with a communist-led civil war to further devastate the country. Shortly after the end of World War II in 1949 the communist revolutionaries became the masters of China.
The Communist Regime of Mao Zedung
By the time Mao Zedung and his communist forces took over the country in 1949 the ancient wonder that had been China for more than three thousand years had virtually disappeared. The lights that had shone so brightly in the Middle Kingdom had gone out.
During the first decade of his rule Mao actually made many social and economic improvements in China. He gave women the right to vote and reformed the ancient tenant farming system. He established a system of universal education and decreed that Mandarin was to be taught as the national language.
But his attempts to rebuild the industrial infrastructure of the country in “Great Leaps” forward ended in disaster, bringing death and untold suffering to millions. In a final desperate attempt to remake China in his image of a communist utopia in 1966, Mao initiated the so-called “Cultural Revolution,” which was intended to eliminate all vestiges of China’s traditional culture—specifically the heritages of Confucianism and Taoism. Mao’s goal was to totally eradicate these traditions because he understood their weaknesses and did not want communism to mutate into a mixture of the two.
Mao’s armies in his new revolution were made up of millions of young people—mostly students—whose lives had been disrupted beyond reason by the results of centuries of war and turmoil. These were the infamous Red Guards who embarked on a ten-year frenzy of burning libraries and destroying temples; intimidating, torturing, and killing members of the educated class; splitting up families; and sending millions of city dwellers into the countryside to force them to live like peasants.
During the chaotic Cultural Revolution, Mao’s government condemned refinement in behavior as a ruling-class plot to inhibit people and keep them down. His Red Guard minions went to extremes to destroy China’s ancient cultural heritage of etiquette.
Present-day Chinese sociologists blame Mao for the virtual disappearance of good manners during his reign. Historians note that Mao himself was coarse and vulgar and delighted in flouting convention. During the Cultural Revolution being called a dalacu (dah-lah-tsu), a “big, rude guy,” was a compliment that was pursued in earnest by top leaders.
The Cultural Revolution was motivated by a desire to do away with traditional values and mores, pitting young people against their parents and teachers in a way that would horrify Confucius. However, the Cultural Revolution did not result in an eradication of traditional values within China—they still hold a potent power of many Chinese people, and later government initiates have at times stressed the need for traditional morality.
Indeed, in 1971, the PLA stepped in to gain control over the young members of the Red Guard, sending many of them to work in the fields as peasants, all of the while stressing the Taoist theme that the students should mind their own business, and just tend to their own fields without worrying about what others were doing. As Lao Tzu said,
There should be a neighboring state within sight, and the voices of the fowls and dogs should be heard all the way from it to us, but I would make the people to old age, even to death, not have any intercourse with it.
This kind of thinking informs the behavior of the generation that came of age during the Cultural Revolution even to this day.
An enduring legacy of Mao’s Cultural Revolution was the disappearance of virtually all of the more stylized forms of etiquette that had distinguished the Chinese for millennia. This was compounded by the new market-orientated society, where survival and achievement became more important than ritualized etiquette. It was to be several decades before the importance of good manners was to become a matter of national concern.
Opting for the Capitalist Road!
The Red Guard reign of terror and destruction in China did not end until Mao died in 1976. Mao was followed in power by Deng Xiaoping, an old revolutionary cohort who had been removed from his position in the government and exiled to the countryside after making known his disillusionment with Mao’s ideas and methods.
Recalled to Beijing by other members of the politburo who had also become disillusioned, Deng was soon to become famous by declaring, “To get rich is glorious!” It is said that an independent-minded daughter of a high-level general made this comment first; Deng apparently just adopted it.
Deng’s epochal new capitalistic ideal was also the result of outside inspiration. He adopted it after a visit to the coastal city of Shenzhen (Shen-jen), where Deng saw that entrepreneurs from nearby Hong Kong had transformed the area into a dynamic manufacturing and shopping center far beyond anything else in China. Beginning in 1978 Deng initiated reforms that were to set the country on the road to capitalistic wealth and power.
The initial benefactors of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms were agricultural workers, because the farmers could now bring their crops directly to the market and keep the money they had earned. Another group which benefitted greatly from the reforms were party cadres. With the decentralization of government control over the economy, they had plenty of opportunities to become wealthy by lining their own pockets through corruption and graft. However, reforms occurred much more slowly in the commercial and industrial sectors, to the detriment of city-dwellers and people with university degrees. At the same time, even though society was becoming more open and people had many more opportunities and choices than ever before, the government itself was not keeping pace with social and economic reforms.
This all reached a breaking point, resulting in the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. While the student protestors wanted to end government corruption and to speed up government reforms, one key factor underlying their discontent was a lack of economic opportunities for themselves.
After the protests were put down in June, 1989, the Chinese government gradually shifted its policies from agricultural reform to privatization, with many government factories and businesses being spun off into private companies which were completely responsible for their own bottom line, even though they were partly or wholly government owned. These state owned enterprises (SOEs) were not bound by the old rules, and could hire or fire whomever they wanted.
With the growth of SOEs, many Chinese people began to groan that “the iron rice bowl was now broken”—that the promise of full employment and a government salary until the day they died was no longer going to be kept. This was only partly true, as the government made great efforts to insure that these SOEs stayed afloat through easy bank loans and favorable treatment. However, with privatization and the loosening of economic restrictions, the private sector experienced rapid growth. This growth intensified after China was admitted into the WTO in 2001.
With this economic growth, people flooded into the big cities looking for high-paying jobs, something the national government has encouraged. In the year 2000, only 36% of the people of China lived in cities, but by 2014 this figure was 53.7%, and the Chinese government plans on raising it to 60% by 2020. Thus, within less than a generation, China has turned from being a largely rural, agrarian society to an urban, industrialized nation, with white-collar wages approaching those found in developed countries. Indeed, in 2011, China surpassed Japan as the world’s second largest economy.
Not everyone has shared in this prosperity, however. Rural areas have become an economic backwater as farming income has declined, and in many cities—especially Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Beijing—new arrivals have often found themselves relegated to low-paying jobs, and barred from receiving public benefits because they cannot get a residence certificate, a hukou (hoo-koh).
With economic reforms there has come in increased interest in the rule of law and greater fairness and openness in how the law was applied. This has been especially true in cities such as Shanghai, which effectively have become laboratories to test out policy initiatives before they are rolled out nationwide. While there are sometimes unexpected anomalies in the way the law and various government rules and regulations are understood and enforced in a city like Shanghai, in daily life the legal system there is in many ways just as transparent and above board as in many developed countries. This is certainly not true throughout China, however, and there is still a great