There will always be China ................

It’s not a very original observation but it will do as an introduction to this week’s programme on Empress Dowager Cixi from Radio Four’s In Our Time.

Empress Dowager Cixi , 1905

I am a great fan of In Our Time but was less than excited by the offering on the Empress who, for almost fifty years, was the most powerful figure in the Chinese court.

But scolding myself for being too Eurocentric I listened and was rewarded by an excellent 40 minutes which challenged my very limited knowledge of this period of China’s history.

Like many I was appalled at how the Great Powers had treated China in the 19th century including our own outrageous use of the Opium Wars to further our own self-interest.

And to my shame my views were coloured by the 1963 film 55 Days at Peking in which a stellar cast of actors including David Niven, Charlton Heston and Ava Gardiner battled the Boxer Rebellion.

Of course even then I knew that the portrayal of the Chinese was pure hokum, ranging as it did from perfidious, and sinister to cruel and unthinking.

What today’s programme did was reveal the truth that the Boxer’s were part of a peasant revolt from a  devastated area of north China where there had been awful drought and poverty.

All of which was revealed by Melvyn Bragg and his guests who discussed the Empress Dowager Cixi, her early life, and her successful and not so successful decisions while framing Chinese policy.

She was born in1835 and died in 1908.

55 Days at Peking, 1963

The sleeve notes describe how she  “started out at court as one of the Emperor's many concubines, yet was the only one who gave him a son to succeed him and who also possessed great political skill and ambition. 

When their son became emperor he was still a young child and Cixi ruled first through him and then, following his death, through another child emperor. This was a time of rapid change in China, when western powers and Japan humiliated the forces of the Qing empire time after time, and Cixi had the chance to push forward the modernising reforms the country needed to thrive. 

However, when she found those reforms conflicted with her own interests or those of the Qing dynasty, she was arguably obstructive or too slow to act and she has been personally blamed for some of those many humiliations even when the fault lay elsewhere.

With Yangwen Zheng, Professor of Chinese History at the University of Manchester, Rana Mitter, The S.T. Lee Professor of US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School and Ronald Po, Associate Professor in the Department of International History at London School of Economics and Visiting Professor at Leiden University

Producer: Simon Tillotson

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production” 

Picture; Empress Dowager Cixi, 1905, Hubert Vos  (1855–1935)  wikidata:Q845989, Harvard Art Museums   wikidata:Q3783572, Fogg Museum, Accession number, 1943.162 (Harvard Art Museums) Edit this at Wikidata, Theatrical poster for the film 55 Days at Peking 1963 reproduced from 55 Days at Peking, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/55_Days_at_Peking 

*Empress Dowager Cixi, In Our Time Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001zdw0

The May Fourth Movement .... China in 1919 ... on the wireless today

"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the violent protests in China on 4th May 1919 over the nation's humiliation in the Versailles Treaty after World War One. 

Tiananmen Square on 4 May 1919

China had supported the Allies, sending workers to dig trenches, and expected to regain the German colonies on its territory, but the Allies and China's leaders chose to give that land to Japan instead. 

To protestors, this was a travesty and reflected much that was wrong with China, with its corrupt leaders, division by warlords, weakness before Imperial Europe and outdated ideas and values. 

The movement around 4th May has since been seen as a watershed in China’s development in the 20th century, not least as some of those connected with the movement went on to found the Communist Party of China a few years later.

With, Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China and Fellow of St Cross College, University of Oxford, Elisabeth Forster, Lecturer in Chinese History at the University of Southampton and

Song-Chuan Chen, Associate Professor in History at the University of Warwick

Producer: Simon Tillotson"

Picture;  Tiananmen Square on 4 May 1919. Around 3,000 students from 13 universities in Beijing gathered there to oppose Article 156 of the Treaty of Versailles which handover a German possession in China to Japan (Shandong Problem). This officially sparked the May Fourth Movement.

*The May Fourth Movement, In Our Time, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live:bbc_radio_fourfm

The Cultural Revolution …… examining the Red Guards & lots of slogans ……. on the wireless

Now I was just 16 when the Cultural Revolution was unleashed, and I have to confess it passed me by.  

I was aware of it from the news but took little interest.

Four years later and in the second year of a degree course I had embraced ideas of Revolution, bought countless copies of the books of Marx and Engels and adorned the walls with their pictures, along with those colourful Chinese posters of workers, peasants and soldiers striding to a better future.

Along the way I had my own “Little Red Book” full of the quotations of the Chinese leader.

None of them have survived the march into old age, although the Little Red Book was still around in the 1980s.

All of which means I shall be interested in the latest In Our Time programme on the Cultural Revolution which was first broadcast yesterday and is available.

"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Chairman Mao and the revolt he led within his own party from 1966, setting communists against each other, to renew the revolution that he feared had become too bourgeois and to remove his enemies and rivals. Universities closed and the students formed Red Guard factions to attack the 'four olds' - old ideas, culture, habits and customs - and they also turned on each other, with mass violence on the streets and hundreds of thousands of deaths. Over a billion copies of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book were printed to support his cult of personality, before Mao himself died in 1976 and the revolution came to an end.

With, Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China and Fellow of St Cross College, University of Oxford, Sun Peidong, Visiting Professor at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po, Paris, and, Julia Lovell, Professor in Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of London

Produced by Simon Tillotson and Julia Johnson".*

And what an excellent edition of In Our Time it was.

Picture; Book cover: "Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung," 1966 Edition, bilingual Chinese-English, published by the People's Republic of China Printing Office

*The Cultural Revolution In Our Time, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000q9b6