On the eve of the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, two words probably stand out. First, the “revolution” that succeeded in 1949. And then, the “reforms” that started about 40 years ago. These two words are often put together, sometimes in opposition, suggesting that reforms are better than revolution; at other times, that a revolution is necessary, reforms are a waste of time and unable to achieve what people want. So these two words have a very interesting and intimate relationship. Yet, the two words are very difficult to unpack. And very often, misleading. Let me begin with the word revolution. We have translated it as geming . But geming , of course, has a long history, quite different in origin from the word revolution. That is a Western word, basically from the French, and we have many examples of it from western Europe. But that idea of revolution was not the same as the idea of geming , which was originally about the change in the mandate for the new dynasty, or a new system of government – a mandate change – and this idea of geming goes back to the Shang and Zhou dynasties. Revolution, on the other hand, has a wide range of meanings. Some are even confusing. It can apply to violent revolution, political revolution, social revolution. The same word is used for industrial revolution, scientific revolution, commercial revolution. All sorts of adjectives have been used to describe revolution. So the word actually doesn’t have a very clear meaning. It means different things with different adjectives. But geming is very simple, a change in mandate. So how did these two words get together? It’s quite clear that the revolution idea was actually brought to this part of the world from Europe. The word geming was chosen, as far as I can understand, by the Japanese to translate revolution. They couldn’t find a better word in kanji , the Chinese text that they use, to translate revolution, and eventually came to use geming . China’s reforms don’t contradict communist revolution – they consolidate it If you remember, when Sun Yat-sen started on his career as a political activist, he didn’t use the word geming . He used, if I recall it from the Xingzhonghui (Hsing Chung Hui or Revive China Society) that he had founded in 1895, he used the phrase zhenxing zhonghua (revive China). Zhenxing zhonghua was his idea of renovation, or renewal, or restoration. That understanding of zhenxing zhonghua is traditional. It is related to the Chinese tradition of zhongxing , a kind of revival in the middle of a dynasty. Zhenxing zhonghua here was new because it also addressed the issue of getting rid of the Manchus as a bunch of foreign rulers. But it also meant the revival of Chinese culture and values and the Chinese civilisation that was being threatened in the 19th century by decades of war, when China lost most of the battles against foreign attacks on its coasts. In that context, the phrase zhenxing zhonghua also came out of traditional secret societies like the Tiandihui (Heaven and Earth Society) organised against the Manchus. So Sun Yat-sen used it in that context, but also in the context of China having lost the war against Japan in 1894 and 1895, which affected the Chinese people, the whole population, very greatly indeed. When he returned from a very desperate escape in London, he became famous internationally as a man who was kidnapped in London and was somehow saved by the British. He was not allowed back in China, of course, he was in exile and also not allowed even into Hong Kong. He arrived in Japan, and a Japanese journalist addressed him as a kakumeisha , a geming zhe (revolutionary). That was the first time Sun Yat-sen saw the word geming apply to him and his cause. How China’s capitalist entrepreneurial spirit arose from the ashes of revolution After he thought about it, he found that he liked it very much. Yes, that was exactly what he was going to do, to change the mandate. Get rid of the Manchus and start again. A new zhong hua (Chinese) mandate. So he adopted it, and it was only after that, that geming was commonly used in the Chinese language to mean revolution. Yet at the same time, it was always ambiguous whether it was about revolution or changing the mandate. They’re not exactly the same thing, but that’s how it began. CHOICE OF REVOLUTIONS Yet, of course, in the Xinhai Revolution ( Xinhai geming ), everybody adopted it. Geming became now the normal word to apply to the Chinese revolution. And it was a word that was accepted by everybody. And before long, they looked out and learned about other people’s revolutions, beginning with the American and the French revolutions in the 18th century, the attempts at revolution in Germany, and the attempts at revolution in Russia several times until the final success in 1917. And then, this idea of a Soviet revolution arrived on the shores of China. During the May Fourth Movement, as you know, it was in that context that the young people, the young generation of China, found themselves with a choice. Not only the French and American revolution model, which Sun Yat-sen had used, but now the Soviet revolution added another dimension; thus they had a choice between two different kinds of revolution. One emphasising, you might say, liberal capitalism, a free economy, and the kind of democratic institutions that followed from capitalist development. And the other, a socialist response to that capitalism, opposing the kind of dangerous divisions, social and economic divisions that capitalism could produce, and offering an alternative. The young people of the May Fourth generation had a choice. They didn’t immediately make it, it took them some years to sort it out. But eventually, the choice became very clear – between the nationalists that had stressed one aspect of Sun Yat-sen’s revolution, and the communists that took the Soviet and the communist international message and added it to Chinese nationalism. They were also nationalists, but with a different emphasis on what they wanted for China. Ancient past, modern ambitions: Wang Gungwu on China’s delicate balance And given that choice, and to simplify it, I would say the first liberal capitalist republican revolution might be called West One. And the other one, also from the West, was the Soviet, anti-capitalist communist revolution, which I shall call West Two. There were other “little Wests”, but these were the two that finally caught the attention of all the Chinese people and became the two major choices. But of course China had to undergo many other problems, including Japan’s attempt to invade and conquer China, which diverted a lot of attention from both kinds of revolution and other changes that the Chinese people wanted. The net result was that we had a second revolution that succeeded, after the first revolution had been seen to have failed. The Xinhai Revolution was thought to have been inadequate, it didn’t have the driven passion to make it succeed. It was further confused by a lot of corruption, by invasion and civil war, and by other damaging capitalist enterprises on the China coast, leading to the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. And so came a second revolution, providing the unification and the coming together of the people of China as one undivided country, with the chance of rising again. As Mao Zedong said, China has stood up. Now that was the major change. It needed two revolutions for the Chinese to complete the story. Even as a young boy, I remember the phrase that geming shang wei chenggong (the revolution is not yet successful), as Sun Yat-sen himself admitted. So in 1949, it was proclaimed that geming chenggong (the revolution is successful). FAILURE OF REFORMS The other word was reform, as I mentioned earlier on. Reform also has many meanings. And it is very interesting that, from the very beginning, reform in Chinese had a very specific context. We always think of reform in terms of the attempts by Kang Youwei (1858-1927), for example, the Hundred Days Reform. Some of us think of Wang Anshi’s (1021-1086) reform in the Song dynasty. And some people can go back to a few others, Zhang Juzheng, and a few others. Wang Mang (45BC-23AD), for example, also tried to reform the Han dynasty to make it stronger again. Hong Kong expects democracy, Chinese don’t want it: Wang Gungwu And yet all those images of reform have been those of failures. Each one of them failed. And those who defeated these reforms would say that lessons have been learned not to have such attempts at radical reforms which were doomed to fail. Of course, the most tragic one in recent times was the Hundred Days Reform, where six of those reformers were executed. And Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao were very lucky to escape and try to bring the message to the rest of the world. That was the context of reform. The Chinese term was not gaige but bianfa . That was the word they used. Kang Youwei (1858-1927) and Liang Qichao (1873-1929) were both prominent political thinkers and reformers of the late Qing dynasty, and influential figures in the intellectual development of modern China around the turn of the century. Now bianfa was regarded as a success in only one case. And that was the case of Shang Yang, who was the adviser to the state of Qin, whose advice taken by the Qin ruler led to the state being finally victorious in unifying the whole of China. So Shang Yang has been given the credit for having given the advice and provided the plans and projects and the management of projects that enabled the Qin dynasty to defeat all the warring states and bring about a unified China. Even Mao Zedong recognised that the Qin unification was a revolution in modern terms. Not just a mandate change, but a total change of the political system itself, from the kind of Shang/Zhou feudal system that led to the Spring and Autumn Warring States period to the unified, centralised, bureaucratic, authoritarian system that has survived for 2,000 years. That’s how it’s been portrayed in history. Mao Zedong saw it as a revolution, so that it can be said that Shang Yang’s bianfa reforms led to a successful revolution. Sun Yat-sen to Mao Zedong, I watched the birth of a new China: the Wang Gungwu memoir That’s one very special example of bianfa . All the other bianfa , whether it’s Wang Mang or Wang Anshi or the Hundred Days Reform, were failures. Wang Anshi’s might have been a little more successful to start with but eventually failed. Certainly, it was a drastic failure for the Hundred Days Reform. How do we reconcile these examples of reform? Why was one successful, leading to a revolution, and none of the others? There has, as a result, grown a Chinese tradition of what bianfa reform meant. It was not a word that was favoured; instead, one which the literati, the mandarins, the scholars, and historians all condemned as essentially a bad idea. I remember one of my uncles told me that when he was young – he wrote an essay praising Wang Anshi. And he got scolded by his teacher for being very stupid. How can you praise a man who brought such terrible things to the Song dynasty? That was the image of bianfa until very recently. This is our first instalment of an edited version of Wang Gungwu’s speech at the September 24 launch of ThinkChina, an English-language online magazine on developments in China by Lianhe Zaobao, a Chinese-language daily in Singapore. Read the second instalment here