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Introduction: China: Forty Years of Revolution
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16714 |
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SPECIAL SECTION
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10 / 1989 |
845 Words |
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More than almost any other major nation, China seems fated to repeat its past. The chaotic and often bloody history of the People's Republic of China since its founding in 1949 has reflected China's stormy history of the last 200 years, centered around the continuing attempt to modernize the oldest continuous civilization in the world. No other leading nation has suffered so much for so long.
Since 1800, as John K. Fairbank has pointed out, China has had to endure five wars of foreign aggression, from the Anglo-Chinese Opium War of 1839-42 to the eight years of Japanese invasion from 1937 to 1945. These foreign conflicts, with the exception of the one with Japan, were almost incidental compared with the civil wars inside China during the same period. There were the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-64, the republican revolutions of 1911 against the Manchu dynasty, the Nationalist revolution of 1925-28 against the warlord, the Kuomintang-communist civil war of 1945-49, and Mao's Great Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, "a climax of both revolutionary aspiration and of self-created national disaster."
Viewed in this historical context, the Tiananmen Square massacre, rather than being an aberration, is consistent with Chinese history, ancient and modern. Always, the central conflict has been between the desire of the people, often led by students, for greater freedom and the refusal of the government in power to grant such freedom. Will this deadly cycle be repeated again and again in the foreseeable future, or is there the possibility in this age of glasnost and instant global communication, in our truly interdependent world, that China will at last achieve its own balance of order and freedom?
In this Special Feature, distinguished experts from the East and West explore such questions as: Who will win the struggle for succession within the Communist Party? What role will China's youth, traditionally in the vanguard of reform, play in the 1990s? Will China, undoubtedly an important Asian power, become a true world power in this century or the next? What is the future of Marxism in China? Will the economic reforms of the last decade be continued?
After surveying the PRC's turbulent political history, Parris Chang of Pennsylvania State University concludes that the Beijing regime has entered a critical transitional period in which the military's influence "is sure to increase." Despite its size and population, argues Harold C. Hinton of the Sino-Soviet Studies Institute, China is not likely to become a true world power in this century.
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