02 Fitzgerald (jl/d) 29/3/99 11:48 am Page 17

THE UNFINISHED HISTORY

OF CHINA’S FUTURE

John Fitzgerald

ABSTRACT This paper traces the history of thinking about the ‘future’ in China
from the late 19th to the late 20th centuries with a view to identifying China’s
particular ‘end of history’. At the turn of this century, the future of New China
was prefigured in a variety of scenarios – from statist to liberal – that implied
competing goals and strategies for realizing the future. These strategies were
shaped by a utopian vision of Great Harmony (datong), which shaped in turn
everyday forms of political and cultural practice. The paper explores what has
become of this ideal at the close of the century, and what its demise implies
for political and cultural practice.
KEYWORDS China • future • history • nationalism • utopia

The almost universal theme of the writers and orators who have celebrated this
bi-millennial epoch [2000 BCE] has been the future rather than the past. Not the
advance that has been made, but the progress that shall be made, ever onward
and upward, till the race shall achieve its ineffable destiny. This is well, wholly
well. (Edward Bellamy, 1888)
It is only forty-five years since the revolution of 1911, but the face of China
today is completely changed. In another forty-five years, that is in the year 2001,
China will have undergone even greater changes. She will have become a
powerful, socialist, industrial country. And that is as it should be. (Mao Zedong
1956)

The future of the country has been a recurring topic of conversation

in China these last hundred years or so. To the late 19th century, people
were inclined to speculate on what had happened in the past, on what the
sages had made of these events, and what their lessons could teach the
people of the day. Many consulted the auguries, of course, to foretell what
lay in store for themselves or their families. But the destiny of the nation

Thesis Eleven, Number 57, May 1999: 17–31

SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Copyright © 1999 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Pty Ltd
[0725-5136(199905)57;17–31;008025]
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18 Thesis Eleven (Number 57 1999)

and the world were not at issue. This changed over the closing decades of
the 19th century when the fate of the state, the civilization, and the people
of China appeared to be in jeopardy. Speculation on national affairs invited
reflection on ‘what has not yet come into being’ (weilai), or the future of
the world and China.
In time, the outlines of a new ‘historical’ China were discerned in the
struggle of the Chinese people to achieve the destiny for which history had
been preparing them these several millennia past. The future of ‘New China’
(xin zhongguo) was prefigured in utopian and dystopian scenarios that could
be mined for what would happen in the future, for what this might mean,
and for what tomorrow could teach people alive today. Old China passed
into history and became, in effect, another country. Reflection on the future
of New China gradually replaced textual exegesis of the Confucian canon as
a guide to moral and political action. Competition to predict and manufacture
New China then had some bearing on the everyday forms of political and
cultural practice.
The inhabitants of Old China were not as foreign to the citizens of
New China as those who patrolled its borders liked to proclaim. Both
belonged, in S. N. Eisenstadt’s terms, to a single Axial civilization character-
ized by a demand for the implementation of transcendental principles on the
mundane level (Arnason, 1993: 190). That is to say, the new future-watchers
operated on old assumptions about the place of China in a universal world
order, and their speculations on the future of New China were shaped by
their reflections on the shape of the world to come. The nation was almost
an afterthought: future-watchers probed the principles governing the emerg-
ing world order before imagining and reconfiguring China as a ‘modern’
national community. Their universal frames of reference invited disagreement
on the principles governing world history, and led to contestation over the
relationship between the universal and the particular (the world and China)
over the century to come. As it happens, the boundaries separating compet-
ing visions of New China proved every bit as fluid, or as fixed, as those
separating Old China from the new one.
In this sense, the political history of 20th-century China may be seen as
a series of experiments in imagining the ethical community of the nation,
before it had come into being, in varying configurations of race, individual,
community and social class, each associated with a different reading of the
universal principles governing world history. Each reading in turn entailed
theory and praxis: theory to assist in classifying and analysing the ‘motor’ of
universal history, and praxis to reconcile the particularity of the nation with
the universal order, and at the same time resolve the problem of unity-in-
diversity within the nation itself, and hence bring New China into being.
Although each had its champions and its detractors, all competitors agreed that
history would be the final arbiter among them. Meanwhile, all sides would
help history on its way by their commitment to praxis (Fitzgerald, 1995).
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Fitzgerald: China’s Future 19

The end of history was imagined as the achievement of a classical ideal

of Great Harmony (datong), an ideal that inspired eschatological theorists
from the time of the Han Dynasty through to the Qing. Initially this had been
associated with a cognate term, Small Comforts (xiaokang). Both terms date
from a passage in one of the Confucian classics, The Book of Rites (Liji), con-
cerning the characteristics of a given age in history. Great Harmony referred
to a universal era when ‘all under heaven belonged to all’, an ideal age in
which no distinction was recognized in the civilized world between public
and private, and in which all primordial, religious or ethical grounds for
rivalry among families and communities had dissolved. In the age of Great
Harmony the world of human society was, so to speak, in harmony with
itself. Small Comforts was a more modest ideal, in fact barely an ideal at all.
The age of Small Comforts hinted at the consolation that some individuals,
families and communities might find in the simple pleasures of life – peace,
comfort and prosperity – in an historical period that fell short of the Great
Harmony ideal. The question at issue was whether China was destined to
achieve Great Harmony in a universal world order, or should settle for the
advantages that Small Comforts would confer on a particular community,
such as China.

VISIONS OF THE FUTURE

China’s long 20th-century history was prefigured over the last decades
of empire, corresponding to the period from 1890 to 1910 on the western
calendar, in a remarkable speculative flurry among reformist intellectuals
about the future of the world and the destiny of the nation. The speculations
of Tan Sitong, Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao and others took a number of
different forms, ranging from euchronian and utopian essays and works of
ethical philosophy, to fictional ‘retrospectives’ on the passing of the century
that was yet to come. These texts were rich in historical erudition, of the old
variety, and at the same time driven by a new sense of historical progress
that gave force and direction to their speculations about developments over
the approaching century. Although by no means consistent in their reason-
ing or predictions, they established a body of literary references through
which the language and preoccupations of modernity were disseminated for
generations to come. A century of speculation on the good society thought
certain to emerge in the 21st century highlights much that was distinctive
about ‘20th-century’ China.
Not every source of inspiration came from within China itself. Edward
Bellamy’s novel, Looking Backward (1888), circulated widely throughout the
country over the last decade of the 19th century. The protagonist of the story,
Julian West, awakens in the year 2000 after more than a century asleep to
discover that his home-town has changed beyond recognition. The city of
the future presents a world of prearranged harmony, substantially organized
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20 Thesis Eleven (Number 57 1999)

by the state, governed by reason, made prosperous by industry, and peopled

by a hearty breed of self-determining and morally upright citizens. On each
point, Looking Backward prefigured a major theme of euchronian and
dystopian writing in turn-of-the-century China. Significantly, it popularized
the Rip Van-Winkle device of ‘waking up’ as a narrative device for imagin-
ing the future (Fitzgerald, 1996).
Even before the appearance of Looking Backward, the idea of China
‘waking up’ in the future had been mooted in writings on the recovery of
China’s national dignity. In 1887, the Marquis Tseng, a distinguished Chinese
diplomat, published an article in the English journal The Asiatic Quarterly
Review entitled ‘China, the Sleep and the Awakening’. The image of China
‘waking up’ was intended to contest a prevailing European representation of
China as a decaying corpse: a corpse has no future, but a sleeping nation
awakens in the future. As the Marquis pictured it, ‘awakened’ China would
no longer tolerate ‘outrageous’ mistreatment of its subjects abroad, and would
forcefully reject interference in the affairs of ‘vassal states’ on its borders.
Awakened China would also renounce all of the treaties that infringed its sov-
ereignty and would ‘combine’ with other nations of the east ‘in an attempt
to have their foreign relations based on treaties rather than on capitulations’.
So China would lead awakened Asia to contest the hold of Europe upon the
world. On every point, the Marquis prefigured a claim underlying attempts
to recover China’s territorial sovereignty and national dignity in the 20th
century. To this day, his claims for national dignity form the irreducible sub-
stratum of attempts to claim the future for China (Tseng, 1887: 152–3).
China’s awakening was not confined to the assertion of national dignity.
The awakening of Julian West, in Looking Backward, drew attention as well
to the domestic organization of state and society. Among those who followed
the instalments of Bellamy’s book as they appeared in print were influential
officials of the court of Beijing and a party of reformers who rose to promi-
nence in the ill-fated Reform Movement of 1898, including Tan Sitong, Kang
Youwei and Liang Qichao (Bernal, 1976; Kang, 1967; Ma, 1991). Tan referred
to Bellamy’s book in his brilliant Exposition of Benevolence (1984) (Renxue,
1896), a work that fused the Confucian Book of Rights (Liji; the source of the
Great Harmony ideal) with Bellamy’s Looking Backward into a vision of a
world where ‘there would not be any boundaries, wars, suspicion, jealousy,
power-struggles, distinction between the self and others, and equality would
emerge’. Tan was conscious of local and foreign sources for his vision: ‘It
would be like the man mentioned in a western story book,’ he wrote, ‘who
wakes up after dreaming for a hundred years, and finds that the atmosphere
of Great Harmony is almost like that described in the chapter on the “Evol-
ution of Rites” in the Book of Rites’ (Dirlik, 1991: 56; Tan, 1984: 215–6).
Looking Backward made an impression on a number of other future-watchers
in China, including Liu Renhuang, who published a comparative study of
utopian thought in China and the west under the title Preliminary Studies on
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Fitzgerald: China’s Future 21

the Great Harmony of the East (Dongfang datong xuean, 1926) (Bauer 1976:
ch. 3). Looking Backward was also an inspiration for the most important
euchronian work to appear in China this century, Kang Youwei’s Great
Harmony Philosophy (Kang, [1902] 1935).
Kang Youwei’s completion of Great Harmony Philosophy marked the
culmination of reflections on this subject in the late imperial period. For Kang
himself, it signalled the end of two decades of reading, reflection and writing
interrupted by bouts of intense political activity. The work was especially sig-
nificant for marrying reflections on the ideal world of the future with politi-
cal activity, more particularly with praxis (Kang, 1967: 32–42). Kang Youwei
envisioned Great Harmony as a global community without racial, class or
gender distinctions, which was united by common language, values and
culture, and which was limited in its extent only by the physical limits of the
planet itself. More to the point, it could be realized through human agency.
The universal claims of this ideal are reflected, quite literally, in Kang
Youwei’s reflections on interstellar travel. The ideal community for Kang was
not the planet earth but the universe. Indeed he had hoped to put an end
to intergalactic warfare: ‘I have pondered deeply how to rid all the stars and
all the heavens of war, but could not (resolve it)’. Out of concern that his
Great Harmony should be realized, historically, he chose to limit his com-
munity to the planet earth and to the creatures inhabiting it: ‘I am only going
to consider how to do away with the calamity of war in the world in which
I was born.’ In a significant gesture to practice, Kang settled for a minimum
programme embracing peace on earth (Kang, 1958: 66, 80). Part of his ‘practi-
cal’ programme was to convert the Chinese empire into a nation-state that
could approximate Great Harmony by eliminating differences of class,
gender, language and race among the people who made up the ‘nation’.
Although he professed to discover Great Harmony, Kang Youwei indirectly
discovered modern China. By recasting utopia from the distant past into the
foreseeable future, Kang also helped to remove many of the obstacles imped-
ing reception of the rational utopias of applied science, of Saint-Simon and
Comte, of applied history, of Marx and Engels, and the rational utopias of
instrumental praxis of Anarchism and Leninism.
There was, however, a competing liberal reading of the Great Harmony
ideal. Kang’s most brilliant disciple, Liang Qichao, offered an alternative
reading of the stages China would take on the road to Great Harmony in an
unfinished work on the future, composed in 1902, entitled An Account of the
Future of New China (Liang, 1902a). The centrepiece of the story is a series
of speeches on ‘China’s History these Sixty Years Past’ delivered to an inter-
national assembly in Shanghai, ‘on the first day of the first month in the Year
of Confucius 2513 . . . or 1962 on the Western calendar’. The fictional speaker
was Kong Juemin, a descendant of Confucius (Kong) whose given name
(Juemin) meant ‘awaken the people’. The fictional occasion was the 50th
anniversary of the birth of New China, an anniversary that fortuitously marked
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22 Thesis Eleven (Number 57 1999)

the founding of the International Peace Congress in 1962 following the ‘Hun-
garian Conference’ some years before. The event marked the birth of Great
Harmony on earth.
By Liang’s account, world leaders selected New China to host the
launch of the new international body in recognition of that country’s role in
planning and creating the new global order. Leaders and dignitaries from all
major countries gathered in China in January 1962 to attend the two cere-
monies, one commemorating the achievements of New China and the other
the birth of the new global order. Visiting dignatories included the King and
Queen of Britain, the Emperor and Empress of Japan, and with the Presi-
dents (‘take note: presidents’ predicts Liang) of Russia, Hungary and the
Philippines. Lesser dignatories, including religious leaders of all persuasions
(‘this is known as Great Harmony’) met in Shanghai along with thousands of
scholars and tens of thousands of university students from around the globe
(Liang, 1902a: 2–3).
Among the men and women who crowded into Kong’s lectures on the
history of the past 60 years were 1000 foreigners, all fluent in Chinese. Since
the start of the reform era, the author points out, thousands of American and
European students had come to learn the language in order to keep up with
developments in China. By 1962, some 30,000 foreign students were enrolled
in local universities and colleges. Most preferred to stay in China. To the time
in question (1962) fewer than 1200 students had returned to their home coun-
tries to work. The west had a serious brain-drain problem on its hands.
Kong began his lectures reflecting on the qualities that had made China
a great power, specifically patriotism, selflessness and democracy. China suc-
ceeded because its people had learned to put their country before themselves
(Liang, 1902a: 5). This marked a radical break with ‘Old China’: ‘Our China
died long ago . . . in fact this is the point [of departure] for the continuation
of New China’. By 1962, China had become a liberal democracy with three
major parties competing for ascendancy: a centralist State Power Party (guo-
quandang), a decentralist Patriotic Self-Government Party (Aiguo zizhidang)
and a party committed to the well-being of the individual, the Liberal Party
(ziyoudang). Each of these parties had its origins in an earlier Constitutional
Party (xianzhengdang), founded in 1902, consisting of a grand alliance of all
existing reformist, revolutionary and secret society organizations which com-
bined forces to introduce constitutional government to China. Three core
principles governed the organization of this seminal political alliance: first,
that the choice of a monarchical, republican or federalist constitution should
be determined by public plebiscite. That is to say, all members agreed to
implement constitutional rule according to the wishes of the people, irre-
spective of their differences over the form that the constitution should take.
Second, the party’s rules and procedures for dealing with internal matters
should reflect those that an enlightened government would employ in
governing a country. Third, party membership was open to all who shared
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Fitzgerald: China’s Future 23

the constitutional aims of the party, and conferred equality on members

regardless of their social status, profession or gender (Liang, 1902a: 7–8).
This brief narrative history of New China to 1962 occupies only a small
part of Kong Juemin’s talks. By far the longest section of the lectures is
devoted to a verbatim account of an old debate between two founding
members of the Constitutional Party about China’s future. One was Huang
Keqiang, son of a noted Cantonese scholar. Old Mr Huang despatched his
son and another student, Li Yunbing, to Britain to study English and learn
the ways of the west. He prepared them for their departure by exposing them
to the works of Kang Youwei (Liang Qichao’s own teacher, and the author
of Great Harmony Philosophy, 1902 [1935]), and by introducing them to Tan
Sitong, who was just completing his Renxue (1896, noted above). They were
among the first to read the work.
On reaching England they gained entry to Oxford. They graduated
around the time of the ‘Hundred Days Reform’, in 1898, an actual historical
event associated with Kang Youwei and Tan Sitong and a party of their sup-
porters and students, including the author of the story himself, Liang Qichao.
The tragic outcome of the reforms forced the two students to delay their
return to China.
Their return was precipitated by the discovery that the universal truths
they had been seeking in Europe were compromised by the Europeans them-
selves. The prevailing mood in Europe soured against China around the time
of the Boxer Uprising in 1900. The two young men observed that Kaiser
Wilhelm II, author of the Yellow Peril scare, now ‘said many things that were
not in keeping with human morality’ and that the German press resorted to
terms such as ‘pigtails’ and ‘yellow monkeys’ in referring to the Chinese
people. This encounter with racism in Europe inaugurates their journey
home, and launches them into their dialogue on the future of China (Liang,
1902a: 17).
‘Which country will be China’s future master?’, they ask on their journey
home. And what of the ‘future of New China’? Their disagreements centre on
what was to be done to ensure that the Chinese people achieved mastery
over their own national destiny – Huang arguing that the best solution lay
in working with the present Manchu court, and Li that the Manchu court was
part of the problem. Their contrasting positions reflected the reformist and
revolutionary positions of the day. Liang Qichao gave each side a fair hearing
over 25 pages of his 40-page story but came down strongly on the side of
the reformers who wished to preserve the Manchu Dynasty under a form of
constitutional rule. On the question of how to involve China’s ‘four hundred
million citizens’ in the struggle they were in basic agreement. Both conceded
that the majority of the Chinese people were ‘asleep, living in dreams’, and
that it was the responsibilty of the awakened few such as themselves (‘people
who already know’) to wake them up.
This was, we noted, an unfinished history of the future. In his preface,
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24 Thesis Eleven (Number 57 1999)

Liang attributed the rambling quality of his story to the lack of any recog-
nizable genre for encoding the future in Chinese letters. Such a work could
not take the form of traditional fiction, he acknowledged, nor could it be a
work of history or philosophy as these were presently understood. A retro-
spective fictional reflection on his own day, from the vantage point of ‘New
China’ 60 years hence, was a work sui generis. The only genre remotely com-
parable was the ‘Discourses on Salt and Iron’ (yantielun) of the Han Dynasty
(206 BCE–24CE), a form that bore some resemblance to the Socratic Dialogue
of classical Greek rhetoric. The result was not entirely satisfactory: an
extended debate between two wondering scholars on the nature of China’s
problems at the turn of the century and how these should best be dealt with.
Ultimately, the differences that divided the two scholars passed unresolved.
Predicting the future was a difficult proposition, but finding a literary form
in which to prefigure the future, and coax it into existence, was more diffi-
cult still (Liang, 1902a: 1–2, 40).
This problem is anticipated toward the end of the story when the two
travellers encounter a young ‘man of the future’, who bears many traits of
the ‘New People’ about whom Liang was concurrently writing in a separate
series of essays (Liang, 1902a: 41–55, esp. 51; 1902b). Two features mark the
young man out for attention: his home-grown recognition that the people of
China have been reduced to slavery on their own soil, and his appreciation
of Byron’s verses on liberating Greece from Turkey. At this point in the story
the author, Liang Qichao, recovers his voice and appeals for a ‘revolution in
poetry’, apparently on the model of Byron’s romantic nationalism. The tale
ends abruptly with an appeal for a new form of literature, apparently because
the author felt uncomfortable with the repertoire of traditional forms to which
he had recourse for plotting and realizing the future (Liang, 1902a: 56–7).
Byron pointed the way.
Liang was not simply a fortune teller. In fact at one point he conceded
that nothing could be predicted at all. ‘Tomorrow cannot be predicted on the
basis of today,’ he apologized in the introduction, ‘let alone decades to come.’
He ventured all the same to foreshadow the rise of a national hero who
would found and lead a national political party, seize power and reunify the
country. Of this he was sure, if nothing else. ‘Of one thing I am certain: the
salvation of this people, some day, depends on a future hero to whom I
cannot give a name’ (Liang, 1902a: 1–2). Once this nameless hero had
stepped forward and saved the people, his successful party would confront
new political forces pressing for individual rights and local self-government.
Liang also foresaw the collapse of the Russian empire and its replacement
by a republic, tension between China and larger states on its borders, and
the creation of a Pan Asian alliance of states oppressed by European imperial-
ism. Not bad for a first effort. Still, Liang was not persuaded that these pre-
dictions would help to bring New China into being. Practice required
something more: a revolutionary style of writing capable of conveying this
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Fitzgerald: China’s Future 25

grand vision, firing public emotions, and persuading people to put their
country before themselves. Although he did not actually predict it, Liang
Qichao foresaw the need for a ‘literary revolution’. The cultural revolution
that he foresaw gave shape to 20th-century China in ways that even Liang
could not have predicted.

CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS AND THE FORM OF THE FUTURE

What Liang Qichao failed to predict was that his interest in new poetry,
new people and New China would be institutionalized through a series of
cultural revolutions that would stretch well beyond 1962. Within a decade or
so of his appeal for a revolution in literary forms, the first of several cultural
revolutions raged through urban China. The New Culture Movement, as it
was known, branded everything of which it approved as ‘new’ – new poetry,
new men, new women, new China, new life, new art, new fiction, new
fashion – and branded everything of which it disapproved as a feudal vestige
of an imperial age destined for historical oblivion. The new fiction was a
literature of the future, highlighting the promise of a world beyond the actual
one which classical forms could not even hint at. The world ‘represented’ in
classical verse and fiction was of much the same order as the world their
readers inhabited. The new literature, by contrast, spoke of another world
alive within the actual one, awaiting realization in history. It spoke implic-
itly of the future of New China. In dreams of what the world might yet
become, the new literature found a world of substance more ‘real’ than the
one it inhabited (Huters, 1991; Plaks, 1976: 14).
Over the romantic phase of the movement, in the 1910s and early 1920s,
writers and artists affected a perspective on the nation that looked down, as
it were, from the mountain top. They adopted a Byronic posture. Some, like
Byron, retreated to the hills and lakes to compose their passionate mono-
logues. Most remained glued to their desks, immobilized by a sense of
imminent national crisis leading to the ‘death of the country’ (wangguo)
(Fitzgerald, 1994). The dramatic arrival of the ‘masses’ (qunzhong) into
national politics in the mid-1920s ushered in a second phase that undermined
this romantic posture by forcing a reassessment of the relationship between
writers and the ‘people’ (Anderson, 1990: 26). The line dividing the new
Realist from the old romantic was now drawn along a gradient of practice,
one of the key words in the lexicon of the Chinese revolutionary. Literary
Realism entailed grasping the inner workings of social contradictions; prac-
tice meant engagement with the actual world in an effort to transform it. What
made the Realists ‘real’ was a capacity to discern the outlines of a revol-
utionary future in the daily struggles of the common people, accompanied
by a commitment to ‘practice’ that involved bringing this world into exist-
ence by representing it in letters. It no longer mattered if art and revolutionary
rhetoric were in touch with the actual world; it was the duty of artists and
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26 Thesis Eleven (Number 57 1999)

revolutionaries to represent a reality as yet unrealized in history. That was

what made Realists of them. Realism was a form for capturing the future, in
the present, in print.
This was only the first of several cultural revolutions. In his Account of
the Future of New China, Liang portrayed a Confucian scholar standing before
the world to recount the history of New China in 1962. In fact, China was
still at war with its past and dreaming of the future in the 1960s. The Cul-
tural Revolution is largely remembered for the private suffering and public
turmoil that came in its trail from 1966 to 1976. Its self-proclaimed ideals are
dismissed as ideological camouflage disguising the self-seeking political
machinations of Mao Zedong. But the Cultural Revolution was also the con-
crete outcome of the ideals that it proclaimed: the reductio absurdum of six
decades of plotting the future in which suffering and turmoil were always
going to play a part. The Cultural Revolution attacked the ‘four olds’ in the
name of ‘socialist new things’ that it tried to coax into existence through
political struggle. The result, not surprisingly, was chaos.
The most eloquent defence in English of the struggle between ‘past’
and ‘future’ in the Cultural Revolution is to be found in a classic work of
future-watching, Han Suyin’s China in the Year 2001, published at the height
of the Cultural Revolution in 1967. By the time Han Suyin wrote China in
the Year 2001, representing ‘what has not yet come into being’ had become
routine procedure for all literature and art in the People’s Republic of China.
Liang Qichao could not have complained: far from there being no form in
which to encode the future, there was no longer any legitimate form for cap-
turing the mundane present. While Liang Qichao, Kang Youwei and Tan
Sitong might have condemned the political chicanery of Mao Zedong, they
could only hold themselves to account for the rhetoric of his apologists.
Han Suyin’s apologia for the Cultural Revolution merits detailed atten-
tion, partly because it returns us to recurring themes in the history of China’s
future, but also because it helps to explain why almost all of these themes
have lost credence in China since the death of Mao Zedong. The first was an
emphasis on ‘history’. As China’s history was irretrievably ‘feudal’, the future
would be shaped by a struggle with history. This struggle was analogous with
the political struggles of the Cultural Revolution, which Han Suyin defined
as a contest between ‘the past and the future . . . between the “forces of dark-
ness” and the shining tomorrow’ (Han, 1967: 8, 126). Unfortunately, the forces
of darkness had the weight of years behind them. ‘There are many centuries
to shake off in a day,’ she wrote. Two decades of education had failed to
‘awaken’ the Chinese people ‘to their historic role, to their responsibility, the
recognition of their rights to become masters of their own future’ (Han, 1967:
125, 12–13).
Mastering the future also meant righting the wrongs of history, seeking
revenge for the national humiliations of the past. So the Cultural Revolution
was to complete the historical struggle for national recognition. This is what
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Fitzgerald: China’s Future 27

history means in China, she observed, where ‘history is measured by its dis-
tance from colonialism to national independence, rather than by the actual
run of the years’. The turning point came in 1949 when a century of ‘servi-
tude, misery and exploitation’ came to an end, after which history recovered
its numbered annual sequence. The run of the years now spelled out a series
of benchmarks in weapons development that had placed China at the fore-
front of the world. ‘America exploded her first nuclear device in 1945, Russia
in 1948 and China in 1964.’ The future promised more. ‘Within three years
we shall see a far wider range of missile development in China than has been
guessed at by Western experts, and also probably the development of new
and hitherto unsuspected weapons’ (Han, 1967: 20, 113). When China awoke,
the world had reason to tremble.
A more familiar claim for the Cultural Revolution was that China’s
assertion of national dignity would underpin a new world order in which the
‘third world’ was counted the equal of Europe and America. The universal
claims of Maoism were intended to buttress a new global human order, ‘a
brotherhood of feeling, international solidarity, the knowledge that whatever
work one does, however menial, has a universal purpose and usefulness in
propelling the advance of humanity towards happiness and abundance’. Mao
asked each of the Chinese people to ‘put his own personal or national con-
siderations aside and work for the good of the whole. It is Mao Tse-tung who
has seen the problem in its universal terms, the Remaking of Man’ (Han, 1967:
91, 246).
The Remaking of Man began at home. The New Socialist Person cher-
ished ideas of self and property quite different from those of unreconstructed
mortals. He/she was ‘a technical, intelligent, modern man’ who recognized
‘no distinction between peasant, worker, military, and white collar staff, no
division between industrial, agricultural and intellectual labour’. It was as if
Liang Qichao’s ‘man of the future’ inhabited Kang Youwei’s world of Great
Harmony. Admittedly, not many New Socialist People were evident in the
People’s Republic at the time of writing. Mao was not deterred. The creation
of New Socialist Man entailed ‘a programme of mental training to grasp objec-
tives and scientific facts’ that would ultimately yield ‘the awakening of 700
million people to an acute political consciousness’. This ‘awakening’ would
show that the effort and the suffering of the Cultural Revolution had not been
in vain (Han, 1967: 40, 44, 47, 88, 124, 204).
In fact the Cultural Revolution gave the future a very bad name. Han
Suyin ended her paean to Mao Zedong Thought with a prophetic question:
‘Would the next generation, say by the year 2001, be degenerate, ally itself
with imperialism, return to selfishness, and become, as in so many other
countries, frustrated and aimless? . . . Will Mao’s successors be as wise or far-
sighted as he?’ (Han, 1967: 184, 201). Far-sightedness had earned a bad name
too. Today, only one element of Mao’s vision retains any credence among
the generation of 2001. This is the quest for national dignity.
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28 Thesis Eleven (Number 57 1999)

THE FUTURE TODAY

God died in the west in the 19th century, we are told, and the idea of
‘society’ in the 1970s (Maier, 1995: 10). God aside, much the same could be
said of China. The introduction of market reforms under Deng Xiaoping in
the late 1970s heralded not just the end of the Cultural Revolution and the
socialist planned economy but also the end of an ideal of the good society
of the future.
China remains to all appearances a future-oriented society. Visitors
entering the country are still required to complete a quarantine form that
ends ‘For A Better and Healthier Tomorrow.’1 This routine bureaucratic pro-
cedure for entering the country offers a point of entry into the symbolic reper-
toire of ‘20th-century’ China of the kind we have been discussing here. The
future beckons everywhere. Firms ask workers to show loyalty to the
company ‘today’ in return for loyalty from the firm ‘tomorrow.’ Birth clinics
require parents to limit their children to ensure an ‘improved quality of popu-
lation’ in the future. Yet the future is no longer what it was. Images of tomor-
row projected today on film, television, billboards, magazines and newsprint
all picture a world of atomic science and rocketry, a greater array of elec-
tronic gadgets and medicinal tonics, high personal incomes, more comfort-
able housing, and a generally improved ‘quality of life’ for everyone fortunate
enough to be born in the right place at the right time. This is a future to be
enjoyed today. As the promise of Small Comforts substitutes for promise of
Great Harmony, China’s future has drawn to an end.
The substitution of Small Comforts for Great Harmony marks the end
of China’s long 20th century more clearly than other portents of the end of
history. There is no longer any gesture toward the New Socialist Person, in
private life or in public, nor much nostalgia for the fallen pillars of the old
rural communes and urban work units. People are running as fast as they
can to avoid being caught under the roof of the old state-socialist economy
when it finally collapses. Where they are running to, however, no-one seems
to know. This can be an uncomfortable feeling. A mixed mood of fear and
resentment, hesitation and hopefulness seems to characterize the country
today. In some ways this is not unlike the mood that prevailed in China over
the decade leading to the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, when Liang Qichao
wrote his Account of the Future of New China and Kang Youwei published
Great Harmony Philosophy. It is a mood better classified as fin de siecle or
crise de regime rather than millennarian. What distinguishes this period from
its equivalent, 100 years ago, is the discovery of a perplexing conundrum:
China can no longer afford the luxury of grand visions, and yet cannot
remain China without them. What is New China without a ‘future’?
In conclusion, I should like to link these observations on the end of
the future to the popular anti-western sentiment that has been circulating in
China in recent years. The two are, I believe, related, in as much as people
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Fitzgerald: China’s Future 29

are reluctant to acknowledge that the tide of history has thrown them up on
the shores of the west. Even when there is no future to speak of, China insists
on staking its own claim to the universal destination of humankind. This is
one legacy of Maoism that the present leadership did not abandon when it
discarded the man and his philosophy: China’s future is a local chapter of a
universal story that China itself must play a part in writing.
Mao’s major contribution to the theory of revolution is still regarded to
have been his proposition that universal laws always take particular national
forms. Mao Zedong Thought was sold around the world as a mundane local
application of the universal principles of Marxism-Leninism. As Mao sinicized
Marxism-Leninism, so the leadership today is trying to sinicize market capital-
ism. Some may scoff at Beijing’s frequently reiterated claims that China is
carrying out ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ or introducing a market
economy ‘in accordance with Chinese conditions’. But these claims are
founded on the old dictum that universal principles and historical processes
always assume indigenous forms. Chinese Marxism owed little to Moscow,
and Chinese capitalism – as one recent neonationalist text advises – owes
little to Washington (Song Qiang, 1996: 3).
The west has, of course, long maintained that there was more than an
accidental link between European civilization and the birth of capitalism and
democracy. Like China, Europe claims intellectual property rights over uni-
versals: a principle once professed with chauvinistic pride by apologists of
imperialism and now confessed with exaggerated breast-beating, in the post-
modern style, to deny to such principles any universal validity at all. In China
both versions of this conceit appear Eurocentric. The country is neither fabri-
cating an alternative universal history of science and civilization, nor dream-
ing up a national system of values to compete with other universals. Certainly
there is some discussion about ‘Confucian’ values among neo-authoritarian
theorists in Beijing but this constitutes only a small part of China’s claim against
the west. The larger part questions whether the west has any special claim to
the universal values of science, modernity and democracy at all, other than an
accidence of birth. Debates within the elite suggest that the present leader-
ship, like its counterpart in Mao’s time, wants to reclaim modernity from the
west by questioning the assumption that ‘modern’ and ‘western’ are inter-
changeable terms. It is a question of national dignity.
It is well to remember the role of national dignity in the history of
China’s future. The Marquis Tseng began the story of China’s ‘awakening’ in
1887 with an essay on national dignity. Liang Qichao was spurred by the
Yellow Peril scare, of Kaiser Wilhem II, to launch his fictional retrospective
on the ‘history’ of New China. Today, national dignity alone has survived
among the four or five central propositions that Mao Zedong took with him
into the Cultural Revolution. There is no longer any prospect of a new world,
or new people, or an alliance of the third world against the first. All that
remains is the dignity of New China.
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30 Thesis Eleven (Number 57 1999)

Admittedly, a concern for national dignity that failed to accommodate

universal principles and values would appear to be unsustainable in the long
term. China’s future has always been imagined as a local chapter in a uni-
versal story about all of the peoples of the world. On the other hand, a
nationalism that appeals to universal values without at the same time pla-
cating an acute sense of historical grievance among ordinary people is
equally untenable. The banal and oft-repeated claim that China has the
longest history of any nation on earth should not be mistaken for an idle
boast, either, for it lies at the heart of the Chinese people’s sense of who they
are. The particular identity of the ‘Chinese people’ as they enter the 21st
century is that of a national community holding deep-seated historical
grudges against ‘the west’ while claiming for themselves many of the values
that people in the west assume to be ‘western’. If Chinese people now aspire
to Small Comforts – embracing a pleasant lifestyle, personal freedoms and
political liberties – it is not because they want to ape the west but because
they aspire to ‘universal’ human values. This is the paradox of the end of
history in China: resurgent nationalism may well be the vehicle for convey-
ing universal rights (Fitzgerald, 1998).

John Fitzgerald teaches East Asian history and politics at La Trobe University.
His book Awakening China: Politics, Culture and Class in the Nationalist Revolution
(Stanford University Press, 1997) was awarded the 1998 Joseph Levenson Prize for
Twentieth Century China by the US Association for Asian Studies. Address: School
of Asian Studies, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria 3083, Australia. [email:
J.Fitzgerald@latrobe.edu.au]

Note
1. Translation on the form issued by the National Health and Quarantine Bureau.
In Chinese it reads ‘yu ni gong chuang jiankang meihao de mingtian’ – lit.
‘working with you to ensure a healthy and fine tomorrow’.

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