In Taiwan, it is hard to get away from the image of Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the Xinhai Revolution and one of the key figures in the history of the Guomindang (KMT): his portrait is on the money, in schools, museums, and a host of other public places. He is also the only KMT figure to be officially honored in the Chinese Communist Party’s narrative of 20th century Chinese history, and even has his own memorial in Nanjing.

The narrative of the CCP’s triumph over the KMT needs Sun’s legacy to fit events in Chinese history into a Marxist framework. At the same time, CCP narratives of 20th century Chinese history have to show the decrepitude and inefficiency of the KMT to establish the PRC’s political legitimacy. Sun is an important and useful figure in these tasks. His political legacy on the mainland benefits, in part, from his early death. Passing away in 1925, he was not alive for many of the later conflicts between the CCP and KMT.

First, the theory: before there can be a Marxist revolution, there needs to be a bourgeois-capitalist revolution. The Xinhai Revolution and Sun Yat-sen’s legacy within it play an important role by filling this plank in the Marxist models of historical change. Sun’ s actions helped set the scene for the eventual triumph of communism by ending dynastic rule in China.

But as much as Marxist doctrine needs something like the Xinhai Revolution to satisfy its analytical framework, the Chinese Communist Party also needed to explain why its own political organization was better than the KMT. Go into nearly any museum around the country and this narrative isn’t too hard to tease out. The CCP, a disciplined and dedicated band of revolutionaries, fought to correct centuries of injustices; the KMT, a corrupt political organization, preyed on the people, taxed them unfairly, conscripted men into the army, concerned itself more with self-preservation than protecting the nation; because they were so different — in ends, means, and organization — it was natural and necessary that one triumphed over the other.

But what if they weren’t? What if there was a high degree of continuity between the organizations and goals of the KMT and CCP?

For a long time this question was not really on the table. In the immediate aftermath of 1949, the establishment of the People’s Republic of China appeared like an important and decisive break. The question was simple but important: Why did the CCP win and the KMT lose? No one really investigated how the two parties were similar, as well as how some of the building blocks of the PRC originated in the KMT.

But for the past 25 years, this is what many political historians of 20th century China have been asking.

During the 1920s and 1930s, historians point out, both the KMT and CCP were Leninist-style political organizations. William Kirby, a historian at Harvard University, uses the concept of “the developmental-state” to find continuities.¹ Both parties took top-down approaches to organizing resources — natural and human — to develop China’s economy.

Morris Bian of Auburn University outlines how the danwei – or work unit, which provided jobs, housing, medical, and other services to workers — originated in the 1930s and 1940s and was not solely the creation of the PRC. Bian sees evolution, rather than revolution, of institutions after 1949.²

Joseph Esherick, a recently retired doyen of Chinese studies, gives this line of thinking its best summary when he writes, “The CCP did not only rise to power as the dialectical opposite of the Guomindang. There were important points of unity in the dialectic-areas where the Guomindang paved the way for the Communists, where the latter built on the foundations laid by the former.”³

That is not a line you’re likely to find in the exhibits in the National Museum in Beijing. For that matter, you are equally unlikely to find it in the National Palace Museum in Taibei. The CCP would prefer not to admit the possible origins of its institutions in the KMT, and likewise, the KMT doesn’t want to show that it was somehow an antecedent to the PRC. Both stress discontinuity.

Of course, this is academic theorizing, but it is theorizing about stuff that really matters: official historical narratives and the building blocks of political legitimacy. The CCP can’t be similar to the because then all the stuff the CCP says is undermined. The historical narrative permeates life in China: you can see it on the evening news, Xinwen Lianbo, in the papers, Renmin Ribao, and museums across the country. Protecting and preserving it is a vital task; questioning and doubting it a dangerous offense. Just another reminder that history matters.

¹ William Kirby, “Engineering China: The Origins of the Chinese Developmental State.” In Becoming Chinese, edited by Wen-hsin Yeh, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 137-160.

² Morris Bian, The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China: The Dynamics of Institutional Change (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2005).

³ Joseph W. Esherick, “Ten Theses on the Chinese Revolution,” Modern China, Vol. 21, No. 1,  (Jan., 1995): 47-48.

Austin Dean is a PhD candidate in Chinese History soon to be based in Beijing. He blogs at The Licentiate’s Ledger and tweets @TheLicentiate.

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There’s little chance Max Baucus, the incoming US ambassador to China, will make an entrance quite like Gary Locke’s in 2011. Locke, the departing US ambassador, nearly broke Weibo when he journeyed from Seattle to Beijing in coach, carried his own luggage, then bought his own coffee. Writing in China Daily, Chen Weihua contrasted Locke’s trip with the travel styles of Chinese government officials: “In China, even a township chief, which is not really that high up in the hierarchy, will have a chauffeur and a secretary to carry his bag.” Chen and others acknowledged and admired a perceived “American way” of official travel: humble, frugal, and simple.

Political travel, the movement of leaders and bureaucrats from one place to another, can be a strategy for managing an empire, a weapon to draw out enemies, a ploy for pushing a reform agenda, or merely a way of presenting a politician as a man (or woman) of the people. In the American context, it is easy to think of political travel in this way – vacation destinations of presidents are subject to scrutiny and polling – but in China the political nature of travel does not nearly as much attention. In part, that may tie to the legacies of the tributary system that governed much of imperial China’s international relations. Other countries sent representatives to China, not the other way around.

Moving beyond this easy-to-arrive-at conclusion, the symbolism and meaning behind the travel of Chinese officials ties to matters of philosophy and practical politics.

With the consolidation of the civil service bureaucracy in the Northern Song Dynasty, the transfer of officials became a highly regulated and symbolic process. How an official traveled had philosophical and moral connotations. Riding a horse was a big deal. Historians have hypothesized it was a type of coping mechanism to supplement Chinese masculinity, a way to display machismo when Chinese men spent most of their time reading, writing poetry, and on generally less vigorous pursuits than their Tang predecessors. Riding a donkey, too, was deeply symbolic. Historian Cong Ellen Zhang thinks that bureaucrats on top of asses were hoping to express a “calculated eccentricity and nonchalance and a sign of conspicuous humility” because donkeys were not “conventional mounts for the powerful.”¹

During the Northern and Southern Song the most magnificent and most controversial means of transportation was the sedan chair. Some Song officials saw riding in a sedan chair as unsavory, unnecessary, and unethical. Chen Yi and Wang Anshi — often on different sides of philosophical, political, and economic debates of the period — both objected to riding in them because this means of transport so “obviously substituted humans for animals.”² Despite these objections on moral grounds, sedan chair became so increasingly common for officials and merchants that the Song had to pass a sumptuary law limiting the size of commoner retinues so as to not impinge upon official dignity.

The question of if and how an emperor should travel was a bit trickier. Though precedents existed for the Emperor to take periodic inspection tours (xunshou 巡守), by the Northern Song dynasty some thinkers associated a court on the move with the chaos of the latter part of the Tang Dynasty. The Jurchen conquests of the Northern Song and the repeated flights of the Song Emperor strengthened the link between an emperor on the move and regime instability. In the ideal and orderly polity, officials thought, the Emperor stayed in the palace. Only then was all right under heaven.

But this was just one line of thinking. The Jurchens, Mongols, and other northern steppe regimes were polities on the move. Leaders traveled to maintain and strengthen personal connections among various vassals and allies. Politics was personal. These two conflicting strains of thought on imperial travel and touring — a sign of chaos and decay or simply another way to conduct business — became more acute during the Ming Dynasty. A resurgent bureaucracy remonstrated a number of emperors seemingly under the influence of Mongol habits of governance. The Yongle Emperor was a “ruler on horseback,” despite the fact that elements of the Ming bureaucracy opposed his sojourns and campaigns. In fact, in the early 1400s, two leading bureaucratic officials compiled Memorials of Famous Officials Throughout History, many of which dealt with the evils of imperial travel and touring.³

In the Manchu-led Qing Dynasty, the travels of the emperor first served as a way to consolidate power and co-opt southern Han literati, but by the end of the dynasty the movement of court reflected the increasing instability of regime. The Kangxi Emperor took six inspection tours to the south of China, particularly in the jiangnan region, around present-day Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. The Manchu court also undertook annual hunting trips to Chengde, their retreat in Manchuria. It was important, Qing emperors thought, for Manchus to maintain their martial vigor. The Qianlong Emperor, mimicking, but not outdoing, the trips of his grandfather, also took six tours to the south, where he held special examinations for the bureaucracy, inspected water works, and continued to co-opt Han literati support for the conquest regime. Travel was a strategy for regime consolidation. By the end of the dynasty travel was again a strategy for regime survival. The Qing Court fled from Beijing to Xi’an during the Boxer Rebellion.

Of course, the 20th century offers numerous examples of Chinese officials on the move. Sun Yat-sen crisscrossed the country giving speeches. A tried and true stratagem of Mao Zedong was to leave Beijing for long stretches of time to draw out his enemies. Deng Xiapoing embarked on his Southern Tour in 1992 to help push through his agenda of economic reform. Looking back on Xi Jinping’s first trip domestically and abroad, first to Guangzhou (echoing Deng’s Sothern Tour) and then to Russia (following Mao’s first trip as the head of the PRC), perhaps reveals some hint of Xi’s dual goals: economic reform and political retrenchment.

Political travel, in China and elsewhere, is a strange combination of style and substance. It can be planned, with pomp and pageantry. It can be serendipitous, with the refusal of Starbucks to honor the coupon of the departing US ambassador to China. In either case, politics takes place on the road as much as in the corridors of power.

¹ Cong Ellen Zhang, Transformative Journeys: Travel and Culture in Song China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011), 96

² Ibid, 98.

³ Michael Chang, A Court on Horseback: Imperial Touring and the Construction of Qing Rule, 1680-1785 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 68. See chapter one for a very good general discussion of controversies about imperial touring (xunshou 巡守).

Austin Dean is a PhD candidate in Chinese History soon to be based in Beijing. He blogs at The Licentiate’s Ledger and tweets @TheLicentiate.

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Jason Lee / Reuters

J.P Morgan Chase, one of the world’s largest banks, can’t stay out of the news. In the past year it suffered a multibillion-dollar trading error thanks to the “London Whale,” reached a $13 billion settlement with the US government over its role selling mortgage-backed securities before the 2008 financial crisis, and settled a $2.6 billion claim for ignoring signs of fraud from Bernie Madoff. If that were not enough, the firm is now under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for the “Sons and Daughters Program” — the bank hires the relatives of Chinese government officials in the hopes of winning lucrative business deals.

Two lines of thought dominate analysis of the Sons and Daughters Program. One sees it as innocuous; the other believes it is a crime. Aaron Ross Sorkin of The New York Times thinks the revelations are part of the normal course of business, especially in finance. After all, Sorkin reasons, “children of the elite have some of the best educations and thriving networks of contacts, it is hard to see how businesses are supposed to not seek them out, let alone turn them away.” “It’s not what you know but who you know” is a cliché, the argument runs, but all clichés have a great deal of truth behind them.

John Carney of CNBC believes it is a much more serious matter because “so much of China’s investment banking business is connected to the government in some way.” Hiring the offspring of private companies in the hopes of winning business is just fine, but hiring the children of government officials violates the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, passed in 1977 with the aim of “preventing U.S. companies from competing for business with each other through bribery.”

There is a larger story here, though. It is tempting — and easy — to think that the Sons and Daughters programs is just another example of the decisive role of guanxi in Chinese society. However, by using guanxi to explain everything, the concept loses its analytical power. The more accurate depiction of the evolution of Chinese society in the past century is the tension between personal relationships and the administrative hierarchies of standardization and meritocracy. Thinking about only one of these two obscures their interaction.

Let’s start with finance. Before foreign-style, joint stock, limited liability Chinese banks appeared around the turn of the 20th century, Shanxi banks or remittance houses (piaohao 票号), local city banks (qianzhuang 錢莊), and foreign banks dominated the financial scene. Piaohao remittance houses played an important role in interregional transfers of money, and in the 1860s began to help the government collect taxes and move them to Beijing, jingxiang (京餉). However, piaohao were almost always closely held enterprises with unlimited liability that traced their origins to various Shanxi families. City banks, qianzhuang, were complementary to the piaohua, and local businessmen could get short-term loans, so-called chop loans, with no collateral. However, this business model made it difficult to lend larger sums of money at a longer term. When foreign banks arrived in China, they focused on international trade and often had deep ties with local qianzhuang banks, and relying on a Chinese middleman, a compradore, to help them navigate the complexities of the business landscape.

In the period around the turn of the 20th century, Qing officials called for the creation of foreign-style, joint-stock, limited liability banks. These banks began to rise in prominence at the expense of the piaohao. A combination of new and old practices helped these new enterprises succeed. Banks moved away from the lending practices of qianzhuang who did not ask for collateral before issuing loans, relying only on personal guarantees. At the same time, however, echoes of early practices remained as some established their own investigative bureau to examine the capital, capability, and character of those taking out loans. This combination of old and new also appeared in hiring practices. Family and geographic connection played a role but banks still instituted a round of tests before appointments. At the Bank of China, for example, all applicants had to pass a written exam that tested a wide range of skills before moving on to an oral exam. Connections only got you so far.¹

At the same time, early multinational companies also had to adjust and adapt to the tension between Chinese social networks and their own preference for administrative hierarchies. The key question, as historian Sherman Cochran put it, was whether “Western, Japanese and Chinese corporations imposed new organizations and practices on existing Chinese networks? Or, have Chinese networks resisted corporations’ organizations and practices, causing corporations to assign or delegate authority to networks?”²

British-American Tobacco, the largest cigarette maker in the world, entered the Chinese market in the early 20th century by transferring a preexisting administrative hierarchy for the management and distribution of its product, but abandoned this strategy after 20 years in favor of relying on the connections of its employees. Taking a different course, Mitsui, a large Japanese trading firm, chose not to rely on Chinese locals to market and distribute goods; instead, it trained its Japanese sales staff with three years of Chinese before sending them abroad to serve the company.

In the field of government, the tension between who you know and what you know has a more complicated relationship in a system that always claims to be a meritocracy. After the abolition of the exam system in 1905, the KMT established an Examination Yuan to administer a renewed civil service exam. However, as political scientist Julia Strauss notes, because the KMT “deliberately adopted a policy of inclusion and co-optation, the rigorous enforcement of impersonal methods of civil service recruitment was a luxury it could not afford.”³ For much of the PRC’s history, there was no civil service exam. From the 1990s, the PRC began holding an annual exam, the guokao (国考), to staff the bureaucracy. Since the test’s inception, one of the main challenges has been removing even the hint that success on the written exam and later on the oral exam depends more on name, background, and connections than it does on the ability to write, think, and act like a bureaucrat.

At the most abstract and academic level the question is if and how foreign concepts of organizing society — either Weberians notions of bureaucratic rationality or Western management practices in business — are adopted, rejected, changed, and critiqued in China. At a more personal level, it is the story of how individuals act and live within the tension of these two systems. In either case, the easy answer of guanxi obscures more than it explains.

¹ For more on the evolution on Chinese banking see Linsun Cheng, Banking in Modern China: Entrepreneurs, Professional Managers and the Development of Chinese Banks, 1897-1937 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

² Sherman Cochran, Encountering Networks: Western, Japanese, and Chinese Corporations in China, 1880-1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 1.

³ Julia Strauss, Strong Institutions in Weak Politics: State Building in Republican China, 1927-1940 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) 35.

Austin Dean is a PhD candidate in Chinese History soon to be based in Beijing. He blogs at The Licentiate’s Ledger and tweets @TheLicentiate.

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For those worried about peace and stability in East Asia, there is plenty to keep you up at night: an international pariah armed with nuclear weapons under the apparently tenuous control of a young adult of questionable maturity; messy historical relations between regional powers; and territorial disputes that tie up political capital, inflame public opinion, and increase the chance of hostilities. If it’s Tuesday, there must be a flare-up in the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands.

Last November the Chinese promulgated one more policy to worsen the insomnia of security experts: The Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea. Definitions, here, are important. As The Atlantic‘s James Fallows stressed, “all four words in its full title” mean something. Taken together, they don’t create a no-fly zone, but instead “create an area where the relevant authorities have a right to know who is flying, and where they are going.” Importantly, Fallows added, the ADIZ  “doesn’t necessarily mean that flights are going to be challenged or interfered with.” Other countries, including the United States, have these zones, too. The ADIZ itself might be innocuous.

Or — maybe not. Tai Ming Cheung, director of the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, argued that the key factor was not the existence of the zone itself but the “PLA’s lack of operational experience, overlapping ADIZs, and unclear rules of engagement could lead to accidents that could easily spiral into dangerous incidents.” Danger arises from complexity, lack of precedent, and lack of training. Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt, director of Asia-Pacific programs at the U.S. Institute of Peace, agreed with this assessment and extended it. The truly worrying aspect of the ADIZ was how it “will further empower actors within China to push for bolder action in the contested territories in the East China Sea.”

After the initial announcement of the ADIZ and the decision by the United States to go forward with a previously scheduled training flight of B-52s, the remarkable thing about the ADIZ is that it has thus far been unremarkable. The difficult thing about thinking about China — or any place, really — is figuring out what is really important and what isn’t. There is tons of news happening each day but it is hard to determine, especially on the first go-around, if today’s news will be historically significant.

To demonstrate, let’s examine flight identification procedures in China during the Nationalist Period. If you haven’t heard of these regulations before, well, that’s kind of the point.

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As the KMT consolidated power in the late 1920s, they set about codifying their rule. Establishing a government, at a basic level, means creating laws and procedures for a number of issues that aren’t necessarily important during the fight for power. A policy on the identification of foreign aircraft is not going to drive people to join, or leave, the revolution. But when running a government, that is exactly the kind of policy that needs to exist.

In 1929, the American government asked its diplomats in China to figure out what, if any, rules existed for foreign aircraft in China. Edward Cunningham, Consul General in Shanghai, reported back the following provisional policies in June 1929.

First, whenever a foreign airplane visited China, the foreign minister or local consul of the country had to notify the Chinese government, which would grant special permission to the plane to fly in Chinese territory. More specifically, the foreign representative had to provide the object of the flight, where the plane would enter and exit Chinese airspace, the places the flight would pass through en route to the destination, the names of all crew members as well as the model and make of the plane itself.*

With this information submitted, the Chinese government would then approve the route and itinerary. Route approved, the plane was not to deviate more than 20 kilometers to the right or left of the sanctioned route. Upon landing in China, the plane was to be subject to inspections “by representatives of the Chinese government when it ascends and descends.” Around cities, planes were not supposed to fly at low altitudes, “thereby endangering the lives and property of residents.” Planes were also not allowed to “scatter things from above.”

This all sounds stringent but reasonable enough, especially given that aviation around the world, and especially in China, was still a new thing. In fact, reporting back to Washington, the American consul at Shantou in Guangdong wrote that he could find no information on provisional regulations and that only one airplane had every been seen overhead. The only thing that complicated matters was that different consuls in different parts of China relayed different information.

The point here is not to reason by analogy — there are immediate and obvious differences between these provisional regulations and last year’s announcement of the ADIZ. Instead, the purpose is more hopefully subtle. When news breaks, it is difficult to guess — let alone know — its ultimate significance.

In histories of the 1930s, airplanes and aircraft identification do not merit much attention. One exception might be the famous flight that Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, Soong May-Ling, and Soong’s elder brother, T.V., took from Nanjing to Xi’an in order to extract Chiang Kai-Shek from captivity, thus creating a united front between the KMT and the CCP to fight the Japanese. No real diplomatic or geopolitical incident, though, developed out of the rules and regulations governing the flight of foreign aircraft in China. In a similar vein, it is possible to imagine future history books devoting no space to the creation of the ADIZ in the East China Sea. If nothing else, let that thought help you sleep through the night.

*Quotations come from “Dispatches Relating to the Internal Affairs of China, 1910-1929,” U.S. State Department Files, M329, Microfilm Roll 211.

Austin Dean is a PhD candidate in Chinese History soon to be based in Beijing. He blogs at The Licentiate’s Ledger and tweets @TheLicentiate.

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A lot of cash changes hands around Chinese New Year. Despite the convenience of electronic payments, China is still very much a cash-based society, and pink 100-yuan notes featuring the plump visage of Mao Zedong proliferate wallets, pockets, and purses.

Most stories analyzing the Chinese demand for cash focus on the stress it puts on the banking system, but let’s take a look at it from a historical angle: what can we discern about recent Chinese developments by looking at who — and what — appears on the renminbi?

The idea of having national money bound by borders is a fairly recent one. From the 16th century through the first part of the 20th century, a variety of silver coins circulated in China — Spanish and Mexican pieces of eight and even a coin minted by the United States specifically for use in East Asia. Silver ingots and copper coins, generally known as cash, formed a complex monetary system in which exchange rates between copper and silver differed across the country. Importantly, silver coins and ingots were not accepted by count but by weight, how much silver the piece contained, and by fineness, the ratio of silver to other metals. The process of measuring silver ingots for weight and fineness was cumbersome and potentially controversial: if I think I have 20 ounces of silver and you tell me that I only have 19, there is plenty of ground for conflict.

The Ming and Qing governments (before the late 19th century) did not mint silver coins, only copper cash. Different types of silver coins flowed into China through foreign trade. Unlike many European currencies, money during the imperial period, either copper cash or periodic issues of paper notes, did not feature the portrait or profile of the emperor. Coins carried the name of the reign in which they were produced, but the hole in the middle obviously made a portrait of the ruler impractical. Toward the end of the Qing, some provincial governors put their portraits on issues of notes from provincial banks:

A provincial governor of Qing

At the very end of the dynasty, the regent Zaifeng appeared on notes of the newly established Qing Bank (大清银行):

Zaifeng (Qing)

Through the mid-19th century, China’s monetary system was not particularly unique in its complexity. Mexican silver dollars circulated throughout the United States in the first part of the 19th century. Before monetary reform in the Meiji period, Japan, too, had a plethora of coins.

Currency reform was a constant issue from the late Qing through the Republican period. In 1903, the U.S. government sent a professor from Cornell University, Jeremiah Jenks, to convince the Qing to replace silver with a gold standard for their currency. Although Zhang Zhidong and several other late Qing officials rejected this proposal, it began a 30-year debate on the gold standard. Though a silver coin featuring the portrait of Yuan Shikai gained some traction between 1915 and 1925, the political fragmentation of China further complicated the monetary system, with various warlords and provincial officials making their own money.

Yuan Shikai

In 1935, the Nationalist government abandoned the use of silver after the United States embarked on a massive silver-buying program to cater to mining interests in western states. As silver drained out of China, the fabi reforms took away the metal’s legal tender quality, giving a monopoly on note issue to four banks. Though some of these banknotes featured the portrait of Sun Yat-sen, he did not dominate them. Though at first fairly successful, the fabi buckled under the pressures of wartime finance as the Nationalist government resorted to printing money to pay for the war. By the end of World War II, fabi notes had depreciated so much that American soldiers used them to light cigarettes.

When the Chinese Communist Party came to power, the currency system, still reeling from rampant inflation, demanded attention. Though ultimately discarding money as a motivator for production is one of the central tenets of the communist creed, there was still a large demand for money to pay wages, even though the state fixed the amount of those wages.

So far there have been five issues of renminbi notes in the PRC. In 1948, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) introduced a number of banknotes with values ultimately as high as 50,000 yuan. At the beginning of this period the most important task of the PBOC was reigning in rampant inflation. Later issues occurred in 1955, 1962, from 1987 to 1997 and in 1999.

What patterns can we see across the different note issues if we look at who and what appears on Chinese money? The most interesting trend is increasing standardization: Mao Zedong now appears on nearly every denomination of bill. The only types of money that don’t feature his portrait are the one and five jiao notes that carry the profiles of two ethnic minorities.

For the first 30 years of CCP rule, Mao did not have the same monopoly on Chinese money. In fact, Mao does not even make an appearance on the renminbi during the first three note issues. Instead, these bills depict a number of scenes: men and women working in factories, farms, undertaking the important work of building the nation. If there is a theme, it is that of moving forward. Groups march along the road; a young woman drives along in a car. Unlike a portrait that generally looks you in the eye, the figures in these notes cast their gaze to the distance and — presumably — the bright socialist future.

When Mao finally appears on the 100-yuan note in the forth edition of the renminbi, he’s not alone. Profiles of Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, and Zhu De accompany the chairman.

Only in the fifth series does Mao’s portrait monopolize all the space on the renminbi. (See top image.)

There are a number of ways to read this change. One might be that it simplifies and perhaps even overturns the communist revolution. Instead of scenes from farm and factory, men and women on the march, busy building a future, the renminbi features the static image of a single leader and eschews any portrayals of socialist realism. Another might be that Mao’s monopoly on the renminbi exemplifies the continuing and unresolved contradictions of a government that must balance Communist rhetoric with continuing market reform. In either case, when opening a wallet and pulling out a pink 100-yuan note, we aren’t just taking out money — we’re interacting with living history, and a potent political symbol.

Austin Dean is a PhD candidate in Chinese History soon to be based in Beijing. He blogs at The Licentiate’s Ledger and tweets @TheLicentiate.

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The end of one year and the start of another lends itself to reflections and predictions. This year, the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, brings a special sense of foreboding. It’s been popular for more than a few years now to compare the 14 years preceding World War I — a time of prosperity, globalization, and, at least in Europe, the seeming triumph of civilization over wickedness — to the first 14 years of the 21st century. At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe drew a direct comparison between 1914 and 2014. The explicit question in this analogy is a terrifying one: is the world careening toward another bloody and futile war?

Luckily, Jeff Wasserstrom, professor of history at University of California, Irvine, reminds us that there are multiple kinds of time and, in turn, multiple ways of remembering. For him, “the continuing significance of 60-year cycles as well as centuries in Chinese timekeeping has relevance for how geopolitical tensions of the present moment are being put into long-term perspective.” Adopting this perspective, the importance of 1914 fades; the significance of 1894, the start of the Sino-Japanese War, increases. That is one way to undermine the 1914 and 2014 comparison.

Another is simply to look at predictions made in the period before World War I as a reminder that no one really knows what they are talking about.

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It’s easy — and in many ways justified — to view the Qing Dynasty in its last 10 years as inept, decrepit, and close to collapse. It’s also bracing to see that some observers at the time were actually quite optimistic about the dynasty’s future.

Thomas Millard, one of the first in a long line of China hands from Missouri (think Edgar Snow and Peter Hessler), was a journalist and author based in Shanghai. Beyond a large number of articles, he also produced what we may call two “big-China books,” The New Far East (1906) and America and the Far Eastern Question (1909). Aside from big-picture questions posed in these works — will the dynasty fall or carry on? what are different dynamics at play in court politics? what role should the United States take in East Asia? — Millard offered more than a few prognostications about China’s future.

His optimism had an interesting origin: the failure of other, more dire, predictions to be borne out. For example, Millard zeroed in on an “old and established hypothesis from ten years ago by many students of the situation of China that a political cataclysm would follow the death of the Empress Dowager Cixi.” Yet the death of the empress and, almost simultaneously, the Guangxu emperor brought no collapse. Instead, “China took her crisis quite calmly.” If pessimistic predictions regularly failed to pan out, went the reasoning, optimism about the Qing’s future had to be the order of the day. For Millard, the non-event of Cixi’s and Guangxu’s death confirmed “the opinion of those, of whom I am one, who believe in the fundamental stability of her institutions.”¹ That is quite a statement to make in 1909, just two years before the Xinhai Revolution.

If Millard overestimated the strength of Qing, he also underestimated opposition to them. Although he acknowledged that most would prefer Chinese to Manchu rulers, he thought this “sentiment is without focus.” After all, there was “no Chinese pretender to the throne” and the “Ming line practically is extinct.”² Anti-Manchuism, for Millard, was an undirected emotion rather than a revolutionary program.

The problem with reading the rhythms of political life at the end of the Qing Dynasty, an article from The London Saturday Review explained in 1910, was that “things are never absolutely quiet in China; it is hardly to be expected that they should be, in such a huge, loosely knit Empire.” Within this general condition though, there are “periods of greater or lesser turmoil, and the average decennial intervals seem just long enough for the average man to forget the last episode.” Noting anti-foreign riots along the Yangtze in 1891 and the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, it was now time for a “fresh period of disturbance.” Though at first a more pessimistic assessment than Millard’s, by identifying a regular cycle of calm giving way to “disturbances,” this judgment, too, adheres to the basic stability of the dynasty. There might be a small uprising, a revolt, but it will die down soon enough and the cycle will continue. 

When the Xinhai Revolution did start in October 1911, it was a rather haphazard and uncoordinated affair. Sun Yat-sen, the self-professed leader of the revolution and the eventual first president of the Republic of China, was not even in the country at the time. He read about it while in the United States.

By the middle of 1912, The Journal of the American Asiatic Association, a publication focused on business affairs, was editorializing — seemingly gloating — about the failed prophesies³:

When the Chinese Republic was declared there were none who were able to rise defiantly and exclaim “I told you so!” The professed prophets, the wise men of the East and West, whose business it is to see further into the dark than other people can were silent because they could not find among their published utterances anything to display proof that they had seen even the slightest into this particular darkness.

In fact, the editorial continued, for more than two decades, time proved supposed wise men wrong at every turn. In the 1890s it was a settled issue that “China was to be partitioned.” With this question not in doubt, “Little maps were published, showing how this greater Poland was to be divided up.” But by 1900 China was no Oriental Poland.

The point here is not to pick on Millard in particular for being wrong. Everyone is wrong about everything all the time, especially when trying to answer unanswerable questions about the future. Instead, it’s to note the flaws of historical analogies, which politicians and pundits unfortunately lean on in order to appear insightful, serious, and profound. The analogy between 1914 and 2014 tells us less about the past or present — let alone the future — than the shortcomings of how we make comparisons.

¹ Thomas Millard, America and the Far Eastern Question (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 306. 

² Millard, 302.

³ “China and the Prophets.” The Journal of the American Asiatic Association. Vol. XIII, No. 7 (August 1912), 208.

Austin Dean is a PhD candidate in Chinese History soon to be based in Beijing. He blogs at The Licentiate’s Ledger and tweets @TheLicentiate.

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A jet-black Audi A6 with government plates rolls down the streets of Beijing and stops at a school, mall or restaurant. Out steps a teenage girl, backpack in tow, who surely can’t be a government official — but just might be the daughter of one. Secretly, every pedestrian scoffs and/or hisses.

If last November’s Communist Party announcement about the procurement and use of government cars actually pans out — eliminating all but a select number (取消一般公车) — familiar scenes like the above may no longer dominate urban Chinese landscapes. Part of the wider move for good governance and eliminating waste, the misuse of government cars (公车私用, gongche siyong) is so damaging to the government because it is so obvious.

It’s tempting to consider gongche siyong a recent problem, since China’s car boom is a phenomenon of only the past thirty years. But the misuse of public vehicles predates the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Looking into the history of private abuse of public vehicles actually makes recent reform measures seem more significant — and at the same time making it doubtful that a solution exists.

The automobile spread quickly around the world in the 1920s and 1930s, remaking urban landscapes and rhythms of daily life. China was no exception. As The New York Times noted in September 1936, Guomindang officials in Nanjing were “acutely traffic-conscious” because “they face[d] the twin tasks of making the population traffic-wise and of educating the thousands of new chauffeurs in the rules of safe driving.”

Safety, though, was just one problem.

By the mid-1930s, the misuse of government cars drained official resources and threatened the prestige and reputation of the government. According to statistics compiled by the Public Works Bureau of the Nanjing Municipal Government, more than 500 of the nearly 1,500 motor vehicles in the city belonged to the government. The authorities owned 259, 65 trucks, 16 buses, 36 motorcycles, 135 bikes and 45 rickshaws, according to research by Hsieh Kuan-Yi, published in the 1935 paper “The Use of Control of Motor-Cars in Central Government Organs.”¹

There were rules for how to use these cars, but they were “grossly neglected in all but a very few government organs.”* Bicycles, for example, were used largely to transport messages while police and health bureaus also used them to carry out routine business as well as inspections. Rickshaws generally served officials venturing out to make purchases and were not used by high-ranking officials.

Cars themselves fell into three categories: specially reserved, office service and general. The heads of all government offices had access to specially reserved cars and this group accounted for more than half the total number of cars in the government’s fleet. Some higher-level bureaucrats had use of office cars for commuting to work. General service cars were for official business errands, but this final service gave “rise to considerable difficulties in matters of distribution and control, due to the limited number of cars.”*

Despite the a number of regulations already on the books, the misuse of official cars for private purposes was relatively easy. In order to get access to a general-use car, an official had to fill out a request form, obtain approval from his superior and send it to the Miscellaneous Affairs Section of whatever government department he happened to work in, which had control over the vehicles.*

In theory, after the journey, the chauffeur had to fill out a detailed report concerning the destination, the route and the length of the journey. This form had to be signed by the official in his role as passenger in the vehicle. In theory, complaints “such as the prevalent one against the use of public motor cars by officials for private purposes should not exist.” But, as anyone could see, the “display of Government cars in front of cinemas and restaurants and speeding along highways and at scenic places on Sunday’s are sufficient testimony to the prevalence of such abuse.”* That sounds familiar.

Chauffeur salary and behavior were also problems. According to estimates, it cost $150 to maintain a government car for one month: $90 for gas, $45 for driver wages and $15 for repair and miscellaneous expenses.* Perhaps these drivers got paid too much: sometimes more than government officials, and always much more than others employed in the menial but necessary positions that kept a government bureau functioning.

Beyond a high salary and reckless driving, chauffeurs stood at the center of another important abuse: stealing. Theft of gasoline was “an open secret” and had “become a sort of recognized vice… one of the of the chief causes for the high gasoline consumption in various organs.” Each government car consumed on average 100 gallons of gasoline a month, with 50 gallons considered quite frugal and 200 viewed as wasteful. Since drivers were charged with requisitioning supplies for their cars, they freely asked for supplies from the Miscellaneous Affairs of each bureau and, “owing to laxity of inspection,” the chauffeurs were “very largely uncontrolled.”*

There was one predictable and one surprising proposal to combat the abuse of public vehicles problem in the 1930s. The traditional bureaucratic answer stressed implementing a stronger system of control. These reforms needed to start with better knowledge of cars themselves. The theory was that if the person in charge of administering cars in each bureau actually knew something about cars, it would be easier to spot skullduggery. The ideal system would have been to centralize the purchase, repair and use of automobiles across all layers of government, but there was doubt whether the adoption of such an arrangement in China was “practicable, at least at present.”*

Instead, the best answer was shrinking the government fleet. Horses would work as well as cars — and were also cheaper. Though the initial outlay for each horse and carriage ran between $300 and $400, the maintenance costs would be three to four times less than motor vehicle. The speed of the carriage — “ample for ordinary government business” — made this a solution that “should be considered as a remedy for the wastefulness for the motor service.”*

The solutions proposed in the 1930s and in 2014 — minus the horses! — really aren’t that different. Eliminate gongche siyong by shrinking the government fleet and give bureaucrats fewer opportunities to misuse, then centralize control over the remaining fleet. If the proposed reforms do eliminate or at least significantly lessen the abuse of public vehicles, they will represent a major step toward eliminating a problem that transcends differences between the CCP and KMT: the private use of government property simply because officials think it’s one of the perks of the job.

Austin Dean is a PhD candidate in Chinese History soon to be based in Beijing. He blogs at The Licentiate’s Ledger and tweets @TheLicentiate.

¹ Hsieh Kuan-Yi, “The Use of Control of Motor-Cars in Central Government Organs,” The Chinese Administrator, Volume I, Number 2 (1935): 229-230.

* Ibid.

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