CHINA’S RISE: AN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Featuring:
Professor Jonathan Spence
Sterling Professor of History
Yale University

In Discussion With:
Dorinda Elliott
Former Assistant Managing Editor, Time Magazine

New York City , March 16, 2006

Mike Kulma: Professor Spence, Dinda, ladies and gentlemen good evening and welcome. I’m Mike Kulma Associate Director of Policy and National programs here at the Asia Society. I am delighted you could make it for what promises to be an excellent discussion on a very interesting and timely topic. Before I go into the substance of this evening’s program and though I recognize many familiar faces in the audience, for those of you who are not familiar with the Asia Society, I want to speak very briefly about us. Asia Society is a global organization dedicated to strengthening relationship and deepening understanding between and among the peoples, leaders, and institutions of Asia and the United States. The Asia Society does this through extensive programming in the fields of policy, culture, business, education and the arts from our nine offices spread across Asia and the United States. This year we are very excited to be celebrating our 50 th anniversary since our founding by John D. Rockerfeller III in 1956 and I invite you to join us in marking this milestone in our history. In an exciting year of high profile events in New York and around the world, many of these you may have already heard about in recent weeks from the Asia 21 Young Leaders Forum to our Anniversary Dinner in February to the new US-China Center we are in the process of putting into place. Those of you who are new to the Society this evening, we would love to have you join us and we have membership materials available to you as you leave. We also have information about upcoming programs and our fantastic exhibit, ‘ A Passion for Asia – The Rockerfeller Family Collects’, currently on view on the second and third floor galleries.

Now on to the heart of this evening’s discussion. Tonight’s program marks the inaugural event on a new signature program series on China’s rise. In this series and over the coming months, the Asia Society will take an in depth look at the rise of China and what it means for China, the US and the world in historical, political, economic, cultural and educational terms. The next program in our series will take place in mid-April, date still to be confirmed around the time of President Hu’s visit to the United States. That program, in April, will focus on the political aspects of China’s rise and will feature professor Chung Lee, William Kenan, professor of government at Hamilton College.

This evening’s program focuses in on the historical aspects of China’s rise. Although the rise of China is one of the most important developments of this century, it is a global change with deep historical roots. Tonight we will explore the living history that underpins China’s emergence as a global power. To inaugurate this series and to lead in this evening’ s historical journey, I could not be more excited than to introduce Professor Jonathan Spence and Dorinda Elliot. I am not going to go into great detail about their backgrounds because you have their bios with you, but I want to say a few brief words. Professor Spence is the Sterling Professor of History at Yale and one of the foremost experts on Chinese history in the world. In fact, if we took an informal poll this evening from the audience most of us would have read some of his numerous books. Finally Professor Spence is also a great friend of the Asia Society, having spoken here many times in the past. Professor Spence we are delighted to welcome you back.

Speaking of close friends of the Asia Society, I am equally delighted to welcome Dorinda (Dinda) Elliot, back to the stage. Dinda is the Former Assistant Managing Editor at Time Magazine and will join Condi Nast’s Traveler in April as Deputy Editor Special Projects. Dinda has an extensive background in journalism and lived in Asia for fifteen years covering China for Newsweek from 1986 to 1990 during the student movement years. Dinda thank you.

Before turning over the floor to Dinda, I would like to do a couple of housekeeping notes. I would like you to please turn of all of your cell phones and beepers so as to not disrupt this evenings proceeding and hope that you will also take a few minutes at the end of your stay here today to fill out the audience survey we distributed so that we can learn more about how to do better programming in the future.

Dinda.

Dorinda Elliot: Well first let me just say that it is an absolute thrill to be here tonight on the same stage as Professor Spence who I’ve revered for many, many years. So it is really an honor to be here. And I thought I’d just start with a tiny, tiny intro to help frame our conversation a little bit and then jump into questions so we can hear as much as we can of what you (Prof. Spence) have to say and at the end we’ll open it up to questions from the audience.

So as China hurtles into the world capitalism and modernity, its not at all crazy to wonder, it seems to me, how is China’s history relevant. Mao Zedong and the communists seemed to close the doors on China’s history, throwing out the Imperial system, Confucianism and any other tradition they could think of and then once again after Deng Xiaoping launched his reforms, capitalist reforms, the country seemed to be turning its back on and even sometimes trying to erase its recent history, the political turmoil and violence of the last fifty years. But the question that arises is that are there roots in China’s history that can help us understand where China is going today. The country is facing enormous challenges as it struggles to become modern. Will it become democratic or will it remain autocratic or will it become some hybrid in between? Will Guanxi or the reliance on personal relations mean that China will always be corrupt or will it somehow evolve into a system in which who you know matters but doesn’t determine your entire chance of success or failure. Will real rule of law ever prevail in China or will China always rely on the idea that the government knows best. Will the country ultimately splinter facing all the challenges that it has these days? So if history can provide a road map at all, it seems a great moment to look back and see if we can find any clues in the past that will help us understand where China is going now and I can’t think of anybody who is more qualified to do that than Professor Spence. So, let’s jump into some questions and I guess we’ll start with some politics.

It’s a hot topic. Hu Jintao managed to take over in a totally peaceful, smooth transition from Jiang Zemin not long ago and Jiang Zemin was even ready to give up the reins of the Central Military Commission. In your view, Professor Spence, how significant was it that there was a peaceful transition and that that smooth succession took place in terms of China’s history. And what does it tell us in terms of what country China is becoming?

Professor Spence: Ok, I am not going to try and answer all the first 15 minutes of loaded questions. We’ll start with this one which is hard enough. I think the Hu Jintao succession which you can say avoided some kinds of violence and feuding that’s happened with earlier successions and changes in China, but we can’t lose sight of the fact this was a totally secretive process and so in praising it for not being violent, we can hardly praise it for being open at any level whatsoever. And we don’t really know any of the background forces that went into the -- I mean I think that when Jiang Zeming came to power it was in a very very turbulent moment and also even Jiang had to work along with Deng Xiaoping for many many years, who was obviously skillful or maybe China’s leaders were skillful in backing off and allowing this powerful position to come to a really young and untried potential leader. But I would put weight on the secrecy, the extraordinary secrecy, that makes such a crucial decision without bringing more than a handful of people into that decision. And I think the size of the communist party is sort of baffling too. I mean this is 70 million people in this elite organization and it is pretty hard even to consult them in a most round about way and the government seems to have no way of doing that.

Dorinda Elliot: Can you talk a little bit about the Mandate of Heaven? To what extent is the Mandate of Heaven still relevant and given that there is plenty of chaos out there these days in the provinces in China and protests every day and what does that say?

Professor Spence: Well the Mandate of Heaven is a real concept from very early on in China and it does suggest responsibility by the ruler for the ruled, at least at some level. The Mandate is very much linked to the cosmos, the universe around us. I have just been reading that, in fact, I am right in the middle of trying to do some work on the Jesuits in China in the late sixteenth/early seventeenth century and particularly the way they worked in the Imperial Astronomy Bureau both in the late Ming and the early Qing. One scholar I had just been reading pointed out that the Jesuits, here to spread the word of God and to work at astronomy because they were very good mathematicians, actually found themselves mainly working on Astrology which is immensely different. And these churchmen were having to make an enormous amount of very difficult political calls because astrology means you have to assign lucky days and this sort of thing and the Jesuits were tangled with the definition of the Mandate.

If we take mandate to mean you’ve got to be responsive at some level to opposition from your own people that has been sparked by real causes not just bad tempered people. If there is something seriously wrong with your country, wisdom tells you in China that you lose the mandate, that you lose the power to be able to govern and that may be an enormous thing. Some of you may want to come back to that in our general discussion, a huge, a complicated theme. But traditionally the state extracts more and more from the people in China as dynasties progress and that is what makes some of this very contentious idea of a cyclical period so forceful because China has been marked by enormous acts of collective violence and this is by no means a communist monopoly or a 20 th century warlord phenomena. You find this extraordinarily early in China. And famine is one of the causes of this. And famine in China, because of the river system means the bureaucracy has to be effective. And so the state and the bureaucracy itself and the Emperor as leader, and in a handful of cases the Empress as leader, have to somehow balance the resources of the society with the extractive needs of the center. At many times this has gone out of control and sometimes the government has fallen because of insurrections from below, with people losing the mandate. In that sense the Communist Party has not yet lost the Mandate. There are major problems. Collective violence in China is anything from three people up and its also just the vocals, I mean, some neighbors yelling at each other that can be classified as an example of collective violence. So can villagers barricading a whole area with broken down trucks and refusing to pay their taxes and killing policemen. So we are dealing here with an extraordinary, shadowy kind of thing acclaimed to god. One reason why there is so much caution in China about the internet, the use of cell phones, pagers and so one is that the government is losing track of its ability to stop people from gathering in large groups extremely rapidly. The analysts and journalists are sure the government has not yet learned how to work on that. If the government is going to have more and more problems in the countryside and taxation avoidance is getting more and more prevalent and as resources in the country diminish, as arable land goes for infrastructure for roads and for highways and for airports, you’re going to get a very, very explosive situation, much more explosive than the international monitory exchanges that constantly get headlined.

Dorinda Elliot: Reminding me of another parallel, I think historical parallel, is that government in Beijing these days is increasingly making an effort to try to listen to voices of people. They are using social surveys, polls, all kinds of things to try to get information because I think they are deeply aware of the fear of losing the Mandate. But as I recall there was a long-standing tradition in the imperial system of where somehow the voice of the people would trickle, find its way up to the emperor.

Professor Spence: There was a terrific system in place and a very powerful system for reaching the emperor. The question was would the emperor be receptive to it at the end of chain. And again in Q&A we can look at that chain a bit more if you’d like which could essentially in traditional China link people from the very poor village level ultimately to the imperial court in Beijing, or wherever it may be because it hasn’t always been in Beijing. But there were also plenty of rulers who simply refused to acknowledge the body of information reaching them. You could argue that information flow and control of information flow is one of the key themes of all Chinese history, certainly for 3000 years. As the same time as I was listening to what you were saying about the government reaching out, the government is also closing off. It was closing blogs, closing certain channels of information, punishing people for using certain kinds of expressions, for reaching out to foreign sources of information. So we’ve got these two things going on at once as well. I remember when I was doing some research on Mao, I was startled to find that for the first four years after 1949, when the communists came to power, Mao was actually very open to reading letters from poor people and they were sent to through to him from his staff. Part of the tragedy of Maoism was the increasing isolation of Mao himself by his own senior party lieutenants, from the voice of the people coming from below. This enabled, I think, the ultimately deadly activities of the Great Leap Forward by the Cultural Revolution. You simply couldn’t reach him any more. And in all societies, think, I have to watch very carefully the willingness of leaders to listen to voices from outside. The most dangerous people in society are those that filter information to leaders, I believe that is a very heavy responsibility.

Dorinda Elliot: Pointed remark.

Professor Spence: That’s a general remark. I am a firm believer in democracy.

Dorinda Elliot: Talk a little bit about the fear of chaos and the whole concept of luan and how and why that seems to resonate so powerfully in China.

Professor Spence: The concept of chaos is deeply entrenched. Again all societies face this to some extent or the other and try to explain it in some way or the other. But in China, this word luan is really linked to this idea of the Mandate and I would say this is true over several thousand years. But just as a huge generalization. Luan means you are not able to impose any kind of discipline on the subsidiary units to the state. In other words, in Luan, you would not have curfews in the major towns, you would not have tax flow into the center, you would not hurt state granaries filled with grain that you need to succor people in times of famine. Luan would mean that you don’t build the canals and the rivers properly. Luan would mean that inside the enormously complex hydraulics system of China with so many dykes to protect against the Yellow River, the Yangtse and all the subsidiary rivers that you no longer get a smoothly functioning hydraulic core. Luan is many, many things. It can be personal or it can be order disappearing from the family. There is something very poignant when order disappears from the family, when men go away to work, or become refugees or the children are sold. Then again Luan creeps in here. Luan can be metaphysical. Luan can mean that your thinkers, your intellectual elite are taking belief systems that are far from the conventional ones. So the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644 can be based on Luan. Luan, the uncontrollable excesses of too many thinkers asking questions about the role of the self and morality being internal as opposed to morality being something that came through education, discipline, and the traditional value system. And by 1660, you find many people in China blaming these thinkers of the 15 th and 16 th century for inducing luan. You can say it means a breaking of ranks, a losing of discipline and the Chinese have a very strong sense how that ratchets rapidly out of control. Some of this that seems totally absurd and the person given life imprisonment or some kind of opposition to a local bureaucrat that is no more than a shouting match and the person disappears into the morasses of the administrative penal system. This is because the charting of these moments is a very strong part of Chinese history and has come down to our own time.

Dorinda Elliot: Democracy it seems is based on some comfort level with messiness and a comfort level with chaos of some sort. The question in my mind would be, do you see anything in Chinese history or in different roots of Chinese thinking that would allow for democracy to evolve? Just to be a little more specific, I remember when living in Beijing in the late-80s Zhao Ziyang, the former communist party chief himself, was thrown out of the party and died in his courtyard house in jail. But he used to talk about a sort of over stability and he was someone that I believe felt that there was a different path that China could take. What I want to ask you is if there is any likelihood at all that China can move in a democratic direction?

Professor Spence: I would say yes and I would say there are examples in the past that can be adduced to make that yes a meaningful one. Order cannot be imposed everywhere and it depend, in a sense, on what levels you want your democratic thinking to be manifested in. Is it going to be manifested in the youngsters choice on whom to marry, is it going to affect whether you must stay in the same place all your life, is it going to affect the ability of migrating possibly to another country, let alone within China? Is it going to affect what religion you choose and how you choose to practice it? Historians would find many examples of rural organizations that are on a different track, there are village representative groupings, maybe assembly is too formal a word. All kinds of ways, even while you had headmen at the village imposed by the state or the state representatives at the local level, you also had a lot of give and take at the community level, traditionally. And the same in is happening in various areas of China now and these are monitored, some of them by agencies from the state. And the scholars try to make a specialty of trying to watch local indigenous groupings. So from older, what you call the village compact which were really outside the purview of the state, as long as their functions, as long as they didn’t lead to luan, they could let you share in the village decisions. Examples might be where to put a bridge, or to ease the way to markets. A student here done a wonderful dissertation on what he called night market. I had no idea how, in traditional China, the peasants could higher boats or boats would be crisscrossing China on the local waterways, entirely on their own planning, based on their own cues. Villagers could have their crops taken to market between about two and five a.m. and the money would come back to them with the boatman at about 9 o’clock by which time they were already hard on their new days work. This whole system, I never knew anything about, and this student has been unraveling huge amounts of information. It explains how Chinese markets were outside the city wall, not inside. That means curfews didn’t have as much value or importance as we thought.

Dorinda Elliot: So there are always some ways of getting around the rules.

Professor Spence: There are always ways. Let us look at traders and merchants. The most understudied group in China is merchants/businesspeople in the 19 th and 20 th century as new businesses took off. There were obviously all kinds of merchant associations in China with all kinds of give and take and something very, very close to democratic sharing of power and influence and zones. So this was localistic in some ways but it was not controlled by the state. This leads directly to today’s discussion of corporate involvement in China. And some of you might have read Jim McGregor’s book on a billion customers. McGregor is very, very witty and informed, I think, about showing how this has come into the modern commercial world, and leads to a lot of freedoms. I could go on all night, but I’ll stop there.

Dorinda Elliot: Once again the idea that there is a comfort level with economic freedom, but on the political side it’s obviously less.

Professor Spence: If you probe, you might find more examples on the political side.

Dorinda Elliot: Can we talk a little about rule of law? Chinese leaders talk all the time about the rule of law and yet dissidents still get in prison regularly and the party remains above the law and courts can get bought and all these things happen. Indeed the idea of an independent judicial system seems somewhat heretical even today in China. So what are the roots, in China’s view, toward law? Can you talk a little bit about is their idea of rule of law.

Professor Spence: Yes, these are all hard questions. The rule of law is linked, as I said in China, to codification of law. In the penal side of law, the emphasis is on punishment and penalty. And the very first founding dynasty, Qin, one of the first things it did was impose codification of law and strict punishment that would be imposed without regard to your family background or your wealth. It was meant to be an equitable system. The rule of law was both coercive but also egalitarian. In some sense people had the right to be beheaded together. So you were not meant to be able to buy your way out of the system, or use your father’s rank. Of course exceptions began to appear. This was originally codified with the vision that the law could be made clear. The idea was that if people knew what the rules were, they would follow them, especially if you back those rules with extraordinarily strict punishment. We have to remember that early punishment included cutting off of hands and feet, castration, branding in the face with the nature of your crime, ferocious beatings, and so on. But if you stayed on the right side of the law that never happened. The idea was that if people knew the penalty for breaking the law, they would not break the law. That psychology doesn’t work in most societies, I fear. No I don’t fear, no it doesn’t work in most societies. And people will think they will get away with it or they’ll think what they have to do is more important, they’ll deserve the punishment and take it. So the idea of a codified law was linked to the idea that law should be reorganized in each successive dynasty. The right to criticize the Emperor, for instance, was a right allowed to a certain branch of the bureaucracy. A special censory division was allegedly able to criticize the Emperor. There were a lot of times one could get killed for speaking out. You could liken that to something like the Hundred Flowers Movement or the middle stage of the Cultural Revolution. You’re told to speak out but when you do you get hit for it or killed for it. Nevertheless, China has a great tradition of speakers against central power. I am trying not to sound too draconian or approving of it, but there was a whole tradition in which it was your obligation as an educated person to speak up for what you thought was right. Part of education was education as privilege, education as moral responsibility. So people would speak out against imperial malfeasance and the Emperor would respond by looking at the law or invoking the law and copies would be sent right down to the local county level in China by each of the dynasties and then you had legal specialists at each sub-county. The code would get longer and longer as each dynasty lasted longer and longer, because all sorts of precedents were attached to the law and also law. You would use one law to refer to one kind of thing that would refer to another law that would refer to another kind of thing. The law, although codified, had moved into some sense of being hierarchical, particularly in gender relations and generational relations. For example, fathers would be punished less for killing sons, than for sons killing fathers. And for example, a son raising his hand against his father could be punished very severely and in some cases even executed.

Dorinda Elliot: That is some part of the continuum hierarchy.

Professor Spence: Well that is not really part of the continuum, that’s a whole other area of discussion. It is hierarchical. Parts of it are echoed in some Confucian texts but most of it comes from something called the legalist tradition. This code was penal, tough and was meant to be all encompassing. There were really no lawyers in China. The law was not encouraged as a profession. It was not regarded as a profession. So you could argue that another word for this could be law without lawyers. Law in which the state makes them so clear that you don’t need lawyers. And indeed, the Chinese called lawyers tricksters. By definition, they were people whose job was to muddle the law not to clarify it because the law was clear. Lawyers would only muddle the law and therefore the state would try to keep them out of circulation.

Dorinda Elliot: For starters that really tells you how courageous lawyers are functioning and representing dissidents in China these days and that take a lot of guts.

Professor Spence: Scholars have found, that people still willing to practice law are willing to be termed as tricksters and they would accept the job of guiding someone through the thickets of the code in exchange for money in some cases, in other cases this was pro bono. But recent scholars have found that the great majority of these were property cases and particularly cases of women deprived of their right to property by the men in the local community. So the scholars, who have done the finest work on this, have found to their surprise, that women were the greatest users of the law because that was the way you could reach the magistrate and then somehow get into the male dominated system that rose above you. So it is true that representing dissidents in China has some very noble antecedents. It is a dangerous thing to do as I am afraid a good many people could tell you from jail.

Dorinda Elliot: Should we open up to questions?

Question: I am the President of the Education and Literacy Fund for Africa. Is there a big divide now between the young Chinese that are acquainted with modern devices and modern thinking and exposure in comparison to the old ways of the government and the law? Is there a big divide now and how large is the population from 25 and younger in China?

Professor Spence: I think you (Dinda) have lived in China longer than me. I will throw in a few comments.

Dorinda Elliot: My first response to that would be that there is a huge and increasing gap but what it really has to do with is money. And so the gaps between people who have money in the cities and the great majority of those who don’t have money out in the countryside is widening. The people in the cities are very very modern indeed these days and then you have peasants from the countryside who don’t have much of anything and don’t know much about the outside world. I think the question was how the government must respond and I think the current government of Hu Jintao is very concerned about the problems in the countryside and the fact that there is so much corruption at the middle and lower levels all across the country. And they are trying to do something about it and they are trying to listen but it’s not easy to control and run a country that large.

Professor Spence: I think that’s a good point. My feeling is that there probably is an economic divide more than a generational one. Though that is a huge area for discussion. People in the countryside itself are beginning to use whatever mobile technologies are available and as units get cheaper and cheaper that economic division may fade. The differences that are occurring in the countryside are so complicated. Surely the current government of Hu Jintao is trying to get more money back into the countryside and of course a lot of that money is being pumped into the countryside by the migrants from the countryside who have gone to the cities and are working on the new infrastructures of the cities and they are pumping the money back to the countryside again. So there are all kinds of very complicated monetary flows here. But there is a sort of rich group of people with the latest pagers, the latest phones, the latest means of access to internet, the most sophisticated know how and so on. And I guess very often their parents don’t know what they are doing. And in that case there is some parallel with our society. I hadn’t the faintest idea what my children were up to once they got on these machines. And I’ve never subscribed to blocking devices. You know I would probably do that wrong and block myself. I mean one thing you really hear is that the Chinese jumped all sorts of generations of intermediate technology. I think the biggest jump, somebody has said long ago, a hundred years ago, why can’t China just jump capitalism and just go from something pretty much feudal to pretty much socialist. And there was a sort of vision that seems to have gone out of the window for now. But one thing I was thinking for instance was jumped over, in terms of the organization of the Chinese society is that of the phone in every home. The idea of a wired culture has gone. And in many cases there would have never been a phone in many of those villages and now villages have various kinds of cell phones and pagers and Blackberries and this kind of thing. So the kind of need for wiring has gone the way of the telegraph and other systems. So in that sense the Chinese youth have jumped just as they have straight over the, what was to me the center of life, long playing records, you remember that weird thing and the joy one had in owning fifty long playing records. That’s true in America too, kids haven’t a clue what these are and in China they haven’t had them at all. And now they’ve gone straight to downloading music from the latest rock show in Shanghai and then circulating it to their kids.

Question: I was privileged to spend a year or two at the Foreign Affairs University at Beijing, at that time Foreign Affairs College, and before that I’d been at Wuhan University for a bit in 1986. Two questions, one your comments on the several companies that were on the hot seat in Congress, especially Yahoo, because people are right now in jail because of their turning over names to the Chinese government. Your comments on that. Secondly during that period I was in China, 01-02, after about a half a year there talking to people and looking around and so on, I concluded the following, which nobody would agree with me on and mostly nobody here. I concluded that ten to fifteen years from then, which would be 2010 to 2017, by then there would be a full-blown democracy in China with full-blown rights, free speech, multi-party system, and the whole business. I have not moved away from that prediction at all and I am interested in your thoughts on that.

Professor Spence: The first one would be a comment on the handing over of names. This seems to be an unbelievably difficult area and to what extent can or should the Chinese government monitor the accessibility, and to what extent foreigners investing in that country are obliged to follow their own rules. I mean the Chinese rules and laws when they find them distasteful politically or morally, this goes back to all kinds of agonizing decisions about morality and how much you speak out at all times or whether you glide along. I mean the same is true of people running TV rights in China, with advertising rights. It comes in many areas. It also happened again under the Kuomintang. I haven’t even mentioned the early period of Chinese government, Republican government, of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. I suppose that is another whole evening. But Chiang Kai-shek and his government were struggling with some of these similar problems including problems about the law and problems about foreign investment. There has been a study written to show Chiang Kai-shek, because he couldn’t tax the foreign investment adequately in the 1930s, because of the foreign power, ended up bankrupting many of the Chinese indigenous industries. And that’s to be shown as the kind of thing the Chinese were facing in the 30s. And the kind of way the foreigners invested in the 20s and 30s in China again very much affected Chinese policy toward joint ventures and their attempt not to fall into that trap. Myself I’d be cautious on the sort of straight moral blame until I knew what the parameters were. I think there may be situations where one is making so much access available that there may be legitimacy in following the law of the country. But the handing over of names, when you know that they are going to be punished for what your society does not view as a crime is an incredibly delicate matter and I am not sure I can be clear about that. My other response is based on the belief in your case that by 2012 to 2017. It is difficult to be that precise, it’s like guessing the end of the world which is always risky. I think it’s remotely possible. Its possible that there will be a mixture of intermediate zones that are developing now with more power to the Peoples Congress and more power to the provincial congresses. This is where China came into the 20 th century. As I recall through provincial governments, provincial assemblies, county organizations and then urban council governments. All of these in different ways are being experimented with in China. And if the People’s Congress gets more feisty and more angry it may begin to ask more questions. One thing that is going to be true though in 2017 is that Chinese are not going to be welcoming foreigners o this process anymore than they did in the nineteen teens and nineteen twenties. Foreigners were to be kept out of the legislative structures in China. I think it is feasible that there will be some pretty massive changes in that direction. In the meantime a lot of Chinese are studying the Russian example and trying to work out how you could get some balance position in there and some may well be going back to the past to look at how those assemblies and groups functioned when they were conducive to law and order and when they were not. This discussion therefore gets us back to the luan idea. If democracy is going to cause chaos, do we want it?

Dorinda Elliot: Do you think there are studies on the mainstream about Taiwan in what’s going on in terms of democratization?

Professor Spence: Certainly some, but I don’t know in fact if there is systematic study of the election system.

Question: I don’t have any affiliation worth mentioning. What is your opinion on the comparable legitimacy of the Taiwanese aspirations for independence and mainland point of view that Taiwan belongs as part of the Chinese nation? And what do you foresee happening with regards to that issue.

Dorinda Elliot: I’d start by saying I don’t think Taiwan will ever be independent.

Professor Spence: Right. I mean it depends again I am not so sure and that. It is really a question of how long the situation can endure. I am not sure I have an absolutely total view on this. Part of it is, that there is an international law side. The whole question of how long some area has to be affiliated with another area to become part of that area. We can look at the Louisiana Purchase or what used to be California or what use to be Texas. Or in the British culture, what happened to Wales and Scotland. Taiwan was not part of China in a meaningful sense until the 1680s. Now is that a long time ago or fairly recent.

Dorinda Elliot: From a Chinese perspective it would be yesterday.

Professor Spence: Yesterday, since it well into the Qing dynasty before you got any kind of structured Chinese presence, as opposed to a little bit of casual trading, but that was not until the 1680s. In the 1890s the Chinese government legally, though under immense duress, but under international law legally gave up Taiwan to the Japanese government as the fruit of a disastrous defeat in war. So from 1683 until 1895, Taiwan was in various forms, but constantly changing integrated with the mainland. The Japanese controlled Taiwan as a colony from 1895 to 1945 when it became initially a tentative base for Kuomintang nationalist forces and after 1949 became their retreat from the mainland. So we have got a 200 year run in which this island was controlled by the mainland. In terms of how we want to balance that with Xinjian province, for instance, which was conquered in the 1750s and gave China its first large Muslim population, but then was named a province in the 1870s and was just by the skin of the teeth held on to by the Nationalists during the early 20 th century and later reoccupied by the communists. It could easily have gone to the Soviet Union but that’s another story. With Tibet again you have a completely separate series of historical dates to look at. Even with Manchuria itself we have separate dates to look at. And of course Manchuria itself was lost to the Japanese for a significant amount of time. So it’s a tricky one. The so-called earlier settlers in Taiwan are not themselves the inhabitants. Which makes it such a vexed question. So one wave of Chinese colonizers really settled Taiwan mainly for Fijian province from the 1680s to the 1890s. And a second wave from the Nationalist Party came in to Taiwan in the 1940s. Its not so much Taiwanese against Chinese in these elections, its Chinese from different times against Chinese from different times with different dialects and different speech patterns and so on. That is why this is a real tangle and that is why Chen Shui-bian has real difficulty, and though he did very narrowly get the election, there is a lot of grumbling about his attempt to sharpen this divide. Some people I have met say that this is not a good policy and the best thing to do is to let this whole thing alone, and hope both sides are sensible and in the meantime allow increasing. Also once you start getting more Chinese mainland contacts with Taiwan, once you start opening regular air and sea transportations, you might slowly move to what you might call a post-Hong Kong situation without the formalism of the Hong Kong takeover. If something like that might be possible, it seems to me that it probably is the best solution.

Dorinda Elliot: I always feel like it’s a tragedy, partly because the mainland it seems has so much that it could learn from Taiwan. And yet it doesn’t happen that way.

Question: I’m a student at Columbia. As a biography of Mao Zedong, I was wondering what you make of the recent biography Mao: The Unknown Story?

Professor Spence: Well, I reviewed the book in November of last year. I find it a very hard book to love. In my view, if you present somebody as unremittingly evil, in the way that that book does you essentially deny all historical agency to the Chinese people. You deny all historical factors that allowed Mao to rise to power in the way that he did. It cut out our memory and the memory of China, everything to do with warlordism and the realities of Japanese aggression in China and the force of foreign imperialism in China. You cut out everything about the tradition of collective violence in traditional China and you somehow push all that onto Mao. It’s not true. China was in a terrible state in the 1920s and 30s partly for the reasons we were circling around here, or chaos, and absolute breakdown and fragmentation into military chiefdoms of every conceivable kind and shape and violence that you can imagine. So for these reasons, even though some of the information was new, it read so one-sidedly that it seems to me that a huge amount of what the reader should know about was denied to the readership. I am not trying to be pro-Mao, I’m trying to be pro history by saying that history is a multitude of factors and to put the whole Cultural Revolution, the whole Great Leap Forward onto one person’s bloody mindedness is just too simple, too easy and it doesn’t ring true to me. I am afraid I wasn’t excited by it. I thought Philip Short’s, though long, work was good, and there are two major scholars bringing out works later this year or early next year. Some really good scholars. Mine was a quick survey, but these will be major scholarly appraisals. Mao is very difficult to evaluate and he did encourage and did himself do terrible things, but he did not himself kill 20 million people at such and such a time. He helped lead to a lack of equilibrium in which such things were possible in China’s name in the name of a kind of socialist system. So I would say it was just too simplified for my taste and doesn’t help us understand the tragedy that China has been through.

Question: It seems like in the press there is a movement about securing land rights and property reform in the countryside. Could you talk about how realistic that is, what it would mean for the government in terms of order and chaos, how viable it would be, and in kind of historical context what would farmers owning their own land mean?

Professor Spence: That is a deeply historical question in terms of Chinese approach to land rights. I am not sure if I will get all the details right. This is a very technical field in economic history. In Chinese traditional history, certainly going back to the tenth century or earlier, there could be multiple owners of any piece of land. So the historical tradition behind some of China’s problems with land ownership and land redistribution and land sale could get local economists nodding with agreement in the year 1033 as the would have nodded in agreement in the year 1265 and 1416 and so on. In China, land could be held in two or three different way depending on whether it was subsoil or above soil rights. One farmer could sell to another the land use right, but the original owner didn’t give up the land. In other words, the surface was seen as superficial even though that’s where the crops were grown because you were allowed to plough under that surface to a certain amount of depth. Something like mining became even more complex, because the mines go into the inner bowels of the earth. But this concept of multiple ownership and passing the ownership of the land and subdividing it to children, the absence of primogeniture in China, not passing it to the older child as in much of the English common law system on the land, led in China to constant and endless subdivisions of small parcels of land none of which were permanently owned by the tiller. So what about for instance the trees you planted there? There is a whole genre, by the way, of economic history on this, some of which I am trying to keep up with. Suppose you move from rice production to silk production. Supposing you plant mulberry trees on a piece of land next to the one that you owned the above soil rights to; but on that piece of land you don’t own you simply rent the right to plant you mulberry trees and you own the topsoil right over here and maybe over there you’ve got a little piece of land where you own the subsoil rights. That’s why the clerical staffs in the magistrates were grey before their time. It was very, very hard and led to an enormous amount of hooliganism. The neighboring owner might just come and cut down those trees and bankrupt the farmer who can no longer collect all his cocoons because the caterpillars are dying. This kind of malfeasance was quite common and it’s also linked very closely to the complexities of China’s taxation system. Whether the government was actually taxing the produce of the land or was taxing the income of the landlord or was taxing the value of the subsoil right that the landlord owned. Now how on earth do you take an accurate running inventory of that? Emperor after emperor sent squads of the equivalent of IRS hatchet men all over China to find out who the hell owned what. The farmers, like skilled people all over the world created, dummy ledgers, triple bookkeeping systems, subdivided five acres of land into maybe 200 parcels, each with a different name and found local farmers who would do that. So the government was unable to have an absolutely thorough acre-by-acre analysis of China’s land holdings. The first time, as far as I know, that that acre-by-acre land holding study was done was in the first period of Chinese land reform after 1949. So in that case the communists got onto something really complicated and in that case it led to confiscation, redistribution and reasserting state ownership of all land. We can see that as the focus of today’s problems. And it was Zhao Ziyang who said we much change this system, we must allow much longer leases, we are not going to give the land to the peasantry, it has been socialized and it is the property of the people, but we will allow farmers to be pragmatic farmers and make much more of their farming by letting them lease for a longer and longer time and Deng Xiaoping backed that. In the 1980s, the period you could lease land from got much longer till it became essentially for the life of the farmer. But there is nothing there to leave your children. You’ve got nothing to give them because the rights are temporary. And supposing you buy a long term right to use the land, if the family buys the right and then you get divorced, which you do in China as elsewhere, who gets that land right? Supposing the custody of the children is split between the parents? It’s a nightmare, a legal and financial problem. It may be eventually addressed by some kind of purchasing agreement/rights to Chinese, but at the moment its been overtaken by real estate developers in conjunction with party functionary and that is a dangerous mix. A lot of them have to widen highways and build airports. Whose land are you going to build it on and how are you going to deal with the increase in property values that go with that? These are the things that are being faced and why the future of China may be in the hands of people with really good legal and financial training and I would hope with a reasonable good understanding of their own history as well. Thank you.

Dorinda Elliot: How is that for Chinese history from the 10 th century until today. That was fantastic Professor. Thank you.