Restless Empire (34 page)

Thick mist now hides the sun

And gentle dropping on pattering spots

Urges the dull day on
¹⁴

But there were important exceptions to the general misery. By early 1917 evening classes were set up, and Chinese newspapers began to be published, at least on the Western Front, bringing news from home. The Chinese workers learned to organize, and the first strikes and protests took place against poor working conditions, low pay, and overt racism. Contacts with French and Belgian civilians increased. Some Chinese got local girlfriends, whom they later married. One worker, Zhang Changsong from Jiangsu province, married his French girlfriend
in 1920; their marriage produced thirteen children and lasted sixty years. Many stayed long periods after the war, in part because of a lack of capacity to repatriate them to China, and often used the time to learn important skills. More than three thousand remained indefinitely in France, joining with the Chinese who arrived as students, and forming the first Chinese labor organizations in Europe.

There are a number of little-known international connections between China and World War I. One involves Chinese labor transports to the Western Front in Europe going through Canada. Canadian authorities made every effort to squelch defections and fraternization between ordinary Canadians and the transiting Chinese, but for the visitors these journeys meant the discovery of Canada, a country that over time would become a favorite for Chinese emigrants. Another unexplored story is that of Chinese workers on the Eastern Front. Most of them probably came from the eastern parts of the Russian empire, or from Russian-held areas of Manchuria and were sent to the western Russian borders beginning as early as 1915. Many joined the armies there, especially after the Russian Revolution, with most ending up fighting for the Bolsheviks in the Baltic region and along the Romanian front. Even though they made their careers with the Bolsheviks, the survivors suffered in Stalin’s great purges because of their foreign origin, with at least 11,000 arrested and 8,000 internally deported back to the eastern areas.
¹⁵

Besides workers, the other big group to go abroad from China was students. From the first students who were sent by the government in the late nineteenth century up to the explosion of Chinese brilliance in the world’s top campuses in the twenty-first century, some of China’s most vital links with the world have come through engaging with educational institutions abroad. As a group, students have been more mobile than any other part of the population—most have to travel to a new city in China, and some go abroad. Ideas travel with them, including new concepts of how to do things and of how things should
be. While workers have populated China’s immigrant communities, students have given them their edge. They, more than any other group, have come to represent China to the world and the world to China.

The explosion in numbers of Chinese going abroad to study started in the early twentieth century. Already by 1911 there were at least 10,000 students overseas, with the majority in Japan and the United States. Although the figure declined during the depression and the war with Japan, it is likely that by 1949 at least 150,000 Chinese had studied abroad. Of these roughly half returned to China. By 2010 the total number of those who have studied abroad exceeds 1.5 million, but during the first twenty-five years after China began to open up in 1978, only twenty-five percent of students abroad returned to their country.
¹⁶
As with laborers, many students trained abroad live their lives between China and other countries, setting up families that are Chinese and transnational at the same time. Except in the period from 1950 to 1980, most Chinese students have traveled abroad on their own accord, supported by their families rather than by the government. And most of them have done well, struggling through a foreign language and a foreign culture to end often near the top of their class.

Most Chinese students who went abroad were, or became, intensely nationalistic. One of them, writing to his fellow students in the United States in 1915, stressed the predicament of being a Chinese born in their generation:

Most of us were born somewhere around the year 1894. Have you not been taught what a year 1894 was for China? It was the year of the Chino-Japanese war over the question of Korea. . . . All these humiliations of our country happened when we were just raising our first baby cries. Do you not realize that you were born in the time when your country was perishing? . . . Having realized that we are the people of a perishing nation, we instinctively want to know what we shall do to save China.
¹⁷

The number of students born in the decade around 1894 who went abroad and came back to try to save China is very large. Among the top Communist leaders, Cai Hesen (born 1895), Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi (both 1898), Li Lisan (1899), Wang Ming and Deng Xiaoping (both 1904) went abroad as students. Among their senior leaders from the first generation, Mao Zedong was in fact the only one who did
not
go abroad. He had no money and found foreign languages difficult.

Cai, Zhou, Li, and Deng were among 1,600 students who went to France between 1919 and 1921 as part of the work-study movement. Organized by radical educators in China, it furnished the contacts the students needed to get a job in French factories (which suffered a labor shortage after the war) in order to earn enough money to later enroll at a university. Zhou Enlai arrived in Marseilles in 1920, hoping to study at the University of Edinburgh, but ended up spending three years in Paris working in a Renault machinery plant and, from 1921, organizing for the Communists. Deng Xiaoping was only sixteen when he arrived in France in 1920. For five years he worked in factories around Paris, developing a taste for croissants, playing bridge, and reading. In 1926 he left for Moscow to join the world revolution.

After the Communists came to power in China, Moscow became the chief destination for Chinese students. The students who went to the Soviet Union in the 1950s were sent by the government and kept under strict political control. They mostly studied science and engineering and had in some cases already been assigned to the institutes or plants they were going to work with in China after graduation. Most felt that their time in the Soviet Union was a happy one. They were funded by Soviet government stipends, making many times more than what their Chinese salaries would be (or what their Soviet fellow-students received). They studied well, but also had time for play and for falling in love, in spite of their CCP minders’ attempts at regimenting their lives. The problems came when the Chinese were about to go home to a much more restrictive society and political atmosphere. The CCP told
them that “in regards to love you should restrain yourself, deal with it correctly; it’s not permitted to marry during your time of study.” Thousands of Chinese men had to leave their girlfriends behind and in most cases never saw them again. Maybe for that reason, as much as for the education they received, the Soviet Union influenced the students deeply, well beyond the period of Sino-Soviet alliance. As late as in 2002 a third of the members in the Communist party’s ruling Politburo had studied in the Soviet Union and eastern bloc countries, and much of their approach to life and to politics remained distinctly Soviet.
¹⁸

Since 1980, the number of Chinese students abroad has really taken off. During the 1980s the majority went to the United States, where many decided to stay, thereby enriching American academia and knowledge-based industry. Later other countries became popular, too, but the Anglophone countries still dominate in terms of where students want to go. In 2010, of those who intended to study abroad, 43 percent wanted to go to the United States, 19 percent to Britain, and 12 percent to Australia. Language obviously plays a role in the choices, but there are also strong indications that Chinese like the close contact between faculty and students that they get in the best American or British universities. Of those who wanted to go to Britain in 2010, business studies predominated; almost 70 percent wanted a business-related education, preferably at least at master’s level.
¹⁹
Even after China’s economic boom, which began in the 1990s, the majority would prefer to stay abroad, at least for a while, after graduating. As with those from other emerging economies, the nationalism that Chinese students abroad evince does not prevent them from taking their opportunities wherever they can find them.

C
HINESE ABROAD HAVE HAD
an immense influence on China’s political fortunes in the twentieth century. In spite of the often repeated truism that all change in China comes from within, I can think of no other major country for which the diaspora and people in exile
have played such a significant role in the reshaping of its fortunes. The opposition against Qing rule found its strength abroad, as did the Guomindang in the 1910s and 1920s. The Communists were not only foreign-inspired but foreign-funded and trained. The market revolutionaries from the 1980s and 1990s were linked to the diaspora. The opposition to the current regime mobilizes outside China, much like the opponents of the Qing did. For Chinese revolutionaries, abroad has always been the initial staging ground for their dreams and hopes.

Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of the Republic of China, spent more than twenty years abroad, in Hawaii, the United States, Canada, Japan, Europe, and Southeast Asia. He studied abroad, worked abroad, and collected money for the revolution abroad, especially from wealthy Chinese in Hawaii and Singapore. His brother, Sun Mei, became a prosperous rancher in Kula on Maui. Sun Yat-sen married a young woman from a prominent Chinese American family, Song Qingling, who had attended Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia (her sister, Song Meiling, married Chiang Kai-shek). In 1896 Sun was kidnapped by the Chinese embassy in London and after his release (following a campaign by British newspapers) published the sensational book
Kidnapped in London!
, which made him a household name among Chinese intellectuals. Sun’s revolution was almost entirely foreign made. As we have seen, he almost missed the real revolution in 1911 because he was raising money in Colorado. He reminded his American listeners of foreign involvement in their own revolution and tried to sell bonds that he promised would be redeemed ten-fold after he came to power in China:

In order to make sure of our success, to facilitate our movement, to avoid unnecessary sacrifice and to prevent misunderstanding and intervention of foreign powers we must appeal to the people of the United States in particular for your sympathy and support, either moral or material, because you are pioneers of western civilization in Japan; because you are a Christian nation; because we intend to model our new government after yours; and above all because you
are the champion of liberty and democracy. We hope to find many Lafayettes among you.
²⁰

In the generations after Sun, the Soviet Union became the center for Chinese revolutionaries abroad. Many went there to study, and some became Soviet residents. Chiang Kai-shek’s son Chiang Ching-kuo, who later became the great democratizing president on Taiwan, was one such. Chiang went to Moscow as a student in 1925 and spent twelve years there, working as an engineer in the Urals. Li Lisan, who had studied in France and became general-secretary of the CCP, went to Moscow in 1931 and stayed for fifteen years; he was later tortured to death in Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
²¹
Wang Ming, who had been the Comintern’s favorite and had opposed Mao’s rise within the CCP, had the good sense to stay in Moscow after he went there for medical treatment in 1956; he spent the last twenty years of his life denouncing Mao’s dictatorship.

As we will see later, the Chinese diaspora played a key role in the transformation of China after 1978. The first country Deng Xiaoping visited after he became China’s paramount leader was Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew, the wily anticommunist leader of the island state, whose ancestors, like Deng’s, were Hakka from Jiangxi province, was uncertain about what to expect. Lee recounts that at their first dinner together, Deng turned to him and congratulated him on having done “a good job in Singapore”:

I said, “Oh, how’s that?” He said, “I came to Singapore on my way to Marseilles in 1920. It was a lousy place. You have made it a different place.” I said, “Thank you. Whatever we can do, you can do better. We are the descendants of the landless peasants of south China. You have the mandarins, the writers, the thinkers and all the bright people. You can do better. . . .” Within weeks, the
People’s Daily
switched lines, that Singapore is no longer a running dog of the Americans, it’s a very nice city, a garden city, good public housing,
very clean place. They changed their line. And he changed to the “open door” policy. After a lifetime as a Communist, at the age of 74, he persuaded his Long March contemporaries to return to a market economy.
²²

After the crackdown on prodemocracy protesters in Tian’anmen Square in 1989, China got its fifth generation of revolutionaries abroad. Fang Lizhi, one of China’s leading astrophysicists, became a symbol for the student movement when he published essays calling for the democratization of China. He now lives in exile in the United States. Han Dongfang, a railway worker from Shanxi who led the nascent independent labor movement, lives and organizes in Hong Kong, “in China, but not of it,” as he once said to me. Wang Dan, who as an eighteen-year-old history student at Peking University was the brains behind the democracy protest in 1989, received a PhD from Harvard in 2008, where he went after spending seven years in Chinese prisons. Like their predecessors, they hope to return to China and change it into a better country. Their position often seems hopeless, but then that was the case for the young Sun Yat-sen and the young Deng Xiaoping also.