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30 years ago when I was 17, the word Chinese meant takeaway chicken chow mane, otherwise known by the thinly disguised racist epithet In economic and political terms as opposed to culinary terms, China scarcely seemed to matter. Today, however, the people's republic is poised to become the largest economy in the world. Imagine the biggest and fastest industrial revolution in history compressed into just 30 years. It's a revolution that affects all of us. With Europeans reduced to begging Beijing to bail out our ailing economies, we're having to cowtow to new
Asian masters. The trouble is we know so little about them. So in this series, I want to find out what really makes China work by examining its past. I have never understood what that means. How can an essay have eight legs and its present? So, we're currently being ticketed for illegal pieces to camera in Tennman Square and by peering into possible futures. It's hell on earth or rather hell under the earth to be precise. I'm going to travel the length and breadth of this country and I'm going to track down the people who can explain it to me.
Very nice. From survivors of the madness of chairman Mao to newly minted billionaires. You must be Mr. Y to the Mao worshippers who believe tomorrow belongs to them. What would it be like to live in a Chinese dominated world? Should we be scared? in a recurrence of the chaos that has devastated China in the past? Over the next few years, these issues will become central to all our lives. This is the smog obscured face of modern China. In just 5 years, the population of the vast metropolis of Chongqing has quadrupled to more than 30 million people.
It's the fastest growing city on the planet. Everywhere I travel in China, this is what I see. Miles and miles of newly constructed apartment blocks, vast new roads and bridges, And yet, the more I look at China, the less comprehensible it seems to be. Is all this the achievement of capitalism or of communism? of the western free market or of traditional Chinese values. As I was just explaining to my friend here, the way the Chinese think is as different from the way we think as the way they write. And that's why I always feel a little bit like an alien from another planet. When I come here, all the basic assumptions that I've grown up with, particularly about individual freedom, just don't apply
here. It's a little bit as if I'd grown up on the moon and was used to leaping around effortlessly and then suddenly found myself on Earth weighed down by gravity. Individual freedom seems to count for less here than in the West. For me, the key to understanding why has to lie in China's history. And the first thing you have to understand is that behind the Chinese economic miracle there lies a great fear. It's a recurring nightmare that an orderly society will disintegrate into what the Chinese call turmoil. Turmoar like the White Lotus Rebellion of the 18th century, which claimed 16 million lives.
Turmoar like the Taiping Rebellion of the 19th, which killed as many as 20 million. Turmoil the authorities are reminded of every year by tens of thousands of rural protests. Such turmoil is as old as China itself. In fact, older. More than 2,000 years ago, there was no China, just a chaotic land of competing warlords. But by 221 BC, one king had emerged to create order out of this chaos and forged the waring kingdoms into a single empire. He was Chin Xi Huang and it's from his name that the word China a derives. Today he's revered as the first emperor.
The man who laid the foundations for two millennia of almost uninterrupted authoritarian rule. Chin was the first person to find a way to hold 2 million square miles together. His solution, autocracy. Total power in his hands. Over the centuries, Chin's system of imperial rule expanded to encompass a vast territory There was the majority, the Han people, but 55 minorities were also enveloped within China's borders, This vast land became more like a continent than a country. A fifth of humanity now lives here. It's as if the combined populations of Europe, North America, and the former Soviet Union were somehow under a single government. And even that entity would
have a smaller population than China's. Remember how the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia collapsed into chaos and civil war when much smaller populations decided they couldn't live together. Hardly surprising then that China should be haunted by the spectre of disintegration. It should really be possible by rights this place should have fallen apart long ago. That after all has been the pattern in the rest of the world. So how's it done today? Of course, it's a communist party, not an emperor, that has the task of holding China together. This vast hall with its thousands of delegates is meant to create the impression the country is ruled on collective principles,
that this is a government of the people. In reality, however, the way China is governed is eerily similar to the way it was under the first emperor. All the power lies in the hands of nine men with expressionless faces and what looks like the same hair dye. The polllet bureau is as unelected and as powerful as the emperor Chin. Autocratic control in exchange for stability. This is the way China's held together and always has been with the same solution imposed by the Emperor Chin over 2,000 years ago.
Yet, it's not just the Chinese system of government that has its roots deep in the past. It's also their philosophy, the way the Chinese think. Wow, it looks very heavy. For anyone trying to understand how modern China works, you have to start with this man, the first emperor, Chin Xi Wang. And there he is, a formidable figure. Freshly minted. It was he who came up with the system of autocratic rule that still operates in China today. And it still operates because as Chin showed, it's capable of doing the most amazing things, like mobilizing the Chinese people on a vast scale.
Just look at these. The magnificent terra cotta warriors lined up as centuries at the tomb of the first emperor. He was clearly a man who aspired not just to omnipotence but also to immortality. And he was the first to start doing things on the epic scale that you see everywhere in China today. This really is a pretty astonishing site. This is only one of three enormous pits where they found rows and rows of terra cotta warriors stationed with weapons to defend the dead emperor Chin. And it gives you an idea as to what kind of a man he must have been. The entire burial area covers around 50 square kilometers. And at its heart is a mausoleum which no one has yet dared to open because it's supposed to be
protected by automatic booby trap weapons, not to mention rivers of molten mercury. Whatever else he was, the emperor Chin was somebody who was determined to go down fighting death all the way. Jyn's mosselum was built by an estimated 700,000 laborers over 40 years. Just to put that in perspective, that's over twice as long and involving seven times as many workers as the building of the Great Pyramid in Egypt. This extraordinary concentration of power in just one person's hands enabled Chin to do amazing things. He was the first Chinese ruler to build a great wall, the precursor to this one, which stretches like a huge stone snake
for thousands of miles along China's hilly northern frontier. It was designed partly to protect his empire from the nomadic raiders of Central Asia, partly just to project his power. Everything the Chin Emperor did was designed to hold his enormous new empire together. He introduced a standard Chinese script which made it possible to enforce his edicts across the land. It was the first emperor who imposed a single currency throughout China. And the circular coin that he introduced, the square hole in the middle, the circle to represent heaven and the square to represent earth. This was the standard means of payment in
China right down till the 20th century. But when you take a step back, you realize that all these achievements, the Great Wall, the script, the currency, had one purpose, to prevent this huge and desperate empire from falling apart. And sometimes, as in our own time, that meant ruthlessly removing opponents, anyone seen as a threat to the integrity of the empire. Chin was a burner of books as well as a builder. He was a tyrant who waged war against both scholars and landowners. He tolerated no threat, however small, to his own monopoly on power. So when I look at the men who rule China
today, I find myself wondering just how much their system owes to this guy and what the first emperor would think of modern China if he could step out of the kiln alive and see it for himself. In some ways, he might find the actions of today's leaders very familiar. There may be a change of leadership coming up in China, but don't expect any kind of election, much less a campaign. In fact, this new ruler will be as far removed from the scrutiny of ordinary people, as an emperor. I'm in one of Beijing's biggest bookstores. I'm looking in the political biography section for something about Xiinping, the likely next president of China, but I can't actually find a single thing.
George W. Bush. Yes. Xiinping. No. Now, you wouldn't have expected a Chinese peasant 2,000 years ago to know anything about his emperor. But today it has to be different surely. So let's see. She gin ping. Nothing. Not a single thing. I'd love to ask people here why that is and what they feel about it. But I've been told that is not the kind of question you should ask in a Beijing bookshop. So let's just reflect on its implications. Imagine going into a bookshop in London and finding no books at all about David Cameron or going into a bookshop in Washington and finding no books at all about Barack Obama and not being able to find out crucial things
like their wife's favorite dress designer or their favorite holiday location or perhaps more importantly what they actually think about politics. That's the kind of question you can't ask in China about the next leader of your country. Think about it. Secrecy over openness, unity over democracy. That's always been the Chinese way. But how on earth do you get a system like this to survive for 2,000 years? Part of the answer again lies deep in China's past in the origins of a system of philosophy that puts social harmony above individual freedom.
This serene temple was built to commemorate a philosopher born back in the 6th century BC. Kong Fu or Confucious in the latinized version familiar in the west. It was Confucious who provided the value system which is the very foundation of China's civilization. A system that has long been used to justify autocratic rule. That's the bell for lessons. I have one question. What is the most important value that these little kids are learning here at your Confucious School? You really can't understand China if you don't understand the enduring influence of Confucious's teaching on its history.
His ideal was of a society based on daton great harmony. In the west, we're brought up with a cultural code of individualism. In China, the first principle is know your place. Really important thing about Confucianism is that it's an anti-revolutionary ideology. It's it's an ideology that's designed to stabilize the social order, not to overturn it. So, it's not surprising Confucious is back in fashion. Officially, the shared values of China today are still communist. But this is a time of massive economic and social change. So, what better message to transmit to an increasingly divided country than the ideal of social harmony?
This is where communism meets Confucianism. Billboards like this are ubiquitous in China. This one says that family planning is good for the harmonious society. Classically Confucian idea. In fact, President Hujen Tao has spoken so often about harmony that human rights activists here talk about being harmonized rather than censored. But the indoctrination of civil obedience is only part of the story of how China is held together. To stave off chaos and to maintain autocratic rule, you also need the means to enforce those shared values right across the country. And once again, the chosen method today is a legacy from China's imperial past. centrally controlled bureaucracy.
Here in the Confucious Temple, there are rows and rows of these steely stone tablets on which are engraved the names of the men who passed the final stage of the Imperial Civil Service exam. And I'm looking for one of them, Lu Yong Hur from Anwe, who was one of the academic superstars of the year 1571. Trouble is there are over a 100,000 names here. So it's a wee bit like looking for a chopstick in a lumberyard. L had come all the way from the small village of Chongan in Anwe province to join the elite whose job it was actually to implement imperial rule. And here he is.
Ying her. Just imagine how this boy from the provinces must have felt to find his name engraved in stone here. He was a member now of the ultimate Imperial elite. The bureaucracy he joined wielded immense power. It was their job to enforce the emperor's edicts to ensure that the doctrine of Confucian harmony was actually applied throughout the land. But first, the bureaucrats had to be indoctrinated in Confucian values themselves. They had to learn the entire Confucian cannon, some 400,000 characters. Then, as a final test, they had to write the dreaded eightlegged essay.
An eight-legged essay. Now, yes, eight legs. I've never understood what that means. How can an essay have eight legs? That's a quite Dr. Jao Dong May has taken on the task of explaining to me the essay's formidable challenges. Um uh eight lag essay should be composed of 10 parts but among the 10 parts there should be four parts. The four parts are quite different are very special. They should have this one special four part called for it means a pair of two parallel sentences. Oh, I see. Now, what's a parallel sentence? Is that um I think it's um it's uh Can you show me?
Um I'm sorry. It's too difficult. self. Okay. Not right here. But I can give you a simple example. Let's say Well, I think I understand the eight-legged essay. Though one thing's for sure, when it comes to exam time, my students get off lightly. These days, it's true if you want to join the bureaucratic elite, you don't have to write an eight-legged essay or to be indoctrinated in confusion values. But the new generation of communist mandarins wield a power beyond the dreams of even the first emperor. When it comes to advertising, the Chinese today are neon addicts. Every building in Beijing is a blaze with brightly illuminated signs. So, when you find one that isn't, it comes as rather a shock.
There are some buildings in China that they really don't want you to film. And this one behind me is the one they really don't want you to film. You can tell because there's no neon sign and there are no fluttering flags. But that is the organization department of the Chinese Communist Party. It's the building that runs China. And it's as powerful as it is anonymous. From here, the select few at the top of the Communist Party control the world's biggest bureaucracy. Some 80 million party members. This is the force that holds modern China together. Nihow. The Communist Party's influence reaches into the tiniest nooks and crannies of people's lives in the smallest villages like Chongqan in Ane Province.
It makes sense to think of the Chinese Communist Party as a kind of pyramid with President Huin Tao at the top and Premier Wji Bao and right down at the base these guys, the village party secretary and the local party carter who's been sent down into the country. Mr. Yao Gang is at the bottom of this pyramid. Oh, this is the guy we're going to visit. Hey. His job is to enforce policies controlling the most personal details of people's lives. From the taxes they pay to how many children they can have.
Ah, here we are. Yeah. Very nice to meet you. And of course, he also has to make sure that people are well happy. So, he's the local barber. And what kind of problems does he have that you can help him with? Sounds ideal. I think I might move here myself. That's something you often hear in China. Everything here is just great. Everything here is fine. We have no worries at all. All right. Why is that? I wonder. One of the challenges about making a film about Chinese communism is that you're never really alone. When you want to talk about the party, there's always
at least five people trying to earwig work out what you're saying, which makes it challenging to say the least. Well, I naturally find this political system deeply uncongenial. And when the Chinese say their country is fundamentally unsuited to Western style democracy, I just instinctively want to disagree. Surely political freedoms are a fundamental human right and need. Surely, it's only a matter of time before the Chinese rebel against their leaders and demand at least some say in the way they're governed. There is after all one very big problem with this particular system of centralized authoritarian rule. A problem which some experts in the west today believe will ultimately force the Chinese system to reform or collapse.
It's a problem that I've found hidden away all over China. And it's as big now as it was in China's imperial past. I'm talking about corruption. and corruption on a scale that itself threatens to spark turmoil and revolt. Is this another courtyard? Yes. This is the largest non-imperial palace in the capital Beijing. It even looks a bit like a miniature forbidden city. It's absolutely lavish, isn't it? If one looks at the decoration up here, it's incredibly intricate. But the fact that it was bought by a corrupt bureaucrat with the illgotten gains of a multi-billion pound scam is somehow missing from the official guide book.
So this is the garden of the palace. Yes. And was this garden built in the beginning for Hen or did it come later? Came later. Emperor Dawan signed it. My guide for the day tells me that the palace was built by the Chiian Long Emperor's favorite at the imperial court, a Manchu official by the name of Hersen. But um how did he come by his amazing wealth? At that time, Hersen was a very good-looking man, very young, and he was very good to the emperor, right? He tried every effort to please the emperor and uh he was very talented to aggregate wealth for some reason. Yes, that's that's pretty clear when you look at this. It's it's uh it's the kind of building we'd expect a billionaire to live in today.
I think billionaire couldn't afford to buy this courtyard beyond trillionaire. So Hen was a Chinese trillionaire. I think what I've just heard there was an absolutely classic example of the Chinese tendency to airbrush the bad news out of their history. Essentially, Hersen exploited his position as the emperor's favorite to pocket practically anything he took a fancy to. And we know this because when his protector died, he was arrested. When they raided the palace, the investigators found an absolutely
amazing hall of stuff. This list that they compiled is just breathtaking. Two jade horses, 10 ceremonial drums, 100 western clocks, hundreds of pearls, 18 gold ingots, these, whatever they are, and the list just goes on and on. It all adds up to a hall believed to be worth a quite astonishing 800 million tale of silver or 22 billion pounds in today's money. That was more than the total state income for 10 years. But if you thought this kind of corruption was a thing of the imperial past, then you've got another thing coming. Well, you get used to pretty big figures when you're talking about this country, but this story in the official government controlled English language daily really does take some beating.
Corrupt officials and company executives in China transfer their assets overseas through at least eight channels according to a report. The report estimates that up to 800 billion yuan, which is about $123 billion, has been transferred overseas by 18,000 fleeing or missing officials and company executives since the mid1 1990s. You cannot really understand China today if you don't realize the huge potential for venality of a highly centralized bureaucratic system. After all, if there's no political opposition, if there's no free press, what's to stop somebody with a position of power from exploiting that position for their own personal gain?
Just as in imperial times, in 21st century China, corruption reaches into every corner of life. Its extent matched only by the ingenuity with which money changes hands. This is the immensely popular game of ma jong which the Chinese absolutely love. According to evidence from some recent trials of corrupt officials. This is one way that money can be surreptitiously passed from property developers to officials. Just imagine the scene. the property developer's wife inexplicably loses a huge amount of money to the party official's wife. That's the way the deal is done. In order to get an American perspective on the problem of Chinese corruption,
I've come here to Washington DC. Well, actually, no, this isn't Washington. It's Fuyang in China's Ani Province. And in many ways, this replica of the Washington capital is an absolutely perfect symbol of the problem of corruption in China today. It was built as the district government office by the local party secretary, Jung Jan. Jung was subsequently convicted of taking bribes 52 times to promote other officials and then of framing the whistleblower who killed himself. Two years ago, Jung and another corrupt bureaucrat were sentenced to death. Despite highlevel campaigns against corruption led by President Hujan Tao himself, we've been unable to get any senior party official to comment on the
corruption issue here. Indeed, the only person willing to talk to us about corruption is a very brave journalist. Su Kai works for China's leading non-party journal, Sai Jing. He's as independent as you can get in a country where government sensors watch journalists like Hawks. When I hear the top Chinese leadership saying they're going to wage a war on corruption, Mhm. I asked myself, should I believe them? Is this fundamentally going to destabilize China? Is it so bad that this system could actually collapse in on itself? So I want to also talk to you a bit about corruption is a cancer gnawing away at the values that are supposed to unite China.
Millions of peasant farmers have lost their land to unscrupulous property developers. Thousands of people have been poisoned by processed food that turned out to be contaminated. Scandals that corrupt officials then tried to cover up. Now and again, a few middle ranking officials get busted, but the big fish swim on. These are more than just minors. The lesson of Chinese history is that grievances about such scandals have the potential to generate full-blown revolt. And in a country the size of China, the consequences of revolt can be devastating, unleashing death and
disintegration. It's the spectre that haunts China's leaders today. It's the one thing they're desperate to avoid at all costs. Because when the Chinese turn against those in authority, they do so on a scale that we in the West can barely imagine. In the last two centuries of the imperial era, violent popular revolts against a corrupt political system repeatedly swept through China. In the 1790s, followers of the messianic white lotus cult took up arms in their hundreds of thousands, running a mock over a huge swath of the empire. The rebellion caused the deaths of some 16 million people. In the 19th century, rebellion followed rebellion. In 1850, while Nan bandits and triad gangs ravaged the North and South,
a vast area of central China became a war zone as the Imperial Army battled millions of supporters of another religious cult. The cult's leader was this man, Hong Xioen. After he had failed the civil service exams and suffered a nervous breakdown, Hong remodeled himself as the brother of Jesus Christ. The Taiping rebellion he led cost the lives of another 20 million people. The human cost of all this conflict and chaos was truly staggering. Between 1850 and 1864, more than twice the number of people were killed as lost their lives
on all sides during the First World War. As harmony gave way to anarchy, the bureaucracy that had enforced imperial rule for two millennia crumbled. In 1906, the civil service exam was scrapped. In 1911, the 559th and final emperor, the six-year-old Pui, relinquished power. It was the prelude to decades of civil war, famine, and the humiliation of China's invasion by the Japanese. It's only when you know this bloody history that you begin to see why the Chinese Communist Party reacts so harshly to any form of disscent today.
This history is their justification for cracking down on the minorities like the Tibetans and weakers who demand greater autonomy or on cults like the 70 million strong fallen gong which to the authorities seems spookily reminiscent of the white lotus movement. or on the artist Iwwayi Weii who openly criticizes the regime in his work. The great fear for China's leaders is that any one of the thousands of protests that hit China every year could mutate into full-blown rebellion. The official line is unwavering. any kind of disscent has to be clamped down on for fear of unleashing the kind of chaos that has periodically ripped China apart. And that's why the freedoms that we take for granted in the West simply
aren't appropriate in a society of 1.3 billion people. That's the argument I've heard time and time again from the highest to the lowest Chinese communist official. And to be fair, there are some Western commentators who give the impression they'd rather like to see China descend into chaos. And indeed they hail every little tweet of descent as a sign of some impending explosion. So, will China be engulfed by turmoil once again? Or will this vast bureaucratic state succeed in keeping the lid on popular protest? Is there anything different about modern China that means it won't repeat the disasters of the past?
The key to answering that question is the legacy of this man. Mao Sidong. In the next film in this series, I'll ask why a man regarded by most people in the West as a mass murderer is still so popular in China itself. Is Mao nostalgia mass delusion? Or was Mao really the man who laid the foundations for the China of today?
