A new history, The Story of China, tackles how China has managed to organise its state and the growth of its civilisation over centuries.
It must be a daunting task writing a single volume history of China; there is an awful lot of it, and more each year. Recently, there has been a flood of new discoveries which fill in years of pre-history. Authorities, now encouraged to be proud of China’s past, publish an “Oscars of Chinese archaeology” each year.
Standing archer, Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), Photo: © Mr. Ziyu Qiu
The problem for historian Michael Wood in his latest book is where to begin in pulling this vast story into a coherent narrative.
He starts where so many other histories have done, with China the state. How did China through much of its history run a quarter of the world’s population as a unitary state, while at the other end of the Eurasian landmass Europe was a region of competing states and languages?
In Chinese pre-history there were kings on the central Plain between the Yellow River and the Yangtze, whose position rested on mediating between Heaven and their subjects on Earth. Later, the Emperor, as both head of state and a semi-divine figure, was regarded as holding the Mandate of Heaven. Below was China, the Middle Kingdom, or “All under Heaven”. And running that were the scholar-officials, who were steeped in the classics and Confucian and revelled in recording their actions, a boon to historians.
It was an organised system. But famine, cataclysms, portents in the sky, peasant uprisings and invasion would disrupt it. The classic novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms even begins: “Everything that is united will fall apart and everything that is fallen apart will come back together again. So it has always been.”
China’s history can quickly become a cycle of rise, plateau, and collapse. Wood injects the stories of ordinary people where he can, pausing to focus on poets and philosophers, or charting the fortunes of families like the Bao, salt merchants in Anhui, eastern China.
But at heart this is a story of how China the state has organised itself.
Historian Michael Wood Photo: Supplied
He is especially good on how the idea of the state shifted over time. There was the Tang (618-907 CE), the open-minded rulers of Silk Road China, who embraced Buddhism and Christianity and foreign delegations, so long as they offered due deference. They were succeeded by the Song (960-1279CE), militarily weaker and who had to ally with other states to survive; “All under Heaven” was now first among equals. Then came the shock as the Mongols invaded to set up the short-lived Yuan (1279-1368), turning “All under Heaven” into a province of the Mongol empire stretching to the Black Sea. When it collapsed, the Ming (1368-1644) sent out their famous naval sorties to re-establish the deference of surrounding states, then retreated into their own isolation and incompetence.
The Story of China is the slightly belated book of the BBC TV series from 2016, which featured Wood walking around modern China looking for visual links to the past and over-enthusiastically nodding at his interviewees. The book is better, the audiobook best, though both retain the author’s enthusiasm for adjectives. China’s cities are great, golden ages extraordinary and casualties of war immense.
Wood’s focus on the state is like that of many single volume Chinese histories. “China has many cultures and narratives, but it has one great narrative.” But this year there have been fine examples of authors exploring other ways to tell its story. Michael Schuman, in Superpower Interrupted, tried to ask not what is the story of China but what is the story China tells itself, and how do they differ. Barbara Demick’s Eat the Buddha, a micro-history of Tibetans living in China, shows there is not one story of China but many.
Wood says China’s story is one of “almost incredible human drama” and he does suffuse his story with people’s experiences. “It is a tale of the efforts of the Chinese people and their rulers to build stable societies, to create justice, order and beauty...and to nurture the pleasures of life, while struggling with the demons as well as the benefits bequeathed by the ancestors.”
The Story of China, a new history Photo: Supplied
Often these things could be intertwined. Wood tells the story of the collapse of the Song, through the eyes of one China’s greatest female poets, Li Qingzhao who fled the rampaging Mongol armies after her husband died of an illness. The Song emperor admonished himself, “I inherited a great and flourishing empire, but I myself was a mediocre person, not up to the job.” Li, fleeing with other refugees, wrote one of China’s best-known political poems. “You didn’t see....times change, power passes.”
At times, it is hard to comprehend the scale of suffering in these spasms of regime change and uprising. Wood estimates 30 million people perished in the An Lushan revolt in 755CE, more than World War One, a millennia later. Mao’s Great Famine, by some reckonings, could be among the worst in human history.
Wood is at his best in two different parts of his story.
First, there is his enthusiasm for the Song, the dynasty which had to buy off neighbours for peace, a dynasty which has recently been eclipsed by the earlier Tang, the dynasty of choice with travel writers and historians rediscovering the Silk Roads. One of the best chapters takes a street scene on a surviving painted scroll and works its way through the commerce and hustle and bustle. Song China, he argues, was on the cusp of modernity, centuries ahead of Europe, until swept away by the Mongols.
And he is very good on the long unravelling of dynastic rule and its aftermath 600 years later. He sees the era of Revolution as stretching back much further than the founding of the Communist Party in 1921, to the 1850s. European visitors 400 years earlier had been astonished by China’s glittering wealth; now they gawped at its industrial backwardness as European machines, guns and hardware remade the world. A succession of blows weakened China: the Taiping revolt – the bloodiest war of the nineteenth century – colonial incursions, the Boxers, famine, Japanese invasions and war. At the same time, waves of reformers, activists, feminists, the Self-Strengthening Movement, nationalists, democrats and finally the Communists argued and struggled with how best to modernise.
Xi Jinping delivers a report to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. Photo: AFP / Xinhua News Agency
Wood sees the Communist regime as falling within the long-running currents of Chinese statehood.
He argues that control of the people is only different in degree to a line of attempts by the state to control its populace, from the Han legal codes, to Ming tax records and the Qing Sacred Edicts on the rules of citizenship.
Under Communism, there is Mao, Deng and possibly Xi, standing like the sage-emperors of old at the top of the state, ruled by a vast bureaucratic party with control reaching down even into villages and suburbs. The country’s prosperity is growing, there is peace, and a strong government is in place.
For now, says Wood, the “new dynasty, founded by Mao, if we may call it that, seems relatively secure”.
The Story of China, by Michael Wood (Simon & Schuster, $39.99)
