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Zheng Yi Sao: Piracy and Performance

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From her probable origins on a floating brothel in Canton, Zheng Yi Sao became one of the most formidable figures in East Asian piracy, commanding around 70,000 pirates at the peak of her power.[1] Due to a number of factors, including a general scholarly neglect of East Asian piracy in China and the emphasis placed on her husbands, Zheng Yi and Chang Pao,[2] Zheng Yi Sao has only recently become a topic of significant interest. Though women’s participation in piracy was by no means rare in her time, Zheng Yi Sao is an especially fascinating figure because she was able to weave through social conventions and amass a remarkable level of influence not just relative to other women but relative to other pirates in a society that at least nominally emphasized Confucian views of female domesticity.[3] This article traces how Zheng Yi Sao adapted contemporary roles available to women as a strategy for advancement and argues that her ability to do so enabled her to shift the balance of power for herself throughout her life.

Piracy is inherently performative, as projecting either an extremely violent image or markers of gentility and statehood allowed pirates to retain power through reputation. Recent developments in gender studies and anthropology also recognize performativity as intrinsic to gender, acknowledging that participation in certain gendered roles, institutions, and norms constitute a “performance” of one’s gender and the expectations associated with it.[4] Zheng Yi Sao’s performance of gender is interesting as it intersects with what initially appears to be a conflicting performance of piracy. As a woman in Confucian society, she gained power partly from marriage and widowhood, while simultaneously leading an organization known for employing terror tactics and extreme brutality. This is not to say that Zheng Yi Sao’s participation in gendered forms was always strategic but it was undeniably a strong influence. She was a masterful leader who wound her way in and out of social convention, selectively choosing when to obey gendered expectations and when to ignore them. Thus, she offers a unique glimpse into how her gender performance intersects with the performative nature of piracy and how that ultimately played a role in her success.

On The Margins

Personal details about Zheng Yi Sao are scarce. She was born in Canton around 1775 and was likely trafficked into sex work.[5] Scholar Nathan Kwan has argued that South China in particular lent itself to female involvement in piracy because it was a place where many marginalized groups resided outside mainstream Han culture.[6] This gave women the opportunity to break out of conventional norms and pushed people of all genders to turn to piracy under economic and political strain. Following the Opium War and the incursion of foreign powers into the region, economic deprivation and political upheaval deeply impacted the South China coast and pressured coastal communities. Women often worked on ships or in jobs related to maritime life, or were sex trafficked and worked on floating brothels called “flower boats.” [7] Given the context in which Zheng Yi Sao lived and worked and the significant presence of minority groups in southern coastal communities, perhaps the best way to understand this figure is as a person on the margins.

Saucer with an image of a Chinese junk near a fort anoniem, c. 1775 - c. 1799.
Saucer with an image of a Chinese junk near a fort anoniem, c. 1775 – c. 1799. Source: Rijksmuseum.

These origins provide a point of departure for understanding how Zheng Yi Sao entered into the world of piracy and highlight how her gender may have played a key role in facilitating that entry. It was Zheng Yi Sao’s connection to maritime life as a sex worker that shaped and gendered her interaction with piracy.[8] Crucially, unlike some of the other moments in her career where Zheng Yi Sao participated in gendered arrangements to gain power, this was likely not a choice, given the widespread prevalence of sex trafficking in the region. Simply because sex work was important to her entrance to piracy does not mean that the work was inherently empowering. Zheng Yi Sao met Zheng Yi through this work. Though embellished European accounts offer speculative and hypersexualized depictions of their meeting that provide little factual value, it is clear that Zheng Yi Sao’s role as a sex worker brought her into frequent contact with pirates, ultimately resulting in her marriage to Zheng Yi in 1801.[9]

Marriage and Widowhood

Though Zheng Yi Sao may not have chosen to be a sex worker, her transition from this role to a wife exemplifies how active participation in marriage, a gendered institution, provided her an escape from sex work and a foundation from which to build influence in the maritime world. Zheng Yi held significant power among pirates operating in Tây Sơn Vietnam. From 1792 to 1802, the Tây Sơn rulers made the Vietnamese Coast a hotspot for Chinese piracy. Because of political tensions in Vietnam, groups of pirates were typically able to secure sponsorship as privateers and their activities flourished. However, piracy in the region collapsed alongside Tây Sơn rule in 1802, at which point pirate activities shifted to the Chinese coast.[10] Zheng Yi Sao and her husband led the new, smaller pirate gangs, still reeling from the collapse of pirate activities, forming seven fleets commanded by leaders loyal to the family, thus establishing their Guangdong Confederation as the dominant Chinese pirate group.[11]

Dish with a standing woman
Dish with a standing woman. Source: Rijksmuseum

At this point, we can begin to understand how the merging of piratical leadership with the gendered “wife” role—regarded as essentially subservient in Confucian China—became an advantage for Zheng Yi Sao. Charlie Harris argues, for example, that due to limited paths for women’s upward mobility, Zheng Yi Sao’s marriage to Zheng Yi was likely a deliberate exercise of agency, not merely an “extension of her status as a second-class citizen.” [12] He emphasizes that although Zheng Yi Sao participated in a patriarchal marriage, she was never Zheng Yi’s “accessory [but] rather… his business partner.” [13] Once married, Zheng Yi Sao used her position as Zheng Yi’s wife to actively participate in efforts to gain power and influence over the maritime world. Dian Murray, the foremost scholar of Zheng Yi Sao, describes her as a true partner to her husband in the consolidation process:

Cheng I [another name for Zheng Yi], aided by his wife, met the crisis [in Vietnam] by leading the pirates to re-establish their power across the border in China…While [Zheng Yi] was the unifier and patriarch, his wife was consolidator and organizer.[14]

By 1804, the Guangdong Confederation numbered 400 ships that were home to 70,000 pirates.[15] In a sense, Zheng Yi Sao’s ability to access power through working with her husband on the consolidation of gangs was not unheard of: elite Chinese women did, on multiple occasions throughout Chinese history, gain influence through their marriages or their sons. These still remained “extraordinary cases where ambitious and socially well-connected women were able, as a direct result of their marriages, to manoeuver their way to power within the male-dominated official bureaucracy.” [16] Yet Zheng Yi Sao’s was far from elite, and non-elite women who succeeded in gaining a degree of power usually only exercised that influence “within their homes.” [17] She therefore wielded the power obtained from her marriage with unconventional strength and independence as a woman from a marginal background, turning her marriage into a political opportunity.

Part of Map of Asia
The World of Zheng Yi Sao. Part of a map of Asia, Gilliam van der Gouwen. Source: Rijksmuseum

Even after her first husband’s death in 1807, Zheng Yi Sao continued to push the conventional pathways to power for Chinese women, leveraging gendered positions as a foundation for dominance. Widowhood offered Zheng Yi Sao a window of opportunity to seize control of the organization she and her husband had built.[18] The crucial component of Zheng Yi Sao’s takeover of the Guangdong Confederation lay in her relational power. Upon her husband’s death, Zheng Yi Sao began to “create and intensify the personal relationships that would legitimize her in the eyes of her followers” and “carefully [balance] the factions around her, building on the loyalties owed to her husband and making herself indispensable to each.” [19] The explicit use of her relationship to Zheng Yi paired with her own strategic abilities yet again demonstrates how Zheng Yi Sao integrated gender into her strategy for ascent, using marital status and diplomacy in tandem.

Zheng Yi Sao’s second marriage presents another revealing case study of her ability to simultaneously use and break marital norms to solidify her influence. By marrying her adoptive son Chang Pao and strategically installing him as leader of the powerful Red Fleet, she “ultimately secured her position at the top of the pirate hierarchy,”  while departing from marital norms by breaking the taboos around incest and the remarriage of widows.[20] Following her retirement, her relationship to Chang Pao would once again prove a taboo-breaking method of gaining status when she claimed the benefits of his military title, despite laws against remarried widows claiming the titles of their second husbands.[21] This marriage seems to have been an explicitly strategic choice, since Zheng Yi Sao’s decision to initiate a sexual relationship with Chang Pao came after she installed him as the Red Fleet commander.[22] Scholars who have studied this relationship concur that Chang Pao became a conduit through which Zheng Yi Sao could exert influence over the Confederation. Both Laura Duncombe and Charlie Harris, for example, cite the establishment of harsh legal codes on the Confederation’s ships as a crucial element in Zheng Yi Sao’s consolidation of power. These were codes she implemented through Chang Pao, using his leadership position to legitimate them.[23] In fact, Zheng Yi Sao’s leadership was so effective that marriage to Zheng Yi Sao clearly provided her husband with upward mobility, turning the contemporary relationship between marriage and political power on its head.[24]

Power, Codified

Zheng Yi Sao was undoubtedly the driving force behind the Confederation’s success. The establishment of protection rackets, investment in on-land enterprises, an aggressive military structure, and the power to negotiate with Chinese officials all demonstrate the professionalization of the Confederation under her leadership.[25]  She was responsible for the financial affairs of the Confederation and set up the tax offices and protection rackets that allowed it to shift into a state-like entity.[26] This professionalizing process allowed Zheng Yi Sao to transform a confederation based on interpersonal relationships into a structured entity with a bureaucracy that kept her in power. As Dian Murray explains, “Although [Zheng Yi Sao] used her marriage as an access to power, her own abilities maintained it thereafter.” [27] Zheng Yi Sao’s ability to convert power which she gained through interpersonal, gendered relationships into formal control of the Guangdong Confederation is a clear example of how she turned combinations of feminine forms with piratical work into tangible power.

Coastal scene
Coastal scene. Source: Rijksmuseum

Of course, the switch from relational to formal power did not entirely remove the influence of gender on Zheng Yi Sao’s career. Most notably, she continued to use Chang Pao to influence the Confederation. It is difficult to render a complete account of how her gender performance interfaced with the period of her life in which Zheng Yi Sao reached peak power, but two interesting issues emerge that can be explored in relation to gender: the treatment of women in her legal codes and the relationship between her gender and the violence of the organization she led.[28]

The legal codes Zheng Yi Sao implemented for the Confederation are interesting in many ways. Some scholars interpret their emphasis on fair division of plunder and protection for women as evidence of an ideological egalitarianism.[29] Notably, the codes also reveal Zheng Yi Sao’s belief that regulated romantic and sexual relationships were intrinsically linked to the smooth functioning of the Confederation. A rose-colored view might see the rules mandating capital punishment for rape and requiring men to remain faithful to captives as proto-feminism. However, provisions calling for the execution of participants in consensual extramarital sex show that these regulations were primarily aimed at keeping order on the ship by controlling personal relationships, reflecting a belief that unregulated romantic and sexual dynamics threatened stability.[30] As Laura Duncombe writes, Zheng Yi Sao “viewed sex as a distraction that kept men from focusing on their jobs.” [31]

The codes, though structured, reflect the violent nature of the Confederation that extended beyond life on deck. Charlie Harris summarizes the violence that formed the core of Zheng Yi Sao’s piratical reputation:

To proactively cultivate a violent mystique, the pirates would drink an explosive combination of wine and gunpowder before sailing into battle… When the pirates captured naval vessels, they would execute even those who had surrendered – apparently by chopping them into small pieces, which would then be thrown overboard. On occasion, they would preface this by nailing their victims’ feet to the decks of their ship. Unsurprisingly, the pirates’ vicious reputation preceded them across the South China Coast.[32]

These practices were not mere rumor or superstition among a terrified Chinese coastal population. Writings from European mariners and merchants captured by the confederation give us a firsthand account of the group’s highly theatrical violence, including disembowelment and consumption of human hearts.[33] The extreme contrast between what would have been expected of Zheng Yi Sao as a woman versus how she operated as a pirate leader served to make her reputation all the more frightening. Dian Murray notes that Zheng Yi Sao “perhaps playing on male fear of her ‘mysterious potency,’ forced government officials to come to terms with her in effecting a settlement.” [34] If this held true for Zheng Yi Sao’s surrender, it was certainly the case for her preceding career. Under her command, the Guangdong Confederation terrorized the coast, besting Chinese, British, and Portuguese ships and even traveling further into mainland China via rivers.[35] Zheng Yi Sao planned and perhaps fought in attacks, cultivating a vicious image made all the more mystical and terrifying by its incongruence with traditional images of Confucian femininity. Zheng Yi Sao’s performance of piratical violence as a woman and her role as “commander-in-chief of the confederation” who “overpower[ed] the provincial navy and challenge[ed] fortresses on land” was a way to assert both reputational and tangible dominance. Her actions were so formidable that Chinese admirals feared venturing to sea..[36]

Surrender and Retirement

Zheng Yi Sao brought both her violent reputation and a deliberate emphasis on her identity as a woman to surrender negotiations, further merging feminine gender performance with piracy and the accompanying reputation for gratuitous, performative violence. Of all the glimpses into Zheng Yi Sao’s career, her surrender offers perhaps the clearest evidence that she knew how to manipulate situations to her advantage through the conscious performance of femininity. Surrender negotiations with the Chinese government began after factionalism threatened the Confederation’s stability, but quickly reached a stalemate when the government refused to let the Confederation members retain their wealth and ships. Both Chang Pao and Zheng Yi Sao insisted on keeping a smaller fleet of 80 ships with 5,000 crew members, plus 40 ships for salt trading.[37] Zheng Yi Sao broke this deadlock by going to the governor-general in Canton unarmed with a number of wives and children in the confederation on April 8, 1810.[38] Taking a step away from her husband and the male officials who worked under her, she presented a feminine image when reopening negotiations. Duncombe suggests that arriving unarmed was a way of “[letting] her powerful track record speak for her,” [39] while Kwan believes Zheng Yi Sao thought that Chinese officials may “panic” if they saw an armed fleet arrive with her.[40] The use of her femininity is not the only reason for Zheng Yi Sao’s successful surrender; the mere threat of her return to piracy ultimately forced the hand of Chinese officials into giving her what she wanted.[41] Yet her choice to meet the governor with women and children after the failure of Chang Pao’s negotiations in February 1810 is perhaps evidence that she approached surrender as not just a pirate but a woman and a wife, securing a position for her husband in the military while surrendering on terms that were highly favorable to members of the confederation in general.

Just as she had gained power through marriage, so too did Zheng Yi Sao set up a successful life after piracy in part through marriage, negotiating a high-ranking military position for Chang Pao and using her status as an official’s wife to claim its benefits.[42] Following Chang Pao’s death in 1822, Zheng Yi Sao continued to use her status as a widow and mother to seek advancement. In 1840, she used her marriage to Chang Pao to charge an official with embezzlement from her long-deceased husband. Additionally, she used her role as a mother to her and Chang Pao’s son (born 1811) to “raise [him] to be a better official than his father.”[43]

Zheng Yi Sao continued using gender roles as a survival tactic until her death in 1844, at age 69. After Chang Pao’s death, stories suggest she ran either a gambling house or a brothel, a lucrative job for women seeking economic prosperity.[44] Perhaps the most remarkable signal of Zheng Yi Sao’s successful career is that she died of old age and not from the dangers of piracy, an accomplishment that may well have been affected by the tactics she used in surrendering, among which her April 8, 1810 performance of gender, discussed above, stands out.

Any investigation of Zheng Yi Sao raises more questions than answers. Fully understanding how she used gender as a strategy for advancement would require speculation about her inner thoughts. There is far too much we may never know about her, including her real name (Zheng Yi Sao translates to “wife of Zheng Yi”). However, she remains a fascinating figure, not least because she was able to transform her gender into a strategic advantage by merging wifehood with power, femininity with violence, and performance with strategy. 

Zheng Yi Sao was not a feminist figure, nor do I suggest that she was a proponent of women’s empowerment.[45] She was a proponent of her own empowerment, able to turn her identity as a woman to her advantage. Zheng Yi Sao’s path to power was not, at its foundation, an abnormal route for a Chinese woman of the period to take. However, Zheng Yi Sao’s ability to use gender as a springboard and a tool to build and maintain the powerful organization she led, an organization that was truly astounding in scale and effectiveness within the history of East Asian piracy, was exceptional and merits careful attention. Zheng Yi Sao negotiated piratical leadership as a woman and as a person on the margins through a mix of preexisting social channels available to her while pushing and breaking the boundaries of gender, thus creating new points of access to power and solidifying her legacy as a markedly powerful and subversive leader.

Maya Jan Mackey is a senior at the University of Texas at Austin pursuing a BA in Plan II Honors, history, and government. She is currently completing her thesis on the Attica Prison Uprising. While completing her undergraduate degree, she has been involved in research on American social movements, gender and politics, the social impact of conspiracy theories, and the history of race. She looks forward to attending law school in pursuit of studying Constitutional and civil rights law.

Acknowledgements: This article originates in Dr. Adam Clulow’s undergraduate seminar on the history of East Asian piracy

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

[1] One significant exception is the work of the Dian Murray. Murray, Dian. “One Woman’s Rise to Power: Cheng I’s Wife and the Pirates,” Historical Reflections, Vol. 8, No. 3(1981), 148, www.jstor.org/stable/41298765

[2] Duncombe, Laura S. “The Most Successful Pirate of All Time,” in Pirate Women: The Princesses, Prostitutes, and Privateers Who Ruled The Seven Seas (Chicago: Chicago Review Press Incorporated, 2017), 180-181.

[3] Murray, Dian. “Cheng I Sao in Fact and Fiction,” in Bold in Her Breeches: Woman Pirates Across the Ages, ed. Jo Stanley (Elmhurst: Pandora Publishing House, 1995), 206.

[4] See, for example, Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

[5] Murray, “Fact and Fiction,” 209-210.

[6] Kwan, Nathan. “In the Business of Piracy: Entrepreneurial Women Among Chinese Pirates in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Jennifer Aston & Catherine Bishop (Camden: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 199-201. See also MacKay, Joseph, “Pirate Nations in Maritime Societies,” Social Science History, vol. 37, no. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), www.jstor.org/stable/24 573942 for a discussion of the Guangdong Confederation as an escape society that was explicitly anti-state in nature and how this may have arisen from the marginal society Zheng Yi Sao came from.

[7] Kwan, “Business of Piracy,” 199-201.

[8] Kwan, “Business of Piracy,” 197.

[9] Harris, Charlie. “Ching Shih and the Pirates of the South China Coats: Shifting Alliances, Strategy, and Reputational Racketeering at the Start of the 19th Century,” in Global History of Capitalism Project Case Studies, ed. Christopher McKenna (Oxford: Oxford Centre for Global History, 2021), 4.

[10] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 149.  

[11] Murray, “Fact and Fiction,” 210.

[12] Harris, “Ching Shih and the Pirates,” 8.

[13] Harris, “Ching Shih and the Pirates,” 8.

[14]  Murray, “Rise to Power,” 149.

[15] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 147-148.

[16] Kwan, “Business of Piracy,” 199-201.

[17] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 148.

[18] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 150.

[19] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 150.

[20] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 150.

[21] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 159.

[22] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 151.

[23] It is worth noting that there is some debate as to the degree to which Chang Pao himself created these legal codes, yet the admittedly limited scholarship there is on his relationship with Zheng Yi Sao tends to take the position that she exerted a significant amount of influence on him and therefore played a significant role in the formation of these codes. Though sources may attribute these codes to either one of the couple, Zheng Yi Sao’s influence is present. For more on this debate, see Duncombe, “Most Successful Pirate,” 178-179.

[24] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 159.

[25] Harris, “Ching Shih and the Pirates,” 10.

[26] Murray, “Fact and Fiction,” 210-211.

[27] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 160.

[28] A minor speculative point also emerges from the fact that at the time, running brothels was a heavily female profession that allowed women a way to enter the Chinese economy, as Nathan Kwan notes (“Business of Piracy,” 211). There is no evidence that Zheng Yi Sao led a brothel, but the possibility that her background in sex work influenced her financial management skills as well as her attitudes towards the capture, ransoming, and selling of women as part of the operations of the Guangdong Confederation. This point requires more evidence and analysis that will not be undertaken here, and we may never know the answer, but the possibility that Zheng Yi Sao’s sex work contributed more to her piratical career than just the opportunity to meet Zheng Yi is one with fascinating implications for the discussion of gender and piracy at hand.

[29] Both Joseph MacKay and Nathan Kwan seem to support ideological or egalitarian readings of the confederation. See MacKay, “Escape Societies,” 564-566; Kwan, “Business of Piracy,” 201.

[30] Duncombe, “Most Successful Pirate,” 178.

[31] Duncombe, “Most Successful Pirate,” 178.

[32] Harris, “Ching Shih and the Pirates,” 5.

[33] Murray, “Fact and Fiction,” 230.

[34] Murray, “Fact and Fiction,” 207.

[35] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 156-157; Harris, “Ching Shih and the Pirates,” 10.

[36] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 154-155.

[37] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 158.

[38] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 157-158.

[39] Duncombe, “Most Successful Pirate,” 179.

[40] Kwan, “Business of Piracy,” 196.

[41] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 158.

[42] Since she remarried to Chang Pao after the death of her first husband, Zheng Yi Sao should not have been able to access these benefits. We do not know the details of how she prevailed, but she was seemingly successful in her petition to the government to be able to use the title and accompanying privileges. Murray, “Rise to Power,” 159.

[43] Murray, “Rise to Power,” 159.

[44] Duncombe, “Most Successful Pirate,” 180; Kwan, “Business of Piracy,” 211.

[45] Duncombe, “Most Successful Pirate,” 178; Murray, “Fact and Fiction,” 230-231.

This is Democracy – China’s Domestic and Foreign Policy

On this episode of This Is Democracy, Jeremi and Zachary are joined by Sheena Chestnut Greitens to discuss the changing political landscape in China and how that affects their relationship to the United States and other world leaders.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, “Far Away.”

Sheena Chestnut Greitens is an Associate Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where she directs UT’s Asia Policy Program.  She is also a Nonresident Scholar with the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Dr. Chestnut Greitens’ first book, Dictators and Their Secret Police (Cambridge, 2016), examines variations in internal security and repression in Taiwan, South Korea, and the Philippines during the Cold War.  Her second book, Politics of the North Korean Diaspora (Cambridge, 2023), focuses on authoritarianism, security, and diaspora politics. She is currently finishing her third book manuscript, which addresses how internal security concerns shape Chinese grand strategy. 

The Master in Bondage: Factory Workers in China, 1949-2019

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In my research on the social history of modern China, I have long focused, first, on how ordinary people lived their everyday life in a local community, such as a village, a production team, a factory or a workshop within it, during times of historical change. And, second, on how their personal experiences differed from what the organizations or movements imposed on them intended to be, and from what the master narratives told us about the events that involved the masses of local people.  Before writing about factory workers in post-1949 China, I had published two books on peasant communities and agrarian changes in China before and after 1949, namely, Village Governance in North China, 1875-1936 (Stanford University Press, 2005) and Village China Under Socialism and Reform: A Micro-History, 1948-2008 (Stanford University Press, 2009).  What I wanted to investigate in those two books was not so much about the formal, visible institutions operating in local communities, as it was about how such externally imposed institutions interplayed with the less visible, less formal institutions embedded in the village community to shape villagers’ day-to-day experiences. 

I adopted a similar approach to studying factory workers.  The Master in Bondage pays equal attention to both formal institutions and the subtle, less visible workplace practices.  Its goal is not to assess whether the formal factory institutions succeeded or failed in executing their official functions as claimed by the state.  Instead, it aims to explain how the imposed policies, systems, regulations, or organizations interacted with local practices and social relations to dictate worker performance in everyday production and factory politics.

Book cover of "Vilage government in north China, 1875-1936."
Book cover for "Village China under Socialism and Reform, a micro-history, 1948-2008."

The approach I employed in this book can be characterized as substantivist, meaning it seeks to contextualize formal, legal systems within the broader framework of informal relations and practices.  It departs from the formalist approach that is often found in past studies, which focuses primarily on formal institutions and interprets individuals’ behavior as derivative from such institutions.  For example, the “egalitarian” nature of the wage system in state-owned factories in the Maoist era lead many to believe that worker performance in production was necessarily subpar and inefficient; and the cadres’ extensive power in factory management also caused many to deduce their relationship with workers as one of domination and subordination. Workers in this light appeared to be either powerless and susceptible to cadre abuses or seeking favoritism from the powerful. 

I do not deny the existence of issues such as inefficiency in production or favoritism in cadre-worker relations; they did indeed exist with varying intensity across different factories and time periods.  My point is that factory life was much more complex and multifaceted than the formalist perspective suggests.  Factory workers inhabited a social environment in which a diverse range of formal institutions and informal practices intermingled, both constraining and motivating them as individuals and as a group; their strategies and actions were far more varied and adaptable than what one would find in the formalist literature in academic publications or in the discourse prevalent in mainstream media in post-Mao China, which was often influenced by recently imported neoclassical economic theories.

Workers in a "commune candle" factory, China, 1979.
Workers in a “commune candle” factory, China, 1979.
Source: Library of Congress.

This book is based primarily on interviews with 97 retirees from mostly large-size, state-owned factories in different parts of China (with a few exceptions of locally owned “collective firms”), which my collaborators and I conducted in 2012-2013.  The method of using workers’ oral account for studying factory politics in contemporary China can be traced to the 1970s and early 1980s and even earlier, when the availability of refugees and emigrees from mainland China made it possible for researchers to conduct interview with them in Hong Kong. 

In comparison, doing such interviews three decades later has its own merits and shortcomings.  The shortcomings are obvious: for our informants, factory life under Mao belonged to the remote past, and many details about their experiences on the shop floor had faded from memory and become increasingly inaccurate as time went by.  The merit is that, having experienced enterprise reforms and restructuring in the post-Mao years, which brought to them both improvements in living conditions and unprecedented frustrations because of unemployment or insecurity of livelihood, the workers’ attitude towards the Maoist past could be ambivalent: a mix of nostalgia and resentment are both present in their memories.  Overall, however, a more balanced account of their life in state firms can be expected in comparison to the views expressed by the emigres of the 1970s and early 1980s, who witnessed huge contrasts between Hong Kong and mainland China, and whose account of their recent past tended to be highly selective and dismissive. 

Book cover for "The master in bondage, factory workers in China, 1949-2009."

This book also draws on documents on factory governance preserved at the Nanjing Municipal Archives.  Similar issues exist with the archives from the Mao era.  Most of the files were produced by the management or “mass organizations” (trade union, the staff and workers’ congress – usually known as the SWC, and the youth league) of state firms.  While they provide interesting details about the implementation of state policies and the firm’s own initiatives or about the activities of the mass organizations, these documents were written primarily to prove the necessity and effectiveness of such policies or measures, and the examples included in these reports were highly selective and one-sided in many cases.  Therefore, caution is necessary when using these files.  Despite the various flaws with oral histories and official archives, however, these sources turned out to be immensely valuable and informative for forming a well-rounded interpretation of factory politics in Maoist China and afterward. 

My interpretation in this book revolves around “substantive governance,” a concept that I initially conceived in Village Governance in North China and further developed in this book.  Instead of focusing on the officially defined goals and functions of factory institutions and evaluating their effectiveness by looking at how the operational realities of those institutions met their officially stated objectives, this concept instead emphasizes the real purposes of factory institutions and how their everyday operations fulfilled the factory’s actual needs in maintaining its functionality. 

Take the trade union and the Worker’s Congress or SWC.  By official definitions, these two organs were intended to be tools for workers to exercise their rights as the “masters” of the factory, enabling them to participate in the factory’s decision-making process and supervise enterprise management; post-Mao reformers further hailed these two organs as mechanisms of “grassroots democracy” presumably leading China to the future of political democratization at higher levels.  But a close examination of the actual functioning of these two institutions shows that their only purposes were to satisfy workers’ everyday needs in production and subsistence in order to ensure the factory’s smooth operation; they had little to do with promoting workers’ social standing or political rights.  Thus, while those institutions appeared to be a failure in the eyes of people aspiring to be the masters of the factory or promoting democracy in China, they worked effectively in satisfying the real-world needs of both the workers and the factory.

A propaganda poster shows the bright future of a post-Maoist China with a modern consumer society and a one-child family, 1982.
A propaganda poster shows the bright future of a post-Maoist China with a modern consumer society and a one-child family, 1982.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

At the core of the concept of substantive governance lies my analysis of the mechanisms of dual equilibrium in regulating worker performance in everyday production and power relations.  Contrary to the prevailing narrative in China’s mainstream media that assumed widespread inefficiency in production in state firms because of egalitarianism in labor remuneration, most workers turned out to be neither fully dedicated to production as the Maoist representation of them as masters of the factory suggested, nor as slacking and negligent as the pro-reform elite made people believe after the death of Mao.  In fact, how workers performed in production was subject to the functioning of two distinct sets of factors that interwove to constrain as well as motivate them.  One was the formal institutions of lifetime employment guarantees, the wage system, labor discipline, workshop regulations, supervision by group leaders, daily political study meetings, and the nomination of advanced producers and model laborers, among others. The second was informal factors on the shop floor, such as peer pressure, group identity, and work norms among coworkers.

These two sets of factors converged to form a social context in which workers developed their strategies for everyday production.  As our interviewees repeatedly confirmed, both those who aspired to be model laborers and those who overtly shirked were few; instead, most of them worked hard enough to meet the minimum requirements of factory regulations and disciplines in order to avoid being openly censured or criticized by supervisors. At the same time, however, they also managed to conform to the informal norms and attitudes that prevailed on the shop floor to avoid being ridiculed or complained by their peers.  An equilibrium thus prevailed in labor relations, which explains why industrial production at the micro level was neither as terrible as taken for granted in the post-Mao discourse nor as efficient as the Mao-era state propaganda claimed.

Mao-era Propaganda Poster from 1956 Featuring a Chinese Typist.
Mao-era Propaganda Poster from 1956 Featuring a Chinese Typist.
The poster reads, “Whatever Work Aims to Complete and Not to Fail the Five-Year Plan, All That Work Is Glorious!”
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

A similar equilibrium prevailed in power relations between cadres and workers in state-owned factories.  Here again, two sets of factors worked together to dictate their relationship, giving rise to an equilibrium in it.  One was the formal institutions of the SWC and the trade union, including the system of appeal by letter and visits to expose cadres’ injustice, the factory management’s lack of power to fire workers and change their wage grades, workers’ guaranteed lifetime employment and wage grades pegged with seniority, workers’ superiority in political discourse, and the recurrent political movements that target corrupt cadre

The second included informal factors and practices such as personal loyalty and friendship, cadres’ care of personal reputation among subordinates, their dependence on worker collaboration to fulfill production targets, and workers’ taken-for-granted rights to subsistence.  It was in this context of both formal and informal institutions that workers defined who they were and how to deal with cadres.  Contrary to the conventional wisdom that assumed the predominance of the patron-client network in factory politics, cadres’ favoritism was limited in nominating workers for honorary titles or recruiting new party members and even more difficult in determining wage raises, bonus distribution, and housing allocation.  In fact, not only was it difficult for the cadres to practice favoritism openly, but given the huge risk of doing so under immense pressure from both above and below, most of our interviewees also believed it unnecessary to seek cadres’ peculiar favor and protection, given the security of their job and livelihood.  Instead of workers’ personal dependence on cadres, what prevailed between the two sides was an overall balanced relationship, each having their own strength and leverage in dealing with the other.

Workers in a glass factory, with baskets of glassware, in Shanghai, China, 1979.
Workers in a glass factory, with baskets of glassware, in Shanghai, China, 1979. Source: Library of Congress.

The dual equilibrium in production and power relations suffered severe damage and, in many state firms, even disappeared during the first few years of the Cultural Revolution due to the chaos or stoppage of production and the paralysis of factory management as workers engaged in Red Guard rebellions and seizures of power, and most factory leaders stepped down.  It re-emerged in the early 1970s when political disorder subsided, and most factories rebuilt their leadership, restored production, and reinforced labor discipline.  However, it eventually collapsed in the 1980s and early 1990s as a result of economic reforms, which granted individual enterprises the power to hire and lay off workers and increase their wage or bonus payments.  It was during this period of enterprise transformation, rather than in the years before it, as many of our informants observed, that cadres’ favoritism prevailed because of their greatly increased power in labor management and workers’ weakened position in relation to them.  Similarly, it was also during the years of enterprise reform, rather than before it, that workers’ slacking and negligence in production became a severe problem, as many of them began to seek opportunities outside the factory for extra income and as bonus payment became the only tool to incentivize them. 

The equilibrium in production and power relations was completely gone in the late 1990s and early 2000s when most state-owned factories were incorporated and turned into private businesses.  Instead of being the master of their factory, a political status that they had enjoyed, at least rhetorically, in the Maoist past, workers became the vulnerable “master” of their own labor only, subject to enterprise management’s complete control and reckless abuses in the absence of effective labor law and an autonomous trade union to protect them.

Interestingly, it was during the privatization of state firms, when workers were confronted with the immediate danger of losing their privileges of lifetime employment and security of livelihood, that for the first time, they used the SWC as the legal weapon to defend their rights, as best seen in the case of Zhengzhou Paper Mill.  In October 1999, workers of this paper mill occupied factory buildings when the mill was to be sold to a private firm.  They further convened a SWC meeting to pass a resolution that demanded the termination of the merger.  The workers succeeded when the city government approved the termination to avoid the worsening of the situation, but it refused to restore the paper mill into a state-owned enterprise as the workers originally requested.  Instead, the paper mill was transformed into a shareholding company in the end, with its management board members elected by the company’s SWC.

Factory in China at Yangtze River, 2008.
Factory in China at Yangtze River, 2008.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

But such cases of successful resistance were rare.  Millions of workers of former state firms suffered unemployment after their factories were privatized, and they were compensated with only a one-time payment by the new owners of the factories to “buy out” their seniority and the pension plan that came with it.  Those who were lucky enough to be re-employed in the newly restructured firm became wage workers only, where the roles of the trade union and the SWC were marginalized and even nonexistent at all.  Even less fortunate were the millions of migrant workers, who were hired as informal and temporary labor force, lacking the protection of labor law and eligibility for welfare benefits.  While enterprise reforms propelled China’s industrial expansion and economic growth, workers’ income levels and living conditions, while improving over time, lagged steadily behind the growth of wealth they created.

In recent years, China has made huge efforts to upgrade its manufacturing industry and narrow its technological gap with the most advanced industrial nations. Key to this task, as many in China have observed, is the need to maintain a large, stable rank of skilled workers.  Cultivating “the spirit of craftsmanship” (gongjiang jinsheng) among the workers thus has been a popular slogan that the party-state has vigorously promoted in its quest for China’s rise as an “advanced manufacturing power” (zhizhaoye qiangguo).  Increasing workers’ wages and providing them with legal protection are no doubt effective tools to incentivize the workers.  However, to make them not only technically competent but also fully dedicated to the workplace requires the cultivation among the new generation of the Chinese working class a shared sense of belonging to the workplace and pride over their workmanship.  There is still a long way to go for a new type of equilibrium to resurface on the shop floor, where workers are treated more as members of a community than simply wage earners.

Huaiyin Li, Ph.D. from UCLA, teaches modern Chinese history at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Village Governance of North China, 1879-1936 (Stanford, 2005), Village China under Socialism and Reform: A Microhistory, 1948-2008 (Stanford, 2009), Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing (Hawaii, 2012), The Making of the Modern Chinese State, 1600-1950 (Routledge, 2020), and The Master in Bondage: Factory Workers in China, 1949-2019 (Stanford, 2023). His latest article on the origins of Chinese civilization appears in The Journal of Asian Studies (Vol. 82, No.4, November 2023).

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of Ruan Lingyu: Her Life and Career (2022)

Review of Ruan Lingyu: Her Life and Career (2022)

A child of poverty, luckless in love, her hour upon the stage mostly lost to history, and dead before the age of 25: all too true for Chinese silent film star Ruan Lingyu. Yet there was also a prophecy that “her artistry will one day serve all mankind,” and this too has proved true. The slim yet thorough and persuasive new book Ruan Lingyu: Her Life and Career by Patrick Galvan explains the contradiction, the tug-of-war between tragedy and imperishability that defines so many of the 20th century’s great artists. After reading it, no one could exclude Ruan Lingyu from the pantheon.

book cover

Galvan’s study follows the parallel paths of Ruan Lingyu, born Ruan Fenggen in 1910 to Cantonese migrant workers, and the Shanghai-based film industry of the young Republic of China. There were growing pains for both. The Ruan family grew and then shrunk, wounded by toil and illness. Young Lingyu found work as a movie actress, not an entirely respectable profession, but one poised to come into its own as the medium grew in popularity and matured in technique. Chinese films struggled to compete with more popular Hollywood imports, and Chinese directors struggled with low budgets and capricious government censorship. What got audiences hooked was not so much the martial arts spectacles and romantic melodramas, but the stunning actresses who appeared in nearly every movie from their respective studios. Popular polls consistently ranked Ruan Lingyu near the top of the list of Chinese starlets, and after her untimely death in 1935 she became a bonafide legend, her story inspiring movies (see 1991’s Center Stage) and TV miniseries (in 1985, 1988, and 2005) decades later.

“Growing pains” is not quite the phrase to describe the tumult in Ruan’s short life and in the Chinese silent film industry. One grows out of growing pains; neither Ruan nor her kind of cinema outlived their moment, as Ruan died young and once-powerful studios folded amid the shift to talkies and political upheavals that truncated many creative careers. Yet their painful and ultimately fatal struggles were rewarded with growth of a sort. Galvan expertly recounts the dense years of the late 1920s and early 1930s, specifically the effects of internal Chinese politics and the Japanese invasion on the nation’s movies. In the wake of the patriotic May Fourth Movement of 1919, domestic film studios gained ground against foreign-owned studios. By the mid-1920s up to 60 production companies of varying size operated in Shanghai, collectively releasing hundreds of shorts and ever-more features per year, but the 1930s brought economic and political crises that radically changed China’s film landscape. While telling this larger story Galvan summarizes of each of Ruan’s films, a great many of which are lost, with close attention to how their fictional narratives reflected and challenged prevailing ideas about gender, class, and nationhood.

Ruan Lingyu poses against a stucco wall next to an open French door in this color photograph, which appeared on the cover of a Chinese magazine in December 1934. Ruan is smiling with her head cocked to one side; she wears a long green patterned dress.
Issue 99 (1 December 1934) of the the Chinese magazine Liángyǒu–called The Young Companion in English–displayed this photo of Ruan Lingyu on its cover. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Concerned about leftist content in popular media, the government of Chiang Kai-shek provided studios with a list of prohibited themes, and censorship became more strict after 1931 when the Nationalist government contended with both an internal communist threat and an external Japanese one. Depicting social problems was acceptable as long as movies did not suggest solutions or issue calls to action, since this would be tantamount to supporting revolution. Even with such restrictions, directors and cinematographers became more confident in their craft, and their stories tended to become more ambitious and nuanced. Ruan and her costars became more sophisticated performers, and Ruan in particular reached such heights that later critics compared her to Brando in terms of her ability to convey depth and authenticity.

Galvan’s book is primarily a work of history, not film criticism, but he does not shy away from assessing the merit of Ruan’s work, which varied depending on the studio, director, and subject matter. 1934’s The Goddess and 1935’s New Woman receive especially detailed attention befitting these films superior quality and messaging. Director Wu Yonggang’s The Goddess is “a hauntingly emotional portrait” of a Shanghai sex worker and her child that features creative camera work and Ruan’s most harrowing extant performance. New Woman is based partly on the short life of novelist and screenwriter Ai Xia, the second woman to author a Chinese feature film, and its critiques of social injustice make it “the most aggressively left-wing film in Ruan Lingyu’s career.”

Galvan is passionate when writing about the relationships in Ruan’s life. They were the source of the tabloid controversies that dogged her in her final months, and they likely played a key role in her two suicide attempts, the second of which was successful. She had two common-law marriages, the first of which fell apart due to financial stress brought on by her partner’s gambling addiction. Her second partner was violent and jealous and reportedly falsified Ruan’s suicide notes. Galvan’s notes and wording are precise, but one may still wonder about facets of Ruan’s life that never entered the written record and whether it is fair to speculate, as the tabloids did, on the circumstances of her death. Still, Galvan’s evidence-based assessments feel correct.

Ruan Lingyu: Her Life and Career is divided into chronological chapters with subheadings for her over two-dozen films. The subheadings note if films are lost, making the book an easy-to-use guide for readers who want to familiarize themselves with Ruan’s filmography. Most of her surviving films are easy to access in the internet age, and Galvan helpfully notes when this is not the case. His chosen images are generally high-quality or highest-available quality, and they depict a range of Ruan performances while also centering the particular aesthetic that made her stand out from her cohort. Galvan finds opportunities to contextualize Ruan’s career in comparison to some of her leading peers, many of whom shared remembrances of her over the years. The book also points to larger themes in Chinese film history, such as the challenges of being a Cantonese-speaker (as Ruan was) in a Mandarin-oriented industry as it shifted to sound in the 1930s, how the center(s) of Chinese-language filmmaking shifted to Hong Kong and Taiwan after the communist victory in 1949, and the effect of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s on the old guard of mainland filmmaking.

And what of the prediction of one Chinese critic, who used the pen name “Yun,” that Ruan’s talent would one day benefit all humanity? Yun likely hoped that the actress would promote social change through her powerful performances in topical movies that spotlighted social problems and national crises. Whether Ruan or her films actually affected the trajectory of history is one measure of success, but as we approach the centennial of Ruan’s 1927 big-screen debut there is another, equally important legacy to consider. Ruan’s work now serves as a window to the past, a body of evidence about what hardworking filmmakers wanted people to know and think about at crucial, contested moments in Chinese history. Thanks to Ruan’s talent, it is a window we can enjoy gazing through.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Red China’s Green Revolution: Technological Innovation, Institutional Change, and Economic Development under the Commune by Joshua Eisenman (2018)

by Horus Tan

The People’s Commune was both a collective farm and a local institution that managed almost all economic and political activities in rural China. It was introduced in China in 1958 and abolished in 1983. Many scholars suggest that the People’s Commune was unproductive because its remuneration system was too egalitarian. According to James Kai-sing Kung , it offered only “a tenuous link between effort and reward. This weakness of incentives led to extensive free-riding behavior, which was cured only by the eventual replacement of the collectives by family farms.”[1] The Chinese Communist Party today shares this perspective. In its official narrative, the People’s Commune was too unproductive to maintain the subsistence of the peasants, and the abolition of the commune was set into motion by a couple of destitute peasants in 1978 who were attempting to improve their living standard. Joshua Eisenman offers a quite different perspective. In Red China’s Green Revolution, he argues that, instead of being an economic failure, the People’s Commune was successful in modernizing agriculture and promoting agricultural productivity during the 1970s. Some top officials of the Chinese Communist Party, not some poor peasants, abolished the People’s Commune in 1983 for their own political gain instead of its economic performance.

Poster of People’s Commune ca. 1958 (via Flickr)

Eisenman’s foremost conclusion is that the People’s Commune of the 1970s can be considered productive because of its ability to generate investment. Eisenman found that the People’s Commune was not a rigid institution. When it was introduced in 1958, it was indeed a disastrous failure and led to the famine of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961). However, it experienced a dramatic transformation in the 1960s. By the 1970s, the People’s Commune, which Eisenman called the “Green Revolution Commune,” was successful in raising the agricultural productivity in China. One of the biggest problems agriculture in China faced before the introduction of the People’s Commune was the lack of capital. In a country with scarce capital and an unlimited labor force living just above subsistence level, it was hard to cut consumption and increase saving rates, in order to make productive investments to take advantage of high returns to capital. The People’s Commune of the 1970s extracted agricultural surplus before produce was distributed among the peasants. In other words, the peasants were taxed before they got their income. This system enabled the commune to “reduce consumption and ensure the high savings rates necessary to finance agricultural modernization.” Unlike the People’s Commune of 1958, which invested household savings in poor quality capital and caused the most catastrophic famine in human history, the People’s Commune of the 1970s turned savings into productive investments like agricultural machinery and chemical fertilizer. It kickstarted a continuous development process that produced rapid growth in food production. At the same time, the People’s Commune of the 1970s tolerated the existence of private sideline plots, cottage enterprises, and rural markets. This tolerance helped the peasants maintain their lives above the subsistence level and avoid the over-extraction which took place in the People’s Commune of 1958.

Mao Zedong shakes hands with Peoples commune workers ca. 1958 (via. Wikimedia)

Many scholars suggest that the remuneration system of the People’s Commune allowed the less productive members to be free riders, and made more productive members work less hard for the commune and seek better compensation outside it. In contrast, Eisenman argues that the free rider problem was largely alleviated by Maoist collectivist indoctrination. He argues that the People’s Commune was a kind of religious community, a church of Mao. Through ceremonial behaviors, like the public recitation of Mao’s teachings, the performance of Maoist opera and dance, and the display of Mao’s profile, the People’s Commune created a self-disciplined labor force who prioritized the fulfillment of Maoist collectivist ideology over material wealth. These activities also created a strict political atmosphere in which a nonconformists felt that criticized by the entire commune. Maoist indoctrination was backed up by the People’s Militia—the semiautonomous local military institution nested within the commune. The People’s Militia was controlled by the leaders of the commune to enforce both the commune’s collectivist ideology and its external security. Eisenman points out one additional characteristic that forced peasants to accept the high savings rates. The People’s Commune was not only a collective farm but also an autarkic institution that managed almost all economic and political activities in rural China. This autarky made it almost impossible for the peasants to flee the commune and seek a better life in the world outside.

People’s Commune Canteen ca. 1958 (via Wikimedia)

Eisenman’s second major conclusion is that the abolition of the People’s Commune was carried out by top officials of the Chinese Communist Party. According to the official narrative, the People’s Commune was too unproductive to maintain the subsistence of its members, so eighteen starving peasants in a commune of East China decollectivized their own commune, risking the death penalty on December 24, 1978.  The improvement of these peasants’ economic conditions after decollectivization supposedly encouraged the authorities to abolish the People’s Commune. However, Eisenman argues that the fate of the Commune was decided not by its economic performance or by grassroots demands, but rather by the winner of the factional struggle within the Communist Party—Deng Xiaoping. The abolition of the Commune was a deliberate decision taken by these top Party officials to overthrow their pro-commune rivals who were still loyal to Mao’s ideology after Mao’s death.  He also shows that there were many local and commune officials who opposed the abolition of the commune and refused to return to household-based agriculture. They did not dismember their commune until they were asked to do so by provincial officials. Some provincial officials admitted that they had to issue orders to stop the local officials from hindering the decollectivization movement.

People’s Commune ca. 1981 (via Wikimedia)

One of the merits of Eisenman’s study is that it offers a very useful approach to help scholars understand the transformation of agriculture in China during the 1960s and 1970s. Famine is one of the most common topics in Chinese history, and agriculture in China still underperformed until the 1960s. But during the 1970s, the situation definitely changed. Between 1962 and 1978, although China was almost completely closed to foreign trade, added almost 300 million people without suffering any massive famine. We can’t understand how Chinese agriculture accomplished this if we do not recognize the contribution of the People’s Commune to agricultural productivity. Eisenman’s study also helps researchers to dispense with their  idealization of private property rights. Researchers of collective agriculture in the Soviet Union and Communist China usually are occupied with the underperformance of collective agriculture and the tragedies peasants suffered in the collective farms in these countries. These tragedies sometimes make researchers assume that private property is therefore superior. Eisenman’s study shows that the foremost obstacle faced by agriculture in many developing and underdeveloped countries is the lack of capital rather than the lack of private property rights. Small peasants cannot overcome the lack of capital by just building a closer connection between effort and reward.

[1] James Kai-sing Kung, “Transaction Costs and Peasants’ Choice of Institutions: Did the Right to Exit Really Solve the Free Rider Problem in Chinese Collective Agriculture?” Journal of Comparative Economics 17, no. 2 (June 1993): 486.


You might also like:
Confucian Patriarchy and the Allure of Communism in China
China Today: Communism for Americans in the 1930s
The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past, by Gail Hershatter (2011)
Sowing the Seeds of Communism: Corn Wars in the USA

IHS Panel: From the May Fourth Movement to the Communist Revolution

The year 2019 marks the 100th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement and the 70th anniversary of the ending of the Communist Revolution in China. Beginning with the unreserved embrace of Western values by “enlightenment” intellectuals, the three decades following World War I in China witnessed dramatic transformation on all fronts, ending in the establishment of a communist government that would rule China to the present day. To make sense of the impacts and legacies of these two historical events as well as the ironies and contradictions that were intrinsic to them, our panelists will discuss the impact of the May Fourth movement on social and intellectual life in Republican China, the opportunities and dilemmas that confronted Chinese women in their involvement in the Communist Revolution, and the strategy and tactics behind Communist success in the Civil War in 1949.

Featuring:

“Rethinking of the May Fourth Discourse: Family, Marriage and Women in the Chinese Revolution”
Xiaoping Cong
Professor of History
University of Houston

“The Making of “Youth” in Modern China: Reflections on the May Fourth Movement”
Iris Ma
Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer, Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs
University of Texas at Austin

“From 1919 to 1949: The May 4th Movement and Communist Strategy and Tactics in China’s Civil War”
Harold Tanner
Professor of History
University of North Texas

Huaiyin Li, moderator
Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

2019 History PhDs on Not Even Past

This month on Not Even Past we are celebrating the accomplishments of seventeen students who completed their doctoral dissertations and received their PhDs in History in 2018-2019. Above you see some of them pictured. Below you will find each of their names and the title of their dissertations.

Many of these students were also contributors to Not Even Past throughout their time here, developing their skills as public historians alongside their training as a academics. Here we offer a comprehensive index to all our new PhDs’ publications on Not Even Past.  Congratulations to all!

Ahmad Tawfek Agbaria
Dissertation: The Return of the Turath: Arab Rationalist Association 1959-2000

Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture by Ziad Fahmy (2011)

Israeli tanks advancing on the Golan Heights. June 1967 (via Wikipedia)

Christopher Babits
Dissertation: To Cure a Sinful Nation: Conversion Therapy in the United States

The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Dir: Desiree Akhavan, 2018)

Digital Teaching: A Mid-Semester Timeline

The Blemished Archive: How Documents Get Saved

Age of Fracture by Daniel T. Rodgers (2011)

Nature Boy, 30 for 30 (Dir: Rory Karpf, 2017)

Doing History in the Modern U.S. Survey: Teaching with and Analyzing Academic Articles

Finding Hitler (in All the Wrong Places?)

The Rise of Liberal Religion by Matthew Hedstrom (2013)

Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self by Jessica Grogan (2012)

Another Perspective on the Texas Textbook Controversy

Religious Book Week Poster from 1925 (via Library of Congress)

Bradley Joseph Dixon
Dissertation: Republic of Indians: Law, Politics, and Empire in the North American Southeast, 1539-1830

Facing North from Inca Country: Entanglement, Hybridity, and Rewriting Atlantic History

Map of Virginia, discovered and as described by Captain John Smith, 1606; engraved by William Hole (Via Wikimedia commons)

Luritta DuBois
Dissertation: United in Our Diversity: The Reproductive Healthcare Movement, 1960-2000

Historical Perspectives on Marshall (dir. Reginal Hudlin, 2017)

UT Gender Symposium: Women’s Bodies and Political Agendas

Thurgood Marshall in 1957 (Library of Congress)

Dennis Fisher
Dissertation: To Not Sell One Perch: Algonquin Politics and Culture at Kitigan Zibi During the Twentieth Century

The Many Histories of South Austin: The Old Sneed Mansion

A 1936 photograph of the Sneed House taken by the Historic American Buildings Survey (via Library of Congress)

Kristie Flannery
Dissertation: The Impossible Colony: Piracy, the Philippines, and Spain’s Asian Empire

A New History Journal Produced by Students

#changethedate: Australia’s Holiday Controversy

Acapulco-Manila: The Galleon, Asia and Latin America, 1565-1815

Notes from The Field: The Pope in Manila

Outlaws of the Atlantic by Marcus Rediker (2014)

Among the Powers of the Earth: the American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire by Eliga Gould

Sixteen Months in a Leaky Boat

The Sapphires (2012)

2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse by Matthew Restall and Amara Solari (2011)

Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America edited by Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara (2009)

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (2001)

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz (1999)

detail of an 18c map depicting a pirate ship sailing near the Philippines.

Pedro Murillo Velarde and Nicolas de la Cruz Bagay. Mapa de las yslas Philipinas (1744) (Detail: Benson Latin America Collection, UT Austin)


Travis Michael Gray
Dissertation: Amid the Ruins: The Reconstruction of Smolensk Oblast, 1943-1953

Every Day Stalinism, by Sheila Fitzpatrick (2000)

Stalin’s Genocides by Norman Naimark (2011)

Soviets fighting during World War II (via wiki commons)

William Kramer
Dissertation: Faith, Heresy and Rebellion: Resisting the Henrician Reformation in Ireland, 1530-1540

Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and Edward VI (via Art Institute of Chicago)

John Lisle
Dissertation: Science and Espionage: How the State Department and the CIA Deployed American Scientists during the Cold War

What Killed Albert Einstein

This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age by William Burrows (1998)

Soviet postage stamp celebrating the 10th anniversary of the launch of the Sputnik satellite

James Martin
Dissertation: In Search of the Nixon Doctrine on Latin America: Levers of Influence and Resistance in Hemispheric Relations

Vice President Richard Nixon’s motorcade drives through Caracas, Venezuela and is attacked by demonstrators, May 1958 (National Archives via Wikipedia)

Kazushi Minami
Dissertation: Rebuilding the Special Relationship: People’s Diplomacy and U.S.-Chinese Relations in the Cold War

Peeping Through the Bamboo Curtain: Archives in the People’s Republic of China

Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World by Hajimu Masuda (2015)

Past and Present in Modern China

Historical Perspectives on Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises (2013)

shot from animated film of a boy looking up at airplane in the sky

from Hayao Miyazaki’s film The Wind Rises

Elizabeth O’Brien
Dissertation: Intimate Interventions: The Cultural Politics of Reproductive Surgery in Mexico, 1790-1940

Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in The Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973 by Heidi Tinsman.

Gendered Compromises: Political Culture and the State in Chile, 1920-1950 by Karin Rosemblatt

The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil by Thomas D. Rogers (2010)

“Women Advance with the Flag of the Motherland” La Unidad Popular poster (1970).

Nakia Parker
Dissertation: Trails of Tears and Freedom: Black Life in Indian Slave Country,1830-1866

Popular Culture in the Classroom

The First Texans: An Exhibit in Jester Hall

Confederados: The Texans of Brazil

Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South by Barbara Krauthamer (2013)

Chickasaw Freedmen filing for allotment in Oklahoma (Oklahoma Historical Society)

Christopher Rose
Dissertation: On the Home Front: Food, Medicine, and Disease in WWI Egypt

You’re Teaching WHAT?

Wrong About Everything

Mapping & Microbes: The New Archive (No. 22)

Searching for Armenian Children in Turkey: Work Series on Migration, Exile, and Displacement

Industrial Sexuality: Gender in a Small Town in Egypt

Texas is Adopting New History Textbooks: Maybe They Should Be Historically Accurate

Exploring the Silk Road

The Ottoman Age of Exploration by Giancarlo Casale (2010)

What’s Missing from ‘Argo’ (2012)

Chris is also the co-founder and main force behind our podcast, 15 Minute History, where he has done many of our interviews.

Map showing typhus outbreaks in Egypt, September 1, 1914 – May 31, 1919 (created by Chris Rose)


Edward Flavian Shore
Dissertation: Avenger of Zumbi: The Nature of Fugitive Slave Communities and Their Descendants in Brazil

 

History and Advocacy: Brazil and Turmoil

Sanctuary Austin: 1980s and Today

Beyonce as Historian: Black Power at the DPLA

Remembering Willie “El Diablo” Wells and Baseball’s Negro League

The Public Historian: Giving it Back

The Quilombo Activist’s Archives and Post-Custodial Preservation, Part II

The Quilombo Activist’s Archives and Post-Custodial Preservation, Part I

An Anticipated Tragedy: Reflections on Brazil’s National Museum

The Public Historian: Quilombola Seeds

Getz/Gilverto Fifty Years Later: A Retrospective

Por Ahora: The Legacy of Hugo Chávez Frías

The Cuban Connection by Eduardo Saénz Rovner (2008)

Che: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson

Narco-Modernities

Photo from Edward Shore’s Collection

Eyal Weinberg
Dissertation: Tending to the Body Politic: Doctors, Military Repression, and Transitional Justice in Brazil (1961-1988)

Our History Mixtape: Embracing Music in the Classroom

Ex Cathedra: Stories by Machado de Assis: Bilingual edition (2014)

For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in Sao Paulo, 1920-1964 by Barbara Weinstein (1996)

The Works Progress Administration’s music project employed musicians as instrumentalists, singers, concert performers, and music teachers during the Great Depression (via Library of Congress)

Zhaojin Zeng
Dissertation: Nourishing Shanxi: Indigenous Entrepreneurship, Regional Industry, and the Transformation of a Chinese Hinterland Economy, 1907-2004

 

Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State by Yansheng Huang (2008) 

Cantonese bazaar during Chinese New Year at the Grant Avenue, San Francisco, circa 1914 (via Wikipedia)

Pictured in photo: Dr. John Lisle, Prof Daina Berry, Dr. William Kramer, Dr. Nakia Parker, Prof. Ann Twinam, Dr. Christopher Rose, Dr. Elizabeth O’Brien, Dr. Eyal Weinberg.

Confucian Patriarchy and the Allure of Communism in China

By Alan Roberts

Former flag of the communist part of China (via Wikipedia)

Despite a growing tolerance for socialism, “communism” is still a dirty word for most Americans.  Many point to Stalin’s Gulag, the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge, and the repressive Kim dynasty in Korea as they preface the question how could communism ever appeal to anyone?  For each country, there are myriad answers to that question, but it is useful to consider the historical situation in each nation before they embraced communism.

In China, for instance, there were political, economic, and nationalistic reasons for the popularity of communism, but interestingly, Chairman Mao Zedong’s movement found broad popular support in part because of his explicit efforts to enforce gender equality.  It was he, after all, who proclaimed that “women hold up half the sky.”[1]  Compared with China’s Confucian patriarchal system that had oppressed women for so long, many saw this as a welcome change.  Nevertheless, part of what makes patriarchy so insidious is its ability to trick whole generations of people—including women—into propagating an oppressive system rather than overthrowing it.

Judith Bennett’s History Matters analyzes patriarchy in a medieval European context, but her theoretical claims could also be applied to pre-communist Chinese society in general, and Confucianism in particular.  Bennett points out that it is problematic to broadly assume that men alone are the perpetrators of patriarchy and that women are their passive victims.  While the institution of patriarchy certainly privileges the masculine over the feminine, Bennett also states that patriarchy has harmed individual men just as it has benefitted individual women.  Indeed, certain women have not only benefited from it, but have also served as active “agents of patriarchy.”[2]

Portrait of Confucius, painted by Wu Daozi, 685-7 58 (via Wikipedia)

Confucius lived circa 500 BCE, but it was not until the Han Dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE) that Confucianism became the official state ideology.  Since then, Confucianism was not simply a “main character” in Chinese society but also the stage, set, and scenery upon which the play of Chinese daily life unfolded.  Central to Confucian philosophy is the doctrine of filial piety.  This principle teaches that universal harmony is maintained when everyone shows proper respect to their elders because the organization of the family is a microcosm patterned after the organization of the state.  A filial son honors his father, but filial piety also articulates the rules of conduct between friends, elder and younger brothers, husbands and wives, subjects and emperors.  In this way, society is hierarchically structured with men ruling over women and the old ruling over the young, all the way from the lowliest peasant granddaughter to the imperial Son of Heaven.

At the apex of the Confucian philosophical pantheon sits Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi.  Writing almost four-hundred years after the fact, the Han dynasty scholar Liu Xiang (79-8 BCE) compiled a biography of 125 women who each exemplified Han feminine virtues.  One of these women was the mother of Mencius, who, according to Liu, taught her son that a woman’s duties are to cook the five grains, heat the wine, look after her parents-in-law, make clothes, and that is all!  This means that a woman’s duty is not to control or to take charge.  Instead she must follow the ‘three submissions.’  When she is young, she must submit to her parents.  After her marriage, she must submit to her husband.  When she is widowed, she must submit to her son.  These are the rules of propriety.[3]

It is worth pointing out that although this quote is attributed to the mother of Mencius, it was actually written centuries later by a man whose intention was to reinforce the patriarchal order by projecting stereotypical female attitudes into the mouth of an authoritative woman whose own gravitas is enhanced by the respected tradition surrounding her son.  However, Liu Xiang laid the foundation for others to buttress the Confucian patriarchy.

Photo of He Zhen (via Wikipedia)

Almost a hundred years after Liu Xiang, Ban Zhao, China’s first female historian, wrote a book titled Admonitions for Women.  Her work condemns spousal abuse, but this text would certainly qualify Ban Zhao as one of Bennett’s “agents of patriarchy”:

On the third day after the birth of a girl…lay the baby below the bed [to] plainly indicate that she [is] lowly and humble and should regard it as a prime duty to submit to others…give her a spindle with which to play [signifying] that she should accustom herself to labor and consider it a prime duty to be industrious.  Let a woman modestly yield to others; let her put others first, herself last.  Should she do something good, let her not mention it; should she do something bad, let her not deny it.  Let her bear contempt; let her even endure when others speak or do evil to her.  Always let her seem to tremble and to fear.[4]

A thousand years later, Confucian patriarchy would intersect gender and class by adding foot binding to its repertoire of female suppression.  While women of the upper class suffered the debilitating pain and immobility of having bound feet, women of the lower classes without bound feet suffered socially from diminished marriage prospects and public humiliation.  However, prior to the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, bowing to society’s unrealistic beauty standards, all classes of Chinese women were binding their feet. Roughly half of all Chinese women had bound feet, although the percentage rose significantly among the upper classes.  Although many Chinese emperors and administrators tried to outlaw the practice, only the communists were successful at doing so because of their superior organizational tactics and relentless campaigning.[5]

In 1907, an expatriated Chinese woman named He Zhen published a series of articles on feminism and equal rights.  Although she preceded the Chinese Communist Party by over a decade, and although she was not widely read by the Chinese public, her essays did influence a number of important social agitators whose movements helped bring the Communist Party to power.  She begins her essay, “Women’s Revenge,” by outlining the patriarchal injustices that Chinese women have suffered.  She then asks “how did this poison fill the entire world?  It can be traced to the doctrines of Ban Zhao.”  She continues by labelling Ban a traitor to her sex, a dupe of Confucian misogyny, and a willing agent of patriarchy.[6]  He’s intention, however, is not simply to lay the axe at the root of patriarchal Confucianism, but to actively promote communism as the treatment for China’s nineteenth and twentieth century social ills.

In another essay, He declares that starvation is the strongest tool of sexual oppression in Chinese society.  By controlling the food (i.e. the products of labor), men control the labor of women.  He argues that just so they can eat, women generally fall into one of three categories: either they are slaves to their husbands; they work in factories for slave wages; or else they become prostitutes and enslave themselves to their pimps.  He proclaims that the problem for Confucian women is that they are dependent on others, and “as long as you depend on others, you cannot be free.  I have a good idea that will exempt you from relying on others while still finding food naturally.  How?  By practicing communism.”  Whether or not a twenty-first century Westerner agrees with He’s assessment, it should at least be understandable why so many oppressed Chinese women agreed with Mao and He that because women hold up half the sky, “if we only unite together, with [communism] we can naturally have a good future.  As we say colloquially, ‘the good times are coming.’”[7]

(Alan Roberts is an alumnus of the Defense Language Institute’s Chinese language program.  He is currently a graduate student in history at Utah State University where he is writing his Master’s thesis on performative elements of gender in Chinese Communist propaganda.)

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/world/asia/holding-up-half-the-sky.html?_r=0

[2] Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 59.

[3] Xiang Liu, “Women’s Virtues and Vices,” in Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook, 2nd Ed, ed. Patricia Buckley Ebrey (New York: The Free Press, 1981, 1993), 73.

[4] Zhao Ban, “Admonitions for Women,” in Sources of Chinese Tradition Volume 1, ed. Wm. Theodore De Bary and Irene Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 821, 822.

[5] Louisa Lim, “Painful Memories for China’s Footbinding Survivors,” National Public Radio, March 19, 2007, accessed May 2, 2018, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8966942.

[6] Zhen He, “Women’s Revenge,” in Sources of Chinese Tradition Volume 2, ed. Wm. Theodore De Bary and Richard Lufrano (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 394.

[7] Zhen He, “What Women Should Know About Communism,” in Sources of Chinese Tradition Volume 2, ed. Wm. Theodore De Bary and Richard Lufrano (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 390-2.

Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China, by Frank Dikötter, Lars Peter Laamann, and Zhou Xun (2004)

By Horus T’an

The opium myth is one of the most important pillars of the conventional narrative of modern Chinese history. According to the myth, opium is presumed to be a highly addictive narcotic and highly harmful to its users’ health, and Great Britain used its military superiority to impost the shameful opium trade on China and turn it into a nation of opium addicts who were “smoking themselves to death while their civilization descended into chaos.” In the opium myth, opium symbolizes the imperialists’ pernicious intention to dominate China and the tragedies suffered by all the nations facing imperialist aggression. In Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China, Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann, and Zhou Xun debunk the opium myth through exploration of the history of opium in China from the sixteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. They point out that the opium myth was invented by nationalist reformers and never reflected the reality of opium in Chinese society during the late imperial period. The authors also argue that the miseries experienced by Chinese opium smokers  from the end of the nineteenth century were brought on by the anti-opium campaigns launched by the Chinese authorities rather than the chemical property of opium. These campaigns degraded the opium smokers into a morally depraved status and forced them to use more harmful semi-synthetic opiates like morphine and heroin.

The opium myth analyzed opium smoking practices in China and India in isolation from the cultural and social factors sustaining these practices. In contrast, this book shows that opium in China served as an essential lubricant in male social activities. Opium was prepared and appreciated in highly sophisticated ceremonies by male social elites. Opium also served as a panacea for many ailments. Quite contrary to the incurable addicts in the opium myth, the authors argue that the opium consumed in both China and India was relatively moderate and had few harmful effects on either health or longevity. Most opium smokers were able to control the quantity of the opium they consumed, and the irresistible compulsion toward ever-increasing doses was not a common phenomenon among them.

The highlight of this discussion about the history of opium before the end of the nineteenth century is the comparison between tobacco and opium. The authors demonstrate that tobacco and opium played a relatively similar role in social activities and people showed similar attitudes toward them. There were alarms in the 1830s and 1840s from a few Han officials over moral decay and the breakdown in social order caused by the prevalence of opium. The opium myth interpreted these critiques as Chinese people’s unyielding resistance to imperialists’ attempt to turn China into a nation of opium addicts. Nevertheless, the authors prove that these alarms were based on Confucian asceticism rather than Han officials’ understanding of the addictive chemical property of opium since some officials expressed similar concern about the popularity of tobacco. In addition, the authors emphasize that the critique of opium by Han officials was related to their desire to restore the scholar-official class to the position of moral authority that it possessed during the Ming dynasty.

The authors suggest that the opium myth, which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, was a confluence of two trends. The first is the prevalence of opium prohibition in Europe from the 1870s. Opium prohibition was “part of the medical profession’s search for moral authority, legal control and statutory power over pharmaceutical substances in their fight against a popular culture of self-medication.” The second is  Chinese nationalists’ effort to defend their own country from the encroachment of imperialism. The nationalists were eager to figure out why China was repeatedly defeated by imperial powers. The authors suggest that the  Chinese nationalists viewed opium smoking as the origin of national weakness rather than a personal behavior and that they saw anti-opium campaign as a useful tool to save China from a world dominated by imperial powers.

The authors’ second conclusion is that the anti-opium campaigns, rather than the opium itself, brought miseries to opium smokers. The anti-opium campaigns transformed the public image of opium smokers from gentlemen to thieves, swindlers, and beggars who were enslaved by powerful chemicals. These campaigns also transformed opium houses from a culturally sanctioned venue for male sociability into a site of perdition, a marker of uncivilized behavior and barbarism where vulgar and despicable addicts were leading the country to complete extinction. The prohibition laws passed in these campaigns gave authorities the right to arrest, punish, and kill opium smokers. Besides creating a criminal underclass, these campaigns also pushed smokers from moderate opium to more addictive and more harmful semi-synthetic opiates like morphine and heroin. Even worse, these semi-synthetic opiates are consumed in a much more harmful pattern: heroin and morphine were usually mixed with other unknown compounds and snorted, chewed, or injected with dirty needles shared by many addicts without any protection.

There are some omissions in this book. The first is the process by which the opium myth gained its concrete shape. The authors do a great job in deconstructing the opium myth but fail to dedicate enough attention to this process. This omission weakens the credibility of their argument. The second is the role of racism in the anti-opium campaigns. Opium smoking was mainly a habit practiced by Chinese and Indian. Racism against Chinese immigrants in the United States is responsible for linking opium smoking as a Chinese behavior with opium smoking as a barbarian behavior. Some Chinese intellectuals might accept the anti-opium ideas without any awareness of the racism behind it. The absence of the discussion of racism makes this book less useful than it is supposed to be in understanding how Chinese intellectuals changed their way of thinking through their interaction with the Western world. Furthermore, the authors’ conclusion that the anti-opium campaigns facilitated the spread of the semi-synthetic narcotics is also questionable. After the collapse of the Ch’ing Dynasty, some places of China witnessed the prosperity of both opium and semi-synthetic narcotics. This prosperity could not be explained just with the pressure of the anti-opium campaigns. Despite these omissions, Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China serves as essential scholarship for the researchers of modern Chinese history. It re-interprets opium use in Chinese society from the sixteenth century to the mid-twentieth century and shatters one of the most important pillars of the conventional narrative of modern Chinese history. It reveals the complexity of modern Chinese history and implies the failure of the conventional narrative in addressing this complexity. The book throws lights on opium smokers’ miseries caused by the anti-opium campaigns and reminds readers that some important stories are crushed and abandoned in the writing of modern Chinese history. Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China also indicates the significance of culture in shaping public opinion about narcotics and encourages readers to reconsider the effectiveness of the restrictive prohibition law in dealing with the spread of narcotics.

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Rethinking American Grand Strategy in the Asia Pacific

By More than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783. By Michael J. Green. Illustrated. 725 pp. Columbia University Press. $45.

by Jonathan R. Hunt
University of Southhampton

First Published by The Imperial and Global Forum (October 23, 2017).

Otto von Bismarck once remarked that the United States was blessed: “The Americans are truly a lucky people. They are bordered to the north and south by weak neighbours and to the east and west by fish.” Thanks to this geographic grace, George Washington could call for freedom from “entangling alliances” in his farewell address. This distance has also bred a strong undercurrent of parochialism and chauvinism in American culture. From these two impulses has emerged the conceptual DNA of American foreign relations in the form of two dichotomies—exemplarism versus interventionism; cosmopolitanism versus exceptionalism—lending form and structure to debates about how a democratic people should manage their affairs in an often unkind, even hostile, world.

In his sweeping and authoritative account of United States grand strategy in the Asia Pacific, Michael J. Green reminds us that Americans have long regarded this maritime expanse – from the Aleutians to Cape Horn in the Western Hemisphere across to Australasia and Sakhalin in the Eastern — as integral to defending their ‘empire of liberty’. Nineteenth-century policymakers from Thomas Jefferson and Matthew C. Perry to Henry Seward and John Hay sought to pry open these watery frontiers to American influence (and conquest) so as to stave off any threats that might overleap the Pacific Ocean. Their twentieth-century successors, Alfred Thayer Mahan and Teddy Roosevelt, George Marshall and Franklin Roosevelt, Dean Acheson and Harry Truman, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, George Shultz and Ronald Reagan, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, among others, have fought to keep the Pacific an American lake – for now.

Green brings scholarly and policymaking credentials to this tour d’horizon. Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., and an associate professor at Georgetown University (not to mention the Asia hand in George W. Bush’s White House), he is supremely qualified to narrate and appraise more than two centuries of decisions, processes, and events. On a hemispheric tableau teeming with squadrons, legations, missionaries, gunboats, marines, emissaries, island chains, and good intentions, he paints a United States government in pursuit of a “distinct strategic approach” that would guarantee “that the Pacific Ocean remain[ed] a conduit for American ideas and goods to flow westward, and not for threats to flow eastward toward the homeland.” (5)

The Alaska Purchase, 1867. Left to Right: Robert S. Chew, Secretary of State (USA); William H. Seward; William Hunter; Mr. Bodisco, Russian Ambassador; Baron de Stoeckl, Charles Sumner; Fredrick W. Seward (via Wikimedia Commons)

Green charts this strategic disposition from the Articles of Confederation to Obama’s pivot to Asia, dividing the chronology into four eras when a rising power—the United States, Japan, the Soviet Union, and China—convulsed the region’s politics. American assertiveness waxed as European empires toggled from New World outposts to Asian colonialism in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. In short order, Jefferson’s greater Louisiana brought on James Monroe’s enunciation of an American protectorate in its hemisphere, John Tyler’s extension of that Monroe Doctrine to the Sandwich Islands (Hawai’i to natives Polynesians), and William Seward’s purchase of Alaska (dubbed his ‘ice box’), before the Civil War cut short the Pacific ambitions of Lincoln’s secretary of state.

This section is rich in geography and personality, acquainting readers with a century-long campaign to seize “stepping stones,” most pivotally Hawai’i, in the Pacific, introducing swashbucklers like Captain David Porter, whose piratical voyage to the Pacific in the War of 1812 foreshadowed the fusion of mercenary and military aims that would become the country’s modus operandi, and keeping a running tally of plenipotentiaries (of uneven quality) who served in an ever more prostrate Qing China. Green’s treatment of dusty concordats such as the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin, in which the United States pledged its “good offices” to Beijing in dealings with rapacious British, French, and Russians after the second Opium War, and the 1868 Burlingame Treaty, which recognized Chinese eminent domain over its whole territory, is welcome. He is sharp on the strategic contours of these many-sided rivalries; yet, while alive to the noxious influence of Anglo-Saxonism in nineteenth-century American culture, his tendency to treat republican virtues as more significant in U.S. foreign policy than Manifest Destiny chauvinism yields a handful of errors and omissions.

Green’s heroes are, above all, republican realists, high priests at the altar of the balance of power who still find ways to promote democracy, the rule of law, and free trade in the wider world. Thus, his hinge is fin-de-siècle power couple are Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan—the quintessential man of action married to the man of ideas. The latter expounded a strategic theory based on naval bases, sea lanes, and deep-water armadas; the former built a Great White Fleet to enforce it. The tendency to view America’s holdings in the Pacific, mostly insular takings such as Guam, Hawai’i, and the Philippines, as incidental rather than intrinsic to American power leads Green to paint the Bull Moose in overly Mahanian hues, emphasizing his naval leadership and power-balancing after the 1905 Russo-Japanese war while downplaying his protectionism and colonialism. What passed for strategic élan in Washington, after all, in Manila simply looked like another instance of imperialism. He is on firmer grounds in his treatment of John Hay’s push for trade reciprocity in China, contesting Wisconsin School members who deem the Open Notes clear evidence that the United States was (and remains) a capitalist octopus in ravenous search of pliant markets.

“AND, AFTER ALL, THE PHILIPPINES ARE ONLY THE STEPPING-STONE TO CHINA” – cartoon from Judge Magazine showing Uncle Sam with the “tools of modern civilization” using the Philippines as a stepping stone to China, ca. early 1900s (via Wikimedia Commons)

His appraisal of Asia policy from Teddy Roosevelt to cousin Franklin is scathing, and for good reason. Wilson sold out Korea and China’s Shangdong province to Japan for his League of Nations, before Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding, and Herbert Hoover retracted U.S. power after Teddy’s ally, Henry Cabot Lodge, nixed an American role in the league. Green includes a revealing vignette about American interwar finance, as William Straight and J. P. Morgan sought Chinese debt before the crash of October 24, 1929, put paid to their schemes. For Green, the Department of State’s willingness to accommodate Japan, whose militaristic expansions would upset the (perhaps excessively) elegant Washington Treaty, violated Mahan’s signature insight—playing sides against one another to avert a peer regional competitor from arising. Although the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere bore this warning out, he dismisses too perfunctorily the alternatives that Franklin Roosevelt’s Asianists—Lawrence A. Lowell, Joseph Grew, Stanley Hornbeck, and John Von Antwerp MacMurray—put forth. After all, MacMurray’s call to retrench at the Second Island Chain prefigured modern realists like Barry Posen, whose 2014 Restraint contends that the United States would best observe Mahan’s dictum by re-drawing its defense lines further west while retaining command of the commons. (To be fair, assured nuclear retaliation has now nullified whatever existential threats had existed.)

What happened after the United States sanctioned Japan for yet another massacre in China in 1940, after seven years of turning a blind eye (par for the course in the Guernica decade), was the country’s first fair fight in the Pacific. Green is too credulous that Hiroshima and Nagasaki won the war (Tsuyoshi Hasegawa shows that the Soviet declaration of war was equally if not more decisive), but his verdict that Roosevelt and Truman failed to leverage Chester Nimitz and Douglas MacArthur’s military triumphs on behalf of a grand strategy that would deliver post-war security is devastating. When the Soviet Union switched from wartime ally to geo-ideological adversary, U.S. officials overlooked the Kuomingtang’s weakness and Mao Tse-Tung’s zeal; as a result, they held out on China serving as a fourth United Nations policeman. This even as Chiang Kai-Shek’s battle lines crumbled, in part for lack of American support (apart from a woefully inadequate 900 military advisors), leading to the loss of China and setting in train a series of events that would culminate in the militarization of containment in Korea and the Americanization of the war for peace in Vietnam.

The Cold War tested American grand strategy in ways new and old, first with proxy wars fused to anticolonial struggles, and then the Soviet Union’s massive naval build-up in the 1980s. Next to old chestnuts such as the extent of continuity in personnel and policy between the Kennedy and Johnson administrations is the conspicuous omission of the former’s obsession with China’s nuclear-weapons program (its first nuclear test was on October 16, 1964); even though it was nearly a decade before Beijing fielded a survivable arsenal, the first Asian nuclear-weapon state was a game-changer, catalysing the Vietnam War, severely constraining U.S. military options once there, and helping usher the People’s Republic into the United Nations. Likewise, there is a clear and disturbing hierarchy of liberal values for Green, with genocide ranking far lower than free trade. When he supports the contention that “noble cause” advocates make that the war helped cauterize communist insurgencies in Indochina, Malaysia, and Thailand, for instance, he glosses over the 500,000 Indonesians estimated dead in the mass killings that shepherded the Suharto dictatorship into power in Jakarta.

Nixon shakes hands with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. It was the first trip made by an American president to the nation, 1972 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Nixon earns plaudits as an unsentimental president who ended twenty-five years of non-recognition between the most powerful and most populous nations on Earth; but Reagan, who convinced Japan to serve as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier,” (405) invested massively in the U.S. Navy, and midwifed democracy movements in the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan, receives the lion’s share of praise. In Green’s telling, his emphasis on security and stability afforded strongmen like Ferdinand Marcos and Park Chung-hee the leeway to sanction free elections. Reagan’s application of military, ministerial, and moral instruments to a coherent strategy in the region affords a case study for wedding power to principle effectively. Green also holds it to offer lessons for the newest and most challenging contender for regional pre-eminence: The People’s Republic China.

The final section dovetails with a set of vigorous debates now gripping Washington and Asian capitals. Can the United States and China resolve differences without military recourse as Beijing stakes its position in the South China Sea and Senkaku islands? Will America’s hubs-and-spoke network of alliances survive as China’s wealth and power cast a spell over neutrals and allies alike? Can Washington nudge the alphabet soup of multilateral institutions toward trans-oceanic rather than intra-regional orientations, especially now that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is comatose? Will the U.S. join the Beijing-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank or acquiesce to the PRC’s “One Belt One Road” initiative of ports, highways, railways, and pipelines? Will Washington and its partners succeed in embedding Beijing as a stakeholder in the global rules-based order or will it shear off its sphere of influence from the norms and institutions that expedited its return to greatness?

Bill Clinton garners high marks for his strategy of engaging and balancing China, a two-pronged approach that George W. Bush and Barack Obama would adopt. And while Donald Trump’s beleaguered and inept administration has so far proven less unorthodox than anticipated on trade, Green’s emphasis on island chains, aircrafts carriers, and strategic sea-lift when compared to human rights, labour, immigration, and cultural dialogue yields a deafening silence on the centrifugal forces now eviscerating what once passed as bipartisan consensus on the importance of engagement in the Asia-Pacific for the security and prosperity of the United States.

Also by Jonathan Hunt on Not Even Past:

1986 Reykjavík Summit between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev
Iran’s Nuclear Program and the History of the IAEA
Review: The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy

You may also like:

Foreign Policy from Candidate to President: Richard Nixon and the Lesson of Biafra by Roy Doron
CIA Study: “Consequences to the US of Communist Domination of Mainland Southeast Asia,” October 13, 1950 by Mark A. Lawrence
David A. Conrad reviews Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

 

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