China: 3000 Years of History, 50 Years of Revolution. Robert Louzon 1998
It is a known fact that the first great civilisations were civilisations of irrigation. It is the productivity of human labour – that is, the utilisation by man of the sources of natural energy – which enables him to produce more than is strictly necessary for the maintenance of life, that makes civilisation possible, and is the measure of its development.
Since agriculture by irrigation was the technique that enabled man to produce for the first time a substantial surplus of food over and above what was necessary to save him from starvation, because this agriculture was mainly perfected in the valleys of the great rivers of the sub-tropical region, it was in these valleys that the first civilisations flourished.
These great civilisations of irrigation are divided into three main groups, each of which embraces the valleys of two rivers sufficiently close to each other to be in easy relationship and – despite certain differences – to be included in the same civilisation and in the same history.
The first group of these civilisations is to be found in the Middle East, and is based upon the two rivers of the Nile and the Euphrates; the second is in the Indian subcontinent, its two rivers being the Indus and the Ganges; the third, in the Far East, is based on the Yellow River (Huang He) and on the Blue River (Chang Jiang).
It is to this last civilisation, and to the state to which it gave birth – China – that the following pages are devoted in a brief effort to retrace its history.
Civilisation based on irrigation is therefore basically agricultural; the cultivation of the soil dominates its entire history, and activities other than agricultural, such as commerce, are generally only necessary extensions of it.
That, however, was only completely true until recently. Recently, that is to say, in the course of the last 100 years, or more precisely from the start of the Opium War in 1840, China in fact found itself penetrated by an entirely alien civilisation born under other skies in a much more recent era than its own, and based upon the utilisation of an entirely different source of energy: fire – in other words, the chemical energy released by the combination of carbon with oxygen, and utilised by means of the steam engine. This, some 150 years ago, provided the Western peoples with the means of increasing the productivity of human labour far more than irrigation had done over a period of 4000 or 5000 years.
This sudden bringing of the aboriginal agricultural civilisation of China into contact with the imported industrial civilisation of the West was inevitably bound to lead to a complete change in China’s political, social and intellectual institutions. It is this revolution which is at the moment in full course of development.
For that reason, this little work will be divided into two parts. The first will go over the broad lines of the history of agricultural China, traditional China, from its origins up to its contact with Europe; the second will deal with the different phases through which the Chinese crisis passed from the beginning of its contact with Europe up to the coming to power of Mao Zedong.
The first part will cover 2000 years or more; the second, a century. Because of the greater interest of the second part on account of its topical nature, we shall give roughly equal space to each, which is not without its problems, for it will tend to give our readers a misleading view of the relative time spans involved. We hope that they will attempt to avoid this mistake as far as possible by always bearing in mind that they will be devoting the same time to reading what took 20 times longer to happen in the first part than in the second.