MCLC: Chan Koonchung imagining a non-Communist China

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Chan Koonchung imagining a non-Communist China
Source: Sinosphere, NYT (11/1/15)
Q. and A.: Chan Koonchung on Imagining a Non-Communist China
By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW
Read in Chinese | 点击查看本文中文版
We’re in Beijing — no, Beiping — Dec. 10, 1979. It’s year two of the presidency of Chiang Ching-kuo, son of Chiang Kai-shek. China has been an American ally since Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang, or Nationalist, forces defeated Mao’s Communists in the civil war that ended in 1949. The Chinese capital is still Nanjing. The Dalai Lama remains in Lhasa. Hong Kong is a British colonial backwater. China is prosperous.
It’s also repressive. Opposition parties are at most decorative; human rights advocates are hunted down. But in the 30 years since the war, after which the Communists scattered abroad, many to the Soviet Union, China has followed a path that diverges sharply from the history we know today. No class struggle, no purge of landlords, no Anti-Rightist campaign against intellectuals, no Great Leap Forward or the catastrophic famine that followed, no Cultural Revolution. The progress achieved in education and civil society under the Nationalists from 1911 to 1949 has continued.
Welcome to Chan Koonchung’s alternative history novel, “The Second Year of Jianfeng,” recently published in Chinese in Hong Kong. (It is not yet been translated into English.) Jianfeng was the courtesy name for Chiang Ching-kuo, which Mr. Chan imagines as the name for his rule. In an interview, Mr. Chan addressed the central question of his book: What if China had not gone Communist?
Q. Could things have been different?
A. The Chinese Communist Party insists that “history has chosen the C.C.P.,” and without the party, there would be no strong and prosperous new China. I want to show the possibility that China could have become strong and prosperous much, much earlier.
History is not “determined” and is not as inevitable as Communist dogma would like us to believe.
The first 30 years of Communist rule under Mao Zedong, before Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, were a total waste of time, an unnecessary historical detour with an unspeakably immense humanitarian cost.
Q. Would China have been better off if the Nationalists had won the civil war?
A. China would definitely have been a nicer place. It would still have had things that were wrong, but much less than what actually happened. Such as, there wouldn’t have been a Cultural Revolution.
There are some things the Nationalists would have done worse. For example, they were more tied to the triads. But I think that by 1979 the Nationalists would have achieved something very similar to what the Communists are achieving now, 37 years later, but with more equality in society.
Q. How difficult was it for you to construct an alternative history for China?
A. I thought it would be very difficult, but it turned out much easier than I thought. It took less than a year to write, though I spent a lot of time preparing for it. I had to think, how would the Kuomintang have ruled? For that I had to think about the Taiwan elite as it was.
I picked several real people to tell the story. One was Zhang Dongsun [a philosopher and democrat who declined to take sides between the Communist and Nationalists and died in prison in Beijing in 1973]. I took the actual words they said and put them into different contexts.
Q. How did you envision the alternative reality?
A. I wasn’t aiming to make a utopia out of China. But maybe because of the success in Taiwan, I can say that they would have done something similar to that.
Of course, the U.S. and China would have been allies from the very start. The coastal cities of China would have boomed from 1949 on, because the U.S. was the big economy at the time so whoever could export to the U.S. had a boom.
In Taiwan after 1949, the Kuomintang did carry out land reform, so I speculated that they would also have done that in China. It was very successful in Taiwan, and the reason is it was nonviolent and cooperative. Landlords were made shareholders in state-owned companies and given loans. They turned into capitalists and promoted industry.
Industrialization took off after that. If they had done something similar in China, it would have been great. The Communists did it differently. They used class struggle and killed off the old owners.
There would still have been a Korean War, because Kim Il-sung was very ambitious and believed he could conquer South Korea in a few days.
Q. How would Chinese culture have fared?
A. In 1968 [in the book, the novelist] Lao She becomes the first Chinese writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, while in real life he was pushed to commit suicide [in 1966] during the Cultural Revolution. Old temples, antiques and historic sites might simply have been neglected, instead of willfully destroyed by the Red Guards, as happened in reality.
Q. Are alternative history novels demanding on the reader?
A. I didn’t explain a lot. I depended on my readers’ understanding of Chinese contemporary history to make comparisons and to enjoy reading between the lines.
Follow Didi Kirsten Tatlow on Twitter @dktatlow.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on November 3, 2015
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