Yao Yang, "My View of Revolutionary History"

Yao Yang, “My View of Revolutionary History”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
　　
Introduction 

Yao Yang (b. 1964) is a well known economist at Peking University, Director of the China Center for Economic Research and the Dean of the National School of Development.  In the context of my Reading the China Dream project, I first became interested in Yao because of his engagement with Confucianism and his argument that reembracing Confucianism would be the best way for China to “sinicize Marxism” (see here and here).   

​When the organizers of the project “The Exterior of Philosophy—On the Practice of New Confucianism” kindly invited me to present a paper at a conference they are holding in Switzerland in late August, 2022, I decided to focus on Yao and his “Confucian pragmatism.”  I find it intriguing that a senior professor at a prestigious university in China would “change course” in a way that, at least at first glance, appears to be bold and even radical.  Consequently, I have been reading a lot of Yao Yang for the past few weeks, which means that, for better or worse, I will be sharing my Yao Yang translations with you for the month of August.
 
Most of Yao’s dozens—if not hundreds—of books and articles focus on economic topics, and I rarely read academic work in economics in English, to say nothing of Chinese.  Luckily for me, throughout his career, Yao has produced both technical, granular studies of whatever he was interested in at the time, as well as “big picture” essays where he conveys the results of his and others’ research in broader, more accessible terms, as a way of contributing to public debate and solving important problems. 

These big picture essays are often both interesting and enjoyable, and a worthwhile research project might be to look at Yao’s writings as a public intellectual over time; the arc of his concerns might shed considerable light on the interaction between formal economic research and public policy debate between the late 1990s, when Yao began his academic career, and today.  Ultimately, I think that Yao’s advocacy of Confucianism is a problem-solving exercise as well, and thus perhaps not quite as bold or radical a move as I initially thought, but I will have more to say about this when I update the blog in mid-August with more of Yao’s writings about Confucianism and liberalism.

In the course of my recent research, I also discovered four essays by Yao that treat neither economics nor Confucianism, but instead are quite personal statements based on his experiences in his father’s home village in Jiangxi.  I translated all four, and include them in this update.  In addition to this one, the other three are “Three Days Back in the Village,” “Before My Grandfather’s Portrait,” and “The Vanishing Town.”
 
Yao was born in Xi’an, but spent most of the first eight years of his life in the small, single-surname village of Hujiangbei, where he was raised by his uncle and aunt.  The emotional ties forged by this experience led Yao to return when he could, even as an adult, and his visits prompted the reflections that led to these essays, three of which appear to have been written in the 2000s, and one in 2019, a further reflection based on the three texts already composed.   All four essays are well-written and interesting in their own right, not the least for their autobiographical nature, which, while not unheard of among public intellectuals in China (see here for one example) is not something I run across on a regular basis. 
 
In terms of the themes explored in these texts, two stand out.  One addresses the effects of reform and opening on village life after 25 or 30 years.  Yao applauds the material success that reform and opening have brought to many Chinese villages, but at the same time notes with sadness and frustration the diminishing sense of community and public spirit—even in single-surname villages like his, where kinship should help, but hardly seems to.  Villagers encroach on public land and goods to build homes that respect neither aesthetics nor tradition, and often leave old homes to decay (in part as a de facto claim on the land, should they ever need to build another house).  They build pigsties in ways that pollute public space, and village “authorities” are incapable either of penalizing those responsible or mobilizing the village to dig sewers to solve the problem.  Part of the problem is that village elites were largely eliminated during the Cultural Revolution, and village government largely abandoned during reform and opening.  It is surely significant that Yao Yang says not a word about village elections. 
 
The other theme is Yao’s reflection on the meaning of China’s revolution.  Yao’s grandfather was a revolutionary martyr, having joined the Chinese Communist Party (as well as the Kuomintang) in the 1920s, to be executed by the Kuomintang after participating in the Nanchang Uprising in 1927.  The grandfather’s portrait still hands in the family home where Yao grew up, which prompts Yao to wonder about what his grandfather would have thought about the twists and turns of China’s long revolutionary journey, and what the revolution has ultimately come to mean in his village.  What struck me was less Yao’s conclusion—“the revolution was indeed necessary, but now it is time to move on”—and more his willingness to think out loud about the revolution, something I find to be surprisingly rare in the writings of most Chinese public intellectuals.
 
The text translated here was written in 2019, and revisits the themes explored in the three earlier essays.

Translation

On the topic of the Chinese Revolution, I have written three articles reflecting on the role that the revolution played in China’s modernization.
 
The first is "Before my Grandfather’s Portrait." When I was young, my parents sent me from Xi’an back to my native place in Xin’gan County, Jiangxi, where a portrait of my grandfather still hangs in the hall of the old house.  My great uncle was a martyr, of which there are many in Jiangxi, and in the early 1980s I visited the Jiangxi Martyrs' Memorial Hall, where there is a list of the names of the martyrs, which meant that back in the counties they pay less attention to their commemoration. So the commemoration of my grandfather’s martyrdom is solely the portrait we hung in our house.  
 
My grandfather died at the tender age of 21, at which age today’s youth have not yet finished university, and at the time of his death, he had only been out of high school for a few years.  Over the years, I have kept the image of my grandfather’s portrait in my mind, leading me to reflect on the Chinese revolution and China’s modernization, and I included these thoughts in my piece on "Before my Grandfather’s Portrait." 
 
I wrote another piece called "The Vanishing Town," about the vicissitudes of another great-uncle’s personal fate and the changes that occurred in that town. 
 
My family was hit hard during the Cultural Revolution.  The great-uncle that lived in town was a doctor, but he still had a few acres of land back home, so had he hired a tenant to cultivate it for him, which meant that he was classified as a "small landowner" at the moment of China’s liberation, and was re-designated as a rich peasant during the Cultural Revolution. The tenants and his apprentices rebelled against him and took over his family's house in town. This house was big, with two entrances and two exits, a courtyard, two small wings, a well in the courtyard, and a main house and another wing in the back. This was the standard configuration of a large family house in rural Jiangxi. 
 
My great uncle had to go back to his own house in the village.  When I went back to the village, my great uncle was still alive.  It was the winter when he was 72, and we had just celebrated the New Year.  We were all sitting around the fire, and my great uncle was lying back in a chair, and he sighed, saying “I’ve lived too long.”  Then he fell asleep, and died that night.  
 
After that town went through the Cultural Revolution, local elites like my great-uncle were completely wiped out, as were the cultural elites. 
 
In the national context, the level of development of Xin’gan county, my native place, is slightly below average, but the county is still quite rich. However, our village was in full decline, and the first waves of new rural construction did not reach our village. When I returned to the village for my aunt's 90th birthday, cadres from the county seat wanted to go with me.  I said that there was no need, since this was a private matter, but they insisted.  When they saw the village, they were shocked at its sorry state, with its mud roads, and its many dilapidated houses that had collapsed decades ago. Because everyone is building new houses, but they did not dare demolish the old family houses.[2]　
 
The country cadres could not bear to see this, and insisted that the new rural construction include our village. Then the township sent bulldozers to clear away all the old dilapidated houses, and rebuilt the ancestral hall, which was not strictly speaking an ancestral hall, but what we call haiting (大厅) in Jiangxi, places where families used to gather to talk things over. Our village is a single-surname village, and at the outset it was built by two brothers, the elder in the east and the younger in the west.  After the ancestral hall was repaired, they invited a dance troup in red mini-skirts to give a performance and sing pop songs. They sent me the video, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and wondered out loud if these demons were trying to make the ancestors furious.  　 
 
The reason I tell this story is to illustrate that the Cultural Revolution destroyed the few remaining nice things in the countryside, and even the ancestral rites became ridiculous. 
 
I also wrote an essay called "Three Days Back in the Village", which was so well received that some people said it was a contemporary version of Lu Xun’s story "My Old Home."  Most of this piece concerned my aunt, because when my parents sent me back to our native place I lived with my aunt and uncle, who had no children.  They brought me up, and my aunt is now over 90, and a couple of years ago, I celebrated her 90th birthday with her.   I sent my aunt to a retirement home on a visit back home more than a decade ago, but she could not get used to it and went back to her house. She has lived her whole life in the old house in the village. Over the course of her life, four generations of my family has grown up, and she prefers to be surrounded by family members.　　
 
These texts raise issues that weigh on my mind as I ponder what the revolution really means, especially for China’s villages.  What role did the revolution play in the progress of rural China, which was anything but linear? 
 
There are many interpretations of the Chinese revolution, and the idea of unconditional support for the revolution makes some sense. But I am afraid that those who support the Cultural Revolution have lost their minds. There is a definite verdict on the Cultural Revolution, as stated in the Party document entitled " Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China." I wrote "The Vanishing Town" to tell everyone that the Cultural Revolution destroyed the hearts and minds of the people as well as whatever elite elements remained in the countryside. 
 
Those who support the Cultural Revolution lack a deep sense of history, and only see certain class divisions that have emerged over the past 40 years, like those students from a research association at Peking University who noted growing inequalities between rich and poor, as well as other issues.  But the problem cannot be solved by going back to the Cultural Revolution, and using those same methods once again, because we all know the results the Cultural Revolution produced.  
 
Revolution is a Tool for Modernization 
 
Of course, some people completely deny the revolution, arguing that it was not necessary at all, or even want to return to the 1908 Outline of the Imperial Constitution put together by the Qing dynasty.   Others praise the Empress Dowager Cixi for having promulgated this document, and say that had she lived a few more years, China might have established a constitutional monarchy.  
 
Such people also lack a sense of history; there was no possibility of modernizing the Qing Dynasty. First of all, the Qing Dynasty was so corrupt that it was beyond repair. Puyi was very young when he abdicated, the abdication edict was signed by the Empress Dowager Longyu, and the next day when this same empress dowager went to the court to conduct government business, the civil and military officials were not there.  She asked the eunuchs why the officials had not come, and they told her that the document she signed the day before had put an end to the Qing dynasty.  Only then did Empress Longyu realize the meaning of the document she had signed.
 
When the dynasty had become this corrupt, there was no possibility that it could continue to exist and modernize.  In fact, the Qing dynasty could no longer exist even in a biological sense, because the last few generations of Qing emperors were infertile, mostly because of inbreeding, so it would have been strange had the Qing not died out. 
 
At the same time, since the Qing rulers were Manchus, nationalist sentiments were at play as well.  At the outset, Sun Yat-sen launched the revolution with the slogan "Expel the Tartars and restore China."  Had the regime been led by Han Chinese, there might have some possibility to turn things around.  But how could the people continue to tolerate a Manchu regime as corrupt as this one? 
 
So the 1911 Revolution was inevitable. But what was the meaning of the Chinese Revolution? 
 
Might there be a neutral way to explain the Chinese Revolution? Sometimes foreigners can see the Chinese Revolution more clearly from their stance at the sidelines. The American historian John King Fairbank (1907-1991) wrote a book in the late 1970s called The Great Chinese Revolution, and he started the book 1840. It was only after reading this book that I understood what Mao Zedong meant by his inscription on the Monument to the People's Heroes: "Eternal glory to the heroes of the people who from 1840 laid down their lives in the many struggles against domestic and foreign enemies and for national independence and the freedom and well-being of the people!"[3] Mao, who had a deeper view of history than his colleagues, wrote the inscription because he realized that China was in the process of moving from a traditional society to a modern one, and that he was merely a tool in China's modernization.
 
Mao was constantly examining himself, and when he entered Beijing on the eve of victory in 1949, he said to Zhou Enlai that "we are entering the city to be tested," a way of reminding himself that "we have to be different from the emperors.” I read the memoirs of one of Mao’s staff, who wrote that when Mao finished writing his final commentary for the 1956 collection Socialist Upsurge in China’s Countryside[4] it was already 4:00 a.m. His personal doctor took a walk with him, and said to him, "Chairman Mao, our revolution has been successful, and you should get your rest." At the time Mao was in his 60s, and his face fell.  He answered: "We must continue the revolution because we are in danger of returning to feudalism." This shows that he was self-conscious and wanted to discipline himself not to become an emperor in the process of China's journey toward modernization.
　　 
From the moment when China was forced to begin to modernize down to the present day, we still have not completely modernized, and we, the people, are still the instruments of China's modernization. This is how we should understand the Chinese revolution, which is not only the revolution led by the Communist Party, or the revolution led by Sun Yat-sen, or the Hundred Days Reform in 1898, or the revolution of Tan Sitong[5] 谭嗣同 (1865-1898) and company. All of these revolutions were striving to accomplish one thing: to change China from a traditional society to a modern one.　　　　 
 
The Inevitability of the Outbreak of the Revolution
 
Some people may say that the process of revolution is too cruel, but revolution is inevitable. If we talk about cruelty, all revolutions, past and present, have been cruel. The modernization of England began with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which was preceded by nearly a century of war. It was at a time of the Little Ice Age and all of Europe was in famine, and there were incidents of cannibalism. China, too, was in the midst of a violent moment of dynastic change and people were also starving. 
 
Compared to Europe, the Chinese revolution was much more difficult. China is a huge country and Chinese civilization had not experienced the ruptures we see in Europe, which meant that revolution was difficult in a cultural sense, and even more difficult politically. The object of the revolutions in both China and the West was at first the power of the monarchy, but Europe was more fortunate in that the European monarchies were not as powerful as the Chinese emperors.  In addition, religion was a check on monarchical power in Europe, which meant that religion and the revolutionares could make common cause to oppose monarchical power, or revolutionaries could simply launch their revolution under the banner of religion. 
 
During the reign of the Catholic king Charles I from 1625 to 1649,  a conflict broke out between Catholics and Protestants, and many of the rich merchants in the English Parliament were Protestants, which meant that religion joined together with the rising bourgeoisie, and led the king to the executioner’s block. So the English revolution had a dominant force, and their revolution was easier than China's, but the process was also very violent, and the war lasted almost a century. 
 
From this perspective, the Chinese revolution was not an alliance.  China had no religion to speak of, and civil society was very weak. The Chinese revolution had multiple tasks to carry out, including not only human liberation and political liberation, but also ideological liberation.　　 
 
China has a long history of imperial power. Since the unification of the empire in 221 B.C.E. by China’s first emperor Qin Shi Huang, China entered the imperial era, which was not feudal.  Feudalism in China refers to the Western Zhou period (1045-771 B.C.E.), the Spring and Autumn period (770-446 B.C.E.), and the Warring States period (445-221 B.C.E.), and Marx's description of China's feudal society is incorrect. Marx did not understand China or East Asian culture, and his "Asiatic Mode of Production" is not altogether accurate. The imperial monarchy was more powerful than the feudal monarchy, so the influence of monarchy on China was deeply rooted.　　 
 
Chinese civilization reached the peak of the world's agrarian civilization in the Song Dynasty (960-1279), and in the absence of the cooling of the planet, we would have probably have had a breakthrough, quite possibly 1000 years ago, and achieved an industrial revolution. At that time, half of Kaifeng’s population was burning coal, and China was technically prepared; muskets and looms had been invented, and the emergence of steam engines was entirely within the range of possibilites. However, because of the Little Ice Age, nomads from the north took turns invading the south, and in the process destroyed the great Song civilization. 
 
In the face of natural disasters and barbarian invasions, Chinese culture began to become conservative during the late Northern (960-1127) and Southern Song (1127-1279) dynasties. The Cheng brothers and Zhu Xi[6] blamed human greed for the turmoil, so instead of encouraging resistance against the foreign enemies, they pushed Confucianism to the extreme and turned it into a conservative doctrine. The stagnation of China during the Ming-Qing (1368-1911) period was the dual result of the barbaric rule of the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) and Chinese civilization’s move toward conservatism. This influence was far-reaching and continues even today; in terms of their general mindset, I am afraid that most ordinary people in China today are still stuck in the 19th century.
　　
Therefore, China's modernization had no allies; our modernization has been difficult because the forces of tradition are too strong. That is why Tan Sitong said that “reform in all countries begin with bloodshed.  No one has yet shed blood for China’s reform, which is why our country is not flourishing.  Please start with me.”[7] When he said this, Tan had already taken refuge in a foreign embassy, but he left the embassy in order to die.  He wanted to use his death to show everyone that national progress requires bloodshed. 
 
To engage in counter-factuals for a moment, the only shortcoming of the Chinese revolution is that if  Sun Yat-sen had not died so early, Chinese history might have taken a different turn, and perhaps our revolution would not have been so tragic. Because Dr. Sun handed over the reins to the wrong person, the revolutionary process became very tragic indeed. Chiang Kai-shek was a gangster from the Shanghai Bund, however, after he studied at a military academy in Japan, his dumb loyalty earned Sun’s appreciation, but he had no historical vision. Chiang Kai-shek usurped the power of the Kuomintang through his military might, and his rise to power was tantamount to usurpation. Wang Jingwei 汪精卫 (1883-1944) was no match for Chiang Kai-shek and he ultimately had to recognize Chiang's authority.[8] 
 
If Sun Yat-sen had chosen Wang Jingwei as his successor, imposed a strict organization on the Kuomintang, somehow continued Sun’s policy of "uniting with Russia and supporting the Communists," and kept the military under control, then the Chinese revolution might have turned out differently.
　　 
In a sense, the later revolution led by the Communist Party was inevitable but accidental. Mao Zedong played a very important role in the Communist-led revolution. He was an intellectual who was determined to change the world through military action, and his personal history is the history of the Communist Party’s striving for success.　　 
 
Mao's success was the result of many fortuitous events. He was captured by the militia in Jiangxi, and he bribed them with a few silver dollars and got out of danger. If he had died there, the revolution would have been over. At the beginning of the Long March, Otto Braun’s (1900-1974) group of three heeded Zhu De's 朱德 (1886-1976) plea[9] before bringing Mao Zedong along, otherwise the Long March would also have failed. After the Zunyi Conference[10] in January 1935, the CCP embarked on the Long March, climbing snowy mountains and crossing the plains, and if the Red Army had gone straight to the Soviet Union, the revolution would have been over, because the Ma Family Army[11] was waiting in the Northwest, and the exhausted Red Army would have known the same fate as the Western Expedition,[12] which was defeated in the Northwest. It was only because Mao Zedong had picked up an old newspaper that he knew Liu Zhidan 刘志丹(1903-1936)[13] was in northern Shaanxi, so Mao temporarily changed his mind and went to Yan'an. The later Xi'an Incident[14] in December 1936 was also fortuitous, otherwise it would have been difficult for the Red Army to establish itself. So, without these chance events, the Communist revolution would not have succeeded. 
 
But we can't just look at chance events; the revolution led by the Chinese Communist Party was also a necessity in some sense.  It was the Communist Party, and not the Kuomintang, that inherited the Chinese revolution started by  Sun Yat-sen. All along, there were many opportunities for the Nationalists and Communists to cooperate and to accelerate the modernization of China without the need for a fierce and bloody revolution, but all of these opportunities were missed. 
 
My grandfather was a Communist martyr, but he also worked for the Kuomintang county committee in Xin’gan County.  In my view, he belonged both to the KMT and to the CCP, because this was a United Front period and cross membership was allowed. Up until 1945, when the peace talks between the two parties failed, there was always a chance for the Communist Party to cooperate. Mao Zedong at one point wanted to move CCP headquarters to Huaiyin so that it would be convenient for him to go to Nanjing for meetings, because the Communist Party wanted to be part of the government. 
 
But Chiang Kai-shek did not have much historical perspective and made another mistake by fighting the civil war. He believed that it was the Xi’an Incident that had kept him from wiping out the Communists in 1936, and that ten years later, here was another opportunity that he could not miss, so he once again chose the wrong side of history. Chiang Kai-shek was not a great man in terms of military ability, organizational talent, or strategy.   Why did he fail when he had such a powerful army? It was because he had no organizational skills and those under him did not listen to his commands. Chiang Kai-shek missed the opportunity to become the instrument of China's modernization, and handed the opportunity to Mao Zedong. 
 
In "Before at My Grandfather’s Portait" I reflected on the Chinese revolution and came to the conclusion that we are all tools of Chinese modernization. Returning to the historical situation at the the time, modernization was not possible without sacrifice. The English revolution was extremely tragic, beginning with the beheading of Charles I.  After Charles’s son retook the throne, Oliver Cromwell's body was exhumed, and his corpse hanged, meaning that he was humiliated even after his death. I used to teach in a Cambridge University program, and I asked the British students whether this passage was included in their textbooks.  They said no. I guess it was too cruel for that. The French Revolution was similar in that the revolutionaries killed each other, and it was also very brutal.　　
 
But the revolution brought results, and Napoleon started a war to protect the achievements of the French Revolution, affecting many countries throughout Europe, but all the places Napoleon's army invaded developed faster than other places in the next century or two.
 
Therefore, for old countries, especially countries with a long history like China, to move from the old society to the modern society, Enlightenment alone is not enough, and there must also be a bloody revolution to completely eradicate the old forces and finally achieve modernization.
 
Notes

[1]姚洋,  “我的革命史观,” posted on Aisixiang on April 1, 2019.  It is not clear if the piece had been published elsewhere prior to be posed on Aisixiang, but information supplied in the essay indicates that it was written in 2018 or 2019.

[2]Translator’s note:  Presumably because the houses constitute a claim on the land? See here for more information.

[3]Translator’s note:  Yao in fact only cites only part of the inscription, but I include the entire quote for reasons of clarity.

[4]Translator’s note:  Yao gives the name of the document as 掀起社会主义建设的新高潮, which does not seem to exist, but Socialist Upsurge in China’s Countryside was a large volume of documents with Mao’s commentaries, which is surely what Yao is referring to.  The memoirs are surely those of Li Zhisui, Mao’s personal physician, available in English translation as The Private Life of Chairman Mao.

[5]Translator’s note:  Tan Sitong well a well-known reformer in the late 19th century, identified with Kang Youwei’s and Liang Qichao’s Hundred Days’ Reform in 1898.  Tan was executed after a coup returned the conservative faction to power in the Qing court.

[6]Translator’s note:  The Cheng brothers were Cheng Hao 程顥 (1032-1085) and Cheng Yi 程颐 (1033-1107) who, together with Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1200), are considered the founders of Neoconfucianism.

[7]Translator’s note:  The Chinese quote is 各国变法，无不从流血而成。今中国未闻有因变法而流血者，此国之所以不昌者也。有之，请从嗣同始.  Yao paraphrases the quote, which is somewhat confusing for the reader not already familiar with what Tan said.

[8]Translator’s note:  Yao actually says that Wang had no choice but to accept the merger of the Nanjing and Wuhan governments 宁汉合流, a reference to factional divisions within the Kuomintang prior to the establishment of the Nanjing government in 1927.  Wang, one of Chiang Kai-shek’s chief rivals at the time, is better known—and generally despised—for his collaboration with the Japanese invaders.

[9]Translator’s note:  Otto Braun was a German Communist, sent by the Komintern to China, who played an important military role in the Jiangxi Soviet and at the beginning of the long march.  Zhu De was an important military figure.  Many details about the Long March remain in dispute.

[10]Translator’s note :  Held in the first months of the Long March, the Zunyi Conference is often portrayed as the moment when Mao Zedong first established his authority in the Communist movement, although recent research has called this into question.

[11]Translator’s note:  The reference is to a coalition of militarists in the region that would eventually become Xinjiang, all Muslims surnamed Ma.

[12]Translator’s note:  Part of the Red Army that was sent to occupy Ningxia and Gansu, but was subsequently defeated by local militarists.

[13]Translator’s note:  Liu Zhidan is often portrayed as the founder the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Base Area in north-west China, which later became the Yan'an Soviet, although recent research as called this into question.

[14]Translator’s note:  In the Xi’an Incident, Kuomingtang troops from originally from Manchuria—occupied by the Japanese since 1931—were sent to Yan’an to confront the Communists, but the Communists convinced them that Chinese should join together to resist the Japanese, and the Kuomintang forces refused to engage.  Chiang Kai-shek flew from Nanjing to Xi’an to resolve the crisis, but was kidnapped by Manchurian troops, and only released when he agreed to change his policy.  The Xi’an Incident was an important moment leading to the Second United Front between the Kuomintang and the CCP.