Charles Patrick Fitzgerald

Lived: 1902-1992

Nationality: British, later resided in China and Australia

Books: China: a short cultural history (1935), Revolution in China (1952) republished as The Birth of Communist China (1964), The Chinese View of their Place in the World (1964), Empress Wu (1955), Communism takes China: How the Revolution went red (1971), The Southern Expansion of the Chinese People (1972), China and South East Asia since 1945 (1973), Why China? (1985).

Profession: Academic, historian

C. P. Fitzgerald, the son of a South African immigrant to Britain, could not afford to attend university so enrolled at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he learned Chinese. He later received an honorary Doctorate of Letters from the Australian National University (ANU). Fitzgerald lived in China for 20 years and worked for British Council in China between 1946 and 1950. Leaving China in 1950, as Mao and the Chinese Communist Party were assuming control, Fitzgerald became an academic and later professor of East Asian Studies at ANU. He also held a visiting fellowship to the University of Melbourne. Fitzgerald’s residency in China during the Warlord, Nationalist and Civil War periods gave him a unique perspective on these turbulent periods and the developing revolution. According to his daughters, “what he had to say about the Chinese Revolution was not always what most Australians wanted to hear. Only his colleagues, some journalists and a few diplomats appreciated that he possessed that rare commodity, an authentic and authoritative view”. Fitzgerald’s republishing of Revolution in China (1952) as The Birth of Communist China (1964) earned him “international acclaim” and “a more attentive audience throughout Australia”. Oddly, this text made no direct mention of the Great Leap Forward – however as Fitzgerald acknowledges in the preface, his book is not a definitive text on the Chinese Revolution as “many of the documents and some of the real facts remain unknown”. Contrasting Fitzgerald’s remarks on the Great Famine of 1959-61 with the work of other historians is an interesting historiographical exercise. Contemporary students may find Fitzgerald’s prose and content challenging. Those interested in how and why viewpoints are formed, and how personal experience and context contribute to the forming of these viewpoints, will find value in his work.

Quotations

“The Chinese Revolution was made possible by the long growth of elements of instability in Chinese society.”

“The parliament elected in 1912 was a travesty of democracy… Without roots in Chinese history, without tradition without honesty, the organs of democracy presented a shameful picture of irresponsibility and corruption.”

“[Yuan Shikai] was treacherous and untrustworthy… loyalty was conspicuously absent from Yuan’s career… The enmity of the Japanese was the second main cause of the collapse of Yuan… The third cause of Yuan’s failure was the ambition and jealousy of his generals.”

“Throughout the period of Warlord rule… conditions steadily deteriorated… It consummated the destruction of two main pillars of the old order. The Civil service… perished… the scholar class… withdrew from government into academic life. Government and administration were left to ignorant soldiers and self-seeking careerists.”

“The nationalist armies [on the Northern Expedition] were filled with a furious and fanatical enthusiasm for their cause, careless of obstacles and ignorant of the outside world.”

“The [Guomindang] could never make up its mind whether its revolutionary past should impel it forward to modernity, or its nationalist chauvinism carry it back to Chinese tradition.”

“During this long and cumulative series of aggressions [by the Japanese] the Nationalists of Nanking yielded step by step, without resistance, without listening to the clamour of the people, the indignation of the intellectuals, or the appeals of those provinces they abandoned.”

“If the Communists by their violence alienated the scholars, the [Guomindang] by its blind selfish indifference lost the peasants.”

“But there was something else which ate the heart of the Nationalist movement: the lack of any real satisfying and inspiring ideology.”

“The Nationalist government, from the end of 1939, never made any further military effort to recover lost territory; it sat patiently in Chungking, the wartime capital, waiting for the world war to alter the whole scale of the conflict.”

“During the years between 1838 and 1941, the Nationalist government was divided into factions favouring continued resistance or negotiated submission to the Japanese.”

“China was no longer one country, but two; Communist China had risen during the war and [Guomindang] China had withered in that wintry climate.”

“Internal factors, the ruin of the wealthy and middle class by war and inflation, the corruption and decay of the Kuomintang, the disappearance of all but Communist government from vast rural areas, the hunger of the peasant for is land and the long-awaited opportunity to take it, all these made peace impossible.”

“[The Civil War] was won in 1947 by the negative result of the [Guomindang] failure to establish communication with the north or expand control in Manchuria.”

“If the military situation of [Jiang Jieshi’s] regime was bad the economic situation was far worse and the political prospect catastrophic. Inflation, uncontrolled, fantastic and calamitous had destroyed the value of the national currency.”

“The [Guomindang] had long lost the peasants… The scholars were lost to the [Guomindang] through its corruption, nepotism, misgovernment and inefficiency. They were won by the Communists, who in a long period of exile and hardship had learned to practice moderation, to govern honestly, and to build a disciplined army… Neither party offered the Chinese people democratic government.”

“It is the apparent that the real reason for the Long March, apart from the pressure of blockade, was to establish the Communist base in a position where it could participate in resistance to, and profit form, the impending Japanese invasion.”

“The Communist movement had thus, in the ten years between 1927 and 1937 developed from a workers’ party of theoretical Marxists, into an agrarian party of rural revolution – heretical Marxism in fact, if not in name – and now appeared as the party of national resistance and reconciliation.”

“Cooperatives… soon transformed the rural regions… There is no doubt that this sweeping innovation [cooperatives] which abolished private property in farm land… was carried out with hardly any friction or open use of force… the power of the propaganda machine… combined to persuade the peasant that it delivered them from their age-old fears of poverty and hunger. There is also little doubt that it did indeed bring much land into cultivation and make possible the rationalisation of irrigation and water conservancy…”

“Even during the three exceptionally bad years 1959-1961 – when widespread crop failures, mainly due to natural calamities, occurred and although severe rationing had to be introduced – famine, in the sense of mass starvation, was averted. There is no evidence that such deaths occurred. The Communists have shown great skill, common sense, and organising ability in handling the distribution of the rice and grain crops.”

“The coalition of peasant and scholar has been the key to the triumph of Chinese Communism.”