REVIEW: FROM THE RUINS OF EMPIRE

I recently finished reading Pankaj Mishra's new book, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia. It's an interesting read because it tries to combine the forms of a "historical essay" and an "intellectual biography" - in other words, he is telling the story of how different Asian societies worked through a series of different responses to Western imperialism, and showing how that diversity of response existed even at the level of individual critical thinkers.

These thinkers include familiar names like Ataturk, Gandhi and Sun Yat-sen, but also less well known figures such as Liang Qichao, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Sayyid Qutb. Major historical episodes covered include the 1857 Indian Mutiny, the Ottoman Sultan's late flirtation with Pan-Islamism, and the war of rhetoric between Lenin and President Wilson after the First World War. In answer to the question posed by Niall Ferguson in Empire - "can you have globalisation without gunboats?" - Mishra seems to say "yes, as long as 'globalisation' doesn't mean 'Europeanisation' or 'Americanisation.'" (See here for Mishra's scathing review of Ferguson's Civilisation.)

Reviewing the book, I found that its momentum is worn down by ambiguities in the writing - in particular, it is not always clear whether Mishra is paraphrasing other people, or expressing agreement with them. Similarly, the final chapters on the second half of the twentieth-century are a bit too condensed compared with the earlier elaboration of developments in the late ninteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Here is a recording of Mishra in conversation with the writer Ian Buruma, where some of the ambiguities in the book are addressed (and a short interview with the Guardian here):

And here is my more considered view:

The twenty-first-century will be Asia's century, but it won't necessarily be an Asian century; this seems to be the take-home message of Pankaj Mishra's sweeping book, which "seeks to offer a broad view of how some of the most intelligent and sensitive people in the East responded to the encroachments of the West (both physical and intellectual) on their societies." He argues that he political and economic resurgence of Asia does not signal the triumph of familiar "Asian" or "Western" values, but an eclectic mix of political ideologies that were forged during the struggle to overcome Western imperialism.
　
At the outset, Mishra informs us that: "The form of this book - part historical essay and part intellectual biography - is primarily motivated by the conviction that the lines of history converge in individual lives." (p.10) I am thus reviewing it in two parts.
　
First, the "historical essay" bit: Mishra's narrative covers the period from the arrival of Napoleon in Egypt in 1798 to last year's protests in Tahrir Square against Mubarak's rule. In his telling of "the remaking of Asia", the crucial shift on the part of the Asian intelligentsia is the move from an exclusively elite-oriented to a more mass-based model of modernisation; the Ottoman rulers' Tanzimat decree and the Qing Dynasty's 'Hundred Days' reform period are examples of the former, whilst the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the People's Republic of China are cited as examples of the latter.
　

Abdul Hamid II in 1908, making concessions to the Young Turks





The Iranian Revolution, 1979

What the book does superbly is to convey the enormous diversity and complexity of the Asian response to the West. Nevertheless, since his two central respondents - Rabindranath Tagore and Liang Qichao - travelled and lectured widely, it is possible to discern some general themes. Above all, it was the "great speed of change" unleashed by encounters with the West that shook these societies to their roots: "They knew that borrowing technical skills through a modern system of education from Europe wasn't enough; these borrowings brought with them a whole new way of life. They demanded an organised mass society whose basic unit was the self-reliant individual who pursues his economic self-interest while progressively liberating himself from...communal solidarities - a presupposition that threatened to wreck the old moral order." (p.301)
　
When initial efforts to harness the power of Western science were obstructed by domestic reactionaries, perceptive Asian thinkers identified the cause of Europe's hegemony in its "superior skills for 'industrial civilisation' or, more simply, organisation." (p.40) Over successive generations of inquisitive Asian respondents, we can observe an incremental shift in their focus from the instruments of "Europe's competitive edge" to its capacities for national mobilisation. The example of post-Meiji Japan, scaling ever-greater heights on the world stage, helped to foster the influential idea that countries needed a revolutionary vanguard, united by a political ideology, that would establish common institutions to mobilise the masses and develop a powerful national identity. Early in the twentieth-century, vanguardism, nationalism and regionalism were the dominant trends, cutting across national boundaries and conventional left-right divisions.
　
Indeed, from the early nineteenth-century, Western imperialism created an unprecedented sense of global interconnectivity. From that point forward, uncompromising conservative responses made little sense (which isn't to suggest that they disappeared overnight). This was especially true given the pervasive intellectual influence of Social Darwinist theories, which contributed to the powerful impression of a historically unique existential threat to the traditional moral order in Asian societies. Under these circumstances, who were the true revolutionaries and who the true conservatives: those who sensed the opportunity that lay in post-war European pessimism and self-doubt, and sought to present their intepretations of traditional Asian values as an alternative for the West to follow (often presented as being compatible with rationalism and science); or pragmatists who sought to imitate the West as far as they could without provoking a backlash from traditionalist quarters?


Ho Chi Minh (1890-1968)

Not only was the distinction between "reformer" and "conservative" blurred by these perceptions of existential crisis and inter-cultural feedback, but some of the region's most influential thinkers, whose ideas continue to drive the "remaking of Asia", were acutely aware of their own beliefs shifting between these categories over the course of their lifetimes, often in response to intellectual and political developments nearby. This mercurial quality must partly be attributed to the fact that different Asian countries embarked on the project of "modernisation" at different historical junctures, so that the experiences of late modernisers were shaped by how they understood their predecessors to have fared. By the time it was China's turn, "modernisation" seemed outdated; the future lied with a fusion of Soviet communism and more traditional utopian ideas about rural communities.
　
Mishra is at his best when dissecting the historical specificity of Asian responses to Western encroachment. By setting his intellectual biographies firmly in the context of a historical essay, he makes it possible for the reader to see the politics that lies at the heart of so much modern thinking about "multiculturalism"; in particular, by tracing the seminal role that religious authorities often played in debates over modernisation, often for historically specific reasons, we can see how "tradition" was, and is, used as a cover for political agendas.
　
He also unpicks the complicated relationship between nationalism and regionalism in Asia. When Western leaders required Japan to give up territory won from Beijing during the 1895 Sino-Japanese War, it was regarded in Tokyo as the ultimate example of double standards. In response, the Japanese intelligentsia came to believe that they could only achieve parity in Western eyes by first removing the idea of a racial hierarchy from the heads of Europeans and other Asians. Thus the imperial impulse in Japan overlapped in a strange way with liberal nationalist ideas: by eradicating the Western presence in Asia, Japan would act as a vanguard to other Asian nations seeking independence.
　

But, as regards his "intellectual biographies", the book falls short in two key respects. First, Mishra repeatedly fails to indicate whether he is expressing his own views or paraphrasing the views of others. For instance, on p. 255:

"Gandhi could see how the unprecedented disasters of the modern age - the Western scramble for colonies in Asia and Africa, the world wars between rival nations and empires, the rise of totalitarianism - worked out the nihilist logic of a purely secular and materialistic outlook...nation-states with economies built around the endless multiplication of individual desires are likely to wage the most destructive wars in order to maintain their chosen ways of life."

　

Should we infer from this that Mishra shares Gandhi's critique of modern Western civilisation? This is finally affirmed when Mishra sets out his stall in the concluding sections, but the effect of this is to cast doubt on the preceding presentation of unfamiliar thinkers: were we reading a fair summation of their arguments, or merely those aspects which supported the author's line?

　

Second, this reviewer did not find the author's line to be persuasive or, curiously, in keeping with the spirit of the rest of the book. It does not help that Mishra saves his diagnosis of the present, and his prescriptions, until the very end, so that they feel more like tagged-on afterthoughts than a set of beliefs which were probably undercurrents throughout his historical essay. Besides the aforementioned retrospective doubt this is likely to engender in the lay reader (for whom the book is intended), it also makes it difficult to pin down exactly what Mishra is advocating.

　

What he seems to say is that we have to turn our backs on a notion of universalism: that we can find universally valid principles for how to live and what to value. According to Mishra, we have to abandon that notion because in practice it serves to mask hierarchy; but his fundamental point seems to be less that it creates a hierarchy of values (i.e. he is not denying the possibility that, if all of mankind were so convened, some values would be found preferable to others) than that it publicises and makes transparent such a hierarchy. In that sense, his argument is a pragmatic one: universalism is inherently self-destructive because it breeds violent resentment among those who espouse unpopular views. In a familiar vein, he writes (pp. 280-281):

　

"Millenarian Islam has a special appeal among Muslims in the West who are convinced that their host countries are moral as well as political failures and who now look to Islam for new sources of moral and religious authority in their secular surroundings. [...] Islam remains a gigantic powder key, likely to blow up at any time."

　



Shinkansen bullet train, 1966

A counter-argument to this might be that liberalism, in its universalist incarnation, is capable of self-restraint: majority rule doesn't extend to matters of incommensurable value, where people are left free to live their lives as they wish. However, at this point in the argument, Mishra appears to sympathise with critics of the West such as Tagore, whom he earlier cites (p.231):

 "Again and again in his writings, Tagore returned to the metaphor of modern civilisation as a machine: "The sole fulfillment of a machine is in achievement of result, which in its pursuit of success, despises moral compunctions as foolishly out of place." Japan, Tagore wrote, could further the "experiments...by which the East will change the aspects of modern civilisation, infusing life in it where it is a machine, substituting the human heart for cold expediency."

　

Rabindranath Tagore in Japan, 1916

From this perspective, the modern West is crippled by its deficit of spirituality; the irresistible impulse to materially satisfy individual desires is without limits, rendering liberalism's claim to "tolerance" a facade. Yet Mishra sees a way out of this trap: the environment (pp. 309-310):

"The hope that fuels the pursuit of endless economic growth - that billions of consumers in India and China will one day enjoy the lifestyles of Europeans and Americans - is as absurd and dangerous a fantasy as anything dreamt up by Al-Qaeda. It condemns the global environment to early destruction and looks set to create reservoirs of nihilistic rage and disappointment among the hundreds of millions of have-nots - the bitter outcome of the universal triumph of Western modernity."

　

The point is stated so bluntly, as if no further justification were required, that we can only assume this is how Mishra proposes we escape from the trap that universalism has become. In short, an appeal to undeniable facts about the detrimental impact of advanced capitalism on the survival prospects of mankind will bring forth a kind of "global consciousness" (which Mishra elaborates on above, in conversation with Buruma) that allows us to recognise radically different cultures and value systems as being equally valid. Once Westernising elites (in the East and in the West) are compelled by scientific evidence to concede the impossiblity of replicating the Western model of society and economy everywhere else, a paradigm shift will occur in their thinking, which presumably heralds the global victory of multiculturalism over universal ideals. He is not advocating a return to a lost past, "when the West merely denoted a geographic region, and other peoples unselfconsciously assumed a universal order centred on their values." (p.9)　

I do not have space here to interrogate this account in detail, but it makes numerous questionable assumptions about, for example: the relationship between tolerance and offence; the ability of science to answer fundamental value questions; and the ideological flexibility of capitalism. Essentially, Mishra attempts to extend the logic of anti-colonial thinkers and activists like Frantz Fanon to the present day:

"Modern European imperialism would be wholly unprecedented in creating a global hierarchy of economic, physical and cultural power through either outright conquest or 'informal' empires of free trade and unequal treaties. [...] [T]he European subordination of Asia was not merely economic and political and military. It was also intellectual and moral and spiritual: a completely different kind of conquest than had been witnessed before, which left its victims resentful but also envious of their conquerors." (pp. 42-45)

The Battle of Tsushima: The Russo-Japanese War, 1905

But whereas earlier generations of anti-colonial and postcolonial thinkers had strived to replace a morally defunct form of universalism - what Mishra describes in an inter-war context as "racially segregated liberalism" - with something better, a synthesis of the respective strengths of different civilisations (which often translated into variants of socialism), Mishra acknowledges that this no longer seems fashionable:

"The rise of Asia...is in many ways the revenge of the East. Yet this success cocneals an immense intellectual failure... It is simply this: no convincingly universal response exists today to Western ideas of politics and economy, even though these seem increasingly febrile and dangerously unsuitable in large parts of the world." (p. 306)



Yet he insists that the large-scale unsustainability of Western practices negates the imminence of the "end of history"; rather, history will only end when countries with different political and economic systems, rooted in different value systems, are unified by a "global consciousness" that enables them to recognise each other as different, but equally legitimate, endpoints. This is, after all, a book intended to help its readers "to understand the world not only as it exists today but also how it's continuing to be remade not so much in the image of the West as in accord with the aspirations and longings of formerly subject peoples." (p.8) Elsewhere, he writes that the book "does not seek to replace a Euro-centric or West-centric perspective with an equally problematic Asia-centric one. Rather, it seeks to open up multiple perspectives on the past and the present." (p.8) Exploring multiple perspectives is a noble endeavour, but, absent some clear criterion for comparison, it all too often feels like a succession of lost opportunities.



Moreover, it is worth asking whether "global consciousness" is too woolly an idea to form the basis of a viable international order. Mishra himself seems sceptical of earlier attempts to build Pan-Asian movements around fuzzy concepts: "Thus ended the dream of a regenerated Asian spiritual civilisation. Certainly 'spirituality' had proved too vague a word; it could readily indicate the warrior spirit of the samurai as well as the self-control of the Brahman." (p. 240) If we regard the practical interpretation of scientific evidence about the environment as being more open-ended than Mishra presents it, then his whole notion of liberation through limitation may appear a poor substitute for the international political movements of the recent past, and the universal ideals that kept them going. Perhaps Mishra's cause is best captured by the European Union's motto: united in diversity (I leave it to the individual reader to take from that what they will).

　

Even with the facts in hand, it is a fantasy to expect that those who reject universalism - or who advocate its violent and oppressive forms - will be converted without the conscious efforts of human beings to persuade them. From the Ruins of Empire, beyond all the great names, famous battles and obscure sects that adorn its pages, can perhaps be read as a defence of the importance of argument and debate, or, at the very least, critical engagement. More importantly, examining an historical range of alternative perspectives on modernity might help us to be more critical about how we categorise the diversity of responses we encounter in the present.

　

BEAUTIFUL IMPERIALISTS

"Beautiful imperialists" - a literal translation of the Chinese for "American imperialists."

Since the late 1990s China's economic engagement with Africa has extended surprisingly quickly. It often feels as if reporters and journalists are chasing to keep up with the pace of development, and to provide some sort of explanatory framework.

I am simplifying, but the standard narrative you hear and read about China-Africa relations usually goes something like this: the Chinese used to care about spreading socialism and actively supported national liberation movements in Africa, but today they only care about getting at the continent's resources, and pragmatism has supplanted principles (hence China's backing for "pariah" states like Sudan and Zimbabwe). Then we are supposed to appreciate the irony that the former liberator has become the "new colonialist."

Below is an excerpt from a BBC Newsnight report on China's role in Zambia, which I think exemplifies the sort of ahistorical and simplistic reportage of this story which is all too common.

"Are the Chinese just new colonialists trying to exploit Zambia's raw materials?" the reporter asks. The rest of the report seems to answer in the affirmative - competition from local Chinese businesses receiving subsidies from China's state-owned banks is stopping Zambia from diversifying its economy away from dependence on exports of raw materials. Presumably China does this, among other reasons, in order to secure better terms of access to these resources.

The fundamental difficulty I have with this argument is that it overstates both the coherence and the state-centric agency of China's activity on the continent - it depicts as a kind of grand master plan what has been in many ways a disjointed and spontaneous response to changes in Africa's relations with the rest of the world.

I will explain in more detail what I mean by this towards the end of this post. First, I want to examine the "first wave" of China-Africa relations in the 1950s and 1960s. Contrary to the idea that China was ever regarded by post-independence African leaders as being in the vanguard of global solidarity, it will be seen that this was the exception rather than the rule - more often that not China's interventions were seen as cynical, opportunistic and vacillating.

A LONG WAY FROM HOME

The first wave of decolonisation in Africa in the 1950s did not bring communist ideologues to power. There were some socialists, like Kwame Nkrumah of the newly-independent Ghana, but they recognised a need for pragmatism given their economic underdevelopment and, in many cases, weak states.

The PRC won early plaudits on this basis by officially registering its opposition to apartheid at the UN in 1950. As Gerald Segal has noted, China's own history of colonial domination meant that the course taken by post-colonial Africa had a symbolic significance far beyond its own shores: "It was not so much that China was intrinsically concerned with the individual struggles in Africa as much as it saw the continent as undergoing a stage in the revolutionary process that China had already endured."


Premier Zhou Enlai at the Bandung Conference



Having seen the Cold War heat up in Korea, there was a strong inclination amongst Africa's first post-colonial leaders that they should unite in order to transcend the bipolar capitalist/communist conflict. This feeling was given symbolic significance in 1955, at the Afro-Asian Conference of twenty-nine nations in Bandung, Indonesia.

The final agreement issued at Bandung committed its participants to uphold principles of political self-determination, national sovereignty, non-aggression and non-interference in internal affairs. It was based on an agreement reached between China and India a year earlier - the so-called 'Five Principles for Peaceful Co-existence' - and it formed the core of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), created in 1961 in opposition to alignment with either the USA or the USSR.

By grounding its opposition to imperialism in a demand for racial equality, the Bandung Conference alarmed members of the U.S. government, who feared that, against the backdrop of the "Little Rock Nine", it would become an anti-American organisation. They were sensitive to any such criticisms, which became a commonplace in Soviet propaganda films such as this one (based on a poem by Mayakovsky):

The Sino-Soviet split at the decade's end provided the greatest stimulus for Chinese involvement in the continent's politics. The CPC saw Africa as a key battleground for influence in the rest of the world, because it saw it as a test for leadership of the world communist movement. Whilst Khruschev was moderating the USSR's domestic and international policies, China could win the allegiance of Africa.

Mao outlined the "Three Worlds Theory" that underpinned the strategy at a meeting with President Kaunda of Zambia. When the world was divided into capitalist and communist states, Mao said, Africa was part of an "intermediate zone." But since the Soviets had abandoned the revolutionary cause, the struggle between the two super-powers had become less ideological and more nationalistic, which re-oriented the pattern of incentives for international alliances - red or not, states that were disadvantaged by the international status quo were natural partners:

"[T]he greatest threat to world peace lies in the rivalry of the two super powers, the USSR and U.S., for world hegemony, whereas China and other Asian, African and Latin American countries constitute the "Third World." In order to oppose hegemonism in the interest of world peace, it is necessary for China to unite first and foremost the third world countries including African countries as well as the second world countries; and the more the better."

The list of contents actually gives a nice precis of the argument:

It was as if, at least momentarily, the struggle against imperialism had eclipsed the class struggle. Initially, this convenient doctrine - "the most revolutionary states are those that are friendly with China, and China is the revolutionary leader because it is friends with so many revolutionary states" - retained the pragmatic quality of China's Bandung-era diplomacy. The historian Stuart Schram writes:

"[T]he Soviet Union embarked definitively, in 1955-6, on a policy which made the 'national bourgeoisie' the bearer of progress in the underdeveloped countries... And during the Bandung era (pre-Great Leap), China displayed a tendency to make similar concessions."

Here is some footage of Mao meeting with African leaders of various persuasions (including the Congolese President at 04:50 and Heile Selassie at 12:13):

The Chinese habit of overlooking ideological disagreements with post-colonial African governments all but collapsed during the Cultural Revolution, when China's relations with the outside world were dragged along by the currents of domestic conflict.

BACKING THE WRONG SIDE(S)

The Cultural Revolution forcefully settled the question that had plagued the PRC in its early years - whether to lend support to more ideologically favourable insurgents in Africa, even if this involved alienating centrist governments with whom China had diplomatic relations (in CPC parlance, the choice between a united front "from above" or "from below"). In countries where there was no absolute balance of power amongst domestic forces, China decided to take sides.

In The Penguin History of Modern China, Jonathan Fenby describes the scale and purpose of China's African entanglements:

"In a twenty-year period starting in 1963, China provided African nations with loans amounting to $2bn on very favourable terms, and sent some 150,000 workers to help on development projects... With the Chairman's long-term associate Kang Sheng playing a major directing role, the PRC spent large sums on backing its favoured revolutionaries."

Each Chinese province was assigned an African state to which it would send "barefoot doctors." In addition to aid and arms, left-wing African guerrilla groups were trained at the Nanjing Military Academy. The PLA also ran a training camp inside Ghana for training insurgents in neighbouring states still under European occupation - below is a picture of Zhou Enlai during a visit to Ghana.

Most of the aid went to the poorest, most stridently socialist yet anti-Soviet regimes, such as in Guinea, Mali, and Somalia. According to Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Story:

"China was not only the poorest country in the world to provide aid, but its aid was the highest ever given as a percentage of the donor country's per-capita income... [T]hey were literally handouts, as Peking constantly said that loans should be treated as gifts, or that repayment should be deferred indefinitely. As for arms, the regime liked to say "We are not arms merchants"; but this did not mean it did not export arms, only that the arms did not have to be paid for."

This new assertiveness required a new theoretical rationale. The "Three Worlds Theory" was essentially defensive, insofar as it called on "third-" and "second-world" states to align in response to a future war caused by super-power competition. China's riskier policy of intervening and undermining potential allies was justified by Mao's heir-apparent, Marshal Lin Biao.

In 1965, to commemorate the twenty-year anniversary of WWII - what the Chinese refer to as "the War of Resistance Against Japan" - Lin wrote a pamphlet entitled Long Live the Victory of People's War.

In this collection of essays, Lin contends that what happened in China before 1949 is now taking place on a global scale: the "world cities" are being encircled by the "world countryside." In other words, now that China was being thoroughly revolutionised from within, the world was ripe for the oppressed to rise against their oppressors, whether they be super-power proxies or national bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, Moscow's brutal suppression of the 'Prague Spring' in 1968 provided a timely reminder of its own imperial baggage.

Once again, this was seen as a field in which China could beat the super-powers, not because of its wealth or power-projection capabilities, but because, as Deborah Brautigam has explained, China possessed authenticity, credibility and experience in guerrilla warfare tactics that had immediate applicability to African uprisings:

"In the South, Chinese theories of guerilla war had obvious relevance. And more significantly, there was the Chinese model of rural, low technology development and of self-reliance - a Third World image which neither the Russians nor the West could match."

But it came at a price. In the same year that Lin's pamphlet became the new required reading for Red Guards, the attempt to organise a second Afro-Asian summit in Algiers fell through.

The conference was due to convene in June, but a military coup only weeks beforehand deposed Algeria's independence leader Ahmed Ben Bella and left participating nations divided over whether it was still appropriate for them to attend. In a show of naked self-interest, Beijing lobbied hard for the conference to proceed as scheduled, because they were worried that any delay would give President Nasser of Egypt a chance to lobby for Russian attendance. China's diplomatic insensitivity divided the group of nations further - even President Nyere of Tanzania, ordinarily a staunch ally, denounced China's opportunism - and a follow-up to Bandung never materialised.

The post-independence struggles that China was most heavily involved in were also some of the most extensive and complex - the civil wars in Angola and in Mozambique, which were triggered by Portugal's hasty exit from southern Africa following the so-called "carnation revolution" of 1974, the bloodless coup that removed the Salazar regime from power in Lisbon.

One of the factors complicating the Angolan civil war was the attempt by South Africa's white rulers to install "friendly" governments in their neighbouring states, who would co-operate in stemming the flow of money and arms going to the independence movement inside Namibia.

Besides ethnolinguistic divisions, the three main movements for national liberation in Angola were differentiated by their Cold War backers: the MPLA were supported by the Soviet Union and Cuba (who provided ground troops), whilst the U.S. sponsored (with C.I.A. support) a tenuous alliance between the Pretoria-backed UNITA and the staunchly anti-communist FNLA.

Here is an episode from the CNN Cold War series which focuses on specific 'Third World' conflicts and provides a good overview of Cold War dynamics in Angola (starting at 20:10):

But China quickly acquired a reputation for cynical and opportunistic meddling in these countries' internal affairs, ironically because its interventions were too ideological in nature. China's professed commitment to support the most revolutionary groups in any conflict incentivised increasingly unrepresentative and extremist splinter groups to come to the fore; as these groups unravelled, China was forced to bit the bullet and switch its support to less likely allies - including the FNLA leader Holden Roberto, whom China had once dismissed as a "CIA tool" - which led to a fresh round of recriminations and accusations of "selling out."

As Alan Hutchison wrote at the time, the CPC set a trap for itself:

"The need to compromise with reality in independent Africa could be set against continuing support for revolutionary movements fighting for independence in the Portuguese territories and in southern Africa... But the facts are that Chinese support for these movements has been sparing, conditional and always given, not according to merit, but according to the dictates of the Sino-Soviet dispute... Her actions were seen as meddlesome and cynical."

Overall, then, the high-point of Chinese military support coincided with a divisive approach that alienated significant African revolutionary groups who instead aspired to pan-African solidarity. By the early 1970s most African states had won their independence and were prioritising economic growth over social revolution, which meant that those states still fighting for their independence needed heavy support from external allies - something China was unable to provide, given its own economic constraints.

Gerald Segal writes:

"States such as Zaire that were strongly anti-Soviet were lavished with praise from Beijing even though they were among the most openly pro-Western and unhelpful to revolutionary causes. China's attitude toward the conflict in the Horn of Africa in the 1970s shifted as the local participants exchanged superpower patrons... The ignominious retreat, and the subsequent inability to provide major aid in the struggles in Zimbabwe and Mozambique, did serious damage to China's position. When it came to the crunch of struggles in southern Africa, China was a peripheral actor."

Having backed their enemies, the PRC finally established diplomatic relations with the MPLA-led government of Angola in 1983.

Yet Chinese engagement with Africa during this period did yield other, more durable legacies, such as the Tanzania-Zambia Railway, or "Tazara."

At the time of its construction, the Tazara was the biggest foreign infrastructure project in Africa since the Soviets built the Aswan High Dam, using the labour of 15,000 technicians. Most of the construction technology and clearing vehicles were Chinese imports, but Chinese workers themselves made up less than a third of the workforce.

It ran for 1800km, across 2500 bridges and through 21 major tunnels, linking the landlocked Zambian copperbelt directly to the Tanzanian coast, facilitating the export of precious metals and minerals without the need to pass through white-ruled Rhodesia.

Here is a Chinese map of the seaward route:

Here is how the President of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, described the project in a speech to inaugurate its construction on October 28th 1970:

"I have noticed one very odd thing about the international reactions to the railway project...Some (nations) suggest that by building this railway now, Tanzania and Zambia are coming under Chinese influence!...But this railway will be our railway...The PRC is giving an interest-free loan for the construction of the railway and provision of rolling stock... A gesture of international solidarity between the poor and the less poor of the world... When the Smith rebellion of 1965 was met by a policy of economic sanctions, the most immediate result was grave problems for newly-independent Zambia...A railway link to the port of Dar-es-Salaam is vital for the full implementation of Zambia's policy of linking herself to the free African states of the north."

Nevertheless, these high-profile projects were the exception rather than the rule, as China sharply curtailed its aid to Africa from the late '70s. More recently, this BBC documentary foreshadows the return of Chinese technicians to upgrade the railway, which has re-ignited the same kind of accusations that Nyerere rejected over forty years ago:

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE PETROLEUM CLIQUE

Whilst China seemed to abandon Africa in the late Mao, and early post-Mao, period in order to focus on its ailing domestic economy, the CPC leadership came to believe that petroleum was the country's only industry with the potential for immediate expansion.


Yu Qiuli inspecting equipment



In order to benefit from existing reserves, and to bring new ones on tap, China needed Western technology and know-how. And this, in turn, required a softening in China's foreign policy stance - most notably on the issue of Taiwan.

Therefore, the faction in the CPC leadership adocateing the pursuit of rapid economic growth also advocated greater openness to foreign expertise, and the pursuit of warmer diplomatic relations with economically necessary partners - they were called the "petroleum clique" and they were led by well-positioned industry bureaucrats like the State Planning Commissioner, Yu Qiuli.

In his book The Search for Modern China, Jonathan D. Spence describes the group's importance in the key debates that shaped China's "reform and opening":

"[A]s the oilfields they had developed proved to be one of the only growth sectors of the Chinese economy, and Mao began to turn against Lin Biao and some of the more insistently radical exponents of complete self-reliance, the "Petroleum Group" (as some called them) came back into favour. They knew that if China were to continue to expand oil production at the rate desired by the top leadership, it would require major initiatives in offshore exploration and drilling, and for this China had neither the resources nor the technology. Foreign skills would be essential, and in petroleum technology the U.S. was the proven world leader."

This short film by U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration illustrates some of the ways in which the U.S. was pushing the boundaries in ways that would have especially interested Chinese policymakers confronting decades of under-resourced and over-used oilfields - policymakers who were, according to Kenneth Lieberthal and Michael Oksenberg, searching for "equipment which permitted improved secondary and tertiary development of a field."

Besides American participants, Japanese oil industry experts also got involved in stepping-up China's industry. As Deborah Brautigam has noted (in the video further down), the model for Japanese involvement bears a striking resemblance to the basis of contemporary Chinese involvement in Africa's primary resources and infrastructure - loans for access to technology and expertise were extended in return for future exports of pre-existing oil reserves.


Bohai Gulf oil platform



This is the present arrangement China has with the Angolan government, as described in David Smith's The Dragon and the Elephant:

"Angola, which exports 25% of its oil output to China, has benefited from $2bn of loans from Beijing, which is being used to fund Chinese-built railways, roads, schools, hospitals and lay a fibre-optic network. China will also train Angolan telecommunications workers; all in return for a guarantee of future oil supplies."

 China learned from Japanese practices in more ways than one: Bill Emmott has observed in Rivals that, "China's overseas aid programme has begun to evolve in the same sort of way as Japanese aid during the 1960s and 1970s: it is being used as an adjunct to commercial investments, especially in resources development."

Gulf of Guinea oil platform, Angola

In spite of their having made possible extensive foreign involvement in a key industry, the influence of the "petroleum clique" rose and fell with the expectation of an upwards trend in world oil prices. In Burying Mao, Richard Baum writes:

"The 'petroleum group' had promoted accelerated deficit spending as a means of stimulating rapid growth in heavy industry, a strategy that had putatively caused serious sectoral imbalances, budget deficits, and fiscal disarray; in the latter half of 1979 they found themselves being squeezed progressively out of the decision-making loop."

FROM LOSERS TO WIN-WINNERS?

I have tried to show in the preceding section how changing expectations of global demand and supply led to a rebalancing of power and influence among competing ministries in the Chinese state, and that once "the near monopoly of petroleum was broken", opportunities opened up for a more evenly balanced growth strategy. Here is how Liberthal and Oksenberg summarise this argument:

"The era in which the petroleum industry and those who led it set the pace for the energy sector and the entire economy seems to have ended... Credibility is helpful but not sufficient... [E]nergy policies are adopted when the top leaders believed the proposed policies promise an attractive solution to the problems they perceive at the moment, make use of existing opportunities, support their ideological preferences and power needs, and are congruent with the organisational missions of the pertinent ministries. From this perspective, the petroleum sector occupied a different and less priveleged position in the mid-1980s."

Chinese-built junction, Kenya

I also think there are lessons to draw from China's experiences on the other end of this relationship for China-Africa relations today. In particular, I think that a close examination of these bilateral relationships suggests an awareness on the part of the Chinese state that both partners are deeply interdependent - China needs African resources and fuel to sustain (or at least smooth) its growth rate, whilst Africa needs China's labour and savings surplus to reverse decades of de-industrialisation and degraded infrastructure.

As the LSE China specialist Chris Alden has noted:

"With African resources becoming ever more important to the health of the Chinese economy, Beijing's domestic policy of delivering greater prosperity at home, on the back of sometimes painful economic reforms, without relinquishing significant political control is arguably in danger of becoming hostage to the fortunes of its international forays in places like Africa."

This is the level at which expectations appear to be crucial, and at which I think we have to be cautious about inferring political influence from quantitative economic data (according to Emmott, "African exports to China grew from $5.5bn in 2000 to $28.8bn in 2006...In the same period, Africa's imports from China grew from $5.1bn to $26.7bn").

If China's trading partners in Africa were to sever their ties, this would likely reduce Chinese growth rates, and, as a knock-on effect, lower global growth, which in turn would be expected to reduce world prices for Africa's raw materials. It would also likely have some effect on the so-called "resource curse" in particular African states that are overly reliant on a few natural resources to power their economies.

Hence it seems to me that if the China-Africa economic relationship carries the risk of exacerbating certain anti-developmental processes already at work on the continent, we should also remember that it contains the prospect of overcoming these. For example, Alden notes that:

"[China's] investment outreach commenced at roughly the same time as the West began to reduce its exposure to Africa... [D]iversifying sources of foreign investment, an explicit policy pursued by oil producers like Angola and Nigeria, has contributed to opportunities to extract better terms from donors and lenders alike."

I cannot say which course these extraordinary and flourishing relationships will follow, whether it will really be, as the CPC presents it, "win-win cooperation" (in any case, it is ill-advised to generalise for the continent as a whole).

But I agree with Deborah Brautigam - author of The Dragon's Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa - that a crucial determinant seems to be the political will of individual African states to challenge Chinese investors where national interests are imperfectly aligned, to enforce decent working conditions and wages (such as the Ethiopian government has done), and to investigate reports of abuses by Chinese managers and workers without succumbing to dangerous populism. Moreover, it is notable that China stopped opposing the deployment of peacekeepers in the Darfur region of Sudan under pressure from a galvanised African Union, rather than from other external actors.

Here is a talk she gave during an IQ-squared debate last year, opposing the motion "Beware of the dragon: Africa should not look to China":

According to Alden, China is seen as a consistent and reliable trading partner on the continent, in contrast with Western development agencies which are perceived as being too short-term oriented: "[W]hat is striking about China's discourse about development partnership is that it has proved to be notably resilient in being constant over time as opposed to the chameleon pattern of shifting Western development discourse." This needs to be borne in mind whenever we hear about Chinese-built "ghost cities" in places like Angola; substantial risks are being borne by both sides.

On balance, I am hopeful for the future of China-Africa relations. I hope that it can move beyond trite statements about the inherent shared interests of underdeveloped nations and become a creative, long-term partnership based on an honest recognition of shared, and divergent, interests. To steal a phrase from Zhou Enlai, it is still to early to tell.

SIGHTINGS NO.2: RUSSELL'S ENTREPÔT

'Sightings': the term used by Prof. Jonathan D. Spence to describe formative encounters of China by Westerners.

When one looks back over centuries of Western encounters with China, self-projection is a recurring theme; a tendency to perceive the 'other' through the prism of one's own hopes, fears and anxieties.

An exemplary case is that of the renowned philosopher and social activist Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), who wrote widely on logic, mathematics and political issues, and who was the only philosopher to have been awared both the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In 1920, he spent six months travelling throughout China and lecturing on matters pertinent to national reconstruction. During his stay, he discovered "a new hope" for the future of a world devastated by war and economic chaos. Yet within a few decades China would be transformed in his imagination from a remedy for the world's ills into a showcase for its most debilitating symptoms.

The story of that reversal, and its implications for Russell's political thinking, begins during the later stages of the Russian Civil War.

IMPISHNESS AND IMPERIALISM

"It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for only in a form which destroys their ideals..." 

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In 1920 Russell travelled to Russia with a Labour Party delegation to witness firsthand the reality of the world's first Communist state.

Shortly before this visit, he had written a book called 'Paths to Freedom' (1918) expressing sympathy with the goals of a less state-heavy form of socialism called or syndicalism. Like the Bolsheviks ruling Russia, syndicalists believed in public ownership of the means of production, but they advocated decentralised institutions for workers' control as a means of regulating the enlarged powers of the state. For Russell, syndicalism applied the ethical principles of the radical liberal tradition to the conditions of the modern, mechanised world. And like Lenin, he believed that capitalism contained an inherent drive towards imperialism.

Since Lenin had spearheaded the 1917 revolution under the slogan of "all power to the Soviets [workers' and soldiers' councils]", it was an open question for Russell how close the practice of Bolshevik of rule approximated his own beliefs. Upon arrival, he travelled by steamship along the Volga, held "interminable discussions on the materialistic conception of history", and met with Lenin and Trotsky.

His hour-long meeting with Lenin crystallised in Russell's mind his firm rejection of the "actually existing socialism" the Bolsheviks had created. In his autobiography, he describes Lenin as possessing an "impish cruelty" and compares his arrogance to that of "an opinionated professor."

I think this picture of Lenin meeting with H. G. Wells at around the same time conveys these qualities rather well.

What terrified Russell almost as much as the totalitarian state apparatus he saw on the horizon was the inability, or unwillingness, of the rest of his delegation to validate his apprehension. He describes being woken in the middle of the night by the sound of political prisoners being executed by firing squad, and his fellow travellers the next morning insisting it was probably just a car backfiring. It was an experience that haunted Russell:

"Our company were noisy, gay, quarrelsome, full of facile theories, with glib explanations of everything, persuaded that there is nothing they could not understand and no human destiny outside the purview of their system. And all around us lay a great silence, strong as death, unfathomable as the heavens. [...] At last I began to feel that all politics are inspired by a grinning devil, teaching the energetic and quick-witted to torture submissive populations."

Russell was a rationalist and had campaigned for all sorts of progressive causes, from free trade to women's suffrage, and yet his confidence was now blasted from all directions. His school of analytical philosophy had been assaulted by Wittgenstein, the optimism of Western liberals had been shaken by the Great War, and any optimism he might have had in the Bolshevik experiment appears to have been shattered.

RENAISSANCE MEN

"Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me."

----------------

It was in this disjointed frame of mind that he accepted an offer from the University of Beijing to spend a year there lecturing on various subjects. 

At the time of Russell's tour, China was a hive of intellectual debate about the course the new Republic ought to pursue. A violent student protest against the unfair terms of the Treaty of Versailles (which gave German concessions in China to Japan) sparked the 'May Fourth movement', a malestrom of iconoclastic social movements that promoted the use of vernacular Chinese in literature and the adoption of various aspects of Western politics and culture.

The New Youth

And the faculty and students at the University of Beijing were at the epicentre of it. In 'The Search for Modern China', Prof. Jonathan D. Spence examines the central role played by four faculty members: Chen Duxiu, the dean who founded the seminal 'New Youth' journal; Li Dazhao, the head librarian who reformulated Marxism; Cai Yuanpei, the president who resigned after his students were arrested for protesting; and Hu Shi, the professor who promoted John Dewey's philosophy of pragmatism (Dewey and Russell were among many intellectuals who visited China at this time, including the birth control advocate Margaret Sanger and the physicist Albert Einstein).

Here is a picture of Dewey during his tour of China:

Landing in the midst of this upheaval, Russell saw potential for great things:

"Out of the renaissance spirit now existing in China, it is possible, if foreign nations can be prevented from working havoc, to develop a new civilization better than any that the world has yet known. This is the aim which Young China should set before itself: the preservation of the urbanity and courtesy, the candour and the pacific temper, which are characteristic of the Chinese nation, together with a knowledge of Western science and an application of it to the practical problems of China."

He travelled around China from 1920-1 lecturing on social and technical subjects until his trip was cut short by a devastating bout of pneumonia which almost claimed his life (premature obituaries appeared in the British press). Having recovered, he recorded his response to the intellectual ferment he had witnessed in The Problem of China (1921).

He makes some cautious introductory remarks about the difficulties of comparing such different cultures as those of China and England:

"Our civilization has been both the effect and the cause of certain more or less unconscious beliefs as to what is worth while; in China one becomes conscious of these beliefs through the spectacle of a society which challenges them by being built, just as unconsciously, upon a different standard of values. It is difficult to compare opposite achievements unless we have some standard of values in our minds; and unless it is a more or less conscious standard, we shall undervalue the less familiar civilization, because evils to which we are not accustomed always make a stronger impression than those that we have learned to take as a matter of course."

However Russell was by no means a relativist - his argument is not that both cultures were equal or non-comparable, but that each cultural tradition was superior or inferior to the other in different respects and that an amalgamation of the best of each would be preferable to either.

Russell was a great admirer of certain features he perceived in traditional Chinese culture which he felt were sorely lacking in the West. On the front page of 'Paths to Freedom' he quotes Laotzu's description of the workings of the Tao: "creation without possession, action without self-assertion, development without domination."

Curiously, he revered the Chinese for the same reason that other Westerners had tended to disparage them, namely, their alleged focus on ends rather than means, and their absence of the Western "creed of efficiency for its own sake"  (conversely, what critics saw as decadence, indolence and the lack of a Protestant work ethic necessary for industrialisation). It seems unlikely that Russell was impartially analysing the facts before him; the modernist writer and social critic Lu Xun remarked sharply that Russell had "praised the Chinese when some sedan chair bearers smiled at him."

In any case, to understand why Russell would have valued a culture that was more ambivalent about the value of work and industriousness, you need to understand his assessment of where Western civilisation had gone wrong, which he elaborated most clearly in his inaugural Reith Lectures in 1948.

The title of the Lectures is Authority and the Individual. The fundamental question considered is this: "How can we combine that degree of individual initiative which is necessary for progress with that degree of social cohesion which is necessary for survival?"

Russell argues that our inability to strike the right balance between authority and freedom is "due more than anything else to the fact that we have learned to control and understand to a terrifying extent the forces of nature outside of us, but not those embodied in ourselves." And the root of that deficiency is to be found in the ever-increasing scale of institutions that organise our daily lives, in all areas of society.

Russell addressing a CND rally in Trafalgar Square

He was not against large organisations per se - as the threat of nuclear war rose, he advocated a single world government, and he recognised than anarchy might be no more preferable than authoritarian government. But he believed the concentration of decision-making power in organisations beyond that which is necessary for it to fulfil their purpose undermines individual initiative by sapping people of the hope that they might make a difference - and thus erodes the principle of democratic equality in practice, if not on paper. As he puts it in his second lecture:

"In national politics, where you are one of some 20,000,000 voters, your influence is infinitesimal unless you are exceptional or occupy an exceptional position. You have a twenty-millionth share in the government of others, but only a twenty-millionth share in the government of yourself. You are therefore much more conscious of being governed than of governing. [...] Your individual feeling about politics, in these circumstances, is not that intended to be brought about by democracy, but much more nearly what it would be under a dictatorship."

Without the institutional means for individual initiative, a "scarcely-conscious" fear replaced hope as people's primary feeling about politics. And politics focussed solely on means rather than ends, because ends were selected by the minority who used the power of their position to manipulate people's fears. The fixation on means meant an obsession with increasing efficiency and production rather than asking whether the methods used to do this conflicted with the reasons we had for increasing production in the first place.

It was this economic dynamic that had led, in Russell's view, to the First World War, as the Great Powers had scrambled for an imperial resource base. Moreover, the scale of violence unleashed was fuelled by the colision of a social system in which "everything is organised and nothing is spontaneous" and men whose basic nature requires outlets for competition and self-improvement.

Russell argued that a retreat from the precipice to which Western civilisation had stumbled blindly would involve a comprehensive rational reorganisation of its society and cultural values. By this he did not mean any grand scheme of social engineering imposed from above, but a social system that would reconcile what we regard as a civilised way of life with non-destructive outlets for our unchanging natural instincts - including the hope of working with others to change the world for the better through politics, "if life is to be saved from boredom relieved only by disaster." Organised rationally, political and social decentralisation would provide, in Russell's lovely phrase, "opportunities for hopefulness."

The alternative was that our need for "adventure" would manifest itself in ways harmful to social order and the resulting unrest would create an opening for utopian ideologies. Here is how he puts it in the third lecture:

"Perhaps it may still be possible, even in our mechanical world, to find some real outlet for the impulses which are now confined to the realm of fantasy [ideology]. In the interests of stability it is much to be hoped that this may be possible, for if it is not, destructive philosophies will from time to time sweep away the best of human achievements."

Here is an interview with Russell on 'Face to Face' from 1959. About halfway through he opines that Bolshevism and fascism would never have taken power without the experience of the Great War.

For Russell, a strictly functionalist society - in which everything was valued only insofar as it was useful for attaining some predetermined end - was a chimera. The illusion of stability it presented would always be undermined by permanent human instincts which need to be accounted for outside of any rational calculation of utility.

If our "savage" needs were not provided with outlets that would put them to constructive use, they would instead manifest themselves in destructiveness or listlessness, "either of which may cause a structure imposed by reason to break down." In this sense, it may be said that forms of 'healthy' competition - in sports, in politics, or in the arts, for instance - operate as a unifying, rather than a divisive, force; a safe outlet for our instinctive need for rivals against whom we define ourselves. Or, as Russell sees it: "the savage in each one of us must find some outlet not incompatible with a civilised way of life and the happiness of his equally savage neighbour."

A NEW HOPE

"Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear."

-------------

How, then, did Russell's political beliefs shape his views about China? In 'The Problem of China' he argues that China - culturally rich but underdeveloped and politically divided, "less a political entity than a civilisation" - has the potential to blaze an entirely new path to development, combining the best of its cultural heritage with Western science and democracy. If China succeeded in this, Russell believed it would force the West to take stock of its problems - "its brutality, its restlessness, its readiness to oppress the weak, its preoccupation with purely material aims."

If the Great War had jolted Western civilisation out of its naive optimism about the "inevitability" of progress, only for a kind of pessimistic fatalism to take its place, then in the intellectual tumult of China Russell found a haven of alternative futures and open possibilities. He did not understate its importance:


"The evils produced in China by indolence seem to me far less disastrous, from the point of view of mankind at large, than those produced throughout the world by the domineering cocksureness of Europe and America. [...] Our way of life demands strife, exploitation, restless change, discontent and destruction. Efficiency directed to destruction can only end in annihilation, and it is to this consummation that our civilization is tending, if it cannot learn some of that wisdom for which it despises the East."

As far as Russell was concerned, there were basically two possiblities: either Socialism would triumph in the West and relieve China of imperialist pressure, or China would follow the course taken by Japan - which had recovered its own Treaty Ports from the Europeans - and become another militarised society. Russell's visit to China coincided with the Washington Naval Conference, which had been convened in an effort to rein-in Japanese aggression in Asia. Of Japan after the Meiji Restoration, he wrote: "the Japanese adopted our faults and kept their own, but it is possible to hope that China will make the opposite selection."


It was precisely because China seemed to be on the edge of the transition from a pre-industrial to an industrial society that Russell hoped it could set an example for others to follow, including the developed nations:

"For those of us who have been accustomed to take progress for granted, it is especially interesting to visit a country like China, which has remained where we were one hundred and fifty years ago, and to ask ourselves whether, on the balance, the changes which have happened to us have brought any real improvement."

The greatest President China
never had



In a chapter of his 'Sceptical Essays' (1928) entitled 'Eastern and Western Ideals of Happiness', he speculated that a time-traveller from the Age of Enlightenment would feel most at home amidst the idealism and vitality of China in the 1920s:

"When he goes to Asia he sees the past; in China he can see the eighteenth-century. If George Washington were to return to earth...he would not feel really at home until he reached China. There, for the first time in his ghostly wanderings, he would find men who still believe in 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness'. I think it would not be long before he became President of the Chinese Republic."



Russian-style hotel, Harbin



During his time in China Russell saw the efforts underway to modernise industry and adopt Western technology. I have included some footage below of Manchuria in the 1920s, which was the industrial heartland of the country (the "cradle of electricity").  

Manchuria was also dominated by Russia and Japan in the early twentieth-century, which helps to explain Russell's fear that China might be tempted to follow either of their paths to development if the European imperial powers prevented it from finding its own way.

In 'The Problem of China' Russell argues that there were three prerequisites to achieving anything more ambitious in China than this kind of modernisation-through-conquest, and he listed them in order of urgency:

1. The establishment of an orderly government
2. Industrial development under Chinese control
3. The spread of education

Regarding the second of these, Russell thought that China, as a "country which is economically but not culturally backward", would be able to skip past capitalism and proceed to "State Socialism" - so long as it could first acquire "a vigorous and honest State."



Dam-building in Tibet, 1970s

 Yet he thought that even these things could only be achieved by a transformation in how the Chinese people saw themselves as a nation: "a patriotic spirit is absolutely necessary to the regeneration of China...the enlightened attitude which is willing to learn from other nations while not allowing them to dominate."

And, he might have added, not dominating other nations in turn. Russell recognised acutely the dangers of Social Darwinism, the theory that individuals, groups, and peoples are subject to the same laws of natural selection as plants and animals. The notion of a society as articulated by Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth-century, based on "the survival of the fittest", was for Russell a grotesque rationalisation of the contingent conditions of society in a particular time and place, and could only lead to great cruelty if adopted as an actual governing philosophy.

Nevertheless it had a far-reaching influence on intellectual debates in China in the early twentieth-century - particularly on Mao's political thinking - because it seemed to make sense of a world that consisted of rich and powerful imperialists, and the poor and backwards countries that they were carving up. With these kinds of ideas the seeds were being sown for the elevation of society over the individual under the PRC.

This habit of treating a society as an entity whose welfare was separate from the welfare of all of the individuals who composed it was just what Russell warned against in his final Reith Lecture (at 12:10 - he goes on to discuss matters of scale and initiative):

THE REVOLUTIONARY WILL TO WORK ARDUOUSLY

Nevertheless it is perhaps at the level of ideology that Russell's predictions about the direction of China's modernisation are weakest. He worried that many of the young reformers buzzing around China had "a slavish attitude towards Western civilisation", which tended to limit their influence on national politics and channel their frustrations into subversive activities, or increasingly atavistic ideologies.

Indeed, many of the concerns he expresses in his Reith Lectures about the disenfranchising effects of "big" issues dominating the political agenda were voiced by Hu Shi, the librarian from Beijing University, concerning dogmatic tendencies he obsered in the May Fourth movement, in a critique entitled 'Study More Problems, Talk Less of 'Isms':



"We don't study the standard of living of the rickshaw coolie but rant instead about socialism; we don't study the ways in which women can be emancipated, or the family system set right, but instead we rave about wife-sharing and free love. [...] And, moreover, we are delighed with ourselves, we congratulate ourselves, because we are talking about fundamental "solutions." Putting it bluntly, this is dream talk."

Hu Shi

Although Russell recognised that Moscow would be a key player in Chinese politics, he underestimated the importance that Marxism, as an idea, would have in the evolution of politics within China. In the same year that the first full Chinese translation of 'The Communist Manifesto' was published, he opined in 'The Problem of China' that it was "not likely that Bolshevism as a creed will make much progress in China." He did not foresee that younger intellectuals, who were the most impatient for China to achieve rapid industrialisation, would choose to devote their time and energies to indigenising Bolshevism as a creed and making it relevant to an agricultural society.

In his youth, Mao Zedong had actually received one of Russell's lectures about China, either in person or via a newspaper. In 'Communism and Dictatorship' (1921) he responded critically to Russell's priorities, especially the idea that China should aim for universal education before trying to achieve democratic socialism:

"In his lecture at Changsha, Russell .... took a position in favour of communism but against the dictatorship of the workers and peasants. He said that one should employ the method of education to change the consciousness of the propertied classes, and that in this way it would not be necessary to limit freedom or to have recourse to war and bloody revolution. [...] My objections can be stated in a few words: 'This is all very well as a theory, but it is unfeasible in practice.'"

The polarisation of the debate over China's future was being foreshadowed even at the time of Russell's visit, but rapidly took hold in the following years.

Lei Feng

To Russell, the People's Republic of China must have seemed like a cruel parody of the hopes he had expressed several decades before. He entertained no such hopes when it was founded. Shortly after delivering the Reith Lectures, he remarked that the Chinese "seem to have no alternative except to be conquered or to adopt many of the vices of their enemies." By 1956 he was even more pessimistic: "I fully expect China to be transformed into a modern industrial state as fierce and militaristic as the powers it was compelled to resist. [...] The new China will possess none of the merits of the old."

In the course of events, a country he had hoped would set the Western world free from the tyrannies of fascism, Bolshevism and all forms of faceless and unaccountable power, had itself become a new form of tyranny in its pursuit of equality. And a tyranny that held up as its role model Lei Feng - "the nail that never rusted" - a worker who never stopped working.

And today, all we seem to talk about in the West is how scarily industrious the Chinese workforce is, and how "Asian values" make for a more efficient economy. For the man who wrote an essay 'In Praise of Idleness' and campaigned for a 3-day working week, perhaps this would have come as the final disappointment...

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A clue as to the subject of Sighting No. 3 - a rainy day, two cigar-case lids, and a champagne cork...