Do Your Own Research: 150 Years of Constant Revolution w/ Rebecca Karl

Richard Hames (0:08)

In 1972, US. President Richard Nixon went to China, and he took with him his top aid, Henry Kissinger. And Henry Kissinger asked Zhao Enlai, the number two in China, what he thought of the French Revolution that had happened some 200 years earlier, in 1789

And Zhao Enlai replied, too early to say.

What do you make of this strange reply? To the Chinese, really, as is sometimes said, think in centuries. Well, if it happened at all, and we're not sure about that, it was probably a misunderstanding. Zhao Enlai was probably thinking that Henry Kissinger was asking him about things that had happened four years earlier, in May of 1968, in a series of protests and strikes that gripped France.

But it does really seem, in some ways, like in order to understand Chinese history, you need to go a very long way back. And that's what I'm doing today. My name is Richard Hames, and this second season of Do Your Own Research, the show that maps everything in the world that has ever mattered and ever will, is all about China. In the first episode, I spoke to Tianyu Fang because I wanted to understand what was happening in Chinese culture and politics right now, and the deeper structures behind it. And then last week, I spoke to Eva Do about spycraft, surveillance and signals intelligence. And now we're going a long, long way back, to a time before even the internet existed. The last 200 years of Chinese history has been a series of revolutions and counter revolutions, each one of which has set the stage for the next, and each one of which has transformed the country more than seemed possible beforehand. Peasant rebellions, colonial invasions, a man who declared himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ and found millions of people to follow him. A nationalist revolution that turned into a period of warlords, a civil war that was put on pause only to fight the Japanese invasion. And that conflict itself merged into the Second World War. And a small group of communists rising from just a handful of comrades to pulling off the largest revolution in world history. In this episode of Do Your Own Research, I'll be taking us through from the Opium War in which the British imposed the first of many unequal treaties on China right through to Mao, standing on the steps of the Forbidden City and declaring a communist republic in the whole of China. This period is so full of interesting stories that we will be dealing with the Mao period next time, from the Chinese Communist Revolution to the Great Leap Forward and through to the Cultural Revolution and the aftermath of Mao's death. This is a history that the Chinese Communist Party certainly hasn't forgotten, and you really can't understand what's happening now without it.

I'll be adding all the people, places, things, ideas, events, technologies and so on to the map as we go. You can see that map anytime you want at novaramedia.com/d-y-o-r.

My name is Richard Hames, and our guide to this amazing history is Rebecca Karl, a professor at New York University. She's the author of many books on China, most recently China's Revolutions in the Modern World, and she tells the history in a way that tells us not only what happened, but also what sense people made of it at the time and why it still matters today. She looks at that history not just as a sequence of violent and tragic events, but also as part of a global story of the struggle for human freedom. Rebecca Karl, welcome to Do Your Own Research. We are covering today, frankly, an enormous period of time. So I'm going to sort of impose a kind of structure here. The first event we're going to engage with is the First Opium War. In the late Qing Empire, what was found out later on to be the late Qing Empire, the British Empire arrives. Talk us through the First Opium War. What do we need to understand in order to be able to understand the Mao period, Chinese Communism, later?

Rebecca Karl (4:28)

Well, first, let me just say thank you for having me on your program. And secondly, let me say that the book to which, about which we're talking that spans all of those many, many years that we're going to discuss today takes the view that this span of time is most usefully seen through the perspective of success of revolutionary moments.

And I start with, in fact, I start with the Taiping Revolution or Taiping Rebellion that happens after the the Opium Wars. But in order to understand the Taiping Rebellion, or revolution, you have to go back to the Opium Wars. So with that, as a preface, let me get into the most easily understood aspect of the Opium Wars that started in 1839 to 1942, is to understand that China was never an isolated, a secluded place that was never open to the world. China was a very vibrant contributor to the transformations of the world in the 18th and 19th century. But by the 19th century, China's participation in that world was conditioned through the exchange, through the silver exchanges that spanned the world. Silver was mined in South America.