A monumental history of China. A giant country whose population represents a sixth of all humanity and which has been the main one for centuries, until the arrival of the industrial revolution, but whose trajectory in time is, despite this, very little known in the West British Michael Wood (Manchester, 1948), historian, journalist, author of The History of China for the BBC and other documentaries on the reform and opening up of Deng Xiaoping and on Du Fu – the poet, he says, greatest of the old and eternal Kingdom of the Center –, now launches with Historia de China (Ãtico de los Libros) a journey through a civilization marked by geography, above all by the fierce Yellow River and its unpredictable floods, overflowing on more than a thousand occasions and to which sacrifices and rituals were offered to appease him.
A river that killed seven million people in the flood of 1332 – although today the problem is the lack of flow – and on which grew, he recalls, “the essential Han civilization that would become the ‘ China’s state has been around for so long.” A civilization always afraid that a river disaster would collapse society generated the need for a strong State, able to dig dikes, monitor irrigation or scan the sky in search of weather patterns, millennia ago. A story found in the country’s myths, such as that of King Yu the Great, “the one who subdues the flood”. “Rivers create different characters. In the Egyptian civilization the Nile rose every year on the same day, it was benign, it brought life. El Groc was unpredictable, killed millions, changed its course continuously. Controlling it as well as they could was very important early on,” notes Wood.
And he points out that “all civilizations have deeply rooted tendencies, and in China when the Empire ended in 1912 and the Republic came and then the Communists took over, if you read the Western academics of the fifties, they were all overwhelmed by how the communist system replicated the authoritarian bureaucratic regime of the Ming and Qing dynastiesâ€. “Another important factor that comes from the deep past and still works today is monarchism, the idea of ​​the great leader, seen as benevolent, wise, powerful. Mao is an example. Despite the fabulous qualities of the Chinese people, patience, hard work, realism, they end up believing that the great leader has the answers, the solution to political problems. And President Xi sees it today,” he adds.
And remember that even if China currently criticizes imperialism, it appropriated Xinjiang, Tibet and part of Mongolia. And that if the Communist Party government in recent decades has lifted more people out of poverty than ever in history, “there are huge inequalities and the possession of wealth is the same as in Great Britain, 1% have a huge percentage”.
“In Mao’s time the Red Guard during the cultural revolution dug up the tombs of Confucius (551-479 BC) and his family to destroy them. Now President Xi writes the sash that accompanies the new edition of Confucius’ thought and says: read this book,†he smiles. “The role of Confucianism in China is enormous. It may come as a surprise, but the central idea of ​​Chinese civilization is a moral order. In the West our order was guided by religion and morality came from there. In China it came from philosophical ideas”, he reflects. “In society these values ​​are still there. It is a country with a large population and collective values ​​are important. Many people have felt that the Communist Party did not give them a moral path and without this the whole order would diminish. An order that has nothing to do with praying but with loyalty, relations with neighbors and the community. I recommend reading Letter 08 written in China in 2008 by three hundred intellectuals like Liu Xiaobo. It talks about what the Communist Party has achieved but also what has gone wrong in this regard”.
Wood talks about how the country has oscillated between order and chaos, such as the Five Dynasties period, with revolutions, murders and cannibalism, talks about the amazing feminist manifesto in China in 1907 under the empress widow Cixi, and of course he talks about Mao, “a nationalist revolutionary, but not a Marxist at the beginning”. “Some believe he was evil from a young age, I think he wanted to fight against injustice and was consumed by power. With the cultural revolution and the great leap forward, tens of millions died. What worries me is Xi Jinping’s conception of Chinese history. Deng Xiaoping’s reform since 1979 is downplayed, the new orthodoxy does not distinguish between before and after. The mistakes are not discussed and Mao, whom Xi admires, is elevated again. The cult of personality that Deng hated has returned.”
