This large and learned book closes on a sentence that its own date makes almost unbearable. Having taken the reader from the Manchu conquest of 1644 to the eve of the May Fourth Movement, the general editor signs off with the hope "that the present volume will contribute to better mutual understanding and friendship between the peoples of the Soviet Union and China." The Russian original from which this English translation descends was published by the Nauka press in Moscow in 1972. Three years earlier, in March 1969, Soviet and Chinese troops had fought a shooting war over Zhenbao (Damansky) Island in the Ussuri river, the same river whose boundary this book takes such trouble to explain. When Tikhvinsky wrote of friendship between the two peoples, the two states were massing armies along the longest border in the world and denouncing one another as traitors to Lenin. That contradiction — a scholarly monograph on China's past produced at the height of the Sino-Soviet split, by the Soviet establishment's foremost China hand, and exported eleven years later in English — is the key to reading it.
Sergei Leonidovich Tikhvinsky was not a marginal figure working under sufferance. He was a Corresponding Member of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, a career diplomat who had served in China, and by the 1970s the discipline of Soviet Sinology largely ran through him. A Modern History of China is the collective product of the modern-history group of the China Division of the Institute of Oriental Studies — eighteen chapters shared among named specialists, most holding the Candidate of Historical Sciences degree, each writing on the period of their research. It is, in other words, exactly what it appears to be: the considered account of China's modern past issued by the scholarly arm of the Soviet state. And precisely because Soviet scholarship was a state activity, the book is also a weapon. By 1972 Moscow and Beijing had been at open ideological war for a decade; each claimed the mantle of October, each accused the other of betraying it, and China's own history — who had oppressed China, who had befriended it, what its revolution had been and still owed — was contested ground. A Soviet Academy history of modern China was never going to be neutral, and this one is not. Its argument runs from the first page: China's past belongs inside the schema Moscow administered, and the villains of that past were the Western and Japanese imperialists, with Russia standing conspicuously apart.
The frame is announced in the opening lines of the Introduction and never varies. "Chronologically, modern history covers the time from the bourgeois revolution in mid-17th-century England ... to the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 in Russia." China is fitted to this universal template. "Throughout China's modern history," the editor writes, "feudal relations continued to predominate"; the "central event in China's modern history was the bourgeois Xinhai revolution of 1911 which swept out the Qing monarchy." Feudal Qing empire, its reduction to what the book repeatedly calls a "semicolony" of the imperialist powers, and the maturing of a bourgeois-democratic revolution in 1911 — this is the five-stage universal history applied without remainder to two and a half centuries of Chinese development. The book is candid that it is applying, not discovering, this frame: "In their study of China's modern history, the authors took guidance in the works of the founders of Marxism-Leninism."
What that guidance costs is visible the moment one asks how the book classifies the Chinese social order. Marx himself, cited approvingly in the Introduction, had reached for a distinct category — the "Asiatic mode of production," his name for the great hydraulic-bureaucratic states of the East whose stagnation he traced to the absence of private landed property and the fusion of state and landlord. That category is a standing embarrassment to Soviet orthodoxy, because it breaks the neat single ladder of feudalism-to-capitalism that every people is supposed to climb; and in this volume it has simply been made to disappear. The word "Asiatic" occurs nine times, and every one is incidental — Lenin's phrase "an Asiatic government," the "Asiatic states" bordering the Qing, the "Asiatic Department" of the Russian Foreign Ministry, the "German-Asiatic Bank," the London Asiatic Quarterly Review. The mode of production named for Asia does not appear in a history of China at all. This is not an isolated tic: the companion Progress volumes on India and on feudal society, prepared in the same institutional world, suppress it in the same way. China is instead forced onto the feudal track by main force, with Lenin's authority supplying the label the book cannot derive from the evidence — his description, quoted here, of "a backward, agricultural, semi-feudal country numbering nearly 500 million people." A social formation that puzzled Marx is resolved by fiat into a phase of European feudalism.
Within that frame the great popular movements are handled with real sympathy and a fixed grammar. The Taiping rising of 1850–64 is "the peasant war of the Taipings," given the largest single block of the book and treated as a heroic anti-feudal upheaval betrayed by Anglo-French intervention on the Qing side. The Yihetuan or Boxer uprising of 1898–1900 is a "massive anti-imperialist" movement of the rural poor, its superstition and its dynastic loyalism noted but subordinated to its patriotic core. Sun Yat-sen is honoured through Lenin, "a democrat of noble feelings and abounding in heroism," and the Xinhai revolution he inspired is the book's climax — "a highlight in Asia's awakening." Each of these judgments is defensible, and much of the underlying research is genuinely good. But notice the tacit boundary the schema draws: the peasant and the bourgeois democrat are heroes precisely insofar as their struggle can be booked as a bourgeois-democratic stage, a rung on the ladder. The revolution that stage is meant to prepare — the proletarian one — lies beyond 1919, beyond the book's close, and beyond the reach of any judgment the book is willing to make.
The book's central and genuine achievement is its documentation of what the imperialist powers did to China. Chapter by chapter it lays out the mechanism of subjection: the Opium Wars fought to force a narcotic on a country that had banned it; the Treaty of Nanjing's cession of Hong Kong "in perpetuity" and its twenty-one million dollars of indemnity; the customs autonomy stripped away article by article; the coolie traffic in "yellow slaves"; the concessions, the missionary privilege smuggled into a treaty by its own translator, the eighteen thousand British and six thousand French troops who burned their way to Beijing in 1860. On the powers — Britain, France, Japan, the United States, Germany — the book is detailed, angry, and largely right. "Imperialist aggression" against China is its organising category, and against those states it is earned.
Then one looks for Russia, and the category quietly fails.
Russia is the one great power whose expansion into Chinese territory the book declines to call aggression. The turning point comes in a single remarkable passage. "In spite of the predatory colonial nature of tsarist policy in general," the authors write, "the tsar showed no initiative either in imposing unequal treaties on China or in defending the post-[18]60 system of treaties. Russia traded with China by the caravan route and the terms were entirely equal. The border between the Qing and Russian empires — the longest land border in the world — was drawn by peaceful diplomatic means under the Aigun and Tianjin treaties of 1858. The 1860 Beijing Treaty gave it its final shape ... The growth of Russia's possessions in the Far East and Central Asia involved lands that were not inhabited by any Chinese or Manchurians and were in no way economically bound to China." Every clause of this does work. The Treaty of Aigun of 1858 and the Treaty of Beijing of 1860 transferred to Russia the entire left bank of the Amur and everything east of the Ussuri to the sea — something like a million square kilometres, an area larger than France and Germany combined. By any measure applied to Britain or Japan these were unequal treaties, extracted from a Qing government reeling under Anglo-French assault; indeed the book itself records that Russia's minister Ignatiev secured the 1860 cession by "mediat[ing]" between the Qing and the very Anglo-French forces then occupying Beijing. But the book will not use its own category here. Aigun, it says, merely restored to Russia "the greater part of the territories lost by Russia in 1689"; the lands east of the Ussuri were places "where, we might add, there was neither any permanently settled Manchu or Chinese population nor any Qing administration." The annexation becomes a restitution; the seizure becomes the peaceful settling of empty land.
The exculpation reaches back to the seventeenth century, and there it inverts the whole moral scheme of the book. In every other chapter the Manchus and the Chinese are the victims of foreign predators. In the chapter on the Amur — the one chapter, the Introduction notes, whose "material ... is from Russian archives" and whose dates are therefore "in the old style" — the roles reverse. Now it is the Qing who are the aggressors, harassing the "Russian settlers" and "Russian pioneers" Poyarkov and Khabarov, blockading the Cossack fort of Albazin, and forcing on Russia the Treaty of Nerchinsk of 1689, which "was imposed on Russia by force" and "meant the loss of a fairly large territory developed by Russian Cossacks and settlers." A history that indicts the Qing for "bloody wars of conquest against ... the Russian settlements on the Amur" while treating Russia's nineteenth-century acquisition of those same lands as a friendly regularisation of the frontier is not confused. It is consistent — consistent to a purpose. The category of "imperialist aggression" is available for every power except the one writing the book.
This is the reflexive tell, and its date sharpens it to a point. The Aigun–Beijing treaty line was exactly what Mao's government, from the early 1960s, denounced as the greatest of the "unequal treaties," the legal fiction under which Tsarist Russia had robbed China of its northeast — and it was over precisely this line, on the Ussuri, that Soviet and Chinese soldiers had killed each other in 1969. When Tikhvinsky's authors insist that these treaties were "entirely equal," "peaceful," and drawn across land with no Chinese on it, they are not writing disinterested diplomatic history. They are litigating the border dispute of their own moment, retroactively, in a book about the Qing. The scholarship on British opium and Japanese gunboats is real; but the chapter that matters most to the Soviet state in 1972 is the one where the evidence is bent to the state's territorial claim.
To be fair to the book — and fairness is the point of a series like this — the suppression is not total, and the honest reader should say so. The volume does record that "tsarist Russia took a dutiful part in all collective moves to squash the revolution and promote Yuan Shikai" in 1911, and it names Russian warships and Russian servicemen among the interventionist forces that gathered in Chinese waters that year. It describes, without much disguise, how the tsarist government exploited the fall of the Qing to detach Outer Mongolia, signing the 1912 Urga agreement that promised Russian arms to the Mongol princes and warned China to keep its troops out. What the book will not do is let these admissions touch the category. Russian troops in 1911 are present in the narrative but never gathered under the word "aggression"; the Mongolian episode is told as the manoeuvring of Mongol feudal lords who happened to lean on St Petersburg, not as a Russian land-grab. The facts are on the page; the judgment the book passes freely on London and Tokyo is withheld from Moscow. That asymmetry — full documentation, selective condemnation — is the operation, and it is more sophisticated than a simple silence.
There is a second front to the same war, and it too is on the page. The Introduction's most heated passages are not about foreigners at all but about Chinese nationalism. The book warns, again and again, against "Chinese great-power nationalism, chauvinism, and xenophobia," against the "Great-Han chauvinism" that "diverted the country's new social forces," against a revived doctrine "asserting the superiority of the Chinese to all other peoples, and seeing China — the Middle Kingdom or Celestial Empire — as the fulcrum of the world." It goes out of its way to remark that "the Qing government (and the 'republican' governments that succeeded it) treated subject non-Han peoples with coarse brutality." No reader in 1972 could miss the target. A Soviet history that hammers on Chinese "great-power chauvinism" and the mistreatment of national minorities by both the Qing and their republican successors is aiming past the Qing at the People's Republic — at the Mao whose regime Moscow accused of exactly this nationalist deviation. The historiography of the eighteenth century is being written with one eye on the frontier of the twentieth.
A Modern History of China stops in 1919, and so it never has to describe the catastrophe toward which its own doctrine pointed. But the doctrine is the thing the anti-Stalinist left answered, and the answer is worth setting beside the book. The organising claim of this volume — that a colonial or semi-colonial country must pass through a discrete bourgeois-democratic stage, in which the proletariat's task is to help the national bourgeoisie complete its revolution and not to overleap it — is not merely an interpretation of the Qing past. It was, within a few years of the events this book narrates, a live instruction to living revolutionaries, and it produced a massacre.
In 1925–27 China rose in a second revolution, and the Chinese Communist Party grew into a mass force. On the theory that China's was a bourgeois-democratic stage, the Communist International under Stalin ordered the young CCP to subordinate itself to the Guomindang of Chiang Kai-shek — to enter it, to accept its discipline, to restrain the workers' and peasants' movements that might frighten the "national bourgeoisie" whose revolution this was supposed to be. In April 1927, with the Communists having delivered him Shanghai, Chiang turned on his allies and drowned the city's labour movement in blood. The party that had been told to trust the bourgeoisie was destroyed by it.
Trotsky had opposed the policy before the killing and dissected it after. Against the whole conception of a fixed sequence of stages he wrote, in The Permanent Revolution (1930), that "the pedantic reactionary theory of Stalin and Martynov on 'stages' and 'steps' must be eliminated at the very outset, must be cast aside, broken up and swept away with a broom." The "democratic dictatorship" the Comintern promised, he argued, "can only be the masked rule of the bourgeoisie during the revolution ... This is taught us by the experience of our 'dual power' of 1917 as well as by the experience of the Kuomintang in China." And where this book credits the 1911 revolution with placing China "in the stream of the world democratic movement," Trotsky's verdict on the second revolution names the price of the doctrine directly: in China, "where, in spite of the exceptionally favourable situation, the leadership of the Communist International prevented the Chinese proletariat from fighting for power, the national tasks found a wretched, unstable and niggardly solution in the regime of the Kuomintang." The stage-theory that organises Tikhvinsky's history of the Qing is the same stage-theory that, applied to the living movement, subordinated the Chinese workers to their executioners.
Trotsky also anticipated, with uncanny precision, the kind of book this is. Writing in 1938 the introduction to Harold Isaacs's history of the Chinese Revolution, he observed that one would "seek in vain in the library of the Communist International for a single book which attempts in any way to give a rounded picture of the Chinese Revolution. Instead, we find scores of 'conjunctural' works ... which docilely reflect each zigzag in the politics of the Communist International, or, more correctly, of Soviet diplomacy in China." A Modern History of China is not a conjunctural work in Trotsky's crude sense — it is serious scholarship, and it earns that description in most of its pages. But its treatment of the Amur is conjunctural in exactly his sense: a passage of the historical record trimmed to fit the diplomacy of Moscow, in this case the border diplomacy of 1969. The border chapter reflects the zigzag; the rest of the book does the honest work that makes the reflection hard to see.
None of this is a reason to discard the volume, and it would be a poor service to the reader to pretend otherwise. On its central subject — the internal history of Qing and early republican China — A Modern History of China is a substantial and often excellent work of research, and much of it has no rival of comparable scope in English. The reconstruction of the Manchu conquest and the peasant war of Li Zicheng; the anatomy of the "self-strengthening" movement, a term the book uses more than sixty times and treats with genuine analytic care as the ruling class's attempt to modernise the means of coercion without touching the relations of production; the long, close, document-based account of the Taiping state's tax and land policy, down to the manifestos of 1860 lowering rents in southern Jiangsu; the social portrait of the Yihetuan, their altars and amulets and the artisans and boatmen thrown out of work by the new railways who filled their ranks — this is the work of scholars who read the Chinese sources and cared about getting the mechanics right. Two chapters written afresh for the modern editions treat China's economic history with a seriousness the general reader will not easily find elsewhere. Where the book stays inside China and away from the frontier with Russia, its class analysis is a real instrument and not a ritual, and its sympathies — with the rebel peasant, the exploited artisan, the patriotic reformer — are honourably placed.
The reader this edition is for can therefore take the book as what it is: an authoritative Soviet account, rich in fact and organised by a doctrine, whose value and whose distortion lie in the same place. Read it for the Opium Wars and the Taipings and the fall of the Qing, and it will repay the attention. Read the chapter on the Amur, and read it knowing that the border it calls "entirely equal" was, when these words were written, a line of trenches. The book hoped to serve "friendship between the peoples of the Soviet Union and China." Its most revealing pages are the ones where that friendship had already broken, and the history was quietly redrawn to defend the ground the two states were fighting over.