Facing History and Accepting Criticism Are Why Humanity Progresses | Living With the Future ⑤

This interview touches on how we look at particular events in history, but it is mostly about the attitude we should take toward history.

"Sometimes the point is not to change the world, but to explain it."

At a critical moment, in thinking about how to explain this world and how to live with the future, we need to hear wise, independent voices.

We invited more than 20 professionals from economics, law, sociology, communication studies and other fields to answer our questions.

The questions are many and complicated, but they bear directly on the future lives of the younger generation. Our interviewees hope that the world left to that generation will work well and stay civilized and progressive — and that people will remain independent and rational in a complex, bewildering world.

The American journalist Ian Johnson once ran a project to record the histories of ordinary Chinese people. Because the technical barrier has dropped, it is now easy to make your own documentary — "it used to cost a lot of money; now a lot of people can do it." Apart from the technology, the other problem Johnson ran into was this: "Maybe there are some restrictions. It depends on what you're reporting. If you keep reporting on things to do with the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward, you'll run into trouble. But if it's just about conditions in your own village, plenty of people still do it."

QDaily has also run several series of its own, such as "Housing and Chinese People's Lives", which likewise started from personal histories to record how life has changed.

The bigger problem we ran into was: what exactly are they talking about? Whether we look at reader comments or at our own reporters sitting across from the people telling the stories, some of it we were hearing for the first time. More often we knew only the concepts, without understanding the sequence of events or the logic behind them.

Fernand Braudel, one of the most famous historians of the 20th century, once wrote A History of Civilizations for French high school students. He said: "I believe that by the age of 18, on the eve of preparing for whatever profession they choose, our young people must gain a preliminary understanding of the current problems of economy and society, of the world's major cultural conflicts, and of the diversity of civilizations. They must be able to read a serious daily newspaper and understand what they read."

That is what we lack.

And things may be getting worse. After reports that high school history textbooks had revised what they say about the Cultural Revolution, a Guangzhou high school student was interviewed and said: "If you don't emphasize its mistakes, history can be a bit more perfect, right — there's no such thing as an absolute mistake..."

He Weifang told us in an interview: "A nation with a healthy mind must never dodge its own history. A nation that always covers up the disasters, the absurd and insane acts that occurred in its past, is bound to repeat that tragedy. That is the only reasonable attitude to take toward history."

How should we face history? He said: by confronting it directly, of course.

This interview touches on how we look at particular events in history, but it is mostly about the attitude we should take toward history — how we should understand it.

Let's start with that famous history-textbook incident.

1. How should we face history?

"The shock the Cultural Revolution dealt the whole of China was without precedent. I think China will need at least 100 years to absorb it."

Tang Shiping, professor, School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University

If the Ministry of Education really did this, I think it is plainly wrong. Every day we tell other people not to forget history — Japan, other countries. That requires us not to alter or forget our own. In fact, I think the movement that damaged this country most deeply began with the Anti-Rightist Campaign. The Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution are in fact linked quite strongly from within. One thing they fundamentally share is that they destroyed the respect that ordinary Chinese people and China's leaders alike had for knowledge and for intellectuals. No country can survive by throwing knowledge away entirely. That is even truer in a modern society. Without innovation in knowledge and technology, a nation cannot grow economically.

So if the Ministry of Education really wants to edit the Cultural Revolution out of the textbooks, I think that is completely wrong. It isn't only because of my own experience. It is that the shock the Cultural Revolution dealt the whole of China was without precedent. I think China will need at least 100 years to absorb it. It damaged trust between people. And the most important thing is that it destroyed respect for the entire intellectual elite, for the intellectual world, for the whole system of knowledge. That, I think, is a nation's true bloodline. That bloodline is how knowledge is handed down.

There is a legend that the president of Coca-Cola once said: burn down all our factories, it doesn't matter, as long as I still have the formula. Put plainly, the bloodline of knowledge is like a formula. Without it, all you have left is temples and palaces. Those are not what matters. What matters is the handing down of knowledge. I want to stress that this does not mean everything in the Chinese tradition is right. What I am saying is that if a country or a society has no fundamental respect for its intellectual class and for knowledge itself, that society and that country are unlikely to truly succeed.

"Face the scars, respect history: there should be more Cultural Revolution memorial halls."

Wu Fei, professor, School of Media and International Culture, Zhejiang University

When I first saw that, it struck me as unbelievable — how could the Cultural Revolution be deleted? A traumatic memory that large is not something a history textbook can wipe away. It is like the Japanese not wanting to talk about the Nanjing Massacre, not wanting to acknowledge it — but the thing exists, so how could you wipe it away? Of course, in the end I hadn't looked at it closely, hadn't really examined it, so I can't judge it accurately.

But if anyone does have the idea of trying to erase this, I think that is absolutely unimaginable. Something like the Cultural Revolution is in fact something we can talk about often and at length. Traumatic memory though it may be, it should at least make us feel that going back to the past is impossible. Because nobody wants to — this was a painful stretch of history in which everyone paid in suffering, the nation's development was set back, and lives and property were badly harmed. It should be something we remember. I even think we should build a great many Cultural Revolution memorial halls, so that people who never lived through it can know what it actually was.

Of course, this is a major cultural event, because textbooks are the most important instrument we have for raising young people. Unbelievable as it is, I also think that as long as there are other channels in society for learning about the Cultural Revolution, then no matter how much you don't want people to know, they may well find out anyway. So in a sense, even if you delete it from the textbooks, you cannot delete it from the public's memory. The archives are there, the history is there; refusing to acknowledge it won't work. History is always written by later generations, so I think knowingly doing what cannot be done is, at times, simply foolish.

You have to respect history as it was. Besides, this was a major traumatic event to begin with. Just like the Nanjing Massacre — how could you erase that? We should remember the humiliation China suffered then, but we don't have to channel it into national hatred and hostility. We should understand that it was in itself a disaster for humanity, or even a disaster of human nature.

So should we guard against something like this happening again? Japanese militarism, for instance, did such terrible things back then — might some other militarism do the same in future? Remembering that kind of history matters. The same goes for the Cultural Revolution. How did it come to be what it was? We should examine it thoroughly rather than try to hide it, like a fig leaf over a scar no one wants exposed. But since it is a scar, since it is a fact, since it is history, it should be allowed to stay right where it is.

"I'm not surprised in the least — we have never seriously reflected on this."

Hong Tao, professor, School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University

I saw the news about the textbook revision on WeChat, and I wasn't surprised in the least. Even if it had said, "fully affirm the Cultural Revolution, the Cultural Revolution was a good thing," I wouldn't have been surprised. Why? Because opinions like that have been around for a long time; and because, if you stop and think, have we, in all these years, ever seriously and genuinely reflected on the Cultural Revolution? That is where the crux of it lies. If there were things the Cultural Revolution got right, what exactly were they? Where did it go wrong? Ordinary people, and young people today above all, simply don't understand, don't know. As long as we never truly reflect on the Cultural Revolution, we can never truly clear away the soil that let it happen, and its happening again is not impossible.

I have heard that a few students who were reading Marx were shut down by the police and were about to be arrested. What comes of doing that? So did the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution really have no causes? Not allowing research, not allowing discussion of the Cultural Revolution — the result of that kind of confinement is that the Cultural Revolution has quietly come back. In fact, in a sense it already has, only not at the level of official, institutional politics, but at the level of everyday politics.

On this question I don't think we can go on with the ostrich policy any longer. We should allow talk, debate and research, and let ordinary people get at the documents of the Cultural Revolution, so they can know what actually happened then. Historians have to take up their responsibility, and politicians need a sense of history too. Right now there are two different accounts, each insisting on itself, opposed to each other. One is the official, orthodox account, which holds that it was internal chaos, a disaster — except that this account hasn't been stated for a long time, and it is unclear whether it still counts. The other holds that the Cultural Revolution was in fact good, or that it couldn't have been that bad. Years ago I heard some young people ask why the Cultural Revolution didn't finish off all the intellectuals, while other young people flatly refuse to believe that many of the things that happened during it were real, and think they were made up. The truth may not be entirely in one side's hands. But whatever the case, everyone should have the chance to learn what happened. This is a major historical event and it cannot be dodged. How we judge the Cultural Revolution bears directly on the present and on the future. That much is already obvious.

What is frightening now is that on one hand, in public, it cannot be mentioned at all, for praise or for blame. On the other hand, the way it is described is quietly being changed. The textbooks, reportedly, used to say "Mao Zedong mistakenly believed," and now the word "mistakenly" has been deleted. Deciding at the time that it was "mistaken" was their own judgment; now they naturally also have the right to decide it wasn't "mistaken." Ordinary people have no say in that — the lot of ordinary Chinese people is to take orders. All ordinary people can hope for, of course, is that these orders be made plain, so that they can form correct expectations about their own conduct and not blunder into a trap.

So it is better to spell things out. And to spell them out, you first have to understand them yourself. That takes research. Right now, whichever side you take, everyone can give you an argument. But first the facts have to be established. The Cultural Revolution was indeed not one monolithic thing. Those who carried it out included the leader himself, members of the ruling group, and ordinary people; those who suffered in it included members of the ruling group and ordinary people too. The ten years of the Cultural Revolution were not homogeneous or unchanging either — a great deal changed over them. Much of the later criticism of the Cultural Revolution, for instance, came out of those ten years itself, while some of the practices of that decade, especially of its later phase, were inherited and developed afterward without any reflection. So the Cultural Revolution has its own many-sidedness and complexity, and that should be fully recognized. In any case, only deep and comprehensive discussion and research into this historical event itself, into its causes and its consequences, can give us the ground on which to distinguish and evaluate different positions and views.

Taking the Cultural Revolution seriously means seriously facing those who actually died in it, and seriously facing our own present and future. That is a responsible attitude toward history, and a responsible attitude toward life.

2. What happens if we can't learn from history?

"If we can't learn the lessons of history, history will teach us a lesson anyway."

Wang Jianxun, associate professor of law, China University of Political Science and Law

Doing this would be terrible, no question. The Cultural Revolution was a disaster for us, and if we don't reflect on it deeply and learn from it, that means we are ignoring the harm it did us, that we don't want to learn from it. I think that is a very frightening thing. What separates humans from other animals is that we can learn lessons. We can draw something out of past mistakes and then go beyond them, in a better direction. If we water the Cultural Revolution down — perhaps not delete it outright, but dilute it or blot it out of public view — that would be very frightening. Given the disaster it brought us, the lawlessness, the enormous number of people harmed, if we stay unmoved and ignore it, the result will be that this historical tragedy repeats and the Cultural Revolution comes again. I think that is a terrible thing, and we must resist it, protest it, oppose it. If we want to avoid another Cultural Revolution, we have to say no to this.

Research on the Cultural Revolution has long been a forbidden zone; it didn't start now. Some of the materials and archives from the Cultural Revolution simply cannot be seen. By rights they should have been opened long ago, so that people could study them, understand them, investigate them. The opposite is true. That shows we don't actually want to learn the lessons of the Cultural Revolution — some people are trying to launch another one, so they don't want people to understand it. Many in the younger generation today don't understand it, don't know what happened to us; or if you tell them, they say, how could such a thing possibly happen? That is very frightening. If we can't learn something from history, if we can't learn the lessons of history, it will teach us a lesson anyway. This is absolutely crucial.

"If people really do turn into machines one day, then Nineteen Eighty-Four can absolutely come true."

Wang Xiaoyu, associate professor, Department of Chinese, Tongji University

The key question, I think, is whether public space is opened up. Turn it around and think about it: people born in the 1960s spent their childhoods in the Cultural Revolution — however poor the education people born in the 1990s get now, could it possibly be as bad as that? The moment public space opened even a little, by the 1980s you saw everything spring back to life. So individual effort matters enormously, but whether there is an open public space matters more. Where public space is lacking, to put it harshly, whether an individual can form their own values is a matter of chance — the influence of a parent or a teacher, say.

(As the generation that lived through the Cultural Revolution gradually passes away) — I don't think that is the main reason the memory is disappearing. I never lived through the Cultural Revolution or the Anti-Rightist Campaign either, and neither did you, but both of us know about them. I think the people who have some understanding of the Cultural Revolution and history like it are still not that small a group; they just face the difficulty of being able to speak.

If you go back to Nineteen Eighty-Four, this mechanism of forgetting contains a paradox. When you demand that everyone forget, you are in fact reminding them. The most interesting thing in Nineteen Eighty-Four is which department Winston himself works in. He works in precisely the department that demands forgetting, the Ministry of Truth. Because he has to do that job, he ends up remembering. In a sense, people are not, after all, machines. If people really do turn into machines one day, then Nineteen Eighty-Four can absolutely come true. But people do have flesh and blood, desires, spirit and thought, so I'm not so pessimistic as to think history will end in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

"Romanticize history, and in the end you lose the ability to see what the real problems are."

He Weifang, professor, School of Law, Peking University

From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, the authorities thoroughly repudiated the decade of calamity, the Cultural Revolution, redressed unjust, false and wrongly decided cases on a large scale, and corrected many of the ultra-leftist practices of the Cultural Revolution. But at the same time as they repudiated it, the authorities also halted and blocked in-depth research into the Cultural Revolution and the uncovering of the historical truth about it.

So citizens of the newer, younger generation are in fact very unfamiliar with the Cultural Revolution. What effects and what losses did that political movement actually bring this country? How large was the human-rights catastrophe? None of this has been allowed to be researched further. Scholarly works on the Cultural Revolution are very hard to publish in China today; there are basically hardly any. There are a few results overseas, but because the archives are closed, that research is itself very difficult. The situation now is that reform and opening-up has certainly changed society a great deal, but because political reform has lagged behind, many ills have appeared in society — the wealth gap, collusion between officials and business, corruption spreading on a large scale. There are too many problems, and society grows more and more dissatisfied, more and more angry. And that dissatisfaction and anger, when we don't know the historical truth, sometimes leads us to romanticize the past. People imagine that the Mao era might have been an age more worth missing. Back then, some say, there was no corruption. Back then ordinary people could rebel, could bring down the officials in power who were "taking the capitalist road." That way of thinking had in fact already become a very prominent phenomenon in Chongqing in 2008 and 2009; what Bo Xilai and Wang Lijun did in Chongqing was all built on it.

Ordinary people, and certain figures inside officialdom, are alike willing to romanticize an era that should not be romanticized or praised, in order to give people a sense of hope that society's problems can be solved — solved that way.

So I think cases like the Deng Xiangchao incident or the Zuo Chunhe incident in 2017 have given us a very large warning. That is: we have to take our history seriously, and take seriously the uncovering of historical truth in our education. That includes whether publishing and speech can become freer, so that people can use all kinds of research to bring the historical truth out — so that we don't end up, faced with reality, in the kind of dizziness that comes from not knowing history, drinking poison to quench our thirst. Personally I think this is a very large problem.

3. Only by facing history can we accept criticism — and that is how humanity progresses

"A 'sense of history' can help us explain the appeal the October Revolution once had, why private property came to be accepted again, and why some reforms succeeded while some experiments failed."

Ma Yong, researcher, Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

(On the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution,) I gave a talk devoted to this; you can probably still find it online. My view may differ from a lot of popular opinion. A very popular view right now, for instance, holds that the whole international communist movement that came out of the October Revolution amounts to the ruin of humanity. I basically cannot agree with that, because I think it looks at the world from today's standpoint and lacks a sense of history. What does lacking a sense of history mean? After the Industrial Revolution, capitalism in its early stage did have exactly the problems that Marx and Lenin analyzed, and that Chinese scholars such as Yan Fu and Chen Duxiu analyzed too. These critiques of capitalism, from Marx onward — we still have to admit that, from a historical point of view, their criticism was correct. Early capitalism really did have huge problems: the greed, the decay, the monopoly of wealth that Lenin later summed up.

To put it in one sentence: by the late 19th and early 20th century, as Chinese scholars such as Liang Qichao and Liang Shuming came to see it, private property was the root of human evil. Today we say private property may still be a very important thing for a society to have, but the conditions of the age have changed. So my view of the October Revolution is that under those conditions, at that early stage of capitalist development, humanity's hatred of private property was likely a real historical fact — otherwise the only reading left is that that whole generation were "scoundrels" who saddled us with the big problems we have today, and that reading is itself too muddled.

I do historical research, and I still prefer to look back with a historical feel for things: the socialism people pursued at the time of the October Revolution should be granted its legitimacy and its reasons. I would even predict that humanity may go further down this road in future, though certainly not the same road already traveled. Because it also fits the Confucian ideal — what Confucianism calls the Great Unity of humankind is, in effect, socialism, communism. The problem to be dealt with here, of course, is that after the October Revolution the socialism and communism that emerged from the movements in the Soviet Union, China and other countries did indeed all fail. But we cannot deny that the ideal itself, standing for a human aspiration, was right. That is one side of what I want to say.

On the other side, the reform of capitalism really is connected to the criticism of Marx and Lenin. If Marx hadn't criticized it, if Lenin hadn't criticized it, capitalism might well be finished by now. Its reform rests on one hand on advances in the social sciences, and above all on advances in science and technology, which raised social productivity enormously. On the other hand, we should also see that the harsh criticism of capitalism by socialists and communists, from Marx onward, amounted to a diagnosis, and to writing out a prescription. As Sun Yat-sen put it, Marx was a pathologist. And of himself he said: I am not only a pathologist, I am someone who can take up the scalpel and cure the patient.

So capitalism's problems were improved through that whole run of criticism. And there was, of course, progress in science and technology. The enormous growth in social wealth is what made improvement possible. That is why, after the First World War and especially after the Second, we see capitalism adjust in a socialist direction; what we call welfare capitalism is in fact an adjustment made after taking criticism. The openness of the capitalist system itself is probably also worth noting.

Conversely, then, why did the socialism that came out of the movements after the October Revolution all end in failure? Because it could not take any criticism at all. From the Soviet Union all the way down to us, any criticism was treated as an attempt to overthrow us, to demonize us. In fact criticism is the greatest help there is. Without Marx's criticism, capitalism would surely have collapsed long ago. From Marx onward, including Mao Zedong after 1949, there was continuous criticism of capitalism. I am old enough to have caught the tail end of that: criticizing "capitalist tails," criticizing the first sprouts of capitalism, criticizing even capitalist leanings in the depths of one's own heart. And that criticism actually pushed capitalism itself toward a healthier course. It deserves enormous credit.

In reality capitalism and socialism have been in competition. We can now see plainly that no matter how much confidence you claim, the moment you say it out loud you sound unconfident. From a historical point of view, we can say quite positively that capitalism's willingness to face its own faults and problems, and to take criticism from any quarter, well meant or ill meant, has been a very important external environment, an external condition, for its own improvement. I think the October Revolution should be understood from this angle.

4. Our own history and other people's history can both teach us more

"What can other people's history — Japan's, Venezuela's — teach us?"

Lei Yi, researcher, Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Many things influenced Japan's decision to begin the Meiji Restoration, and a very important one was the condition China was in at the time. That included books written by Chinese authors that were banned in China but that, over there in Japan, everyone had to read. So I thought at the time what a pity it was: China's experience never became China's knowledge; instead China's experience became Japan's knowledge.

I think we should still insist on openness, and treat other people's lessons as our own experience. That way the cost is smallest. I've posted about this many times on Weibo, for instance, and I keep stressing it: Venezuela's economy has come to the state it is in, and we should study hard why it got there, so as to avoid making the same mistake. You don't want to make the mistake that far yourself and only then correct it — the losses by then would be far too great. It offers a very good lesson. You do a case study of someone else so you don't have to take that detour yourself.

Because Chávez came to power with very broad popular support. He satisfied that kind of populism, for one thing, and at the start his popular support was extremely high. Even now, in the state things have reached, I still think his base of support is there. When Maduro and the others held elections, he didn't fall. And we know the shops are often empty. So if we study this phenomenon, we can learn from what other people paid without having to pay it ourselves. As for the Meiji Restoration, they studied China's preceding decades, from 1840 to 1868, and concluded that they could not take the road of China's late Qing, that they had to take a new one. That is how they avoided the twists and turns of the late Qing.

"The Russian State Historical Museum has only half of it open; the other half, the 20th century, has been sealed away."

Dai Jinhua, professor, Department of Chinese, Peking University

I haven't done enough homework to argue here in detail about whether the Russian Revolution succeeded or failed, or what it meant. But I probably would not accept the account, from the new Russian historiography or a new global historiography, that treats the Russian Revolution as Russia's wrong turn, the thing that led the country into disaster. That is a textbook case of the victors writing history. I cannot accept it at all.

Because if you look at Russian history on its own terms, you see that Russia has always been hemmed in by its geographic position straddling Europe and Asia, so it has always had a strong drive to leave Asia and enter Europe. Europeans once believed that Europe was the whole world and that everywhere else was where barbarians lived. Russia of course sat in that position, its Asian part looking like a barbarous frontier. So even in the history written by Ivan the Terrible and his like, there is an enormous Russian anxiety about its own survival and its place in the world.

In that sense, the Russian Revolution created the Soviet empire. It undoubtedly realized a dream Russia had carried for generations. If you say today that this was a wrong turn, then rethinking the future road for Russia that Leo Tolstoy's thought might have sketched can only ever be a historical hypothesis.

And it is right here, I think, that a proposition closely bound up with China emerges: we say that all the successful socialist revolutions of the 20th century happened in underdeveloped countries. That in itself is not a denial, not a way of saying this was fake socialism or anything of the sort; it is itself a demonstration of what those revolutions meant within the global capitalist order. The success of socialist revolution in underdeveloped countries has always been a double proposition. One prominent part of it is the road to modernization: how can an underdeveloped country complete its own modernization and industrialization when the developed countries are already developed? The other part is the self-expectation, or the historical promise, of world revolution and communist history. The two always unfold together.

The significance of thinking about the Russian Revolution today lies in the line, "the cannon fire of the October Revolution brought us Marxism." That formulation already contains the idea that the October Revolution showed underdeveloped countries a road to making themselves strong and founding a nation. That layer of meaning has in fact always been part of what the Russian Revolution offered China. As for China itself today, I have always held this view: everything in China today is still a dividend of revolution; we are still enjoying the dividends the Chinese revolution brought. And the Chinese revolution runs from the democratic revolution all the way through the large-scale transformation of the 1980s and 1990s. That transformation was deep and broad enough to count as a revolution in itself, because it involved a large-scale redistribution of social wealth. So revolution is what actually made the China of today.

In that sense, I think China is a successful example and Russia a failed one. And the reason Russia is called a failed example is that when the Soviet Union collapsed it lost its international standing altogether, lost its say in international politics, economics and culture — and that is why, internally, Russia has had no way to digest the narrative of the Russian Revolution. I say this because when I went to Russia I was genuinely shocked. In the State Historical Museum of Russia, history ends at the 19th century; there is no 20th century. The friend I went with refused to believe it, so we ran around the State Historical Museum three times and finally found someone who spoke English. We asked him and he said there wasn't one. In fact we know the historical museum has only half of it open; the other half, the 20th century, has been sealed away. Because it has no logic in which to speak of it, no way to digest this stretch of history, no basis in present reality for digesting it. So I think this is a reason we cannot today simply repudiate the Russian Revolution — and in China's own history and present reality above all, we have to be aware of what the Russian Revolution once meant for the world, and whether it still means it.

The second angle I'd offer is that the significance of the Russian Revolution lies in the appearance of what we call Leninism. I'm not discussing Leninism itself here, but the significance of Leninism as something that created Marxism where there was no Marxism. In other words, it was a form of creativity that met a new situation with new solutions. In that sense, I think, what it has to teach is unquestionably still there. Because as the whole world has developed to this point, I think everyone faces a situation with no precedent to draw on, and that makes this a moment that challenges our imagination and our creativity.

Those two aspects are, roughly, the historical response I think we should give as we mark 100 years since the Russian Revolution.

5. Only by thinking through the 20th century's catastrophes and its vitality can we understand where humanity stands ethically today

"What lessons have we taken from all those events of the 20th century?"

Dai Jinhua, professor, Department of Chinese, Peking University

The 19th century was the age of Europe's so-called hundred years' peace, and also the age when the Industrial Revolution bore fruit across the board. By the end of the 19th century the problems of the distribution system had become very sharp: society polarizing, class lines hardening. All the problems faced at the end of the 19th century have already reappeared today, and all of them have become extreme. By the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries it had in fact reached the point where everyone could see two options coming: revolution, or war. And in fact the world at the time — or rather, the people then able to steer the world — made a choice: they would rather have war than revolution.

Because clearly, the 20th century opened with the rise of the international communist movement and the rise of fascism. And after the First World War a standoff between fascism and communism quickly formed. But at that point the free world chose fascism over communism, and as a result fascism rose worldwide, and the world fell into the Second World War.

So in a sense you can also say the victory of the Second World War was a matter of chance: humanity might well have been unable to defeat fascism. Had we been unable to, that would beyond doubt have been an enormous catastrophe for humanity, because Nazi racial cleansing was global in scope. So I say we survived after that war. And most people at the time understood what the two world wars meant.

After the Second World War, the two Cold War blocs faced off. But on the other hand the two blocs shared a strong conviction: the world had to change structurally and essentially, or its inner mechanisms would ultimately lead to war and destruction. So the second half of the 20th century was an age of global upheaval, or you could call it a great age of social experiment. And in the end it played out with the Eastern bloc dissolving itself, ending the Cold War by losing without a fight.

But when the Cold War ended, many people pointed out that although the Cold War was over, every problem that had produced the two world wars and the Cold War was still there. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century in fact contains no new discovery as such. What is most valuable in it is his observation of the present, what his mathematical models reveal about the world economy today: more than 20 years after the Cold War ended, the world's overall structure has gone completely back to the 19th century, has regressed entirely into what he calls "patrimonial capitalism." I like a netizen's translation of it: "whose-daddy-is-richer capitalism." It is really saying one thing: class lines hardening, and the room to rise closing off. And within the pattern of globalization, this will fix certain regions in place altogether, so that certain regions never have any chance or possibility at all.

There is another situation too, of course, the one Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe in Empire: worldwide, the Second World is weakening, and the First World and the Third World are everywhere. In every society, and in developed societies above all, the middle class is shrinking while the two ends expand. The small group at the top keeps getting richer, the bottom expands fast, and the middle class can barely hold on to the very stable social position it once had.

So this pattern of change, inside and outside, is a very clear one. In that sense, simply labeling the 20th century an age of extremes, or calling it a complete failure of a century, is pointless. Because today you have been put structurally right back in that same position, and this contradiction will in the end produce a catastrophic reality. Some people, for instance, think the appearance of the European Union has prevented a 21st-century world war — because both world wars had Europe as their main theater, and both broke out of competition among Britain, France and Germany, three structurally similar countries. Now that the EU exists, it appears to prevent war caused by competition among countries with similar political and economic structures.

But today, I would say, the whole world lives inside a culture that has bid farewell to revolution, so both the energy and the desire needed for great change in the world are lacking. Then, with no revolution and no war, in what form will these insoluble contradictions occur? Perhaps unrest, perhaps collapse — and to my mind these are not one bit better than revolution and war; they may be more frightening. Because revolution and war both end in structural change, both bring about, to some degree, a redistribution of social resources and social wealth. But collapse and unrest tip toward no outcome at all; they are pure destruction.

So in that sense I really do believe that if we can't draw useful resources from the 20th century, take its lessons, or settle its debts, and so put the legacy it left us to work, then I honestly hold out little hope for the world's future as a whole.

"Why do the 1960s matter?"

Dai Jinhua, professor, Department of Chinese, Peking University

For me, revisiting the 1960s was originally an attempt to find a different set of parameters for touching the Cultural Revolution. At first I started from internal questions, because I felt that we stand inside this history, and that for me it is a history that cuts to the bone. Even today, when you touch it, it still hurts — it hurts sharply. So I felt I could find no way to handle this stretch of history.

My first realization, of course, was that this Chinese political era did not happen purely inside China, did not happen purely within China's own historical logic or logic of power. It was in fact part of the global 1960s. That was the first realization. Second, I had hoped to use the global 1960s to gain some different angles and approaches for dealing with China's 1960s. That was the original idea. What I hadn't expected was that once I got into researching the 1960s I would end up combing through I don't know how many secondhand bookstores abroad. I wanted to turn up a large number of memoirs, publications and historical documents from the time, because I wanted to be able to sense the atmosphere of that era, the way people lived then. In a sense, I think I gained something; I touched that state.

Then, through the whole process — and I wasn't consciously chasing any particular discovery — I found that the biggest change in the world in the 1960s was that history was happening in the Third World. The 1960s were not, as people used to understand them, Paris in 1968, Italy's "Hot Autumn," America's anti-war movement or the "flower children." All of these were in fact passive responses to the upheaval and rise of the Third World. Take the whole arc from the French New Wave in cinema through May 1968 — that near-toppling of the government, that revolution that almost came off. It was a response to Europe's loss of its colonies as a whole, to the Algerian War, to Fanon's philosophy of hatred. And in fact, if you look, many of the important postwar thinkers, writers and theorists of Europe, and of France above all, were born and raised in the colonies, and only returned to America when the colonies were lost. The others all had very rich experience of the former colonies. Come down to the 1960s specifically and you find that the heroes and idols of the day all came from the Third World — Gandhi, Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, Fanon, Salvador Allende, Ho Chi Minh. That struggle, taking place in the Third World and fighting the First World, was the power source of the entire 1960s, and it then turned into a crisis internal to Europe. For me, I think, that was an unlooked-for discovery.

Later, starting from this line of thought, I tried to handle, to touch, some of modern history, or the coming into being of modern history. I feel I found one way of seeing history. We all now know, for instance, that the prosperous age of the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors, or China's enormous trade advantage over Europe as a whole, was the most direct cause of the Opium War. At the same time, there are a few ways of telling Europe's story: taking the Renaissance as the starting point, or taking Columbus's discovery of the Americas as the starting point. But in fact you will see that Columbus's story came first — it was not the primitive accumulation of capital that gave modern history its first motive force, but Columbus and Magellan's so-called discovery of the Americas, the plunder of Latin America by European pirates; that was the first pot of gold. And at the same time you will see, for instance, that the Renaissance was tied to the upheaval and unrest in the Turkish region, which drove the scholars of Greek learning who had long lived there to flee to Italy, and only then was Greek learning brought back to Italy, back into Europe. You start asking yourself: where does the driving force of history actually lie?

I haven't gone deep enough yet, but I have begun working through this material. I find it fascinating. The East India Company, for instance, had in a sense already become a government Britain posted abroad; it was even the equivalent of an independent government. Then there was their war with the Dutch for supremacy at sea. In fact, to this day, many of the important international disputes we have over the confirmation of the law of the sea are still leftovers of that struggle for dominance. And the British beat the Dutch, and went on to drive out the French. In a sense that was an external trigger of the French Revolution. It was France's loss of an overseas colony that had been diverting its domestic contradictions that made the French Revolution break out in the way it did, and so savagely. Then, having driven out the French, the East India Company rapidly enlarged its territory on the Indian subcontinent. And among these events, what matters very much for us is its occupation of what is today Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka's most important cash crop was the poppy. It occupied that land. Its need to commercialize the crop and find an outlet for it was an extremely direct starting point of the Opium War. So in that sense, it is of course still Europe's earliest colonial expansion that drove the changes of world history, or the very occurrence of world history. But from another angle, none of these stories happened on European soil; European soil was only where the feedback to those facts from distant parts of the world was processed.

And I also find that, overall, when we discuss the 20th and 21st centuries today, one of the most significant changes is our repudiation of the model of the French Revolution. The French Revolution once offered a universal paradigm — a paradigm for thinking about social change. And from the revisionist school inside France to the rewriting of history worldwide, there has been an ongoing process of demonizing that revolution and drenching it in blood. But in all these discussions, no one seems to have actually dealt with why the French Revolution was so bloody, or why France and Germany afterward produced such different intellectual lineages, cultural traditions and political systems. The clumsiest explanations reach for national character or historical tradition; the slightly better ones explain it through Europe's internal political structures. But nobody discusses the colonies, the Third World — which at the time was not the Third World but the center of the world. Nobody discusses Chinese silk and porcelain, or the cotton goods of India, Persia and Iran, and the enormous grip they had on the whole world's economy and ways of living. How was all of that overturned and rebuilt by that filthy war?

So my most important personal gain from studying the 1960s is right here: you discover a history you could never discover as long as you flatter yourself that you too are European, put yourself in Europe's position, and think with Europe's descriptions and Europe's habits of mind.

And in that sense I also think the most important thing about the 20th century is that it created an ethic that had never existed in human history before. That ethic is our respect for laborers, our fellow feeling for people at the bottom. Within that structure of feeling there arose the sense that the 20th century was an age of betrayal — but this was betrayal running from the higher classes toward the lower, a conversion and identification of those with power toward those without it. So I think this is an extremely precious and important legacy. Because the overall direction of the modern world's development in the 19th century was in fact for vested-interest groups to present themselves as weak and frail. It took the powerful self-adjustment the 20th century produced — corporate accountability systems, strong government intervention in the economy, relative control over profit distribution as a whole by non-economic means. That produced the entire postwar boom, capitalism's rise across the board. So I don't think this is a simple endorsement made from one political position; it is that we should think through the catastrophes of the 20th century and at the same time think through its vitality.

(More coverage to follow, updated continuously.)

The people interviewed for this report:

Graphics: Feng Xiuxia

Cover image: Unsplash