In the 19th century, China also suffered from the expansion of colonialism, and, as its rulers also sought to exert control over trade, particularly the demands of European nations, such as France and Britain, to sell Opium in China, in exchange for tea, that led to the Opium Wars, and the carving up of China, imposition of unequal treaties, stationing of European colonial forces on its territory, and the seizing of entire Chinese regions such as Hong Kong. At the same time, wars with Japan led to the loss of Taiwan, and China's influence on the Korean peninsula. China became a semi-colony. At the start of the 20th century, a rising US imperialism sought to limit the colonisation of China by Britain, France, Portugal, Russia, Germany and Japan, with its Open Door policy, but if failed to be enforced, given the still subordinate position of the US to British imperialism. Only after WWII, was US imperialism able to implement such a policy of breaking up the old European colonial empires to open the door to US multinational corporations, and the global hegemony of US imperialism.
That condition, and the feeling of national humiliation, engendered a strong nationalist sentiment, in a period when such nationalism could still represent a progressive force. The same effect, but, now, in the age of imperialism, representing a reactionary force, resulted from The Treaty of Versailles, which engendered the nationalism in Germany that aided Hitler's rise to power, and similarly the humiliation of Russia, by NATO, following the fall of the USSR, which aided Putin's rise to power. A similar effect, of declining former imperial powers, lies behind Brexit, Trumpism and other such petty-bourgeois nationalism, in an era when the idea of national independence is a reactionary utopian fantasy.
The nationalist movement, in China, led to the revolution of 1911 that ended the Qing dynasty, and established the Chinese Republic. The figurehead was the bourgeois nationalist Sun Yat Sen, who became the first President, and leader of the bourgeois nationalist party, the Kuomintang. But, Sun did not hold military power in China, not only because of the continued role of foreign colonial powers that had their own police and military, in areas of the country under their jurisdiction, but also, because that military power resided with Yuan Shikai, to whom Sun ceded the provisional Presidency. Yuan later made himself Emperor, echoing the history of France, and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. The Chinese bourgeoisie, was closely tied to imperialist capital, much as with Ukraine's ties to NATO, and US and EU imperialism, today, and that determined the nature of the political regime.
A part of the tasks of the bourgeois national revolution is to unify the state, but the nature of China, as a semi-colony, divided up between assorted colonial powers, each with their own inextricable ties to the bourgeoisie in each area, much as in Ukraine, today, and to the militarists/warlords that held sway in each area, prevented that task being fulfilled. Another task flowing from that is the establishment of a single internal market, and control over foreign trade, but, again, the role of foreign imperialism, the various treaties establishing unequal trade and so on, prevented that also from being accomplished. So, the first Chinese Revolution, of 1911, left all of these tasks to be fulfilled by the second Chinese Revolution of 1925-7.
No comments:
Post a Comment