r/China • u/arthurhu5498 • 4h ago
历史 | History Philip Short writes that there is "no reason to think" China under Chiang Kai-shek's successors would wish to act significantly differently from China under Mao's heirs. What do you make of this comparison?
In the afterword to Mao: The Man Who Made China (I.B. Tauris, 2017), Philip Short writes the following about Mao's and Chiang Kai-shek's competing visions for China (pp. 673–674):
As for the conflicting visions of China’s future pursued by Mao and Chiang Kai-shek, one may legitimately wonder how much difference it would really have made, in the long sweep of history, if Chiang rather than Mao had won in 1949. Rana Mitter, an Oxford don whose thinking is representative of the younger generation of China scholars, has pointed out: ‘Both the nationalists and the communists wanted to establish a politically independent state, with a government that penetrated throughout society, and a population that was stable, healthy and economically productive ... However [neither] was seeking to establish what the West, and particularly the United States, would regard as a democracy: a liberal, multi-party regime with significant civil liberties.’ Indeed both explicitly rejected it. In a passage which remains relevant to American policy today, Bai Chongxi, the Guangxi warlord who in 1934 had allowed the Long Marchers to cross his territory to reach safety in the south-west, and who, ten years later, became one of Chiang’s key commanders, wrote in his memoirs in the late 1970s, long before there was talk of ‘regime change’ and ‘exporting democracy’ in Washington: ‘The big mistake that America often makes is to force their model of democracy on other countries’.
Mao’s victory was viewed at the time as a grave setback for America’s strategic goal of establishing a democratic or at least neutral China on the Soviet Union’s southern border. Yet the ‘loss’ of China to communism did not prevent the United States becoming the world’s dominant power. Nor did US support for Chiang’s rump state in Taiwan make it a democracy: that did not happen until long after the Generalissimo’s death. Had Chiang defeated Mao, would he have been able to unify and develop China as effectively as his communist rival? In Pankaj Mishra’s words: Would China without Mao have found the political basis for its current prosperity? That is open to debate. In any case, the challenge to the West posed by Xi Jinping’s China today is not communist but nationalist. There is no reason to think that a mainland China ruled by Chiang Kai-shek’s successors would wish to act significantly differently from that now ruled by Mao’s heirs.[71]
Note 71 (p. 800):
Jay Taylor has speculated that, were Chiang alive today, he would see the current Chinese leaders as ‘modern neo-Confucianists’ like himself, with the same goals for China that he would have adopted had he been in a position to do so (The Generalissimo, p. 592). The implication is that Mao’s successors have succeeded in implementing Chiang’s vision where the Generalissimo himself failed. If one accepts Taylor’s premise – which I find debatable – it can be interpreted either way: as showing that Chiang’s ideas have triumphed (‘lost the battle but won the war’); or as vindicating the system Mao founded which has put those ideas into effect (‘game, set and match’).
What do you make of Taylor's idea? If you accept it, does that suggest a triumph for Chiang's vision, a vindication of Mao's system, both, or neither?