CSET Practice Test History Subtest I

Economic Growth: Progress and Its Discontents 

The population and economy of California continued to grow
during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Agricultural production expanded and new industries
appeared. The state's growth was accompanied by intense
controversies over the natural resources of California and
among the competing forces of labor and capital. As the
new century dawned, the forces of reform gained strength
and emerged triumphant.

Industries Old and New The economic growth of California
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
included industries both old and new. Advances in
agricultural technology contributed to a bonanza in wheat
on the rich farmlands of the great Central Valley.
Horticulturist Luther Burbank, the wizard of Santa Rosa,
developed specialty crops that transformed California
farming. The growing of citrus fruits, most notably
oranges and lemons, spread throughout the southern part of
the state. Inspired publicists blanketed the midwest with
the slogan, "Oranges for Health--California for Wealth." 

The discovery of vast petroleum resources contributed to
the oil boom of the twenties, a time of headlong economic
expansion. The prosperity decade also witnessed the
blossoming of California's love affair with the car.
Automobility became an integral part of the much admired
(and much imitated) "California life style." The greatest
promoters of things Californian, of course, were all those
motion pictures produced locally and distributed globally.
The movies discovered California in the early years of the
new century and the film industry soon became a mainstay
of the state's economy. The story of "A Polish Goldfish"
reminds us that many of the pioneers in the early film
industry were European immigrants. The glamour of
Hollywood stars--including their shenanigans at palaces
like Pickfair--became the stuff of enduring legend. 

Land and Water Controversies over land and water resources
have been a part of California history since at least the
days of the gold rush. One of the earliest struggles was
between the hydraulic mining industry and the state's
farmers. In the matter of miners v. farmers, the farmers
emerged victorious.  

Scottish immigrant John Muir was an eloquent defender of
California's natural resources against unrestrained
development. He worked tirelessly but unsuccessfully to
halt the transformation of the Hetch Hetchy into a
reservoir for the city of San Francisco. The farmers of
the Owens Valley waged an equally unsuccessful battle to
halt construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

Serious efforts were undertaken such as the Central Valley
Project, a system of dams and canals designed to move
massive amounts of California water from north to south.

Labor and Capital Historian Carey McWilliams once
commented that the struggle between labor and capital in
California has been one of "total engagement." The
struggle was especially intense in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries when organized labor steadily
increased its strength and challenged the powers of
corporate America. "Closed shop" San Francisco emerged as
one of the most thoroughly unionized cities in the nation.
In contrast, the opponents of organized labor remained
dominant in Los Angeles, led by Harrison Gray Otis and his
Times.

Radical organizations appealed to discontented workers and
called for fundamental economic and political change. The
Wobblies in California organized migratory farmworkers and
stirred intense opposition from farm owners. The Mooney
case revealed the fiery passions that swirled around the
ongoing contest between labor and capital.

The Age of Reform Discontent with corrupt governments and
economic inequities led to an age of reform in California
and the nation during the early twentieth century. 

The demand for reform in San Francisco was especially
strong following the devastating earthquake and fire of
1906. The city celebrated its recovery in grand style by
mounting the Panama Pacific International Exhibition, also
known as the PPIE. The San Francisco reformers' most
notable achievement was putting behind bars Boss Ruef, the
mastermind of a citywide system of corruption.

Katherine Philips Edson and other reformers in southern
California tackled a host of urban problems while Allen
Allensworth founded an all-black community in the rural
San Joaquin Valley. Anti-Japanese sentiment was on the
rise throughout the state, a plague that poisoned race
relations in California for decades.

The election of Governor Hiram Johnson in 1910 was proof
positive that the forces of progressive reform were in the
ascendancy. With the progressives in power, a series of
reforms came pouring from the state legislature.

Ancient Chinese Civilization

The Origins of Chinese Civilization: c. 2200 - 221 BC

Xia (c. 2200 - c. 1750 BC) Not much is known about this
first Chinese dynasty -- in fact, it until fairly
recently, most historians thought that it was a myth. But
the archeological record has proven them wrong, for the
most part. What little is known indicates that the Xia had
descended from a wide-spread Yellow River valley Neolithic
culture known as the Longshan culture, famous for their
black-lacquered pottery. Even though no known examples of
Xia-era writing survive, they almost certainly had a
writing system that was a precursor of the Shang dynasty's
"oracle bones." 

Shang (c. 1750 - c. 1040 BC) There are three things to
know about the Shang: one, they were the most advanced
bronze-working civilization in the world; two, Shang
remains provide the earliest and most complete record of
Chinese writing (there are a few Neolithic pots that have
a few characters scratched on them; however, a few
characters do not a complete writing system make),
scratched out on the shoulder blades of pigs for oracular
purposes; and three, they were quite possibly the most
blood-thirsty pre-modern civilization. They liked human
sacrifice -- a lot. If a king died, then more than one
hundred slaves would join him in the grave. Some of them
would be beheaded first. Some of them were just thrown in
still alive. Later dynasties replaced the humans with
terra-cotta figures, resulting in things like the
underground army. They also did things like human
sacrifice for building consecrations and other ceremonial
events. The Shang had a very odd system of succession:
instead of a patrilineal system where power was passed
from father to son, the kingship passed from elder brother
to younger brother, and when there were no more brothers,
then to the oldest maternal nephew. 

Western Zhou (c. 1100 - 771 BC) Most scholars think that
the Zhou were much more "Chinese" than the Shang. For one,
they used a father-to-son succession system. Also, they
weren't too keen on human sacrifice. However, they weren't
as good at working bronze as the Shang. Still, it would be
centuries before the West was able to cast bronze as well
as the Zhou. Some, though not all, scholars believe that
the Xia, the Shang, and the Zhou actually were three
different cultures that emerged more or less at the same
time in different areas of the Yellow River valley. And
the historical record supports this view -- the Shang were
conquered from outside by the Zhou, as the Xia had been
conquered from the outside by the Shang. 

The Zhou actually didn't rule all of what was then China.
China was then made up of a number of quasi-independent
principalities. However, the Zhou were the most powerful
principality and played the role of hegemon in the area.
They were located in the middle of the principalities,
giving rise to what the Chinese call their country -- the
Middle Kingdom. The Zhou were able to maintain peace and
stability through the hegemon system for a few hundred
years; then in 771 BC, the capital was sacked by
barbarians from the west. 

Eastern Zhou (771 - 256 BC) Spring & Autumn Period (722 -
481 BC) Warring States Period (403 - 221 BC) After the
capital was sacked by barbarians from the west, the Zhou
moved east, thus neatly dividing the Zhou dynasty into
eastern and western periods. As might be expected, the
power of the Zhou declined somewhat. The so-called Spring
& Autumn period, named after a book (The Spring and Autumn
Annals) that provides a history of period saw a
proliferation of new ideas and philosophies. The three
most important, from a historical standpoint, were Daoism,
Confucianism, and Legalism. 

Daoism is a can be a very frustrating philosophy to study.
It is based on study of the Dao, literally translated,
"the Way." For starters, the oldest great book of Daoism,
the Dao de Jing, The Way and Virtue, was allegedly written
by a man named Lao-zi. However, we don't know 1) if Lao-zi
was his real name, 2) if Lao-zi ever actually existed, and
3) if the book is even the work of one author. Then there
are the texts themselves. The first line of the Dao de
Jing can be translated as "The Way that can be walked is
not the enduring and unchanging Way." It can also be
translated as "The Way that can be known is not the true
Way," as well as several other translations that, while
all having the same general paradoxical meaning, are all
different. It is also full of other cryptic and
paradoxical sayings, like "The more the sage expends for
others, the more does he possess of his own; the more he
gives to others, the more does he have himself." Daoists
loved this kind of stuff; the story about the man dreaming
he was a butterfly, then waking up and wondering if he was
a man or a butterfly dreaming about being a man is classic
Daoism. Daoism profoundly influenced the later development
of Cha'an (also known as Zen) Buddhism. 

Confucius, who lived about five hundred years before
Christ, basically believed that moral men make good rulers
and that virtue is one of the most important properties
that an official can have. He also believed that virtue
can be attained by following the proper way of behaving,
and thus placed a great deal of stress on proper. Most of
what is considered 'Confucianism' was actually written
down by a disciple named Mencius, who also believed that
all men were basically good. Confucius also codified the
status of the ruler in Chinese political thought; the
Emperor was the Son of Heaven (while Heaven in a Western
context is a place, Heaven in the Chinese context is a
divine/natural force) and had the Mandate of Heaven to
rule. 

Legalism derived from the teachings of another one of
Confucius' disciples, a man named Xun-zi. Xun-zi believed
that, for the most part, man would look out for himself
first and was therefore basically evil (remember, this is
more than two thousand years before Adam Smith argued that
self-interest is what makes markets work and is therefore
good). Consequently, the Legalists designed a series of
draconian laws that would make a nation easier to control.
The fundamental aim of both Confucianism and Legalism was
the re-unification of a then divided China, but they took
difference approaches. Confucianism depended on virtue and
natural order; Legalism used a iron fist. Legalism has
been called "super-Machiavellian;" this is not
unwarranted, as it called for the suppression of dissent
by the burning of books and burying dissidents alive
(maltreatment of the opposition is nothing new in China;
because the system starts with the idea that the Emperor
is the Son of Heaven and has the Mandate of Heaven to
rule, there is no such thing as legitimate dissent and
thus no concept of "loyal opposition"). Legalism advocated
techniques such as maintaining an active secret police,
encouraging neighbors to inform on each other, and the
creation of a general atmosphere of fear. In fact, many of
the same tactics that the Legalists approved of were later
employed by Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. 

The politics of the Warring States period were much the
same as those of the Spring & Autumn period; the major
difference was that while in the earlier period, armies
were small and battles lasted only a day, much like in
pre-Napoleonic wars, the later period featured what modern
strategists would call "totalwar." Massive armies (half a
million per army was not an uncommon figure), long
battles, sieges, were all common features of the Warring
States battlefield. 

The Early Empire: 221 BC - AD 589

Qin (221 - 206 BC) In 221 BC, the first Emperor of China
(so-called because all the previous dynastic heads only
called themselves kings), Qin Shihuangdi, conquered the
rest of China after a few hundred years of disunity. There
are two major reasons why he won; the first is that he was
a devout Legalist (so much so that he burnt all [at least
what he thought were all] the books in the country) and
did things like execute generals for showing up late for
maneuvers (this was later to prove to be his downfall).
The other reason is because the state of Qin had a lot of
iron, and consequently, at the dawn of the iron age, had
many more iron weapons than the other armies did. Qin
Shihuangdi had a great many accomplishments, not the least
of which was the linking together of many of the old
packed-earth defensive walls of the old principalities
into the Great Wall of China. This is not to say that he
built the massive masonry construction that today is
called the Great Wall of China; what is today called the
Great Wall was actually built close to two thousand years
later, during the Ming dynasty.

In the year 210 BC Qin Shihuangdi died. It wasn't long
before the dynasty fell apart, helped in part by a
revolution started by a soldier who, when faced with
execution because he was going to be late delivering a
group of new draftees (it had been very rainy and the
roads had turned to mud), convinced his conscripts to
rebel with him (they faced execution as well). And while
they eventually were caught and duly executed, the
revolution they started ended up destroying the old
dynasty and set the stage for the Han. 

Earlier Han (206 BC - AD  Wang Mang Interregnum (AD 8 -
25) Later Han (25 - 220) The Han dynasty plays a very
important role in Chinese history. For starters, they
invented Chinese history as we know it today.
Additionally, the overwhelmingly predominant ethnic group
in China is called the Han; they are named after the
dynasty. But, most importantly, they developed (actually,
it was invented by Qin Shihuangdi, but perfected by the
Han) the administrative model which every successive
dynasty would copy, lock, stock, and barrel. 

Why is the development of bureaucracy so important? Well,
first of all, because ancient China was a big country. In
206 BC, when the Han dynasty was founded, China stretched
from modern Shenyang (some 500 km north of Beijing) in the
north to around Guilin in the south; from the Pacific in
the east to well past Chongqing in the west. Until Russia
laid claim to Far East Siberia, China was the largest
country in the world. It was also the most populous (60
million people at the time), and still is (however, India
will probably overtake China in terms of population some
time early in the 21th century). This is a management
issue of tremendous proportions. How are you going to do
things like collect taxes, keep the peace, and basically
run a government without bureaucracy? The Chinese
bureaucratic system is based on the study of the Confucian
Classics, which provide an ideological reference point for
proper behavior (which was often ignored, but it worked
well enough) and loyalty to the Emperor. By developing
this system, the Han emperors were able to run China with
a reasonable degree of efficiency. 

During the reign of an emperor named Han Wudi lived a
historian named Sima Qian. His most important contribution
to Chinese history was that he wrote a book known as
Records of the Grand Historian (actually, he claimed to
just be completing a book that his father, Sima Tan, had
started, but most of the book is Sima Qian's). Most
history books are very linear: first you talk about the
Greeks, then the Romans, then the Dark Ages, and so on.
What Sima did was structure his book so that each chapter
covered a different topic: one chapter was a political
record of the kings and emperors; the next would cover
literature; the third, philosophy, and so on. Every
dynastic record that followed copied Sima's original.
Actually, there is an English-language history of China
that loosely follows this model; it's called China's
Imperial Past, written by Charles O. Hucker. 

Between AD 8 and 25, a man named Wang Mang ruled China. He
had been part of the Han royal household; he himself,
however, was a commoner and had no royal blood in his
veins. He had been appointed emperor after a power
struggle in the Han house. History is mixed on him. While
he did seem to have some good, reform-oriented ideas (e.g.
power back to the people), he really wasn't up to the task
of ruling. After his death in AD 25, the Han royal family
took back the reins of power, and set up the Later Han
dynasty. 

The later Han were able to keep it together for about 200
years; however, towards the end of their rule, they become
more and more dissolute. More importantly, they were
unable to deal with two factors: a population shift from
the Yellow River in the north to the Yangzi in the south;
and they simply could not control barbarian tribal raiders
from the north, which were one reason why people were
moving to the south. Eventually, in AD 220, the center had
lost so much control to the provinces that it collapsed (a
small rebellion in the north helped), plunging China into
350 years of chaos and disunity. 

Three Kingdoms (220 - 265) Dynasties of the North and
South (317 - 589) While there was a great deal of
political activity occurring during this period, most of
it, consisting as it was of various wars between different
kingdoms (one of the great novels of China, The Romance of
the Three Kingdoms, is about this period), was not
terribly important to the later development of China.
Perhaps its greatest accomplishment was to reinforce in
Chinese thought the importance of having "one Emperor over
China, like one sun in the sky." 

Socially, though, there were two important developments.
The first was that the ethnic Han Chinese kept on moving
south, while 'barbarians' moved into the north and
assimilated themselves into Chinese society. The second
development was Buddhism, which had had its start in India
sometime in the 6th century BC, when the Buddha probably
lived. It was introduced into China around the middle of
the first century AD (probably about the same time that
the early Christians were writing the Gospels), but really
didn't catch on until the fall of the Han dynasty. 

Buddhism competed strongly with Confucianism, and for a
long time, pretty much eclipsed it as a major cultural
force. For various reasons -- some political, some social
-- it spread very quickly throughout China. It also
changed somewhat from the Indian original, which, as far
as I know, is not practiced anymore anywhere in the world.
From China, Buddhism would spread into Tibet, Southeast
Asia, Korea, and Japan. 

Buddhism also merged somewhat with Daoism, particularly as
a popular religion; and while the process may be compared
to Christianity's appropriation of indigenous European
beliefs and traditions, Daoism maintained its own identity
and was not subsumed into popular Buddhism.

The Second Empire: 589 - 1644

Sui (589 - 618) The most important thing to know about
this dynasty is that it was very short (by dynastic
standards) and that it did a pretty good job of re-
unifying China. Because it had a northern power base, it
was part barbarian, as was the Tang. Despite the fact that
the royal houses of Sui and succeeding Tang were not
entirely Han Chinese, both of these dynasties are
considered to be Chinese, as opposed to the Mongols and
Manchus later on. 

Tang (618 - 907) The Tang are considered to be one of the
great dynasties of Chinese history; many historians rank
them right behind the Han. They extended the boundaries of
China through Siberia in the North, Korea in the east, and
were in what is now Vietnam in the South. They even
extended a corridor of control along the Silk Road well
into modern-day Afghanistan. 

There are two interesting historical things about the
Tang. The first is the Empress Wu, the only woman ever to
actually bear the title 'Emperor' (or, in her case,
Empress).The second was the An Lushan Rebellion, which
marked the beginning of the end for the Tang. 

The Empress Wu was not a nice person. She makes Catherine
the Great look like an angel of mercy. While Empress Wu
was still a concubine in the imperial Tang household, she
deposed of a rival by murdering her own son, and then
claiming her rival did it. In her own vicious, ruthless,
scheming way, she was absolutely brilliant. Had
Machiavelli known of her, he probably would have written
"The Princess." 

The An Lushan Rebellion had its roots in the behavior of
one of the great emperors of Chinese history, Xuanzong.
Until he fell in love with a young concubine named Yang
Guifei, he had been a great ruler, and had brought the
Tang to its height of prosperity and grandeur. He was so
infatuated with Yang that the administration of the
government soon fell into decay, which was not made any
better by the fact that Yang took advantage of her power
to stuff high administrative positions with her corrupt
cronies. She also took under her wing a general named An
Lushan, who quickly accumulated power. 

An Lushan eventually decided that he would make a pretty
good emperor, and launched his rebellion. The civil war
lasted for eight years, and was, for the years 755-763,
pretty destructive. The emperor was forced to flee the
capital, and on the way, the palace guard, blaming Yang
Guifei for all the problems that had beset the dynasty (to
be fair, it wasn't all her fault; there were forces of
political economy at work that were pretty much beyond
anybody's control), strangled her and threw her corpse in
a ditch. There is a legend that what actually happened was
that the emperor had procured a peasant look-alike who was
actually the one killed, but as far as I know, that is
only fiction. Anyway, the rebellion pretty much shattered
centralized Tang control, and for the remaining 150 years
of the dynasty, the country slowly disintegrated. 

Northern Song (960 - 1125) Southern Song (1127 - 1279) The
Song (pronounced Soong) dynasty ranks up there with the
Tang and the Han as one of the great dynasties. Fifty
years after the official end of the Tang, an imperial army
re-unified China and established the Song dynasty. A time
of remarkable advances in technology, culture, and
economics, the Song, despite its political failures,
basically set the stage for the rest of the imperial era.
The most important development during the Song was that
agricultural technology, aided by the importation of a
fast-growing Vietnamese strain of rice and the invention
of the printing press, developed to the point where the
food-supply system was so efficient that, for the most
part, there was no need to develop it further. There was
enough food for everyone, more or less, the system worked,
and it became self-sustaining. Because it worked, there
was no incentive to improve it; the system thus remained
basically unchanged from the Song up until the twentieth
century. In fact, many rice farmers in the Chinese
interior and in less-developed regions of south-east Asia
are, for the most part, still using Song-era farming
techniques. 

The efficiency of the system not only made it economically
self-sustaining, but also re-enforced the existing social
structure. Consequently, society and economics were
largely static from the Song until the collapse of the
dynastic system in the twentieth century. 

This is important because one of the factors behind the
Industrial Revolution in Europe was that they didn't have
enough people to work the fields. There was an incentive
to create better technology in Europe; there was no need
in China. China actually had a surplus of human labor. 

While the Song was a time of great advances, politically
and militarily, the Song was a failure. The northern half
of China was conquered by barbarians, forcing the dynasty
to abandon a northern capital in the early 1100's. Then a
hundred and fifty years later, the Mongols, fresh from
conquering everything between Manchuria and Austria,
invaded and occupied China. 

Yuan (Mongol) (1279 - 1368) While time of Mongol rule is
called a dynasty, it was in fact a government of
occupation. While the Mongols did use existing
governmental structures for the duration, the language
they used was Mongol, and many of the officials they used
were non-Chinese. Mongols, Uighurs from central Asia, some
Arabs and even an Italian named Marco Polo all served as
officials for the Mongol government. One of the more
significant accomplishments of the Mongol tenure was the
preservation of China as we know it in that China wasn't
turned into pastureland for the Mongolian ponies which not
only was common Mongolian practice for territories they'd
overrun but had actually been advocated by some of the
conquering generals. 

The Yuan dynasty also featured the famous Khubilai Khan,
who, among other things, extended the Grand Canal. While
in many ways, the Yuan was a disaster, the reluctance of
the Mongols to hire educated Chinese for governmental
posts resulted in a remarkable cultural flowering; for
example, Beijing Opera was invented during the Yuan. On
the other hand, attempts to analyze the failure of the
Song in keeping barbarians out China led to the rise and
dominance of Neo-Confucianism, a notoriously
conservative(if not outright reactionary) brand of
Confucianism that had originally developed during the
Song. 

Ming (1368 - 1644) Then came the Ming. The Ming rulers
distinguished themselves by being fatter, lazier, crazier,
and nastier than the average Imperial family. After the
first Ming Emperor discovered that his prime minister was
plotting against him, not only was the prime minister
beheaded, but his entire family and anyone even remotely
connected with him. Eventually, about 40,000 (no, that is
not a misprint) people were executed in connection with
this case alone. They were also virulent Neo-
Confucianists. 

In the early 1400s, a sailor named Zheng He (with a fleet
of some 300-plus ships)sailed as far west as Mogadishu and
Jiddah, and he may (or may not) have gotten to Madagascar.
This is nearly 100 years before Columbus had the idea of
trying to sail to Asia the long way around. But once the
sailors came back, the trips were never followed up on.
Conservative scholars at court failed to see the
importance of them. For the first time in history, China
was turning inwards, clinging to an incorrect
interpretation of an outmoded philosophy. 

To give the Ming their due, however, they did do some
positive things. Among other things, they moved the
capital to Beijing, fortified the Great Wall (the massive
masonry structure that you see in all the pictures and
postcards is, with some recent, Communist-era repair, an
all-Ming construction), built the Forbidden City, and gave
Macao to the Portuguese.

The Birth of Modern China: 1644 - present

Qing (Manchu) (1644 - 1911) In 1644, the Manchus took over
China and founded the Qing dynasty. The Qing weren't the
worst rulers; under them the arts flowered (China's
greatest novel, a work known variously as The Dream of the
Red Chamber, A Dream of Red Mansions, and The Story of the
Stone, was written during the Qing) and culture bloomed.
Moreover, they attempted to copy Chinese institutions and
philosophy to a much greater extent than then the Mongols
of the Yuan. However, in their attempt to to emulate the
Chinese, they were even more conservative and inflexible
than the Ming. Their approach to foreign policy, which was
to make everyone treat the Emperor like the Son of Heaven
and not acknowledge other countries as being equal to
China, didn't rub the West the right way, even when the
Chinese were in the moral right (as in the Opium Wars,
which netted Britain Hong Kong and Kowloon). 

To live during the Qing Dynasty was to live in interesting
times. Most importantly, the Western world attempted to
make contact on a government-to-government basis, and, at
least initially, failed. The Chinese (more specifically,
the ultra-conservative Manchus) had no room in their
world-view for the idea of independent, equal nations
(this viewpoint, to a certain degree, still persists
today). There was the rest of the world, and then there
was China. It wasn't that they rejected the idea of a
community of nations; it's that they couldn't conceive of
it. It would be like trying to teach a Buddhist monk about
the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. This viewpoint was so
pervasive that Chinese reformers who advocated more
flexibility in China's dealings with the West were often
accused of being Westerners with Chinese faces. 

Other problems that plagued the late (1840 onwards) Qing
included rampant corruption, a steady decentralization of
power, and the unfortunate fact that they were losing
control on too many fronts at the same time. Rebellions
sprouted like mushrooms after a rain; apocalyptic cults
undermined what little official authority remained.
Several of the rebellions, such as the Taiping Rebellion,
very nearly succeeded. Compounding the problems was
squabbling between various reformers who disagreed on how
to best combat the chaos and the West (not necessarily in
that order); in hindsight, it is clear that the entire
system was slowly collapsing. An excellent account of this
period is Frederic Wakeman Jr.'s The Fall of Imperial
China. 

The attitude of the Western powers towards China (England,
Russia, Germany, France, and the United States, were, more
or less, the primary players) was strangely ambivalent. On
the one hand, they did their best to undermine what they
considered to be restrictive trading and governmental
regulations; the best (or worst, depending on your point
of view) example of that was the British smuggling of
opium into Southern China. Other examples included the
'right' for foreign navies to sail up Chinese rivers and
waterways, and extra-territoriality, which meant that if a
British citizen committed a crime in Qing China, he would
be tried in a British council under British law. Most of
these 'rights' came into being under a series of treaties
that came to be known, and rightly so, as the Unequal
Treaties. 

On the other hand, they did do their best to prop up the
ailing Qing, the most notable example being the crushing
of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 by foreign troops
(primarily U.S. Marines). What the Western powers were
interested in was the carving up of China for their own
purposes, and that, paradoxically, required keeping China
together. 

But two things happened to prevent that. First, in 1911,
the Qing dynasty collapsed and China plunged headlong into
chaos. Second, in 1914, the Archduke Ferdinand told his
driver to go down a street in Sarajevo he shouldn't have,
and Europe plunged headlong into chaos. 

Republican China (1911-1949) During World War I, the
Chinese Government, such as it was, sided with the Allies.
In return, they were promised that the German concessions
in Shangdong province would be handed back over to the
Chinese Government at the end of the war. They weren't,
and to add insult to injury, the Treaty of Versailles
handed them over to Japan. On May 4, 1919, about 3,000
students from various Beijing universities got together in
Tiananmen Square and held a mass protest. The movement
that was born at that rally (called, not unsurprisingly,
the May Fourth Movement) was the first true nationalist
movement in China and has consequently served as an
inspiration for Chinese patriots of all shades, stripes,
and ideologies since. The students of the "Beijing Spring"
of 1989 intentionally drew parallels with the May Fourth
Movement; it is all the more ironic and tragic that June
Fourth will now live on in infamy as the day that the
tanks rolled in Tiananmen Square. 

In the early 1920s, Dr. Sun Yatsen, as the leader of the
(up-to-then unsuccessful) Nationalist Party (KMT),
accepted Soviet aid. With the Communist help, Sun Yatsen
was able to forge a alliance with the fledgling Chinese
Communist Party (CCP), and started the task of re-unifying
a China beset with warlords. 

Unfortunately, Sun died of cancer in 1925. The leadership
of the KMT was then taken over by Chiang Kaishek. 

After Chiang took over the KMT, he launched his famous
"Northern Expedition" -- all the way from Guangzhou to
Shanghai. This unified Southern China and, more
importantly, let the Nationalists control the Lower
Yangzi. Once they got to Shanghai, Chiang, who had never
liked the Communists anyway, launched a massacre of CCP
members. Among those who managed to escape the carnage was
a young communist named Mao Zedong. 

The Communists were forced to abandon their urban bases
and fled to the countryside. There, the Nationalist forces
(aided and abetted by German 'advisors') tried to hunt
them down, and in the words (more or less) of Chiang,
"eliminate the cancer of Communism." In 1934, the
Nationalists were closing in on the Communist positions,
when, under the cover of night, the Communists broke out
and started running. They didn't stop for a year. 

This was the Long March. When the Communists started, they
had 100,000 people. A year later, when they finally
stopped, they had traveled 6,000 miles, and were down to
between four to eight thousand people. 

Part of the problem is that they didn't know where they
were going. They started in Jiangxi Province, about 400 km
northeast of Guangzhou. Then they headed west, past
Guilin, and into Yunnan province, in southwest China. They
would have stopped there, but the local warlords weren't
really happy about having them. At Kunming, the capital of
Yunnan province, they turned north, past Chengdu in
Sichuan province, and eventually ended up in Shaanxi, near
Yan'an. From then on, being a Long Marcher was the mark of
aristocracy in the CCP. Deng Xiaoping, the former
paramount leader of China, was a Long Marcher. With Deng's
passing, there are few, if any Long Marchers left in the
Party elite. 

While in Yan'an, on the periphery of Nationalist power,
Mao consolidated his position (gained during the Long
March) as the sole leader of the Revolution. The classic
book on this period is Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China,
which includes some texts by Mao himself. 

While all this was going on, the Japanese were busy
occupying Manchuria. This proved helpful for the
Communists -- the troops sent by Jiang to the North to
contain and eventually eliminate the CCP much preferred to
spend their time fighting the Japanese. In late 1936,
Jiang's own generals kidnapped him and held him captive
until he agreed to fight the Japanese before fighting the
Communists. 

In 1937, the Japanese invaded China proper from their
bases in Manchuria, using the notorious "Marco Polo"
incident as an excuse. Once whole-scale war had been
launched, it didn't take the Japanese long to occupy the
major coastal cities and commit atrocities. By the time
that the war had ended in 1945, 20 million Chinese had
died at the hands of the Japanese. The Nationalist
Government fled up the Yangzi to Chongqing from Nanjing. 

In 1939, World War II started. This initally had little
effect on the situation in China, as the Japanese were not
involved with war in Europe. However, after the attack on
Pearl Harbor in 1941, the main thrust of the Japanese war
effort turned away from fighting the Chinese and towards
fighting the Americans. 

After the Americans entered the war, the Communists
started to consolidate their control over North China in
preperation for the resumption of the civil war that would
occur after the Japanese had been defeated. 

The Nationalists, in contrast to the Communists, were
disorganized and corrupt, problems that would only
intensify after the war. Moreover, their attempts to fight
the Japanese were ineffective at best. The general in
charge of US efforts inside China, General Stillwell,
lobbied Washington (ineffectively) to channel some aid to
the Communists; this was not because Stillwell was
sympathetic to their cause but because the CCP, employing
guerrilla tactics they had independently developed during
the civil war, was simply doing a better job fighting the
Japanese than the Nationalists. 

At the end of World War II, the war between the
Nationalists and the Communists started up again. The
Communists were hampered by the fact that the Japanese
were under orders to surrender only to the Nationalists,
not the Communists. This, however, did not end up making
much of a difference. By early 1949, the Nationalists were
hamstrung by intractable corruption and huge debts; they
paid off their debts by printing more money, which only
lead to hyperinflation. 

By that October, the Nationalists had fled to Taiwan and
Mao Zedong had proclaimed the creation of the People's
Republic of China. Curiously, while the Red Army was busy
re-unifying the south, they didn't bother re-unifying
either Macau or Hong Kong, even though it would have been
extremely easy, and neither Britain or Portugal would have
been in much of a position to protest. 

The People's Republic of China (1949- ) In 1950, China
intervened in the Korean War to save the North Koreans
from being wiped off the map, and by 1953, the Korean War
was over (actually, South Korea and North Korea are still
technically at war with each other, even though the
fighting stopped in 1953). 

In 1958, Mao, who was growing increasingly distant from
Moscow, launched the Great Leap Forward. The idea was to
mobilize the peasant masses to increase crop production by
collectivizing the farms and use the excess labor to
produce steel. What ended up happening was the greatest
man-made famine in human history. From 1958 to 1960, poor
planning and bad management managed to starve 30 million
people to death. Officially, the government blamed it on
"bad weather." 

By 1962, the break with the Soviets was complete, and
China started to position itself as the 'other' superpower
while it recovered from the Great Leap Forward.
Unfortunately... 

... in 1966, Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution. The origins of the Cultural Revolution are
vague, but probably stem, in part, from a growing
separation between Mao's clique and the rest of the CCP.
Mao called upon students to rebel against authority, and
they did, forming units of Red Guards. China promptly
collapsed into anarchy. Schools shut down, offices closed,
transportation was disrupted -- it was so bad that even
today, the full history is still far from known. In terms
of the chaos, blood, and destruction, it was comparable to
the French Revolution, though it lacked the same political
impact. At one point, Red Guards were fighting pitched
battles with Government troops outside of the Foreign
Ministry building. Later on in the Cultural Revolution,
Red Guard units ended up fighting each other for
supremacy. In the summer of 1967, there were massive riots
in both Hong Kong and Macau. 

One of the reasons why Mao was able to pull off something
like the Cultural Revolution was because he was taking on
the trappings of an emperor -- indeed, Mao himself often
compared himself to the First Emperor of China. Another
reason was the political support of the People's
Liberation Army, spearheaded by a general named Lin Biao.
During the glory years of the Cultural Revolution, Lin
became very close to Mao, and was appointed his heir-
apparent. Lin was also in charge of developing the 'cult
of personality' around Mao. But after 1969, Lin's position
began to deteriorate, and he vanished in 1971. Lin
apparently died in an airplane crash in Mongolia; the
official story is that he was fleeing to Russia. Many
people believe that Mao had him murdered. It is doubtful
that the whole story will ever be told, particularly as
the principles involved (Mao and Lin) have taken their
secrets to the grave. 

While the Cultural Revolution 'officially' ended in 1969,
and the worst abuses stopped then, the politically charged
atmosphere was maintained until Mao's death in 1976. Deng
Xiaoping, who was purged twice during the Cultural
Revolution (once at the beginning; once again right before
Mao died); eventually emerged as the paramount leader in
1978, and promptly launched his economic reform program. 

Deng's actions, initially limited to agricultural reforms,
gradually started to spread to the rest of the country.
One of his favorite sayings is "It doesn't matter if the
cat is black or white; what matters is how well it catches
mice." This is in direct contrast to the ideology of the
Maoist years, where a favored slogan was "Better Red than
Expert," which meant, in practice, that totally
unqualified ideologues were put in charge of projects that
really needed technical expertise. 

In 1982 Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister of Britain,
went to Beijing to meet with Deng Xiaopeng. Most of the
talks concerned the issue of Hong Kong. By the time she
had left, the United Kingdom and the People's Republic of
China had signed an agreement in principle to hand Hong
Kong from the UK over to China. In 1984, the agreement was
formalized in a document known as the Joint Declaration.
The people of Hong Kong were never consulted about their
future. 

Hong Kong is a place of many ironies, and the handing over
of the territory to China is replete with them. Many of
the people who made Hong Kong what it is today were only
in the territory because they were fleeing the Communists
and are now faced with the prospect of returning to
Communist rule. The Hong Kong Chinese residents lucky
enough to have British citizenship are not actually
allowed to live in Britain; and those who hold the British
National (Overseas) [BN(O)] passport will find themselves
PRC nationals after 1997, whether they like it or not.
Finally, there is perversely poetic justice in the fact
that Hong Kong, which was made by unequal treaties, will
be unmade by an unequal treaty. 

As the economic reforms on the mainland spread, the
question of political reform started to come to the
surface, propelled by events in the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe. This came to a head in Tiananmen Square in
May, 1989. The leaders of the Communist Party saw this as
an attack on their power, and proceeded to destroy it.
Officially, 200 unarmed demonstrators died. The actual
figure is far higher, and it is doubtful that there will
ever be an accurate roll call of those who died on June 4.

After June 4, progress and reform in China stopped for
three years. But in 1993, Deng Xiaoping, in one of his
last major public appearances, toured the Shenzhen Special
Economic Zone and emphatically voiced his approval. After
that, the Chinese economy exploded, and it has only been
recently that the economy has cooled off to more
reasonable levels. 

One of the most significant developments in recent history
was the death of Deng, on February 19, 1997. While he has
not been active in politics for some time and has not
appeared in public for more than three years, the deaths
of senior leaders has always had an unsettling impact on
Chinese politics. Given Deng's former position as the
paramount leader of the country, the political shockwaves
will not only be substantial, but unpredictable. 

On the other hand, given that Deng had apparently handed
over power to Jiang Zemin several years ago and 'retired,'
we may be witnessing a new epoch in Chinese politics, one
where the death of a senior leader does not automatically
result in a scramble for power. It will be several years
before we are able to look back and accurately assess the
events of this period; after all, Mao died in 1976 but it
was not until two years later that Deng was able to fully
consolidate his grip on power. 

Either way, the next few years will be interesting times. 

Longer term, it is impossible to predict what will happen.
China will probably become a leading industrial power
sometime in the next century, and it will probably become
more closely economically tied to its East Asian
neighbors. However, predictions that China will become the
world's largest economy by the year 2020 are based on
unsustainable growth projections. And if the last 150
years of Chinese history tells us anything, it is that the
only predictable thing is unpredictability.