establishment of Tsinghua University. So how would you characterize Chinese attitudes towards the Americans in this century of humiliation?
There were lots of reservations about the United States at the beginning. But eventually, I would say the Chinese decided that learning from America was a way of dealing with the West, because America was willing to at least teach them. And the mission schools, the colleges. Of course, they were also preaching Christianity and generally trying to convert the Chinese, which they didn't particularly like, but they didn't mind that. America provided also some opportunities for them. Learning about capitalism, entrepreneurship, all the modern features of economic development. And it was a very successful America. America's transformation, economic transformation at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century was really most impressive. I mean, they are the great economic growth. If you want to look at examples in modern times, the Americans showed that. And the Chinese admired all that. Whereas, of course, for the British and the French, they were polite and so on, but they really treated the Chinese. They offered nothing to the Chinese really, other than that the Chinese would be absolutely impossible for the Chinese to succeed in Europe, in England or France. But in the United States, it was possible. Even though there were racist troubles every now and then with labor unions and so on, but the rich, successful Americans were quite happy to deal with rich and successful Chinese. They were dealing at the level of capitalist cooperation, collaboration and so on. And generally, they admired the Americans. Americans had an open society, relatively free, and not too discriminatory to the Chinese. The Chinese did feel it there. But the Chinese couldn't even get to Britain and France. Whereas in the United States, at least they got there, treated not so well. But on the whole, many, many Chinese benefited from that. And the students, the Americans invited and opened up itself to Chinese students by the thousands, right from the beginning, very early, where hardly any Chinese went to Britain or France. Japanese did for the navy, for naval thing, at the military level. But where America was concerned, it was educational, it was cultural, civilizational, in a way. And the entrepreneurship that the Americans showed appealed very much to the Chinese. The Chinese had very mixed feelings. But on the whole, I would say, in balance, the Chinese were very positive about America right up to 1949, up to the Korean War. And then, of course, the government took a different line.
Well, let's end on that positive note, that how Chinese attitudes towards America were quite positive. And then in next week, when we discuss a more contemporary era, we can discuss about the transformation of Chinese attitudes towards the Americans. Thank you very much, Gang Wu, for this discussion.
Hello. It gives me great pleasure to welcome you back to the conversation with Professor Wang Gang Wu. As you know, last week we covered the period of the century of humiliation and its impact on US-China relations. Today, we are going to move beyond the century of humiliation and cover the period from the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 till today. And I'm going to begin by asking Professor Wang Gang Wu about the, in a sense, the truly major war that the US and Chinese forces fought against each other, which was the Korean War, from June 25th, 1950, to July 27th, 1953. So, the first question I'm going to ask you, Gang Wu, is, could this war have been avoided? And what damage did this war do to US-China relations?
It probably could have been avoided if the Americans had made it very clear that they were not going to let anybody take South Korea, and that, in other words, they were prepared to fight for South Korea. But apparently, some of the leaders in the State Department had been a bit vague about that, that their defense line was really more about Japan. That was the ultimate line, and they didn't say anything about South Korea. And that misled Kim Il-sung and the Russians to believe that there was an opportunity to take South Korea, that the Americans were not prepared to stick their necks out to fight for South Korea.
So the Russians were pushing Kim Il-sung more than the Chinese?
Oh, no. The Chinese were not pushing anybody. Yes, yes. And the Russians, I wouldn't say was pushing, but when Kim Il-sung wanted to do it, the Russians were looking at the opportunities and didn't actually stop him. Stalin didn't say, "You can't." So, but at the time, Stalin was much more powerful. And Stalin did not want to come in the open because he didn't want to come in direct conflict with the United States, because the United States was watching the Russians. So when Mao was approached, the information that I have seen is that the Russians encouraged the Chinese to go in because they can't go in. And Mao waited very carefully, I believe. And they did so because they were afraid that if Kim Il-sung did that without any support from them, then unification of Korea under Kim Il-sung, backed by the Russians, may also affect them, where they had just started, you know, they had only just won the war in China. They were in need of all kinds of things from Russia. They needed Russian help. But what they did not need is to have trouble on their borders. So I think they had tremendous difficulty agreeing to this. I believe they debated a long time. They were not enthusiastic about it. They were not enthusiastic, and they couldn't stop Kim Il-sung anyway. They couldn't. Kim Il-sung wouldn't have listened to them. Kim Il-sung would have listened to Stalin. Oh, but Stalin did not stop him. So when he started the war, the Chinese had to decide whether to support or not support. And not to have supported him would have also been a different message, and would have put Kim Il-sung very hostile towards China thereafter. So there were all kinds of considerations. And after fierce debate, they decided to go in. But they knew it was a terrible cost, because they were not prepared for that kind of war against most modern army, armed forces in the world, led by the United Nations, or United States for the United Nations. But they decided that they had to do it. So by the time Kim Il-sung decided to go to war, it was probably unavoidable that Mao would get in. But even then, as I said, there was fierce debate. But Mao did decide to go in, and the United States didn't really expect it.
I think they were a bit shocked, and MacArthur was furious. And one of the reasons why he was prepared to actually prepared to push into Manchuria to take over, and in fact, even prepared to use nuclear weapons. And he was sacked for that because Truman refused to do it. That was very brave of Truman. Right. It was really quite a remarkable decision. Yeah. And MacArthur was, he was a very popular general. He was, when he was sacked, and he went back to America, he was welcomed as a great hero. Yes. So Truman took a brave decision, definitely. So anyway, both Truman and Mao, in some ways, took very brave decisions to fight in that war. And, you know, the interesting thing is, is how what a strong personality Mao Zedong was, you know. And as we know, China is fortunate to have at least two great leaders in the 20th century, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. And what's interesting is that when Western scholars discuss these two leaders, they often are much more critical of Mao Zedong and criticize him for several disasters, including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. At the same time, they also give Deng Xiaoping credit for reducing poverty dramatically in China and making China a great economic power. So if you had a vote among Western scholars or Western observers on China, they would say Deng is a greater leader than Mao. But within China, Mao is regarded as a much greater leader than Deng Xiaoping. How do you explain this? Why do the Chinese people revere Mao Zedong so much?
I think there's a big difference. Mao was the great leader. Deng Xiaoping was one of his loyal supporters, right up through the Cultural Revolution. Yes, he was still a supporter of Mao Zedong. And not even the immediate number two or number three. He was a bit further down, but still one of the very loyal supporters. All the achievements, unification of China, winning the civil war against the Kuomintang, in a way, major contributions towards keeping China safe from Japan on the northern part where his root army held control. All these things that he was able to lead the Communist Party to victory through all those difficulties, and then to go through the whole cycle of change, transforming a very backward country, very economically poor, to the point when they were beginning to make their presence felt in the world. All that was done by Mao under his leadership. So he picked up a broken country, put it together. It gave them a sense of identity and pride, and a new China with great hope. The aspirations of the young were tremendous. Of course, his greatness was also the cause of his great failures. You might say the very fact that he failed was because he was so great that he failed. He made some mistakes, and every mistake he made had great consequences. Because he was so powerful. This is because he's so powerful. So, but in the end, the benefits that he brought to China by success and victory was definitely a great moment in history when he said, "China has stood up." He was good. Nothing compared to that. Deng could not have done what he had done if not because Mao laid the foundation. Foundations. I think that's how the Chinese will see it. They say Mao made some mistakes at the end of his life. It's a pity, you know, and he would have been even greater if he hadn't lived that long, so to speak. But in the end, what he achieved was absolutely stupendous. Compared to which, Deng was doing some repair job. Cleaning up after the mess, and did a very good job, fine job. But Deng was not always right either. Deng also made many mistakes. He went too far one way to relax, and therefore he had a ten. Yes, massacre was partly because Deng had been a bit too lax. It was also a bit lax about decentralizing. So that later on, they had a tremendous job pulling back, tightening. And the party got corrupted by too quick a move towards capitalism, when he said that some people must get rich first before others. And so all these things misled a lot of people. And some of the corruption that followed, even even before Tiananmen, all the way down to Xi Jinping, and became worse and worse and so on. Some people would blame that on that he had not foreseen that, and he had allowed by being too relaxed, too too relaxed too early, had allowed some of that to happen under his successors. So that Xi Jinping had to come and, you know, do cleanup some more. The best. So it's hard to, it's depend on where you, what emphasis you give. If you want to emphasize the horrendous things, the mistakes that Mao made, you can say Mao was an absolute failure and turn him into a monster. But that's not how the Chinese people see it. It's you must look at what he did first. The mistakes are a pity, regrettable, but probably forgivable, given the remarkable achievements that he first.
Yes, I guess if you didn't have someone with a kind of iron will of Mao Zedong, the country would have had difficulty pulling the country together and making it one strong country again.
Yes, iron will. But more than that, it was cunning. Cunning. He was very smart. He made use of his young colleagues, won against the, outplayed them against others. He was a highly skilled strategist, both political and military strategist. He strategized and he seized power in all sorts of ways. I mean, he was not an easy or innocent person in that. He was tremendously ruthless to achieve what he did, at the expense of a lot of other people. But whatever he did, in the end, for various reasons, he made all the right decisions for the great successes of the first 20 years, from the end of the war with Japan all the way to the Cultural Revolution. You can say up to the Great Leap Forward, I would say that successes will far outweigh his failures. So that I think people still say that he deserves to be treated as the founder of it all.
Well, I mean, the other person who recognized that Mao Zedong was a great man was another great American, Henry Kissinger. And as you know, Henry Kissinger made a surprise dramatic visit to Beijing in July 1971. You were 40 years old then. I'm sure this visit must have made an impression on you. And I'm just asking, just from memory, what do you remember about this visit? And what were your thoughts and impressions? As you said, "Wow, this is unusual." And how do you think future historians will assess the significance of this visit by Kissinger?
There's no question about that being both a remarkable decision that he could persuade Nixon to let him go. But for myself, I was in a slightly different position and saw it slightly differently, because I happened to be in Australia at the time. In other words, there was a move, pressure against the United States' position of hostility against China was already being pushed back by a large majority of the members of the General Assembly. Secondly, I'd also been reading up about the Sino-Soviet split and the fighting in Ussuri from the late 1950s onwards, when Khrushchev came in, and Mao Zedong was extremely unhappy with Khrushchev, the way he treated Stalin, on the one hand, but also his more conciliatory voice with the West. He was very suspicious of Khrushchev, and he also felt that he deserved a higher reputation than Khrushchev. "Who was Khrushchev? Schoolboy." Yeah. Nothing. Whereas he was as good as Stalin. If not better, he wouldn't dare to claim that. But he was a great revolutionary who led a country to independence. You know, what did Khrushchev do? So he had contempt for Khrushchev. So the Sino-Soviet split had already begun in the late 1950s. So by the time of the 1960s, it was becoming increasingly clear that China and Russia were suspicious of one another, no longer trusted each other, and the growing hostility was making it almost impossible for them to collaborate about anything except Vietnam. They were helping Vietnam in the Vietnam War. But apart from the Vietnam War, the split was becoming very obvious by the late 1960s. So that when the United Nations admitted China, and the United States couldn't stop it, Australia, who had been supporting America all along, began to change their minds. So Whitlam had actually gone to China as opposition leader of the Australian Labour Party before Kissinger arrived. Before that. So I happened to know these people in Australia at the time and knew about Whitlam's trip, which was hammered by the government. The government said, "You can't do that. You, the opposition, is pro-communist." And so Whitlam went, and just a few weeks later, Kissinger went. I see. So although Kissinger's thing is remarkable, where I stood in Australia, Whitlam had already made the move. But Kissinger's calculations are different. He calculated on the side of the Soviet split, that this is a time to get the Chinese away from the Soviet orbit and encourage the Chinese to be even more anti-Soviet. So it was in that context that I didn't quite immediately see that as the turning point. Yes. But looking back, there's no question. The fact that Kissinger would go at the behest of Nixon, the President of the United States, and arranging for the President to visit China is an amazing transformation in the whole political scene.
Yeah. But it must have, it showed that both Nixon and Kissinger, and I think this is confirmed also by Mr. Kuan Yew, were very astute students of geopolitics, you know, and probably in a class by themselves. I remember Mr. Lee Kuan Yew was once asked who do you consider to be the greatest American president, and he actually said Richard Nixon.
The Chinese actually agree with that. The Chinese agree with that. What, what was the Chinese, great friend to that, to Chinese was a great friendly act. What do you remember about any of the discussions that took place between Kissinger and Nixon and the Chinese leaders? What do you remember, if anything, about that period?
Well, I'm a bit confused about all that because I went to, at that point, followed in great detail all the problems with Nixon afterwards, and all the reports about what was on his tape and Watergate. So Watergate. So that a lot of my memories about that got caught up with all the details. Some rather nefarious ideas were exchanged at that time. So I must confess that I didn't have a very positive view of this kind of machinations in the White House at that time. And Watergate was a fascinating story for most of us who read it at the time. So that, in a way, colored my attitudes towards Nixon. But my admiration for Kissinger never stopped. That was remarkable. But his background is so different. And in his case, I would say he benefited from the fact that he was moving among the highest analysts in the American universities who understood Russia and who saw the Sino-Soviet split as being particularly significant and really believed it. Because there are some others who believe they're communists anyway, all bunch of communists, don't trust them. But he and this realistic group of analysts said, "This is a great opportunity to break this up, because that combination is a threat to us. But divided, and if China could be at least partly on our side, and at least away from the Soviets, will give us tremendous leverage over the Russians." I think that part was part of his academic background too, that scholars had done the work to show that this is a serious split. It isn't just quarreling among comrades. They really were bitterly opposed to each other. And that, I think, reading that is very important. And I think Kissinger was emboldened by that to actually say to Nixon, and as I understand to say to Nixon, "This split is serious. We can take advantage of this."
Yeah. I'm sure that that split was also the key reason why Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, of course, we must mention Zhou, were very welcoming of both Kissinger and Nixon. But at the same time, you know, what's interesting is that the Chinese have always had a kind of mixed feelings about the West, you know, regarding it with great admiration and at the same time also recognizing that the West played a role in humiliating China and so on and so forth. So how, you know, as you look, if you take a sort of a longer view here of China's attitudes towards Western civilization as a whole, and I don't know whether this is a fair question. I'm sure one man who actually understood Western history very well was Zhou Enlai. How would you characterize the attitudes of a man like Zhou Enlai towards the West? What did, how would he regard it, and how would he see its strengths and weaknesses?
My understanding of Zhou Enlai was he was fundamentally a Mandarin by his instincts, serving his country, serving whoever is the ruler loyally and intelligently would be his upbringing and his whole background. His family background would put him in that sort of position, which makes him a top Mandarin in the best Confucian context. At the same time, he had been to the West. He belongs to that generation, together with the young May Fourth generation, who knew that the West has something to offer China. By absolutely no question. And because of slogans like "Science and Democracy," which were thrown around at that time, everybody, almost everybody in China, agreed that these were the two things that China needed to be a modern country. Science and democracy. And democracy, both. And I think at that point, even the Communists didn't really disagree. The Chinese Communist Party didn't disagree with that. They accepted that these were the two thrusts. They just defined democracy differently. But they accepted that the concepts were vital to China's modernization process. And I think they had no question. They rejected the traditions. They were agreed that the traditions had failed us. We were wonderful in the past for 2,000 years, but 2,000 years too long. And they were slow to react. Therefore, we are in this terrible position that we must catch up. And science and democracy will be the key. And I think that was right across the board, with the exception of some old generation people who are old conservatives. The vast majority of the Chinese people would go along with that. And I think they have been consistent about that. Their success in sciences is proven. We know that, no question at all. Their success at democracy is in dispute, because they have defined democracy in a way which is unacceptable to the liberal democrats, who have interpreted that to mean the Anglo-American parliamentary system, elections, the republican French system. These are the proper way to do democracy. Whereas the Chinese have, you know, reinterpreted Marx and Lenin and so on to mean that as long as you're caring for the people, you're doing it in the name of the people, for the sake of the people, and the people respond and agree and like what you do, that is democracy. And that is a little bit closer to a Chinese traditional idea of a caring emperor. The Son of Heaven is after all there because he's morally the person to provide the welfare, caring for the welfare of the people, and ultimately help making the people peaceful, happy, prosperous, harmonious. And so that's part of his responsibility as Son of Heaven. So that's a little bit nearer to what the Chinese would normally expect their leaders to be anyway. So the question of democracy, however, has caused tremendous drifts within the Chinese public, arguing among themselves precisely what they need. There are Chinese who would prefer the American, the Anglo-American system, believe that that way, participatory democracy, enabling you to change your rulers by the people directly and peacefully without killing each other, that's a much better way. Whereas others feel, provided it doesn't create chaos and anarchy and disruptions and continual fights, internal fights and so on, and provide what the people need. They are so poor, going to lift them, care for them. So they put a different priority on that. And that priority, I think, has led them more and more to say the kind of system that the traditional Chinese had, which is now modernized by the Chinese Communist Party, is probably what we need. And this is what China needs to succeed. And it's proven to be more or less right today. I would say most Chinese say, "Yes, I think we got it right, because otherwise we'll have civil wars. We'll have tremendous difficulties getting people all agreed. There are so many different opinions. You need leaders, strong leaders who provide a sense of direction, a vision to lead the way, and then ensure that this is done peacefully and harmoniously, and everybody, most people are enjoying the benefits of that. And we don't take the risk of all this up and down." And they look at some of the democracies outside has actually confirmed in many of the people in China that that's probably not what we need in China. But what has been done in China has actually worked so far. So why not stick with this? And this fits in with our tradition. It doesn't go against any of our traditional ways of doing things. And to have a new class, new set of mandarins, doing their job, selected for their skills and devotion and utter loyalty to do the job, provided they're not corrupt, is probably the best thing we can do at the moment.
I'm just going to fast forward to 2020. And wouldn't you agree that COVID-19, in many ways, when the Chinese see how much better they have handled COVID-19, where there are four or five thousand deaths, and the United States is now exceeding 300,000 deaths, has that in some ways also helped to confirm the Chinese?
There is no doubt that the Chinese are interpreting that to confirm what they've been inclined to believe anyway, and that is their system works better when there's a crisis, and that people can unite and can share the burden of trying to solve a problem together. A sense of being brought together and united in their efforts to do something. Whereas they feel even more than ever that the kind of freedom that has been so much talked about only leads to so much disagreement and inability to support a unified or national purposeful way of solving national crisis problems. So I think the Chinese at the moment are actually almost gloating at what they think they have achieved compared to what all the so-called Western liberal democratic countries have failed to achieve. This may be a good moment for us to pause our discussion on week two, because when we come to week three, we actually going to touch upon some of the difficulties that have arisen in US-China relations, and one of them, of course, being the misunderstandings about their political system. So thank you very much, Gang Wu, for joining us on this discussion for week two of this course. Thank you.