World Country Guide

History and Government

History
China has one of the world’s oldest continuous civilisations. Shang Dynasty ‘oracle bone’ inscriptions, dating back to the 12th century BC, are easily recognisable as early forms of the ideograms, some of which are still used today in Chinese calligraphy. During much of China’s history, the collapse of a dynasty or the accession of a weak ruler would result in the country’s fragmentation into smaller kingdoms, until reunited once again under a new powerful dynasty. In the period of disunion following the Han Dynasty, Buddhism reached China along the Silk Road from Central Asia. During the Tang Dynasty (AD618–907), the Chinese civilisation spread to Korea, Japan and South-East Asia.

In the 13th century, the Mongols under Genghis Khan overran Asia and Genghis’ grandson, Kublai Khan, founded the Yuan Dynasty in 1271. It was during this period that Marco Polo visited China. In 1368, Chinese rule was re-established by the Ming Dynasty, which built the Great Wall to prevent further incursions from the north. Despite this, the Manchus invaded China and founded their own Qing (Ch’ing) Dynasty in 1644.

Modern Chinese history begins in 1840, with the Opium Wars, when Britain and other European powers imposed their will upon the ailing Qing Dynasty, forcing Chinese ports to accept opium consignments produced in India by the British East India Company. Hong Kong was ceded to Britain until 1997 for this purpose. In 1856, Canton, one of the ports forced to accept the trade during the First Opium War, put up concerted resistance. The Chinese suffered another defeat, this time at the hands of an Anglo-French alliance and further trading concessions were extracted from them at the 1858 treaty of Tientsin.

Following the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, Sun Yat-sen founded the Republic of China but the country was plagued by civil war and warlords. When the Japanese imperial army invaded China in 1937, during its campaign to establish a Japanese empire throughout eastern Asia, the Chinese armed forces were still too poorly organised to put up much resistance. Eight years of brutal occupation followed, which has continued to sour relations between the two countries to this day. Following the defeat of the Japanese in 1945, civil war ensued between the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists under Mao Zedong.

In 1949, the remnants of the defeated Nationalists fled to Taiwan, while the victorious communists founded the People’s Republic of China. In the early days of the People’s Republic, a close alliance was forged with the Soviet Union but policy disagreements and personal antipathies led to a rupture in relations in 1960. Internally, the China of the 1960s was dominated by the convulsions of the Cultural Revolution – an attempt by the national leadership to re-invigorate the party and the country by launching campaigns to reassert its principles.

In 1976, the two towering figures of post-revolutionary China, Premier Zhou Enlai and Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong, both died within months of each other. Hua Guofeng first replaced Zhou as Premier, then went on to replace Mao as Party Chairman, and Zhao Ziyang became Premier. Hua left the Politburo after a series of further changes in the leadership in September 1982. The two prominent figures in the government were now Zhao and the Chairman of the Communist Party Central Military Commission Deng Xiaoping. Under this pair, China began its major reform programme. It differed from those that have since been adopted by other socialist economies, particularly in Eastern Europe, in allowing a lesser degree of political ‘liberalisation’ in tandem with the economic measures. This was typical of the east Asian pattern of development since the 1970s, where economic progress has been afforded the greatest priority while political pluralism – specifically, significant organised opposition to the ruling party – has been largely suppressed.

By the end of the 1980s, there was widespread agitation – particularly among students but with significant support from the wider community – in favour of political reform and action against the corruption that had become widespread since economic reform had begun. The situation came to a head in May 1989, when a group of several thousand students and workers occupied Tiananmen Square in central Beijing during the visit to the capital of the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. The Communist Party leadership was initially split on how to react but, after Gorbachev’s departure, the army was sent in and the square cleared with great loss of life. After that, the government took decisive measures to reassert political control. The moderate Zhao Ziyang was replaced as Premier by hard-liner Li Peng who worked with Deng Xiaoping on the government’s resolution of the internal disorder.

As the 1990s progressed, the octo- and nonogenerians at the top of Chinese politics were gradually replaced. Jiang Zemin, who was appointed president in 1993, typified the new generation of leaders. Vice-President Hu Jintao was earmarked to take over from Jiang, and did so in 2003, in line with announcements made at the Communist Party Congress the previous October. The nature of Chinese politics is such that Jiang is likely to retain substantial influence over policy-making through his chairmanship of the powerful Central Military Commission. A new vice-president, Zeng Qinghong and a new premier, Wen Jiabao, were also appointed. The new government was quickly faced with a major crisis in the form of an epidemic of SARS, a pneumonia-type virus with a high fatality rate. The initial reaction – denial followed by a refusal to admit the scale of the problem – was typical of the old regime but, under international pressure, the authorities have now come clean with the international community.

Hu Jintao was originally a protg of Deng Xiaoping and came to prominence as the head of the Chinese administration in Tibet in the 1980s, where he successfully put down a political uprising of Tibetans by imposing martial law. This far-western province had been put under Chinese military control in 1959, as the Mao government sought to remove what they perceived as a reactionary, quasi-feudal regime dominated by a priestly class. In the course of their heavy-handed occupation, they have driven the much-revered leaders of Tibetan Bhuddism, including the Dalai Lama, into exile and have destroyed much of the Tibetan cultural and social infrastructure.

Chinese policy in Tibet and especially Tiananmen Square caused difficulties for China’s relations with the West, both generally and for its major foreign policy objectives. These are three-fold – an improvement of relations with the United States of America, membership of the World Trade Organisation, and the reunification of the national territory, meaning – since the recovery of Hong Kong and Macau – Taiwan.

After the ground-breaking 1971–72 Nixon-Kissinger visit, contacts with the USA developed at a glacial pace. US support for Taiwan is a constant irritant, as are incidents such as the 2001 US spy plane row (in which an American electronic eavesdropping aircraft was forced down by Chinese fighter planes). Within East Asia, the situation is further complicated by China’s involvement in one of the region’s more intractable territorial disputes, concerning the status of the Spratly Islands, a small uninhabited archipelago in the South China Sea, which is claimed by no less than six nations and is thought to sit above substantial oil fields. The Chinese have occasionally occupied some of the islands for a short period; their future is the subject of complex multilateral negotiation. Elsewhere in the region, Beijing remains concerned by the continuing tension between India and Pakistan (see India and Pakistan). China has consistently provided military support to Pakistan and considers India a rival and political foe. (One reason is that one of Beijing’s major irritants, the Tibetan religious leader, the Dalai Lama, operates from exile in northeast India.) Other foreign policy preoccupations are Vietnam and Russia. Despite historic enmities, relations with both have improved considerably since the early 1990s. As for Japan, the major issues are economic, although the historical legacy of Japan’s brutal occupation of China during the 1930s and 1940s continues to cast a shadow.

Government
The National People’s Congress (NPC) is the most powerful organ of state and elects all those with the principal executive functions – the President and Vice-President of the People’s Republic, the Premier and Vice-Premier of the State Council (after nomination by the president), other members of the State Council and the heads of individual ministries. The State Council reports to the NPC or, when the Congress is not sitting, to its Standing Committee. The NPC is held every five years and attended by some 3000 delegates drawn from the provincial administrations, the military and various state organs. The NPC membership and all major appointments are ultimately under the control of the Chinese Communist Party, whose 22-member Politburo is effectively the country’s governing body.