6 { China’s Quest
China’s traditional social and political institutions were being thrown into
disarray by deepening contact with modern industrial societies, and the
resulting institutional decay interacted with foreign intrusion and domina-
tion. Eventually, the objective formulated by what became mainstream na-
tionalist thinkers was to make China a “rich nation with a strong military”
(fu guo, qiang bing). In line with this slogan, foreign domination of China was
to be ended, and the myriad bitter humiliations of China in the decades after
the First Opium War (1839–1842) were to be wiped away. China would again
become a major power able to defend itself and a respected member of the
international community—a status to which Chinese nationalists uniformly
believed China’s brilliant history and civilization entitled it.^11
Exactly how this was to be done was the topic of considerable debate. In
the early decades of the twentieth century, liberalism, republicanism, anar-
chism, social Darwinism, traditional and neo-Confucianism, and socialism
contended with one another to explain and remedy China’s fall into weak-
ness and poverty. Virtually all of the people who founded the PRC were first
drawn to politics by nationalism, by a passionate desire to “save the nation”
(jiu guo). Only later did they discover and embrace Marxism-Leninism, the
Bolshevik creed. Then, inspired by the powerful example of the Bolshevik in-
surrection of 1917, which led swiftly to a centralized dictatorial state, a cohort
of young Chinese patriots—represented by the figures who will dominate
much of this story, Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping—embraced
Marxism-Leninism as the best, perhaps the only, way to “save the nation” by
making it again rich and strong.^12 It was the Bolshevik model of centralized
dictatorial rule, not the vision of a post-capitalist utopia, that brought these
young Chinese people to political activism and to Bolshevism. Their embrace
of Marxism-Leninism was initially instrumental: it offered a way to “save
China.” From beginning to end, the nationalist component of China’s revo-
lutionary experience was strong. When Mao proclaimed the PRC in October
1949, he declared that “the Chinese people” had stood up. Sixty-four years later,
Xi Jinping, newly inaugurated as CCP paramount leader, announced that a
core mission of his rule would be realization of the dream of a restored China.
After Mao and under Deng, the fact of communism’s instrumentality for
many Chinese nationalists facilitated the discarding of very large parts of
what Mao had understood to be Marxism-Leninism. The doctrine had been
adopted to make China rich and strong, but once it proved unable to do that,
it was modified as necessary. But Mao was not among these people. Mao de-
fined himself, his position in world history, in the continuum of Marx, Engels,
Lenin, and Stalin. For these men, the purpose of the struggle was transition to
communism, the end state of human development.
The rise and fall of the quest for post-capitalist, communist utopia was
a central element of the history of the twentieth century, and PRC foreign
relations must be framed by that quest if they are to be understood as Mao