A Case Study in Forecasting: Bertrand Russell’s The Problem of China

 Bertrand Russell’s The Problem of China, published in 1922, is a strikingly clairvoyant book. Often it seems prophetic. A great deal of the statements and predictions of the book materialized. This paper explores just some of Russell’s statements and predictions—particularly regarding state-society relations in China and the international context. It argues that Russell got things so right because his analysis is uniquely discerning. The paper then goes on to assess how Russell achieved this discernment and its implications for today. 

How Right Russell Was

In his introduction, Russell writes:

China is confronted with two very different groups of foreign Powers, on the one hand the white nations, on the other hand Japan…Japan remains very unlike Europe and America and has ambitions different from theirs as regards China. We must therefore distinguish three possibilities: (1) China may become enslaved to one or more white nations; (2) China may become enslaved to Japan; (3) China may recover and retain her liberty. Temporarily there is a fourth possibility, namely that a consortium of Japan and the White Powers may control China; but I do not believe that…the Japanese will be able to co-operate with England and America…Japan must dominate the Far East or go under. If the Japanese had a different character this would not be the case; but the nature of their ambitions makes them exclusive and unneighbourly.[1]

Russell probably succeeded in spelling out all possibilities for China’s future. History first realized his third scenario, then his fourth: Japan overran China, but China then regained its liberty after the Second World War. Japan did try to dominate the Far East and went to war with “England and America” over China. Pearl Harbor had as its immediate cause the American oil embargo put on Japan because of its aggressive actions. [DM2] Japan’s attempt at domination failed and Japan surrendered unconditionally in 1945.

He writes elsewhere: 

The Bolsheviks have, of course, the enthusiastic sympathy of the younger Chinese students. If they can weather their present troubles, they have a good chance of being accepted by all vigorous progressive people in Asia as the liberators of Asia from the tyranny of the Great Powers.

A half-century after Russell’s writing, China, like much of Asia, went red, under Mao. China was led by Mao. Some of his thoughts project even further into the future. He thinks, for instance, that China will not become a major player without an industrial economy.  

If low wages meant cheap labour for the employer, there would be little hope for Lancashire, because in Southern China the cotton is grown on the spot, the climate is damp, and there is an inexhaustible supply of industrious coolies ready to work very long hours for wages upon which an English working-man would find it literally impossible to keep body and soul together. Nevertheless, it is not the underpaid Chinese coolie whom Lancashire has to fear, and China will not become a formidable competitor until improvement in methods and education enables the Chinese workers to earn good wages[2]. Meanwhile, in China, as in every other country, the beginnings of industry are sordid and cruel. The intellectuals wish to be told of some less horrible method by which their country may be industrialized, but so far none is in sight. [3]

China today is a world power. It became so due to its industry and remains so due to its industry. Chinese today wages may be relatively small, but so is the cost of living in China.  So, while the living standards of many Chinese may often be basic, they are still those of an industrial country.  Russell also soothsays the course whereby China ended up achieving its modernization and resurgence:

The three chief requisites [for independence], I should say, are: (1) The establishment of an orderly Government; (2) industrial development under Chinese control; (3) The spread of education. All these aims will have to be pursued concurrently, but on the whole their urgency seems to me to come in the above order.

Indeed, first China eventually got an orderly government: that is, one with a real grip over the country after 1949. Although the civil war never fully resolved, the government on Taiwan was also orderly. Then China went onto industrialize, particularly starting with Deng Xiaoping—Taiwan did so even earlier. Remarkably, as Russell observed, industrialization was essential for true rebirth. China has been an autonomous actor on the world stage after the Sino-Soviet split, but one cannot consider China to have been a great power as it is today before its industrialization under Deng. Today, China has embarked upon Russell’s third step. China’s recent focus has been on science, education, and technology for the purpose of being not just an industrial country but one of advanced industry—although with this last success has not been undiluted.  

How was Russell so Right?

Why is Russell so good? Because he is wonderfully discerning. Etymologically,  ‘analysis’ means to loosen thoroughly. Russell, the father of analytic philosophy, takes the jumbled knot that is the problem of China of his day and breaks it down into its component threads and identifies which are really connected by causal ties.[4] That is, Russell breaks down the problem into sub-questions and takes stock of the pertinent factors impacting these sub-questions. Mark ‘pertinent’—not salient, or important or relevant: Although Russell describes things wholesomely in context, when he expounds on what should become of a matter, he does so based on the factors he has identified as really affecting the question. He does not confound the effectual factors with other considerations or phenomena, however prominent otherwise they may be. He deals with questions as they arise and arrives at conclusions throughout the book. 

Two instances of how Russell stands out are how he insightfully distinguishes between state and society and between actors and subjects while tackling some of the different questions he discusses. 

Society versus State

Russell focuses his discussion of China’s internal realities on Chinese society rather than politics. This is partly because Russell, a philosopher, is more interested in cultural and educational questions: the merits of industrialism, economic development, and practical versus moral education; and how China’s attitudes to these have changed and may change and, in turn, the implications for the world and the West. Russell admits that these questions have little practical relevance for daily diplomacy and statecraft. He nonetheless recognizes that one should look to these broader questions and social aspects of China, rather than its politics, to get a sense of what will become of China in the future. Russell writes:

The position of China among the nations of the world is quite peculiar, because in population and potential strength China is the greatest nation in the world, while in actual strength at the moment it is one of the least. The international problems raised by this situation have been brought into the forefront of world-politics by the Washington Conference. What settlement, if any, will ultimately be arrived at, it is as yet impossible to foresee. There are, however, certain broad facts and principles which no wise solution can ignore, for which I shall try to give the evidence in the course of the following chapters, but which it may be as well to state briefly at the outset. First, the Chinese, though as yet incompetent in politics and backward in economic development, have, in other respects, a civilization at least as good as our own, containing elements which the world greatly needs, and which we shall destroy at our peril. Secondly, the Powers have inflicted upon China a multitude of humiliations and disabilities, for which excuses have been found in China's misdeeds, but for which the sole real reason has been China's military and naval weakness. Thirdly, the best of the Great Powers at present, in relation to China, is America, and the worst is Japan; in the interests of China, as well as in our own larger interests, it is an immense advance that we have ceased to support Japan and have ranged ourselves on the side of America, in so far as America stands for Chinese freedom, but not when Japanese freedom is threatened. Fourthly, in the long run, the Chinese cannot escape economic domination by foreign Powers unless China becomes military or the foreign Powers become Socialistic, because the capitalist system involves in its very essence a predatory relation of the strong towards the weak, internationally as well as nationally. A strong military China would be a disaster; therefore Socialism in Europe and America affords the only ultimate solution.

People might disagree with Russell’s socialism. Nevertheless, one hundred years after Russell wrote his books, historians at large basically hold the views Russell expressed in The Problem of China.

Russell’s fundamental realization above is that China as a society or polity merits analysis, but not as a state. After all, it stands to reason that it does not necessarily matter who happens to hold or claim a monopoly on legitimate force on a given day if politics is in tumult and the state is in semi-collapse—quite literally in China’s case. After President Li dissolved parliament in 1917, about half the Parliament moved South and set up a rival government in Canton. When Russell is writing his book, the two branches of government have effectively been sundered. Reading the history of this period 100 years, many names, events, coups, countercoups, and restorations come up. Despite their eventfulness and drama, Russell does not devote much discussion to these precisely because, it seems, they amount to mere drama. However involved for the people caught up in them, they are insignificant for the general outlook of the country. 

What Russell does note about Chinese politics is that southern factions tend to be more liberal and commercial, the northern factions more conservative and military, and that this is a genuine reflection of different regional orientations and attitudes. Russell thinks it would be better for China—as well as for Britain and the United States—that the south win out and come to govern. He considers the northern government in Beijing—which is the internationally recognized one—as instrumental to the Japanese and dominated by the military.[5] However, since the military governors, the tuchuns, who dominate it tend to be after their own pocket rather than some greater cause, this government is not necessarily a consequential one.

Instead, it is to social phenomena that Russell looks at for telltales. He often draws connections between China’s social realities and political ones. He considers the tuchuns’ avarice as rooted in a worldliness he deems an ancient and salient feature of the Chinese mentality. For this stridently secular thinker, this is not a strict condemnation. It makes China an altogether reasonable and moderate place where conflicts are not vehement and battles are not bloody, in contrast to the crusading fervor of other places.

Nonetheless, Russell deems the corruption and avarice of officials to be a serious impediment to the development of a modern and vigorous state, something he considers necessary. He imputes the avariciousness to that worldliness as well as to Confucian ideas of filial piety which prioritize family commitments over others.[6] However, he sees the potential for change:

I have been speaking of the Chinese as they are in ordinary life, when they appear as men of active and sceptical intelligence, but of somewhat sluggish passions. There is, however, another side to them: they are capable of wild excitement, often of a collective kind. I saw little of this myself, but there can be no doubt of the fact. The Boxer rising was a case in point, and one which particularly affected Europeans. But their history is full of more or less analogous disturbances. It is this element in their character that makes them incalculable, and makes it impossible even to guess at their future. One can imagine a section of them becoming fanatically Bolshevist, or anti-Japanese, or Christian, or devoted to some leader who would ultimately declare himself Emperor. I suppose it is this element in their character that makes them, in spite of their habitual caution, the most reckless gamblers in the world.

What else was Maoism but a very excited form of Bolshevism, stressing the collective?

Much of the book is about Young China, today’s students who will, per Russell, come to run the country. Russell again and again emphasizes the necessity of education. By education he means literacy among the masses and the inculcation of some Western concepts and knowledge among those with higher education. Foremost, this is in technical knowledge—for instance, better agricultural and arboricultural techniques—which Russell deems necessary for China’s advancement. He also thinks, with some reservations, that Western concepts like patriotism and certain ideas of discipline are needed. Russell is, philosophically, critical of both discipline and patriotism. Russell faults discipline with emphasizing actions without regard to its purpose, and patriotism with ascribing an importance to the fatherland to the exclusion of the rest of humanity—like, he considers, filial piety does to the family. Nevertheless, he thinks a certain patriotic spirit and commitment is needed to improve the administration and condition of the country. He hopes this will not lead to militarism and aggression as it has elsewhere.

Of course, students imbued with Western concepts did come to run China. Russell’s foresight does, however, seem to fail on one matter, the countryside. Russell’s views on development are essentially metropolitan in nature. This is in line with Russell’s own experience in China. He resided and taught in Beijing and once went to lecture in Changsha. It also conforms to contemporaneous thinking: many progressive people of the time; Edwardian Progressives, Bolsheviks, socialists….; put their hopes in an urban segment of society that was educated or could be educated, be they bureaucrats, factory workers, or something else. However, things turned out differently. The history of 20^th-century socialism and communism is one of transition from a movement in which urban workers and intellectuals and journalists were prominent—think of the Petrograd Soviet and Trotsky—to one where administrators and rural workers were—think of Khruschev, the kolkhoz, and the Soviet development of the periphery. Indeed, for those more familiar with the countryside, Russell’s thinking may have seemed Panglossian. At least it seemed so for at least one of the young Chinese men Russell makes so much of: Mao, then around university age, heard Russell speak at Changsha and wrote:   

In his lecture in Changsha, Russell ... took a position in favour of communism but against the dictatorship of the workers and peasants. He said that one should employ the method of education to change the consciousness of the propertied classes, and that in this way it would be necessary to limit freedom or to have recourse to war and blood revolution ... My objections to Russell’s viewpoint can be stated in a few words: ‘This is all very well as a theory, but it is unfeasible in practice.’[7]

Mao’s dictatorship was a woeful time and Russell’s ideas were not impossible. But Mao has a point. What would the cadres in whose coming Russell places his hopes; the dedicated but still contemplative, technically skilled, and erudite young men who will promote literacy; really mean for a tenant farmer in a faraway region of rural China?

Contrast with Today

Russell’s writing contrasts starkly with pieces written today. Political analysis today seldom pays much attention to the broader social context. Sometimes it neglects even the broader economic context. For instance, some analysts seem to have seriously thought that the sanctions put on Russia because of Ukraine would have short-term significance upon the conduct of the war itself. This ignored Russia’s size, healthy agricultural economy, and—in contrast to many Western countries—solid, if unsophisticated, industrial base. Even in the case of failed states, modern analyses seem more interested in who holds party and state office, and sometimes even not merely administrative practices. For instance, in Politics on the Edge. Rory Stewart relates, how a 400-page British government international development strategy for South Sudan, a place probably more fragmented than 1920s China and pitched in a conflict involving the struggles of pastoralist Nuer clans, mentioned ‘accountability’ 125 and ‘sustainability’ 145 times; ‘clan’, once; and ‘Nuer’ or ‘ox’, never.

Russell’s discussion—although unlike many of his contemporaries, Russell was never a racist—does betray some belief in the idea of national character. This is unsurprising for the 1920s, but today national character is a concept eschewed in serious analysis—with good reason. It can inflame vile prejudices and generate dangerous attitudes. Moreover, it is not very useful; it is not a strong predictor of political outcomes. The Koreans have two very different states. The Germans did. Britain, once heavily industrial and economically liberal, first established a fully-fledged welfare state and then went on to have an emphatically deindustrializing economy with Thatcher. 

Nonetheless, Russell’s discussion of national character remains useful for the exposition of current Chinese social facts. It matters little whether the Chinese are an “artist nation” or whether the passionate indignation Russell attributes to Westerners as opposed to the Chinese can really be ascribed to the Jewish influence on Western civilization, as Russell thinks. It matters very much that the Chinese have strong provincial identities, a profound feeling of national unity based on a common written language, a shared ethical consensus, a high regard for education, and many young, educated men—as Russell, then a professor at Peking University, observes—eager for Western knowledge, albeit more interested in political and economic theories rather than technical knowledge. Russell identifies this last as a legacy of Confucian education’s emphasis on moral and theoretical rather than practical education. Russell thinks this predilection predisposes China to Bolshevism.[8] Again, how far the predilection Russell observes can be ascribed to the formerly dominant educational system is up for grabs, but Russell’s observation of the predilection itself proved right. Mao was one of the eager students Russell mentions—and met. The Chinese Communist Party had just been founded in 1921. China’s search for theoretical panaceas ceased only about 80 years later with Deng Xiaoping.

Russell’s conclusions, in contrast with some of his contemporaries, are accurate despite his reliance on as tenuous a concept as national character because Russell never gets carried away with an idea. He deals with social facts but never lets go of modern political and economic realities. For instance, he dismisses a line of thinking that he describes as then current with the Japanese government: that a confrontation between the United States and Japan is inevitable but that the Japanese warrior spirit will win the day—whose falsehood would become evident by 1945—back in 1922:

The Japanese are firmly persuaded that they have no friends, and that the Americans are their implacable foes. One gathers that the Government regards war with America as unavoidable in the long run. The argument would be that the economic imperialism of the United States will not tolerate the industrial development of a formidable rival in the Pacific, and that sooner or later the Japanese will be presented with the alternative of dying by starvation or on the battlefield. Then Bushido will come into play, and will lead to choice of the battlefield in preference to starvation. Admiral Sato[91] (the Japanese Bernhardi, as he is called) maintains that absence of Bushido in the Americans will lead to their defeat, and that their money-grubbing souls will be incapable of enduring the hardships and privations of a long war. This, of course, is romantic nonsense. Bushido is no use in modern war, and the Americans are quite as courageous and obstinate as the Japanese. A war might last ten years, but it would certainly end in the defeat of Japan.

The International Context

Russell’s appreciation of current realities also mean that he understands that the questions of the day are not decided in Beijing, either by currents of opinion he discusses at length or by the individual statesmen and soldiers he ignores. China may be at the center of Far Eastern affairs and the backdrop to and source of the contentions of the Great Powers, but it is not the master of its own affairs. China as a state is not a player. It is rather the field the Great Powers play over. The framework of customs regulations and arrangements known as the Nine-Power-system further sets the conditions for the Great Powers actions. Those actions and the system’s nuts and bolts constitute Russell’s second axis of analysis and put China in the international context. Despite China's great history and civilization, this context and China’s significance to the great powers are economic. 

This appreciation means Russell avoids potential pitfalls. The Russian Revolution is the event of Russell’s time. Its impacts in the Far East were substantial. The Americans and Japanese occupied Vladivostok. White refugees flooded into Inner Manchuria. These events, combined with the predisposition in China for Bolshevism that Russell identifies, may have led one to consider some sort of Russian involvement in China. Yet Russell understands that Russia does not have an economic interest in China like the other powers do, and so, the Kremlin does not have a real and practical political interest there.  

Among those economically, and thus, politically, interested in China, Russell discerns a further distinction between what he calls the national capitalist powers (Japan and France—though there is not much discussion of France, the least influential of all the Great Powers in China) on one hand, and what he calls the commercial capitalist powers of Britain and the United States on the other. While Anglo-American interests are purely commercial, French and Japanese are also strategic. In the Japanese case, this is wholly so. Japanese economic interests in China have substantial military, economic, and demographic ramifications. 

While much of Russell’s work reads like a travel book or a long historical narrative, much of the rest reads like a transcript or investigative journalism. Russell dedicates much of his writing to the Great Powers’ politicking. Japan is the most active power in China and because Japanese interests are strategic and not just commercial, the Japanese government is especially involved with them. 

Much of The Problem of China is about the Japanese government. Here too Russell stands out. He observes certain key facts. The Meiji constitution is an example of Prussian Constitutionalism: a functioning legislature and cabinet but with the cabinet responsible solely to the monarch. This means Japanese governments can go on without the assent of the legislature, like German ones before the First World War. 

Yet, as Russell realizes, the Japanese system differs crucially from the antebellum German one. Although the kaiser could dismiss the chancellor at will and only the kaiser could dismiss the chancellor, the chancellor had to co-sign all edicts. Moreover, with the Germans, there was an element of collective responsibility and cabinet government since all other ministers were responsible to the chancellor as the chancellor was to the kaiser. 

In contrast, under the Japanese system Russell describes, ministers are accountable to the emperor individually. The prime minister’s authority over the others is at most nominal. At the same time, ministers all hail from their respective services. The navy minister is an admiral; the army minister, a general; the foreign minister, a diplomat. This means that despite the existence of a formal cabinet, Japan is really administered by a circle of individually quite independent senior statesmen checked only by each other and a biddable emperor who by longstanding tradition and habit does not take too close an interest in affairs of state. In further contrast to Wilhelmine Germany, Japan’s suffrage is qualified. Whatever democratic voice there is in public affairs is thus limited. Most saliently, the Japanese constitution is a gift freely bestowed by the emperor. The Mikado may derogate from it. He may even abrogate it. Therefore legislative and judicial check on the executive are severely limited; the legislature is not sovereign and anything that has somehow gotten royal assent cannot be against the law since the Mikado’s word is supreme. In short, Democracy and constitutionalism are very weak, and cabinet government is but a sham.

Dispensing with illusions, Russell can concentrate on consequential realities. If, as it is, Japanese policy is not decided and deliberated and enacted by a single authority but a clique of statesmen each acting from the vantage point of his own ministry and interest, Japanese policy is liable to incoherence or aggression. Since Japan’s government is by its nature scrappy and since by the nature of Japan’s interests Chinese affairs are a matter for Japanese government policy, Japan is aggressive and meddlesome in China. 

Japan’s political scrappiness is excellently illustrated by Japan’s decision, about twenty years later after Russell’s time of writing, to enter and then surrender in the Second World War. Tojo, the war minister, an effective officer but lacking in global vision, agitated for war. Togo, the foreign affairs minister, strongly opposed it. But Tojo’s side won the vote, and the emperor acceded to the wishes of the majority. Similarly, the Japanese cabinet was disunited about peace, even after the nuclear attacks. Only then, under the shadow of nuclear annihilation, did the emperor weigh in for surrender. This is the dynamic which belay militarism and what Japan’s political troubles were about. Russell’s clairvoyance is substantial. In 1922, the Second World War was a long way away, and Japan was a member of the League of Nations, and had only a short time ago fought alongside Britain and the United States in the First World War. The world had not yet seen the watershed moment that was the assassination of the Japanese prime minister—and China expert—Inukai Tsuyoshi had not happened. The armed forces did not dominate the government as they were to. The influences and dynamics which Russell identified had not yet manifested themselves as they would.

Contrast with Today

Here too, Russell’s approach contrasts with those employed today. Nowadays any analysis is almost obliged to dedicate some discussion to administrative hierarchies and the opinions of a constituency or faction, even if they admitted that reality could be quite different. It is hard to imagine somebody today dismissing a façade as daringly as Russell does.[9]

Style of the Book

Despite the rigor by which Russell comes to his conclusions, his process is quite diffused. He deals with questions as they arise and arrives at conclusions throughout the book. The book has chapters, but they relate to different domains like Industry or Education, or periods of history, or aspects of current affairs. The chapters, despite having some thematic cohesion, are not logical units, just opportunities for Russell to address questions relating to those aspects of Chinese life the chapter is about. The book is not a long essay or sequence of scholastic reasoning or a white paper. As such, analysis is not forced into preconceived patterns, something Russell warns against. Yet, it also makes the book somewhat repetitive and amorphous. The relationship between a lack of illusions and therefore clairvoyance on one hand, and amorphousness and repetition are not accidental. Russell is not trying to get things to fit in a box.

Present Implications

It is precisely because Russell is not trying to get things to fit in a box that it is hard to get analysis like Russell’s today. Academics are in the business of theorizing and statesmen are in the business of exercising. An academic is impelled to relate a question he studies to something else or to the whole. A statesman is impelled to relate it to a practical course of action, preferably an easy or well-known one. Neither are likely to be very pleased with reading something amorphous and eccentric. Long, repetitive, and eccentric reading can especially be noisome for the statesman; he has work to do. The implication of all this is that neither is well-disposed to studying a matter on its own terms. Quite immediately, one is trying to fit questions into a framework and the other into an action plan.

This problem is aggravated by the setup of the ordinary democracy, with politicians who take the decisions and experts who advise them. Politicians are often too busy or insufficiently knowledgeable to delve too deeply into policymaking. At the same time, experts are often hesitant to pronounce on policy; it is often beyond their province and it may seem like they are stepping on the politicians’ feet.  So, while politicians often must turn to experts to essentially formulate policy, the experts’ response must not sound like the policy proposal or policy opinion the politicians really need, but merely technical advice. Consequently, experts cannot contribute the full advice they can while politicians, instead of the detailed action plan they seek, get listings of facts from which they can infer unstated and vague recommendations. 

So, while politicians are held responsible for bad policies, this might often not the true problem, which might stem from elsewhere on the grapevine. On the obverse, precisely it is hard for many people to pronounce effectively on a matter, those who are still able to get to run the show. For instance, it is a matter of public consensus in the United States that American neoconservative policies regarding Iraq, and more recently Afghanistan, failed. Yet many people involved in them remain the people to go to, simply because they are the sole voices from within government with the knowledge, experience, and confidence to speak up and hold forth about the issues of the day.

People must be liberated to think and pronounce policy more effectively. At the same time, they must be made more accountable when they get things wrong, not to persecute them for having been mistaken, which is understandable, but so we do not get things wrong in the future. Equivocation is generally unhelpful in the search of truth and effectiveness.  Russell demonstrates the importance of having a hard look at the facts.