XII
Lenin, originally wedded to the Marxist idea that
China suffered from the
system of production and
governmental despotism peculiar to Asia,
gradually
began by the First World War to shift to the view that
China
might become a future center of revolution and
social democracy. In his
writings of the war years,
Lenin dismissed as irrelevant the peculiar
character of
Asiatic society and sought to demonstrate that elimi-
nation of private property would lead
everywhere to
the victory of socialism. But in the 1920's he advocated
a closer union between the Western proletariat and
the Eastern toilers in
their common struggle against
traditional bondage and capitalistic
imperialism.
Trotsky, a close student of Chinese affairs, saw in
the economic
backwardness of China a positive in-
centive
to creative revolutionary action. In his theory
of permanent revolution
Trotsky envisaged China as
one of the leading elements in the movement
towards
global revolution and rapid social and economic
progress.
While he did not believe that the peasantry
as a class was devoted to international revolution, he
was
convinced by 1927 that a socialist revolution
would succeed in China. The
undirected political radi-
calism of the
Chinese would be swept towards social-
ism by
world revolutionary trends too powerful to be
resisted.
Stalin, once Lenin's influence was removed, began
to emphasize the
“feudal” character of China's agrar-
ian society and bureaucratic government, and to
deny
the common interests of the peasants and workers. Of
the three
types of class societies described by Stalin
(slave-holding, feudal, and
capitalist), Nationalist China
was to become the prototype for latter-day
Marxists
of the “feudal” or
“semi-feudal” society. Until his death
Stalin
remained convinced that the followers of Mao
Tse-tung were
“margarine Communists” and that rev-
olution based upon the peasantry would fail. In 1950,
the leading lights in Oriental studies in Russia declared
the complete
“rout of the notorious theory of the
'Asiatic mode of
production'” (Wittfogel, p. 5).
Karl Wittfogel, a close student of the Marxists and
Weber, finds the source
of Oriental Despotism (1957)
in what he defines as
the hydraulic society. The total
power characteristic of Asian states
derives in his eyes
from governmental management of the large-scale
works of irrigation and flood control necessary to the
development and
nurturing of agriculture. The class
that manages the government, not the
property-owners
or the workers, constitutes the dominant elite in such
societies. Agrarian despotisms, such as China, suffer
from landlordism,
capitalism, and domination by a
gentry inspired and sustained by the
administrative
bureaucracy. Social stagnation is characteristic of
hydraulic societies, and fundamental social changes in
them have been
affected historically only through the
impact of external forces. The
endurance of the Con-
fucian tradition in
China is a cultural expression of the
staying power of the monopoly
bureaucracy which
upheld it as the official credo. Even in Communist
China a managerial order has been retained which,
while differing from the
old bureaucracy in structure
and intent, owes a substantial debt to the
agrarian
despotism of traditional China.
The victory of communism in China in 1949 brought
sympathy and affection in
most Western powers to a
swift end. The treason of China to the West, and
to
Western expectations, set up a formidable, and through
the 1960's,
irreducible barrier to communication and
understanding. Communist China is
seen by those who
fear it as a growing industrial and nuclear power as
nothing but a belligerent and implacable foe. Respect
persists for its
ancient culture; but fear of a united,
efficient, and totalitarian China as
the leader of Asian
communism has come to override almost all other
considerations.
Throughout the history of modern Western thought,
China and its civilization
have been subject to a variety
of interpretations. The number increased
with the
passage of time, but no one interpretation was ever
completely lost. At all periods the West remained
undecided as to how best
to evaluate and relate to
Chinese civilization as a totality. A fascinating
ambi-
guity constantly appears between the
Westerner's view
of objective conditions in China, and his own vision
of European society in its relations to other civili-
zations. While the West's changing conception of
China strongly reflects the main currents of Western
intellectual history,
occasions arise when objective
conditions in China impress themselves upon
the cur-
rent image. To our own day China is
still conceived
of as being at once remote and fantastic, wise and
admirable, backward and inferior, and fearful and
dangerous. While it is
conceivable that these paradox-
ical
characterizations are entirely of the West's own
creation, they are also
reflections of the distortions that
inevitably occur whenever spokesmen of
one civili-
zation take a fixed position
from which to look at or
generalize upon an alien civilization of great
longevity
and complexity. The total impression which Westerners
possessed at every period derived from the prevailing
intellectual
conditions at home, the stereotypes in-
herited from the Western past, and the objective con-
ditions in China itself.
