Tuesday, July 26, 2016

秦晖:缅甸拒绝中国建坝之惑


秦晖 清华大学历史系教授
2011930,在缅甸国内政治体制酝酿变革的气氛中,缅甸政府宣布在本届政府任期内搁置原本由中资公司开发建设的伊洛瓦底江上规划中最大的水电项目——密松水电站。这消息在我们国内引起很大震动。这次到克钦邦,与各方面了解事情原委,并且考察了密松现场,形成了一些看法。
反密松情绪在缅甸基础广泛
此行的第一点感受,就是对密松项目的反感在缅甸确实有非常广泛的基础。缅族与克钦人,缅族中的现政府与处于在野地位的民主派,克钦人中反政府的克钦独立军和接受政府招安的新民主军,缅甸各族与华人、宗教人士与世俗精英、宗教人士中的基督教徒与佛教徒、世俗政治中传统上亲西方的、亲军政府的和亲中国的各派势力,他们在许多方面观点有分歧,乃至有尖锐的对立。但是提起密松工程,他们大都持反对意见,对政府的搁置之举也是支持的。
这当然不是说没人赞成密松工程。军政府当初是全力支持、推动密松项目和整个伊洛瓦底江上游梯级开发计划(所谓七坝计划)的。但是了解缅甸的人都知道,自1962年军人执政以来,缅甸军政府一直存在时激时缓的内部斗争,1988年奈温被军内政变所推翻,缅甸社会主义被否定,2004年强硬保守派丹瑞对温和开明派钦钮发动清洗,在民族、民主问题上全面倒退。而每次斗争中的各方在民主与政治改革问题、民族与联邦体制问题上都有明显不同态度,在经济发展和国际关系方面也是如此。
最近缅甸的变革能够启动,缅族民主派、少数民族地方势力和国际社会的压力固然有作用,但在近年来僧侣革命被残酷镇压、果敢事件中对民族武装动蛮得逞、而美国等西方国家又因金融危机和阿拉伯阿富汗伊朗等问题焦头烂额之际,这三种压力如果说没有减轻,至少也谈不上加强,这种情况下变革仍然发生,应该说军政府内部斗争的因素至关重要。而在密松项目的问题上军政府内部显然也有分歧。在如今的变革中力挺密松的丹瑞一派已处下风,如果说还没有失权的话,也显然已经逐渐失语,社会上几乎听不到他们为密松工程辩护的声音,就连军方办的《缅甸新光报》,现在也出现了反密松言论。
与军政府直接对立并且实际上处于战争状态的克钦独立组织(KIO)过去强烈反对密松工程,曾声明如果军政府和中资公司一意孤行,就会引起内战,密松工地过去发生的一系列爆炸等破坏事件也被怀疑是他们干的。但我们这里最近却有人说,他们只是基于凡是敌人拥护的我们就要反对的立场给军政府捣乱,其实他们是支持水电开发的。
的确,作为多年以来实际控制克钦邦大部分地方并负有社会治理与经济发展责任的KIO,在很大程度上其实是一个地方自治政府,他们看问题的角度与非政府组织不一样。同时他们过去的意识形态也有较多的进化论色彩,不像宗教机构那样唯心,更不像一些环保组织那么敬畏自然1990年代后他们虽然淡化了意识形态,但为了在与优势的政府军的对抗中求得生存和发展,他们获取经济来源的愿望是很迫切、甚至可以说是急功近利的。开矿、伐木、淘金等当代环保组织经常抨击的破坏环境的行为,他们干得并不少,并且也曾因此被各种非政府组织批评。
就水电而言,KIO主政的克钦第二特区政府曾经相当积极,而这个背靠中缅边界、别无国际通道的特区,稍大一点的项目都只能与中国人合作,因此在引进中资开发水电方面他们甚至还可以说是先驱。但是一些中资公司目光短浅只抱粗腿,为巴结军政府就抛弃了他们,对这种讨好大朋友,出卖小朋友的做派他们是很生气的,并且也为此改变了对一些项目的态度。例如大唐公司修建的太平江水电站,原来就是该特区引进中资,在自己的控制区开发的,特区方面也投入了自己的资金,但后来军政府插足进来,中资转而与军政府合作,迫使克钦方面退出,而且让军政府以保护工程为名出兵控制了电站附近地区。克钦方面不仅蒙受经济损失,还丢失了地盘,其气愤可想而知。于是对太平江水电站改取破坏政策,多次出兵骚扰,致使电站瘫痪。这类案例显然就是出于凡是敌人拥护的我们就要反对,并不是反对太平江电站本身。
不过,这样的解释可以用于太平江,却不能用于密松。虽然KIO并不是反坝派,也曾热心于水电并与中资合作,但具体对密松项目,他们也从来是反对的。其原因后将详谈。更清楚的是,如今缅甸政府已经改变主意要叫停密松坝了,但KIO并没有按凡是敌人反对的我们就要拥护的逻辑变成密松的拥护派,相反他们的反应有两种:一是认为虽然这是迟到的决定,但克钦邦的各族人民仍然表示欢迎。二是怀疑叫停是假的,密松工程还在暗中进行,换言之,他们的态度是敌人说反对不算,我们要求他们真反对。应该说,历史上KIO一直是亲中的,今天他也不想得罪中国,如果中资公司能够平等相待,今后合作的机会还会有,但不可能是在密松了。
这里要指出的是:即便是克钦民族中最亲军政府的派别,即已接受缅军政府改编为边防军的前缅共武装新民主军NDAK),其前领导人丁英因依靠缅军政府平定内部异己,已完全成为丹瑞的傀儡,甚至加入丹瑞的政党作为国会议员常驻仰光,克钦其他派别视之为丹瑞的说客,但他也从未发表过赞成密松工程的言论。而新民主军的其他人士则明确反对密松项目,如新民主军前副司令吴茂银先生在与笔者的谈话中就指出,中资搞的密松项目是中国人在这里干的最失人心的一件事。
后面要提到,密松的神圣地位是克钦人反对筑坝的一个重要理由。这种山川崇拜本是克钦人古老万物有灵信仰的体现,一般克钦人有这种传统观念并不奇怪。但是从19世纪末基督教传入克钦地区后,教会是一直致力于祛除种种落后信仰原始崇拜的。笔者与当地最有影响的基督教派之一克钦浸礼会KBC)一位负责人昆桑牧师谈话时,他就侃侃而谈,讲了一大堆基督教传入后如何使克钦人摆脱了各种巫术迷信愚昧陋习的故事。
但我注意到,就在这间KBC的办公室内,与圣像一起悬挂的就有在密支那到处可见的二水环山神圣密松的中堂画。于是我问:您也觉得密松是个神圣之地吗?您认为克钦人的密松崇拜是否属于教会需要反对的原始崇拜呢?我知道您也是反对密松工程的,那么除了环保和经济利益方面的理由外,您认为也有文化与信仰方面的理由吗?他正色说道:作为基督徒我当然不认为密松那里藏有什么神灵,但是作为克钦人,我仍然认为它是我们民族精神的象征,这和基督教不矛盾,军政府和中资公司不跟我们商量就拿它去赚钱,我们当然不同意,更不用说它还破坏环境……”
缅甸华人社会的背景也极复杂,有大陆背景,有国军背景,有果敢、佤邦背景,等等。仰光、曼德勒等地的华人有的已经几代居缅,军政府又长期实行强制同化政策,他们中的新一代缅化程度已经很高,很多人已经不会讲汉语。而果敢、佤邦华人长期在缅甸政府鞭长莫及、中国影响却无处不在的缅共及其衍生的民地武地区生活,绝大部分不懂缅语,他们不仅完全用汉语中文,而且是全球华人世界(除新移民外)中罕见的不用繁体字和国语腔、完全适应当代大陆语言氛围的族群。这些年来缅北动乱不安,他们很多人富裕后都移居仰光、曼德勒等缅内地城市,形成一个特殊群体。由于背景特殊,他们不仅尚未融入缅族主流社会,与本地华人也有隔阂。
然而总的来讲,华人在各个族群中比较能干和富裕,在那个敏感社会里他们大多小心谨慎,埋头挣钱,不问政治。而中缅经贸关系的发展是近年来很多华人致富的机会,他们自然珍惜。所以他们对中国和缅甸军政府都极力维持友好关系,而与中国及缅甸军政府不喜欢的人和事都保持距离。近年来缅族不满军政府的民主化情绪高涨、各少数民族维权意识也在加强,而相对来说,华人却成为对这二者都最不关心的族群。通常他们很少谈到密松这样的话题,但是如果谈到,他们也大都认为这事做得不对,包括那些与中国和缅甸军政府关系密切的华社精英也如此。
曼德勒福庆宫孔子学堂校长李祖清先生就是这样。自少年时代就非常认同新中国的李先生对今天的中国和缅甸军政府都很为称赞,对中缅友好十分热心,经常奔走于两国之间,与两国一些政要也相识。他对民主化并不看好,对历史上与缅当局有过节的果敢、佤邦人颇有微词,在油气管道等缅甸社会有争议的话题上都为中缅当局辩护。在与笔者交谈中他认为中国对缅几十年来好事千千万,只有两件事肯定做错了。一件就是文革时鼓动缅甸华人学生搞红卫兵宣传革命造反,我那时也积极得很,做了傻事;另一件就是密松工程,不晓得谁出的这种馊主意。在哪里修电站不好,偏要修到人家最忌讳(修建)的地方
总之,缅政府毁约赢得民心,中资忽视民意惨遭损失,网上有网友这样的评论,这次在缅我感到确实如此。
为什么密松工程如此不得人心
何以会形成这样的局面?
如今反对密松工程的人们经常说,密松水坝会破坏环境,影响某些鱼类的生存;会淹没大片森林,影响下游水情;坝址位于地质断层,地震时会有垮坝危险……以环保理由来反对大型水坝工程,在欧美比较流行,这些民主国家已经基本没有强制拆迁、野蛮征地之类的人文之弊,他们最关心的是环保,最能引起他们共鸣的也是环保。因此在密松问题上,我们听到最多的也是这类担忧。
这些担忧很多不是没有道理。但是第一,这些理由可以用来反对几乎一切水坝,可是事实上人们不能一个坝不建,所以利弊是需要权衡的:如果这里不能建,那么哪里能建?这里建坝相对弊大,哪里相对弊小?这是需要考虑替代方案的。如今一些环保组织几乎从来只是说哪里不能建坝,就没有说哪里能建的。从社会博弈的角度讲这也可以理解。因为有另一些利益集团几乎从来只说哪里能建坝,就没有说不能建的。在一个文明社会两者会有正常的博弈,环保组织不能阻止一切坝,但可以阻止相对最糟糕的坝,而对立方不能想建哪个坝就建哪个坝,但相对利大弊小的坝还是会克服阻力得以修建的。双方都不能尽遂所愿,社会却可以在妥协中进步。所以环保组织的作用应该肯定,但具体就某个工程而言,环保组织的一面之词也不能一锤定音。
第二,上述问题有的是可以通过修改方案、追加投资、增添一些设施来解决的,并非只有照原设计建不能建两个选择。此外有的问题也未必就像传说的那么严重。例如所谓地震垮坝的危险,我曾对一些缅甸朋友说,断裂带是个宽泛的概念,并非所有断裂带都是地震高发区,而且据我所知,密松主坝设计为混凝土面板堆石坝,这种坝型不像重力坝、拱坝那样的一堵墙,它的边坡平缓坝基极宽,因而比较抗震,即便受破坏也有个过程,瞬间垮塌使下游猝不及防的可能是几乎没有的。
还有的事确属讹传,例如我在某位朋友那里看到一张讲述密松危害的地图,里面把计划中的密松水库画得非常大,一直淹到克钦邦北部的葡萄附近。我笑说葡萄的海拔比密松能高出300多米,要能淹到那里,这世界上还没有那么高的坝呢。
第三,所说的种种弊病有的是矛盾的。例如库区人烟稀少,有人就说这是难得的原始自然生态不能破坏,但是如果人烟稠密,那么移民的危害就被认为非常严重。这样无论人烟如何,水库反正都不能建了。其实这两种问题是互为替代的,而且需要权衡。我觉得像缅甸这样的专制国家,强制圈地移民的人文灾难要比淹没一片无人区严重得多,而在没有这种问题的发达国家,人们却更喜欢保护无人的原生态大自然。我一直认为如果还有一条河流修大坝的弊病最少,那就是几乎全程奔流于峡谷、沿河人口稀少的怒江(即缅甸的萨尔温江)了。当然即便移民再少,也不能说他们就活该牺牲,支持他们维权争取更大补偿是对的,但这就是社会问题,不是生态问题了。我的这种想法,与搞环保的朋友也是有分歧的。
但是在克钦邦走访以后,我发现虽然在反密松舆论中环保的声音最大,实际上密松工程最惹人反感的原因还不在这里。
在克钦邦各地,你会发现全景拍摄或绘制的二水环山密松河曲的形象无处不在。克钦人的各种公共场所,如克钦文化会馆、目瑙场、议事厅挂着它,密支那大学那样的文化单位挂着它,教会、寺庙里也可以见到它,很多人家或商店用它作中堂画,甚至我们住宿的华人开设的密支那双龙宾馆,尽管是中式装修,大堂里也醒目地挂着二水环山图。这个象征元素还广泛出现在克钦地区的招贴、工艺品、各种节庆仪式和日常美术中。甚至在克钦以外的缅甸其他地区,人们对它也不陌生。仰光中国大使馆附近就有一家密松餐厅,以缅、克钦和中文(作蜜颂)三语的招牌和二水环山的图像为装饰,据说使馆还常有人光顾。给人的印象是:密松在这里就像富士山在日本、金刚山在朝鲜,具有崇高的心理地位。
为什么会这样?我们专门去那里走了一趟。密松”(Myitsone)是克钦语汇流处之意,位于密支那城北42公里,伊洛瓦底江的东源恩梅开江和西源迈立开江在此汇合,缅甸的母亲河伊洛瓦底就此开端。两源流域莽莽苍苍,就是当年中国远征军抗战史上著名的野人山,而密松就是从密支那平原进山的口子。从汇流处西侧山上望去,两源汇流后迎面奔腾而来,到山前又掉头东去,形成一个巨大河曲,景色非常壮观。密松工程的拦河主坝位于河曲东头,溢洪副坝则在汇流上游的恩梅开江口,切过山口泄洪于河曲之下,纯从水工角度讲,这个枢纽的布局比较合理。但是如果考虑人文因素,在此地建坝是欠考虑的。根据当地克钦人的传说,密松是龙的父亲及他的儿子HkraiNawngHkraiGam(就是东西两源)的诞生地,人们相信如果这龙脉被破坏,龙就会不安,从而祸及众生。这当然是信不信由你,但反正克钦人是信的。而他们才是这里的主人,不是吗?
而从历史上讲,当初藏缅语先民(包括缅人与克钦人)从青藏高原南下,就是在这里走出崇山峻岭,进入伊洛瓦底江河谷,从而诞生了后来的文明。据说当初克钦酋长就是在密松建立了第一个部落联盟的。所以即便不管神话,克钦人也有理由把密松当成自己的文明发祥地来崇敬。
当然,密松的这种崇高地位会不会因修水库而受损?我当初对此是疑惑的。我曾经问当地的作家克塔先生:无论建不建坝,密松是搬不走的。在密松如果出现一个人工湖,难道它就因此不再是圣地了吗?就像耶路撒冷,那里也有许多现代建筑,可是这不会影响人们去朝拜哭墙,就像麦加最近还建了城铁,那也不会影响穆斯林去朝觐天方啊。克塔反问道:那么你们中国人心中的圣地,比方说(他想了一会儿,就其所知说道)长城,你们会不会修个水库把它淹了呢?
我答道:别的我不敢说,如果要讲长城还确实有这样的事,你知道中国有个潘家口水库,就是把长城的一段,还是著名的关门给淹在了水下,现在那里水下长城还成了景点了。
克塔有点生气:我不理解你们为什么会这样,但是我们不能接受这种事发生在密松。停顿一下他又解释说:也许和耶路撒冷、麦加不同的是,我们克钦人没有圣殿、天房那样的人工建筑作为民族信仰象征物。密松是以其自然状态被人崇敬的,成了一个大人工湖,它就不是密松了!就是要修水库,为什么就非得修在这个地方?还根本不和我们商量,几个缅族军头和中国老板说修就修了?
密松之惑(中)
关键在于根本不和我们商量
其实,听来听去,我觉得根本不和我们商量才是问题的关键,这和昆桑牧师说的军政府和中资公司不跟我们商量就拿它去赚钱,我们当然不同意是一个道理。密松是神圣的,但神圣密松是否不能有任何人工建筑?我想即便在克钦人中也未必看法一致。密松汇流处现在就有新建的佛塔、教堂和一些简陋的旅游设施,如果盛名传出,将来这里变得和国内许多旅游地那样游人如织熙熙攘攘,那会不会也影响到二水环山的自然圣洁?我想,那时肯定会有这种抱怨,但不会引起强大的反对声浪。原因很简单:就是因为这种情况如果出现,那肯定也是当地人民愿意的。但如果按如今水电站这种开发模式,由军政府把密松圈禁起来霸占为官办旅游公司,把当地百姓强行赶走,再委托一些外国人来经营——如果这样搞,那就会与电站一样招致千夫所指了。
有朋友告知,实际上密松过去的名气没有如今这么大,二水环山的形象也没有如今这么随处可见。如今这种现象其实在一定程度上是军政府与中资公司的行为引起的反弹:密松现在似乎不仅是克钦文明发祥地的象征,还在某种程度上成了克钦民族抵抗专横维护尊严的象征。
对于这些朋友,你跟他讲环保问题没有那么严重,将来的水电站能给你们的政府财政增加多少钱,那是没有用的,尤其是后一理由只能增加他们的反感。
从克钦人的角度想,以独裁、腐败闻名的军政府圈占我们的土地,把当地百姓强行赶走而只给极低的补偿,然后把这里交给一家外国公司,建起的电站按BOT方式(即建设经营转让,是指政府通过契约授予私营企业,包括外国企业,以一定期限的特许专营权,许可其融资建设和经营特定的公用基础设施,并准许其通过向用户收取费用或出售产品以清偿贷款,回收投资并赚取利润;特许权期限届满时,该基础设施无偿移交给政府,编者注),由外国公司经营50年,生产的电力90%输往外国;当然外国公司为此会给军政府一大笔好处(政府财政收入),但过去从来没有在克钦地区搞过公共福利,只是派兵屠杀、抢掠我们的军政府得到这些好处与我们有何关系?那不就是使他们更有能力扩充军备镇压我们吗?外国公司与军政府不是在狼狈为奸吗?
在缅族人看来,密松当然未必是龙脉,但作为母亲河的发源地也具有一定的象征意义(只是没有克钦人那么强烈),军政府在克钦人看来是征服者,在缅族百姓中同样不得人心,这在最近的变革中已经越来越清楚。这个独裁集团过去屠杀克钦人和镇压缅族民众的民主运动同样残酷,因此密松工程给军政府带来的好处同样未必是给民众的好处,中资公司与军政府的交易不仅违背克钦民意,也违背缅族民意。因此在克钦地区修建一个可能对中下游缅族地区造成巨大影响的大水库,缅族民众也是有顾虑的。在缅族人关于环境的种种抗议中可能就包含了这种不便明说的担心,因此他们抱怨的核心同样是根本不和我们商量
而从中资公司的立场讲,密松工程是中缅合作的,代表缅甸方面的只能是军政府而不可能是反对党或民地武。军政府同意我们独立经营50年,我们给他们相应的回报,这是两国间正常的平等交易、互利合同。关于当地老百姓的补偿,我们给军政府的回报已经包含了这笔钱,在我们看来也不算少。至于军政府如何把这笔钱给老百姓,老百姓是否被强迫征地、野蛮拆迁,这是他们的内政,与我们无关。公司只管开发,不与百姓谈判,由政府出面搞征地拆迁,我们在国内也从来是这样搞的,怎么能说是欺负缅甸人或者克钦人?
关于缅北和克钦地区的内政
这里显然涉及到一些在我们这里的语境中至今无解的问题,即主权是否高于人权主权是否只能或只应该由统治者来代表?政府意志是否等于国民意志?与一个独裁政府达成交易去做该国国民普遍反对的事,就是不干涉内政吗?但是,笔者认为在这里可以越过这些敏感问题,因为密松电站所在的克钦地区情况是有它的特殊性的。
这是因为包括克钦邦在内的缅北地区的现状实际上是与几十年来我国政府在这里的强大影响密切相关的。
缅甸是个多民族国家,历史上孟族、掸族和缅族都曾在今缅甸版图内建立过相对强大的王国,但没有哪个王国曾经直接管理过今天缅北的所有地区,尤其是克钦地区。当然南边这些王国与北边中国的元明清等朝势力的影响都曾达到过这里的许多地方,今天基于不同国家立场对谁的影响更强可能会见仁见智,实际上在不同时代这种影响也是不断进退的。但毋庸置疑的是,当近代意义上的国际关系开始在中缅之间形成时,缅甸已是英国的殖民地。真正把控制延伸到缅北并与中国发生矛盾的是英国人,而且英国殖民势力处于扩张期,相应的就是中国势力的退缩。然而中国与亲中国的当地土著一直在反抗,边界的划分也长期未定。1914年英国以印缅共同宗主的身份提出了麦克马洪线,这条线的中印段现在基本上是中印东段实际控制线,但我国并未承认。而中缅段在1960年实际上成为中缅两国正式划定的北段国界以前,中国也是不承认的,当时中国主张的是更靠外的一条界线,包括了历史上曾是中国属地的一些地区,今天的密松恰好就在这条界线上。
当然在抗战以前由于国力孱弱,当时的中国政府实际无力控制这片地区,因此如今有人讥为地图开疆。但是当时英国人对今缅甸境内各族实行严格的分而治之,不允许缅族、哪怕是臣属于英国的缅族势力进入,所以那时这些地区的克钦等民族受英国影响固然很大(克钦人使用拉丁字母克钦文,并绝大多数信基督教,英文教育比缅文教育发达,至今不少地方懂英文的克钦人还比懂缅文的多),受中国影响,甚至受掸人影响(克钦与掸历史上就有混居现象,英治时对缅人进入克钦地区极力排斥,对掸人则相对宽松,今天这里的掸语地名很多就体现了这类历史因素)也很可观,但是缅族的影响却是微乎其微。
中缅先后卷入的抗日战争又带来了新变化。一方面在抗战前期英国置身事外,中国却因沿海被封锁,严重依赖缅甸国际通道,被迫接受英国要挟,未经边界谈判就临时通过换文承认了英国控制的既成事实,从而有了所谓“1941年线(主要涉及掸邦北界)的说法。另一方面抗战后期英美卷入,日本侵占缅甸,中国远征军入缅作战,以蒋介石为司令、美国将军史迪威为参谋长、而英国人参与甚少的中印缅战区成立,缅北控制权因而经历了剧烈的变化。1942年中美中英宣布废除以往的不平等旧约,签订平等新条约,其中的中英新约并未肯定“1941年线边界未定成为公认的事实。而在实际控制方面,中国远征军不仅在战时一度控制了大部分争议地区,而且由于果敢汉族土司宣布内附,重庆政府予以接受和正式委任,中国军队进入佤邦,以及1946年中国军队为修建第二中印公路(又称新中印公路,即今腾密公路)留驻密支那及克钦地区等情势,抗战后中国对这些地区仍保有着强大的影响力乃至控制力。尽管国民党政府后来忙于打内战,并未积极扩大这种控制力,但把这个时期的状况仍然讥为与抗战前一样的地图开疆,显然是不符合事实的。这个时期的许多争议地区不仅在中国地图上划在中国一侧,而且实际上也控制在中国人和认同中国的势力手里。
而英国势力在抗战后虽然重返缅北一些地区,但却远远未能恢复战前旧观。一是战前旧观本来就没能通过条约获得法理支持。二是不仅很多地方仍有中国军队留驻,另一些地方也在战时乱局中为地方民族势力(包括亲中的和不亲中但也不附英的势力)控制。加上战后不久缅甸就于1947年独立,英国仓促退出缅甸,其在缅北控制的一些地方也未能完成移交,更何谈其他地区了。
不仅英国在殖民时期搞分而治之阻止缅族势力进入这些地区,导致当地与缅族的传统关系本来就弱于与英、中的关系,战时的多数时段由于当地民族追随中英两国抗日,克钦人军队尤其在抗日中立下赫赫战功,而缅族的民族主义者却在很长一段时期错估形势,企图通过联日反英争取独立,因此受到日本利用,不但站在了中英的对立面,而且也和与中英同舟共济的克钦等缅北民族加深了对立。尽管日本战败前夕以昂山将军为代表的缅族民族主义者终于认清形势举兵反正,避免了像印度的鲍斯势力那样在战后被淘汰出局,得以保留了战后缅族代言人的资格,并且在战后的反英斗争中与同样争取自立的缅北少数民族有了联合的可能,但是历史的阴影终难消除,缅族想要继承英国人在缅北的势力并非易事,何况这种势力在抗战中也已大幅削弱。
边界条约与缅共革命
在这种情况下,缅甸民族主义政治家们主要的思路有二:一是通过尽量宽松的联邦制,以向少数民族放权来换取他们对联邦国家的认同。二是打中国牌,借助中国的力量来搞定缅北。昂山本人力推第一种方式,于1947年独立前夕与多个少数民族势力签订了彬龙协定。该协定不但给予各少数民族以极大的自治权,而且规定10年后这些民族如果仍无法与缅族共处,可以选择退出联邦。这就是今天缅甸各少数民族要求自治的法理理由。但即便条件如此优惠,仍有一些少数民族不愿接受。而更为不幸的是在彬龙协议刚签订不久,昂山将军就被暗杀,继任的领导人并未正式宣布废除这个协定,但却不予实行,使协定实际上成为废纸,导致少数民族强烈不满。
昂山之后的领导人吴努等转而借助中国牌,希望利用中国政权更迭之际,借新政权的力量消除旧政权在缅北的力量,于是缅甸成为最早承认新中国的非共产党国家之一。而此前在中国内战末期,国民党的败军退至边境争议地区,强化了抗战后中国人对当地的控制。这虽然在南段边境(即东掸邦、佤邦一带)最为明显,北段的克钦地区其实也是如此。作为中国内战的延续,1952年新中国的解放军也进入这些地区与国民党作战。于是缅北出现了中国的国共两军和各个民族势力各据一方的局面,除了几个点外,缅甸中央政府对边境几无控制能力。
而当时的新中国迫切需要外部承认,对缅甸政府相当感激。到1950年代末60年代初,虽然新中国根基已固,需要承认的迫切性已经缓解,但当时国内因人祸导致的大饥荒和其他极左做法引起云南许多地方出现边民外逃,因此也需要解决边界问题。在这几年的边界谈判中,中国政府基本是以中缅段麦克马洪线和“1941年线为基础,承认了缅方对绝大部分争议地区的主权要求,只有片马和班洪两个点,因历史上的抗英事件曾导致舆论沸腾,在国人心中有强烈的记忆,得以留在了中国版图内。在其余地区,中国政府不但应缅甸的要求撤回了1952年后进驻的解放军,而且在撤军后缅甸政府仍然无力填补真空的情况下,应缅方要求出兵争议地区击败了国民党军队,再把地方移交缅甸。就这样,一批中国人赶走了另一批中国人,不仅在地图上而且也在实际控制方面把当地交了出去。这个故事主要发生在佤邦,但在克钦地区也如此,笔者此次在密支那见到前缅共克钦族老干部吴茂银,老人就讲述了当时他的家乡其培一带中国人赶走中国人的故事。
这样划定了中缅边界后,缅甸控告当时的台湾当局侵略缅甸领土也就有了明确的法律依据,在缅甸向联合国(微博)告状后,仍未被解放军赶走的一些国民党残军也在国际压力下被迫撤离前争议地区。而缅甸当时甚至还提出修改麦克马洪线,进一步索取该线中国一侧的独龙江地区,中国政府做自己的内部工作表示可以考虑,因为我们反正不承认麦克马洪线,所以我们虽然愿意以该线为基础,但缅甸越过该线提出要求则是可以的。虽然后来缅方急于结案而收回了修改要求,但中国政府这种对不承认的解释也实在让人叹为观止。
但不管怎样,中缅边界问题总算是解决了。如果从此两国果然互不干涉内政,后来的许多故事也就不会发生。尽管1962年后缅甸军人政变废除了不成熟的民主,独裁的军政府推行缅甸式社会主义激化了社会矛盾与民族矛盾,即使在没有中国因素的克伦、克耶地区也出现了反抗,但是真正大规模的抗争还是中国支持下的缅共发动的。1960年代,刚刚解决了云南境外蒋军残部骚扰问题的中国在极左思潮控制下又急于发动世界革命,以人力物力大规模支持缅共开展武装夺取政权的革命。但内地的缅共武装不久被打垮,缅共的人民军集中到缅北,先后在背靠中国的沿边一带形成了东北军区、中部军区、815军区与101军区等大片割据地带。它们是当时缅甸境内最大的反政府势力,也是今天缅北几支主要的民地武之前身。这些割据的中国背景今天已经不是什么秘密,缅共中的中国知青故事甚至已经成了知青史上最热门的话题之一。
公平地说,当时中国并没有收复失地的民族主义动机。中国支持缅共与缅甸政府打仗当然很难说是不干涉内政,但也很难说是国家之间的侵略。中国是打着国际主义(实际上就是左派的普世价值)和世界革命的旗号干预缅甸局势的。缅北的人民军虽然基本上是中国出钱出枪甚至出人(不仅派出顾问,大量干部战士是越境参加革命的中国人,甚至缅族的缅共领导层也曾长期居住中国并从中国返回),但中国并没有干涉缅共领导层的所谓大缅族主义。在缅北实际浴血奋战的非缅族将士与缅共高层的矛盾日渐发展。加上国际国内大气候的变化,尤其是改革开放后的中国大幅度改变对外政策,决定与缅甸军政府修好,缅共因而被抛弃。到1989年缅共终于彻底失败并且不复存在。但无论是缅甸军政府,还是中国对此都没有做好善后工作,使得前缅共的四个军区蜕变而来的四支民地武与联邦政府的关系一直处在不稳定状态。
西方背景还是中国背景
这里还要说说与密松问题关系很大的克钦邦最强民地武克钦独立军(KIA)。克钦独立军及其党(克钦独立组织,KIO)其政权(KIC)并非出自缅共余部,而是创建以来就打民族主义旗号。而在很多中国人看来克钦人似乎又是缅北各民族中最为西化的一支(多信基督教,拉丁化文字由西方传教士创制,英语较为普及),因此克钦独立组织强烈反对密松工程的消息传出后,许多国人便认定该组织有西方背景,是受西方唆使反对中国。其实这是极大的误解。
笔者这次在克钦邦访谈的政治人物都是亲缅政府派系和前缅共衍生派系的,因为战争状态造成的不便,未能直接接触KIO的人。但是这些并非KIO成员的受访者都对所谓KIO的西方背景之说嗤之以鼻。根据他们的介绍,克钦人近代史上受西方影响是不假,但这种影响和在中国一样,除了带来基督教,还带来了马克思主义和反殖民、民族自决等思潮。创建KIO的许多老一代克钦知识分子不但是马克思主义者,而且相当亲华。当初他们成立了克钦共产党并到中国寻求支持。但是中国告诉他们根据中国认为的组织原则,一个国家只能有一个共产党,要求他们必须合并于缅共才能获得支持。然而,这些克钦共产主义者亲华却不亲缅,不愿加入缅共。既然中共反对成立克钦共,他们就只能另想名号,于是就成了KIOKachinIndependentOrgani-sation)。
同时也有一些克钦民族主义者,虽然对马克思主义不感兴趣,但为了对抗缅甸军政府寻求民族自治之路,希望得到中国的支持,当听说中国只能支持缅共后,这些人为了获得支持也就加入了缅共。丁英、吴茂银等人都是这样从KIO变成缅共的。所以缅共与KIO那时其实是你中有我,我中有你。
那时缅共虽然在党内搞大缅族主义,党外也搞统一战线,宣传革命成功后也会实行民族自治。因此KIO也加入了缅共主导的统一战线,并且因此经由缅共间接地获得中国的支持,包括军事援助。至今KIA在克钦邦和掸邦北部的控制区还是沿中国边界一线延伸,其首府拉咱更是中缅边界上的重要口岸,和中国的那邦一水之隔,镇上充满中国情调。所以,与其说KIO西方背景,毋宁说她的中国背景要强烈得多。
但是KIO和并非KIO的许多克钦人,包括当年的缅共成员一样对我们如今的许多做法都十分不理解,以致强烈不满,密松工程就是一个爆发点。 (经济观察报)
秦晖:缅甸拒绝中国建坝之惑(下)
2012021908:42南方网秦晖我要评论(54)
字号:T|T
原标题:密松之惑
秦晖 清华大学教授
我们倒想亲西方,可是办得到吗?
这些克钦人说:克钦民族如果能独立当然好,但我们都知道做不到。如果能够加入中国或者印度我们也愿意。当初中国要是在边界划分时不把我们划给缅甸,也就没有现在的问题。既然划归了缅甸,我们只希望缅甸政府能够实行彬龙协议,善待我们,允许我们自治。但是中国却号召我们起来革命,推翻缅甸政府。我们响应号召参加了革命,中国却又与缅甸军政府言归于好,这让我们怎么办?中国只让缅共的德钦巴登顶等人到中国养老,却把我们扔给军政府去蹂躏。在万般无奈中我们接受了钦钮(缅甸军政府开明派领导人)的条件,实现了和平,好不容易维持了这些年。军政府却又清洗掉了钦钮,对我们越逼越甚。我们指望中国调停一下,中国却与军政府越来越打得火热,甚至给钱给军火来打我们。中国的做法使军政府越来越强硬,前年(注:2009年)灭了果敢,收服了丁英,现在又向克钦独立组织(KIO)大举进攻,看来是下决心要消灭我们了。中国看着军政府攻占果敢,但总算收容了逃到中国境内的果敢人,就因为他们是汉人吧(据了解,多数果敢难民后来还是被动员返回了缅境),而这次缅军进攻克钦人,克钦难民逃入中国境内,中国却拒绝接纳(据笔者所知其实还是接纳了不少,只是由于联合国(微博)机构无法进入,我国境内的这些难民处境比密支那附近联合国资助、当地NGO管理的难民营差得多),这到底是为什么?
他们说,除了密松那样的圣地,我们其实不反对中国公司来修水坝,就是反对密松工程也不是反对中国,因为如果别的国家在密松建坝,我们也一样会反对的。但是中资公司与军政府联手,在我们的土地上建坝,淹没我们的地盘,驱逐我们的人民,却不顾及我们的意愿。结果每修一坝,军政府就以保护工程为名派军队进攻我们。水坝竟成了战争的向导,不但造成生态问题,首先还严重改变了当地的政治现状,这难道是不干涉内政吗?
这些克钦人说:我们克钦只是要求自治,但军政府一定要消灭我们,我们只有抵抗。弱小的克钦要抗争,当然希望有外援,我们愿意和所有人交朋友,但并不是找主子。无论中国、印度、西方国家还是缅族中那些愿意善待我们的人,如昂山素季,我们都愿意交往。过去我们克钦人曾与中国、英美一块抗日,后来很长一段时间,我们的斗争主要是中国在支持。我们对此很感谢。但很多不愉快的事使我们痛心,有人说中国只是在利用我们。现在想和军政府联手赚钱,就反过来帮他们打我们了。”“说实话,现在如果有谁愿意帮我们,我们当然欢迎,包括西方。但是我们这里又没有什么重大战略资源,谁会为弱小的克钦民族得罪庞大的中国?就是他们想帮,我们这里又不靠海,深处内陆中印缅交界山区,他们又怎么帮得了?何况很多西方人至今不是把我们看成缅共余孽,就是怀疑我们与贩毒有关(贩毒现象过去在掸邦的几个缅共蜕变而来的民地武中比较严重,近年来他们也在全力禁毒,而克钦地区有木材和玉石可以提供经济来源,又不是传统的罂粟产区,所以并无严重的贩毒问题),他们当然讨厌缅甸军政府,但不等于就会帮我们。我们倒想亲西方,可是办得到吗?KIO前领导人早迈卸任时曾慨叹:上帝为何不把克钦人安排做美国人或者俄国人的邻居?早迈也曾是缅共,与中国合作过。不能说他就是亲西方的,他的慨叹只是无奈。KIO现在的控制区都紧靠中国边界,连印度边界都很远,西方就更不用说了。我们当然知道得罪中国的后果。所以虽然我们对中国很有意见,但绝不会想开罪中国。只希望中国与缅甸军政府搞关系要对我们留有余地,不要把我们逼到墙角。
国家不变革,克钦无出路 克钦无路走,大坝亦何有
在克钦邦的访问使笔者有两个明显感触,一是越是过去与中国密切合作过的克钦人(例如前缅共成员)如今对中国越反感。中国不可信,克钦人应该争取西方支持之类的观点在他们中很盛行。他们中甚至流行着一些匪夷所思的说法,如说中国正在向缅甸军政府提供毒气弹,甚至在帮军政府搞核武器等等。这些说法当然不可信,但反映了一种强烈的情绪。而在过去从未与我国合作过的人中反而听不到类似的话。
二是,KIO如今正获得克钦人前所未有的认同。克钦人过去曾有多个政治派别,但现在亲军政府的派别正明显地边缘化。例如新民主军(NDAK),自从丁英接受军政府改编为边防军后,他本人就离开部队到仰光去当了丹瑞党的议员,几乎在克钦邦政坛上消失,也不再对NDAK成员有影响力。政府军对克钦独立军(KIA)发动进攻后,他于去年岁末回到密支那召集各界克钦人开会,意图是通过他们向KIO喊话,希望KIO接受军政府的条件。结果召集数百人的会只来了30多人,一些人还是专门为了骂丁英而来。一位颇有声望的克钦女士就在会上当面斥责丁英为独裁者当说客:你如果真为和平,就不要到这里来和我们说这些,发动战争的是丹瑞他们,请你到内比都向他们要和平吧。我已经老了,也活够了,我不会离开密支那,今天来就是请你告诉他们,让他们来抓我好了!
笔者到密支那时这个会刚开过不久,很多人都提到会上这些情况。丁英的使命可以说彻底失败。新民主军的一位老战士慨叹说:丁英的政治生命到头了,我和他相识40多年,想不到他会走到这一步!他说,改编为边防军后的NDAK现在仍驻扎板瓦一带,与KIA毗邻,但是开战半年多,双方仍相安无事。尽管军政府在各单位都安插了缅族军官,但他们控制不了部队。克钦人不会打克钦人,现在我们不参与,但是塔玛多(缅语tatmadaw武装部队,缅甸人以指军政府)如果再这样欺负人,早晚我们还会跟他们开战。”“是与KIA联手吗?”“当然。现在克钦人就认他们。
这位老战士说:过去克钦邦发生的战争是局部的,可是这次,KIA的抗击空前猛烈,战事从中国边界的传统冲突区域已经向西蔓延到胡康河谷、孙布拉蚌一带,向南出了克钦邦,蔓延到掸邦北部的南坎、南吞一带。激烈的程度超过缅共时期,许多过去从未发生抵抗的地区也出现了KIA的活动。我也很奇怪,过去我们(缅共)得到中国全力支持的时候,也没有这么能打。现在中国支持塔玛多,敌视KIAKIA反倒越来越厉害了。”“那么谁在支持他们?西方吗?”“西方?且不说没那回事,就是西方支持,怎么支持?现在KIA的地盘是封闭的,三面都是塔玛多,一面是中国,过去我们的武器都是从中国来,现在中国武器只卖给塔玛多,难道中国会给KIA转运西方武器不成?说白了,支持KIA的就是克钦邦的人民,我们克钦人从来没有这么团结!
的确,这场战争在缅甸几十年内战史上强度罕见,双方都伤亡惨重。克钦军固然打得艰苦,但半年过去,战场的形势似乎对政府军更不利了。克钦方面的种种精彩战报固然有宣传成分,不可尽信,但有趣的是政府军报告的损失却比克钦宣传的还要多。KIA最近宣称累计歼敌已达3000多人,外界多怀疑这个数字有水分,而政府军累计上报的损失人数据说已高达7000多。怎么会有这种长敌人威风灭自己士气的怪事?有人揭发说:这是因为缅军中军官侵吞阵亡抚恤金自肥成风,所以他们惯于多报死魂灵以便多领抚恤金。这种事真让人听来倒吸凉气,这样的军队尽管人多势众,要打赢战争也是戛戛乎难哉。
因此尽管KIO也有它的问题,但人们对塔玛多的强烈反感就是KIO的最大资本。就在政府军严密控制的密支那,也可以感到明显的人心所向。军政府宣布晚6点以后戒严,可是笔者看到晚上9点多街上还是熙熙攘攘。据说这里到处有密探,可是在饭店等公共场所人们谈论对塔玛多的不满仍然相当大胆。
街上的书报摊上KIO的禁书不可能出现,但刊载昂山素季大照片的民主派书报随处可见,十分醒目,这和到处都是的二水环山密松图像一样表达着一种情绪。KIO驻密支那的办事处因开战撤走后,原由他们主持的目瑙纵歌会和文化会馆等克钦文化活动和传统仪式也随即完全停摆,不管是军政府禁止这类活动,还是克钦族无人出面给政府当维持会撑门面,都表明塔玛多与克钦人之间的格格不入。
其实在克钦邦以外也是如此。在首都,军政府安排的克钦国会代表吴载勇吴也照样抨击密松工程,其实也就是抨击与中资公司合作的军政府。我们在仰光会见的一位克钦族女作家似乎是民主派,她对塔玛多与KIO都有批评,认为两者都是军人行政,都不民主,都破坏环境……她说克钦人民要和平,不是要KIO。我问道:那么塔玛多有可能与KIO言和吗?她说塔玛多就是要消灭KIO,言和也是假的。我问:那么KIO有可能打败塔玛多吗?她说不可能,KIO太弱小了,没有这个能力。我说,其实和平无非只有三种可能,要么双方言和,要么以一方消灭另一方来结束战争,或者是KIO打败塔玛多,或者是塔玛多消灭KIO。既然前两种可能都没有,那就只剩下最后一种可能:如果和平是通过塔玛多消灭KIO来实现的,克钦人民能接受这种和平吗?她说:当然不能接受!我说,那就是说他们还是支持KIO抵抗的,即便这种抵抗无法取胜,和平因而也没法实现?她想了一下,叹道:的确是这样,我们再不满意KIO,也不能接受他们被消灭,哪怕这意味着要和塔玛多打下去。
这就是克钦民族的悲剧啊,如果整个国家不变革,克钦问题是没有出路的。
而克钦问题如果找不到出路,在这个地方投资搞巨型工程的前景又会如何呢?
你不干涉内政 内政要干涉你
显然,在缅北少数民族地区尤其是克钦邦这种地方,中国要进行大规模投资,所谓不干涉内政其实是做不到的。因为从二战以来中国其实一直是这里内政中的重大参与方和利益相关方。抗战时中国军队为了生死攸关的缅甸通道在缅北浴血奋战,1950年代仰光政府假手新中国旧中国赶出争议区,1960-1980年代中国向缅甸输出革命支持缅共搞割据,而现在的情况就更不用说了。
只有80年代末90年代初中国是极力从这里脱身的。当时中国对缅共停止输血,缅共覆灭后又对其蜕变出来的各民地武实行八部委制定的所谓四不政策(政治上不承认,组织上不往来,军事上不支持,经济上不援助),极力撇清关系。而那时中国与缅甸军政府建立的正常关系也没有热到奇特的程度。当时的军政府与民地武关系也比较缓和。可以说,那时候中国、缅甸军政府与民地武三角关系的每一边都既非剑拔弩张,又非亲密无间,中国对那里内政的影响也降低到历史上最低的程度。假如缅甸的官民能够相安而中资也不需要大举入缅,这种状态也许就持续下去了。
但是很快情况就发生变化。首先是缅甸独裁的军政府内政越搞越糟,尤其在比较开明的钦钮被清洗后,民族和解与民主进程都大大倒退,缅族内部的官民矛盾与塔玛多和民地武的冲突都重新激化了。
其次,民地武过去几十年与中国形成的关系千丝万缕,远不是四不所能了断。由于他们与军政府关系仍不正常,为了自立,不能不大力加强与中国的边贸以解决财源,开始是沿袭缅共末期的毒品经济,给中国和国际上都造成很大麻烦,后来在各方的压力和帮助下逐渐改邪归正,转而依靠中国的经济繁荣,全面向中国开放和招商引资,通过中国分享全球化红利。结果随着中国经济日益全球化,民地武的经济也日益中国化,中国公司中国钱、中国通信中国话都大行其道。犹如中国的深圳等口岸在中国实现了胜于内地的特殊繁荣一样,各民地武中心城镇也成了缅甸的小深圳,取得了与内地封闭的缅族城市形成鲜明对比的特殊繁荣。但同时中国模式的许多弊病也在这里得到集中体现。各民地武这样做,固然一是为了解决自立的财源问题,二是为了替代毒品经济,改善国际形象,但显然更重要的还是第三:高度中国化、大幅增加与中国的利益相关,也有一旦与塔玛多摊牌时迫使中国介入的深远考虑。尽管进入这里的主要都是中国民间中小商家,中国的特殊体制对于他们的利益受损具有奇特的承受能力,正如果敢事件中所体现的一样。但是经过30年改革,中国的舆论空间、尤其是网络舆论空间已经大为扩展,果敢事件中中国商民受损引起的舆论压力已经不小,如果这种现象愈演愈烈,中国事实上是很难坚持不介入的。
而更关键的因素是这些年来中国与缅甸军政府的关系越来越热,越来越特殊。平心而论,这种关系既有经济互补(中国需要资源与市场,缅甸需要投资与技术)和国际地缘政治(中国需要印度洋通道,缅甸需要摆脱孤立)的基础,也有明显的意识形态色彩(中国有些人与塔玛多一样都不喜欢民主化,都在抵制所谓西方的和平演变,在他们眼里塔玛多几乎已经成为兄弟党了)。这三重因素的叠加不仅使中缅官方关系迅速升温,而且由于这种关系具有战略性,大型、垄断性国企就起了至关重要的作用。而缅甸军政府之所以极力对中资、特别是对垄断性国企大力开放,也和民地武一样有明显的内政考虑,实际在很大程度上是对反对派打中国牌。中国投资在民地武辖区,塔玛多却插进来充当合作方;中国水坝建到哪里,塔玛多的军事保护就推进到哪里;中国水坝建在塔玛多控制区,而淹没的库区却是民地武的地盘。这都是明摆着让中资企业给塔玛多向民地武叫板充当挡箭牌。更不用说投资即便互利,缅甸所谓的利也主要是充实塔玛多腰包使其更能买军火打内战,这能不损害另一方吗?
在这种情况下,所谓不干涉内政即便符合政治正确(在我们国内似乎是这样,在国际上是否是这样已经大有疑问,至少把不干涉绝对化,国际社会是不认为正确的,我国的实践也不是这样的),实际上也越来越难以落实。尤其是在缅甸国内矛盾尖锐地区,例如民地武辖区,中资与此方合作就会得罪彼方,与彼方合作就会损害此方,要想两不得罪乃至两面讨好,已经极其困难。
其实,今天中国战略性投资对缅甸的内政固然有影响,而缅甸的矛盾也透过这种经济互动开始对我们的内政显示影响了。这些年来,塔玛多攻打果敢导致那里许多中国商民血本无归,而民地武抵抗塔玛多又使一批中资项目施工受阻,乃至瘫痪。两者都使国内的网络舆论出现了越来越多的呼吁干预缅甸事态的呼声,而且表面上这些呼声往往都还有类似的大中华民族主义的包装,但是你仔细看,实际上这些呼声中存在着尖锐的矛盾。有人呼吁支持我们的兄弟革命的遗民民地武,打击西方的走狗军政府。有人则呼吁支持抵制西方民主,坚持自己特色的军政府,打击受到西方唆使,破坏中国工程的民地武。似乎缅甸斗争的各方倒是在中国有了他们各自的代理人。实际上我们也确实可以在这些矛盾中找到逻辑的根据。由于在民地武那里投资的主要是中国民间中小商家,而为军政府所引进的却多是垄断性大型国企,他们的不同倾向性是否也在一定程度上反映了中国国内不同利益群体和阶层的冲突呢?
缅甸式专制的脆弱性
当然,民地武在缅甸,和中小商民在中国,都是相对弱势的。中缅关系的主流走向还是两国的官方(包括两国的官办公司)。在这次密松事件之前,这种官方的合作似乎还处于蜜月期。那时很少有人注意到,其实中缅官方在这样的合作中可以说各有短板。通常人们都认为缅甸比中国穷,朋友也少,应该更有求于中方。在国际制裁的背景下也确实如此。但这只是一个方面,更重要的是这种合作的意识形态色彩,中方要比缅方更强烈。人们都知道军政府独裁,甚至认为比中国还厉害,比如在征地拆迁问题上,一位在中缅两国都有阅历的西方NGO人士说,军政府的征地拆迁要比中国国内的征地拆迁粗暴多了,尤其在民地武活动地区,缅族的塔玛多实际上是把当地非缅族原住民当作潜在的叛乱者,对他们动蛮、强制拆房圈地是毫不客气的,中国的所谓野蛮拆迁都还没这么厉害。
但是人们所忽略的是:首先缅甸毕竟曾经是英国殖民地,西方思想在这里的影响不会比中国小。其次,缅甸在1948-1962年间实行的也基本是多党制宪政民主,他们对民主并不陌生。虽然那时的体制很不完善,没有解决当时的社会问题,使人们对乱糟糟的民主出现厌倦和呼唤铁腕的情绪,遂使奈温有机会发动政变,以军人独裁的缅甸社会主义取代了民主政治。但是奈温可不是俄罗斯的普京,他不但没有给缅甸带来普京式的铁腕繁荣,反而正是在缅甸社会主义26年间使这个国家由东南亚最富变成了东南亚最穷。致使人民怨声载道,对民主时代的怀念形成强大的社会潮流。
1988年民主潮流终于冲垮了奈温体制,1990年的大选出现了令人咋舌的一面倒,以昂山素季为首的民盟竟获得82%的议席,而政府党只得到2%,连第三大党都当不上。这样的局面是东欧、韩国等其他国家的民主化开局从未见过的。后来军人拒绝交权、镇压民主已经纯为保住既得利益,他们已经改了国号、换了国旗、改了宪法,彻底抛弃了缅甸社会主义,甚至把奈温也抓了起来。因此以后的缅甸军政府并没有意识形态,他们理论上从来没有否认市场经济、宪政民主,甚至也没有造出什么缅甸式民主的说辞。军人手中也没有可用的象征资源。缅甸的国父昂山将军的象征资源无疑在他女儿昂山素季手里,旧体制的象征奈温已经被塔玛多自己判了刑,予以彻底否定,缅甸传统的精神支柱小乘佛教界又和军人极度对立,佛教僧侣是民主派的盟友、番红花革命的主力,因此塔玛多也无法利用传统文化来树立自己的统治合法性。独裁的缅甸却很奇怪地没有个人崇拜,看不到领袖像,军头们缺少个人魅力,也没有众望所归的伟大家族(如果有,大概就是属于民主派的昂山家族),终身制与世袭制都不被认可,每个人独裁几年就要下台。塔玛多在公共场合乐于树立的偶像既不是昂山、奈温那样的世俗政治家,也不是佛陀、活佛等宗教象征,甚至丹瑞等实权人物也有自知之明没有神化自己,他们到处树的只是古代的几个有名的将军——班都拉、雍牙籍之类。但是这些人武功他们也没有。
这一切使得塔玛多政权成为历史上罕见的纯粹以武力维护特权利益的体制,他们拒绝交权的唯一理由就是要维稳,说是交权时机未到,交了权就会乱。但这种说法恰恰表明他们自知终究是要交权的。实际上他们不交权,国家也在越来越乱。因此这样的体制一方面经常出现赤裸裸的暴力,显得比谁都独裁,但另一方面这个纯粹以利益来凝聚的独裁又显得十分不稳定。由于利益分配总是不容易摆平,内部斗争从来不断,随时都有人可能因为内部斗争的需要会出来打民主牌”——无论他是不是真有民主信仰。
在这样一种背景下,中资公司的投资,尤其是战略性投资怎样才能得到保障呢?(经济观察报)


Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Chinese government imposes nationwide military training for students - World Socialist Web Site

Chinese government imposes nationwide military training for students - World Socialist Web Site

Sunday, November 24, 2013

homework

Despite the importance of the Beijing materials to the final study, reliance on only one of the
archival depositories would not have sufficed. Although the Grand Council had a policy of making
duplicate and even triplicate (or more) copies of its documents as early as the eighteenth
century, several unique items turned up in both places. The book could not have been attempted
without recourse to crucial materials in both Taipei and Beijing.
Archival access is necessary to study the Grand Council. No surviving published primary
sources tell the full story. The council's early growth depended in part on its being shielded by
inner-court secrecy, a situation that has also shielded the facts of its development from later
investigators. A policy of confidentiality appears to have prevailed well into the nineteenth
century. When an official entry finally appeared in 1818 in the Chia-ch'ing Collected Statutes and
Precedents (Hui-tien and Hui-tien shih-li ), the statutes provided a short description of the

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council, but little was supplied under precedents.[8]

Grand councillors also guarded the council's secrets. The published autobiographical writings

and memorial collections of grand councillors such as Chang T'ing-yü (1672–1755) and A-kuei

(1717–97) preserved confidentiality by omitting information on important council activities.

Chang T'ing-yü's chronological autobiography, for example, fails to mention the new group of

High Officials until YC11 (1733), more than two years after its founding, even though he had

been intimately concerned with its labors throughout the period.[9] Moreover, while some

eighteenth-century council clerks (Wang Ch'ang and especially Chao I) left useful descriptions of

council processes, they too appear to have exercised self-censorship and avoided sensitive

information. The same stricture probably applied to the extensive selection of surviving records

made by the Grand Council clerk Liang Chang-chü (1775–1849) for his 1822 compilation on

Grand Council history and working processes, Shu-yuan chi-lueh . Although Liang had access to

the council's voluminous archival remains, his compendium is highly selective. In recent years

some scholars have resorted to the piecemeal recollections of peripheral figures such as Hsi Wu


ao


10 ―
and Yeh Feng-mao, who wrote about council origins many years after their tenuous early
observation of some of the activities of its forerunners, but now that comparison with archival
evidence is possible these remembrances have frequently proved only partly accurate or, even
downright misleading. Reliance on them has sometimes thrown modern scholars far off the track
and exacerbated the difficulties of researching the Yung-cheng period.[10] My emphasis on the
role of Yung-cheng's loyal younger brother, Prince I (Yinhsiang), and the Board of Revenue
ministers as significant formative elements of the Yung-cheng inner circle, for instance, derives
from archival materials dating from long before the time that the authors of those hazy
reminiscences got around to publishing their observations.
The documents relevant to the eighteenth-century Grand Council story probably number in
the hundreds of thousands, with perhaps as many as several thousand items in Chinese and
Manchu per year; needless to say, even if I had gained access to all these materials, it would
have been impossible to read through them. As a result, at many points I have summarized
strenuously in order to condense the material to meet the page limits of modern academic
publishing. Among the multitude of state papers available for studying the Grand Council are the
palace memorials—high officials' reports to the throne—preserved in their original form (chu-p'i
tsou-che ) as well as in reference copies (lu-fu tsou-che ) and record books. All of these may now
be tapped for a deeper level of detail and frankness than we have had heretofore.
For the Yung-cheng reign an even more unusual set of documents survives: the numerous
holograph imperial responses (rescripts) to the memorials, inscribed in the emperor's own color,
vermilion. Frequently the Yung-cheng Emperor composed these when he was off his guard,
spontaneously confiding his thoughts for an audience of one or another of his most trusted
favorites. Some of these imperial screeds run for several pages and amount to stream-ofconsciousness
letters. When we read these today we find Yung-cheng speaking to us directly and
without subterfuge. We have nothing like their length and self-revelation for any other ruler of
imperial China.
Yet although the Yung-cheng documentation frequently reveals what was on the imperial
mind, this evidence is also difficult to use. The emperor's ruling style was chaotic at times—to
deal with it I developed a card file category headed "Yung-cheng chaos." Notes from the file
show that behind Yung-cheng's earnest and frenzied attention to governing there flourished an
imperial preference for handling things independently and sometimes haphazardly or even
capriciously. For instance, Yung-cheng frequently inscribed his decisions on memorials that were
then sent back to the field without any record of what had been said being retained in the capital
files. Not surprisingly, the high assisting officials soon developed methods for keeping track of
the imperial detritus. Another feature that turned up in the Yung-cheng chaos file was the
emperor's proclivity for using different terms to refer to the same thing, or the

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11 ―


same term for different things. Researchers familiar with the Yung-cheng materials will have little
cause to wonder why officials of the times remedied the situation by instituting strict
regularization at the very outset of the Ch'ien-lung reign.

Changes in archival documentation mark the Ch'ien-lung and Chia-ch'ing periods. Although
fuller than the previous period, with many more record books (tang-ts'e ), nevertheless materials
of these two later reigns lack the numerous spontaneous imperial confidences of the Yung-cheng
papers. Thus in contrast with Yung-cheng's long-windedness and frankness, the Ch'ien-lung
Emperor usually wrote pithy and routinized rescripts, a fact reflecting the regularization
introduced at the beginning of the new reign. As a result, the researcher has to forgo the
fascination of the many direct Yung-cheng holograph revelations in exchange for the pleasures of
increased general information.

Another Ch'ien-lung–era phenomenon, one of many examples of the increased scope of
Grand Council activities, came to light in the archival volumes of the Office of Military Archives
(Fang-lueh kuan ). These ledgers reveal the operations and development of the archives and
historical compilation offices that were directly supervised by the council. The new publications
office was able to censor (approve, gloss, or suppress) original archival documents before
publishing the many military campaign histories (fang-lueh ) that were issued in particularly
large numbers in the Ch'ien-lung period to extol the dynasty's territorial conquests. The Grand
Council also came to be in charge of some of the many publication activities bequeathed from
earlier times. Other archival sources depicted the Grand Council's Manchu Division (Man-pan ), a
group whose activities have been overlooked until now, possibly as part of the general faith that
what the dynasty was claiming about the existence of an evenhanded Manchu-Chinese dyarchy
was true. The Grand Secretariat record books of instructions for writing the routine draft
memorial rescripts (P'iao pu-pen shih) depicted the previously unimagined extent of the
bureaucratization in the Grand Secretariat and Six Boards system, where thousands of details
were anticipated and little was left to the possibility of independent action in routing or framing
decisions. In the Beijing archives I also ran down the Grand Council's own storage records,
regular inventories that suggest the changing range of council responsibilities. Grand Council
daybooks containing correspondence below the imperial level opened vistas on the activities of
middle-level bureaucrats, a layer of the bureaucracy that heretofore has rarely reached the
researcher's eye.

For the entire period the grand councillors' own memoranda (tsou-p'ien ), composed to
convey explanations to the Ch'ing emperors, in the twentieth century performed the same
service for this grateful researcher. 

Sunday, October 20, 2013

presantaion



10/14/13 Monarchs and Ministers "d0e620" 10:48 AM Preferred Citation: Bartlett, Beatrice S. Monarchs and Ministers: The Grand Council in Mid-Ch'ing China, 1723-1820. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991 1991. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft287004wt/
PROLOGUE
PROLOGUE
This book describes the great eighteenth-century transformation of Ch'ing (1644–1911) rule by which many of the central-government agencies were consolidated under a new supervising and coordinating high privy inner-court organization, the Grand Council (Chün-chi ch'u ). Early Ch'ing emperors had for the most part discharged the relatively uncomplicated government affairs of their day by dealing personally and directly with the multiplicity of subordinate agencies in the capital. For most of these responsibilities the monarchs had only a few ministerial assistants and small staffs. As a result of the mid-Ch'ing transformation (1723–1820), several of the scattered groups of imperial assistants were gathered in a new body—the Grand Council—and that organization was interposed between the monarch and the central-government agencies, creating an entity able to deal with the greatly increased business of the mid-Ch'ing polity. The transformation was an important factor in the final defeat of China's ancient Mongol enemy on the northwest frontier as well as in the military successes of the Ch'ien-lung Emperor's Ten Campaigns, which pushed the boundaries of the Chinese Empire to their greatest extent in history (except for the period when China was part of the Mongol Yuan Empire, 1260–1368). After the Opium War (1839–42), the experienced council was in place to deal with the dynasty's final half-century of emergencies wrought of great rebellions, infant emperors, regencies, and the intensified western intrusion. Thus the eighteenth-century transformation from direct imperial personal rule to joint monarchical-conciliar administration enabled the dynasty to rise to greatness in its middle years and at the end prolonged its life.
The main concern of this book is to ask how and why this eighteenth-century transformation took place. What caused the formation of the Grand Council and enabled it to rise to the overlordship of almost the entire central government of the Chinese empire within such a short space of time? How was a new
― 2 ― high-level agency propelled to dominance in an administrative context that was frozen by legal codes of exhausting detail and susceptible to factional disputes between long-established ministerial and bureaucratic coalitions? Do the existing theories of Grand Council genesis, usually applied to the final seven years of the Yung-cheng Emperor (r. 1723–35), assist our understanding when we shift to the broader time frame of the council's first and formative century?
The Yung-cheng Three-step Model of Grand Council Genesis
Most accounts of Grand Council development in the Yung-cheng reign have followed the Ch'ing official view and looked back from the standpoint of the strong centralized council of subsequent reigns to describe how a supposedly wise, all-seeing Yung-cheng Emperor purposefully created the powerful, centralizing inner-court agency known in English as the "Grand Council." Although these analyses vary slightly, the usual story is that the early Grand Council—believed to have originated as an offshoot of the Grand Secretariat—developed in three precisely definable steps. It began in YC7 (1729) as the "Military Finance Section" (Chün-hsu fang ), set up close to the emperor in the inner court to deal with the northwest campaign against the Zunghar Mongols.
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10:48 AM Next it metamorphosed through an intermediate phase as the "Military Strategy Section" (Chün- chi fang ). And finally it became the powerful "Grand Council" (Chün-chi ch'u ). All three of these steps are said to have been accomplished within the final seven years of the Yung-cheng Emperor's reign.
[1]
This picture of a single agency growing in strength and undergoing name changes presents difficulties. As Chuang Chi-fa of the Taipei Palace Museum has pointed out, the term "Military Strategy Section" (Chün-chi fang ) does not regularly occur in documents of the Yung-cheng era.[2] In his 1970 book Communication and Imperial Control , Silas H. L. Wu also questioned the standard view when he described a small tightly knit group of imperial assistants who, while not members of a single changing agency that dealt with the northwest military situation, nevertheless performed duties characteristic of the later grand councillors. These inner-court assistants to the emperor, sometimes called "inner grand secretaries" (nei chung-t'ang ), were high-level imperial confidants who could be deputed to perform any task the emperor assigned. They were concerned with the other inner-court administrative staffs not as full-time members but as part-time supervisors.
[3]
With this brilliant insight Professor Wu's work supplied the essential step toward the understanding that the administrative part of Yung-cheng's inner court did not consist of a single powerful agency and thus did not precisely resemble the Grand Council of later times. Rather, the Yung-cheng inner court consisted of several informal nonstatutory groups, a design intended to facilitate imperial control.
My own subsequent archival discoveries have filled out this new framework.
― 3 ― At the Taipei Palace Museum in the 1970s, thinking that the Ch'ien-lung Emperor might have been briefed after coming to the throne, I unearthed a crucial memorial that revealed another flaw in the standard narrative. This document showed that after the Military Finance Section was founded subordinate to the ministerial level of the Board of Revenue, it never underwent name changes or any kind of metamorphosis at all but instead remained continuously in place, operating under its YC7 mandate and title right through to the end of the reign. In 1980–81, when I used Chinese materials in Beijing's Number One Historical Archives, I found repeated mentions of yet another inner-court group, the "High Officials in Charge of Military Finance" (Pan- li Chün-hsu ta-ch'en ), created late in YC8 (early 1731), whose title later changed to "High Officials in Charge of Military Strategy" (Pan-li Chün-chi ta-ch'en , also sometimes Chün-chi ch'u or, in Manchu, Cooha-i nashun-i
[*]
ba ). This proved to be yet another staff—nowhere near as strong as the later Grand Council but bearing the same name.
[4]
Like the other two groups, this one also had a separate existence and lasted to the end of the reign.
Finally, when I was in Beijing for a conference in the autumn of 1985, I was allowed to see some recently sorted court letter edicts and Manchu-language memorials and record books. These supplied further details about the inner-court confidants and the High Officials in Charge of Military Finance—their responsibilities, personnel, and organizational structure. These archival discoveries conclusively demonstrate that for the administrative sector of his inner court, Yung- cheng clung to the K'ang-hsi model of a divided inner court. Yung-cheng's inner court consisted of separate individuals and small staffs, not a consolidated Grand Council. This is the story told in Part One of this book. The key transformation from a compartmentalized to a consolidated inner court had to wait for the early years of the Ch'ien-lung reign (late 1735–95) and is recounted in Part Two.
The Inner/Outer-court Model and Grand Council Growth in the Ch'ien-lung Period
In contrast with the Yung-cheng–period Grand Council genesis, which scholars have narrated in dozens of chapters and essays, the council's astonishing rise to dominance over the central government in the Ch'ien-lung period has hardly been studied at all. Yet similar developments in dynasties before the Ch'ing have been described. These have frequently been analyzed as power struggles between the so-called inner court (nei-t'ing ), the emperor's faction, and the outer court (wai-ch'ao ), the bureaucracy's faction.
[5]
On the one hand were the emperor, his palace
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10:48 AM household, and his privy council assistants; on the other were the officials who presided over the departments that administered the empire. Specific elements in the contests varied from reign to reign and indeed within reigns. Strong emperors might direct the administra-
― 4 ― tors; strong bureaucrats might isolate the emperors and administer the realm independently. In some periods battles were fought entirely within the inner court, sometimes with the palace eunuchs playing a leading role. But with the notable exception of Huang Pei, who astutely grasped the significance of the council's early history as "essentially" a re-creation "of the inner court," most writing about the Ch'ing has failed to stress this kind of cleavage.
[6]
In fact, an inner/outer-court division did exist at the heart of the Ch'ing government. What is more, it was intimately related to Grand Council development.
The two communications systems that flourished through most of the Ch'ing period supply a good example of this bifurcation and offer an opportune means of studying it. The routine communications system inherited from the Ming flourished in the outer court. This was an open, public, regulated bureaucratic channel, many of whose documents—both the reports as well as their responding edicts—were eventually published in the Peking gazettes. To support and make further use of the routine communications system, the outer court had its own archival installations and drew on its archival holdings for official compilations such as the court chronicles (Shih-lu ) and official histories (Kuo-shih ).
By contrast, the palace memorial system began in the K'ang-hsi period as the emperor's private channel, with documents kept secret and limited to circulation between the inner court and provincial correspondents. The two main kinds of official responses to the palace memorials were rescripts written in vermilion, the emperor's own color that signified the source was the emperor himself, and court letter edicts. These responses were composed, dispatched, and processed entirely in the inner court. Under Yung-cheng the inner court also began to develop its own archival storage, first for the palace memorials and later of other types of documents. In the next reign the inner-court Grand Council acquired authority over its own publication projects, notably the campaign histories (fang-lueh ), which were based on its inner-court files. The special inner-court communications system played a key role in these Grand Council developments, supplying both secrecy and access to important information for the monarchs and their inner- court ministers.
Differences between the inner and outer courts were likewise exhibited in the structure of the central-government administration. The outer-court bureaucracy consisted of the major administrative organs, most inherited from the Ming and earlier times. The chief mission of these agencies was to process the documents of the routine system—reports from all over the empire concerning nearly all the major spheres of government enterprise. Most important for understanding eighteenth-century developments was the fact that the outer court operated according to statutory prescription: the administrative code governed the outer-court staffs that ran the empire.
Unlike the inherited and largely unchanging organizations of the outer court that were defined by law, the early-Ch'ing inner court was the creature
― 5 ― of imperial fiat and tended to change from reign to reign. Although the Yung-cheng Emperor, for instance, allowed his father's Deliberative Princes and Ministers (I-cheng wang ta-ch'en ) and the Southern [Imperial] Study (Nan-shu fang ) to continue, they were used less and gradually declined; in their place he conceived a new design for his inner court and appointed a top echelon of his favorites—one to four high assisting ministers—and two new middle-level staffs— the Board of Revenue's Military Finance Section and the High Officials in Charge of Military Finance (described above). When Ch'ien-lung came to the throne another major change took place as Yung-cheng's three new inner-court entities coalesced in one organization. The old name of the Office (or High Officials) in Charge of Military Strategy (Pan-li Chün-chi ch'u ), now appropriately translated into English as "Grand Council," was revived for the new consolidated
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10:48 AM agency, which became the major central-government administrative body for as long as the dynasty lasted. This explains why for the remainder of the Ch'ing and into modern times, people believed that the powerful consolidated inner-court Grand Council of the Ch'ing had been founded in the Yung-cheng period. But we now know that this was true only in the sense of its name.
In employing English-language terminology in this book I have used the words "bureaucrat" and "bureaucracy" much as Yung-cheng himself saw these men—to refer to the large outer-court staffs. By contrast, the inner-court upper-echelon officials whom I call "ministers" (certain grand secretaries, board presidents, and vice presidents who were the focus of imperial blandishments) were the emperor's personal appointees, usually in daily contact with the sovereign. Although they had become inner-court servitors, through their concurrent outer-court positions the emperor deputized them to supervise the outer-court bureaucracy. From Yung-cheng's as well as Ch'ien-lung's perspective these men were not ordinary outer-court bureaucrats, and I have accordingly avoided using outer-court terminology to describe them.
We would be wrong to regard causation in this study (that is, the reasons for the Grand Council's founding and growth) solely as the outcome of a long-term imperial plot to develop the inner court and thereby the capabilities of the autocrats. Other factors also contributed to the council's development into a large inner-court organization of more than two hundred persons directing the government of the empire. The council's monopoly of a fully developed communications channel played an important role in Grand Council growth, as did the secrecy that hid inner-court activities and council expansion from outer-court jealousy and retaliation. Special situations of the times—Yung-cheng's fear of outer-court tendencies to malfeasance, needs of the military campaigns, Ch'ien-lung's fondness for touring—also favored a small tightly knit council directed by ministers with whom the emperors were well acquainted and in whom they had confidence. Although ministerial ambition is difficult to measure, that must also be reckoned as a factor in the council's rise.
― 6 ― Finally, inner-court informality—particularly as manifest in Yung-cheng's inner court—was another important element in Grand Council growth. Yung-cheng's new inner-court staffs were neither enshrined in statute law nor awarded the prestige that would have accompanied formal establishment. Instead his three inner-court entities functioned beyond the reach of the administrative code, thus gaining an advantage that I call "the extralegal dynamic." In the Ch'ien-lung period, when these groups joined together and challenged the long-established outer-court agencies, this freedom from legal constraints promoted growth. The council's extralegal status allowed it to undertake new activities and so engage in expansion of kinds that the administrative codes did not permit its competitors, the outer-court agencies. One example of this advantage is recounted toward the end of Chapter 6, where the grand councillors' concurrent posts—which arose from the lack of formal positions on the council itself—are described. Some of the outer-court responsibilities of those holding the concurrent positions were transferred into the council's purview, thereby enlarging its capabilities. Concurrent posts also supplied council members with unofficial contacts throughout the capital bureaucracy, as well as access to widely scattered sources of information. Thus paradoxically, Yung-cheng's insistence on developing his inner court while keeping it weak, divided, lacking in formal status, and subservient to his will was a major factor that resulted in a Grand Council heyday in the following reign.
At this point the reader may ask how in an autocratic situation where the monarch supposedly made the law, an extralegal dynamic could confer an advantage. If the emperor wished to change the legal arrangements for either the inner or the outer court, it might be argued that he surely possessed the power to do so.
The key fact lies in the differing statutory status of the inner and outer courts. The outer- court agencies of the government were set up under the administrative code and generally ran according to its statutes and precedents. Although the monarch could probably change these arrangements at will (and indeed in a few instances did so), for most matters imperial respect for established statutes prevailed and advice on the wisdom of proposed changes was both sought and followed. The outer-court government thus ran more by a combination of law and consensus
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10:48 AM than by the imposition of raw imperial power, even though the rhetoric of governing always strongly implied that such power existed.
By contrast, in the early eighteenth century—and at the beginning of our story—statute law did not define the inner court. At that time the imperial assistants and staffs were regarded as the emperor's own men: his to appoint, his to command. In the inner court no statutes could be summoned to confound the monarch's desire. The sovereign's will was law. The inner court was free of legal restraints and enjoyed a flexibility denied its outer-court competitors.
― 7 ― Where did the mature Grand Council described in Part Two of this book fit in the inner/outer- court framework? Was it an inner-court privy council that loyally served the mid- and late-Ch'ing emperors and promoted their autocratic designs? Or did it eventually develop its own concerns and become an outer-court administrative staff that ran the bureaucracy? In other words, did the council enter the nineteenth century as the emperor's pawn or as the bureaucracy's directorate? My research suggests that the council did not take sides in this struggle but seized the opportunities provided by both worlds. It remained loyal to the emperor but at the same time extended its reach to direct most of the agencies of the outer court. The result was a greatly expanded inner-court dominance, but one where both ministers and monarchs could be strong. While the framework for autocracy continued in place, the expansion of inner-court work and the ministerial skill and labor essential to accomplishing it weakened the monarchs' ability fully to oversee and direct the government. As a consequence, much of the entire central government— inner as well as outer court—and the provinces too, came under the new inner-court consolidated council.
Plan of the Book
This book is divided into two main parts. Part One investigates the council's Yung-cheng–period origins at the hands of a monarch who distrusted organizations with plenipotentiary powers. These chapters (1–4) show how the Yung-cheng Emperor, jealous of possible alternative power centers that might rival his own, pursued a divide-and-rule policy, preferring to deal directly with selected individuals and small informal groups that were never intended to coalesce and become a single strong privy council at the heart of the inner court. In Chapter 1 I describe the inner/outer-court situation that Yung-cheng faced on coming to the throne and explain how he apparently decided that strengthening the inner court was the answer to his difficulties. Chapter 2 shows how two inner-court confidants gradually came to be used for a variety of high-level tasks. In Chapter 3 I explain how these two became the nucleus of a very small nameless high- inner-managerial echelon, which I call the "inner deputies." Chapter 4 completes the Yung-cheng period with a description of the two subordinate staffs set up to deal with the military campaign. Thus, although Yung-cheng founded the inner-court organizations ancestral to the Grand Council, he always kept them separate and strenuously avoided creating a single strong organization worthy of the translation "Grand Council."
Not all readers will be interested in the details of the first part; many will want to proceed directly to Part Two, which describes the mature eighteenth-century Grand Council. In comparison with Part One's focus on a short thirteen-year reign, the approach in Part Two, which covers a sixty-year reign plus the three years after the abdication, has had to be less detailed. The
― 8 ― introductory Chapter 5 narrates the consolidation of Yung-cheng's three informal inner-court staffs in the single mourning-period transition council (T sung-li shih-wu wang ta-ch'en ), which I have called the "Interim Council," and explains how the name of one of Yung-cheng's small inner-court groups, the "Office of Military Strategy" (Chün-chi ch'u ), was revived early in the Ch'ien-lung period and applied to the newly enlarged inner-court council, whose name is thenceforth properly translated "Grand Council." Chapters 6 and 7 then describe the council over
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10:48 AM the sixty-three years that Ch'ien-lung ruled. Some narrative of development is supplied but there has been little attempt to depict the twists and turns of council growth in detail. The main thrust of these chapters is to show the tremendous expansion of central-government paper-work and thereby of Grand Council responsibilities that took place during the long Ch'ien-lung reign.
Finally, Chapter 8 describes the Ho-shen abuses and Chia-ch'ing reforms of 1799–1820, following the height of the council's power. A few features of the council were reformed, but the reform process was limited and the council emerged largely unchanged from the Chia-ch'ing period. Although I would have liked to round out the Grand Council story with a detailed description of the effects of the new conciliar administrative and decision-making structure on central-government policy making, only a summary can be offered here. It would take another book to describe the council's nineteenth-century history and show how its influence probably did not cease with its demise in May 1911.
[7]
Future study may reveal ways in which council traditions have shaped Chinese government and bureaucracy in the present day.
Sources
The Ch'ing Grand Council is the only historic Chinese high privy council for which substantial numbers of archival materials survive. During the course of my research, the magnificent Ch'ing archives in both Beijing and Taipei were arranged and opened to foreigners. For my initial research, on a slightly different topic, I used the Taipei Palace Museum's superbly indexed Grand Council materials. But at the very moment that I was completing my work, a delegation of scholars led by Professor Frederic Wakeman was touring the mainland archives. As a result, the next year part of that treasure trove was opened to foreigners, and my application to go to Beijing found favor.
In Beijing I was confronted with an ocean of documents ten times as numerous as the holdings I had worked with in Taipei. I realized that the staggering number of new materials would make it possible to write a history of the eighteenth-century monarchical-conciliar transition, whose story had been only indistinctly visible in the Taipei archives. In the end I recast my focus and wrote an almost entirely new book.
The Beijing documents were both voluminous and difficult to use. In 1980–81
― 9 ― archive rules did not permit research assistants, nor were photocopying and microfilming easily available; everything that might be needed had to be copied out by hand and summarized in Chinese in a final report to the archive authorities. My report ran to 108 pages! A brief return trip late in 1985 yielded the pleasures of much-improved facilities but only a frustratingly short time to inspect the tantalizing sea of newly available documents now at my disposal. As a result, on both trips I had to limit my searches to periods of Grand Council history not well covered in Taipei—chiefly late Yung-cheng and early Ch'ien-lung (ca. 1728–60). Even these years could only be skimmed, while I reluctantly had to overlook the Beijing documentation for most other years. This concentration has resulted in an intensive examination of the council's formative years—up to approximately CL25 (1760) when the new conciliar system was being worked out—and less detail for the remainder of the reign.
Despite the importance of the Beijing materials to the final study, reliance on only one of the archival depositories would not have sufficed. Although the Grand Council had a policy of making duplicate and even triplicate (or more) copies of its documents as early as the eighteenth century, several unique items turned up in both places. The book could not have been attempted without recourse to crucial materials in both Taipei and Beijing.
Archival access is necessary to study the Grand Council. No surviving published primary sources tell the full story. The council's early growth depended in part on its being shielded by inner-court secrecy, a situation that has also shielded the facts of its development from later investigators. A policy of confidentiality appears to have prevailed well into the nineteenth century. When an official entry finally appeared in 1818 in the Chia-ch'ing Collected Statutes and Precedents (Hui-tien and Hui-tien shih-li ), the statutes provided a short description of the
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10:48 AM council, but little was supplied under precedents.[8]
Grand councillors also guarded the council's secrets. The published autobiographical writings and memorial collections of grand councillors such as Chang T'ing-yü (1672–1755) and A-kuei (1717–97) preserved confidentiality by omitting information on important council activities. Chang T'ing-yü's chronological autobiography, for example, fails to mention the new group of High Officials until YC11 (1733), more than two years after its founding, even though he had been intimately concerned with its labors throughout the period.
[9]
Moreover, while some eighteenth-century council clerks (Wang Ch'ang and especially Chao I) left useful descriptions of council processes, they too appear to have exercised self-censorship and avoided sensitive information. The same stricture probably applied to the extensive selection of surviving records made by the Grand Council clerk Liang Chang-chü (1775–1849) for his 1822 compilation on Grand Council history and working processes, Shu-yuan chi-lueh . Although Liang had access to the council's voluminous archival remains, his compendium is highly selective. In recent years some scholars have resorted to the piecemeal recollections of peripheral figures such as Hsi Wu- ao
― 10 ― and Yeh Feng-mao, who wrote about council origins many years after their tenuous early observation of some of the activities of its forerunners, but now that comparison with archival evidence is possible these remembrances have frequently proved only partly accurate or, even downright misleading. Reliance on them has sometimes thrown modern scholars far off the track and exacerbated the difficulties of researching the Yung-cheng period.[10] My emphasis on the role of Yung-cheng's loyal younger brother, Prince I (Yinhsiang), and the Board of Revenue ministers as significant formative elements of the Yung-cheng inner circle, for instance, derives from archival materials dating from long before the time that the authors of those hazy reminiscences got around to publishing their observations.
The documents relevant to the eighteenth-century Grand Council story probably number in the hundreds of thousands, with perhaps as many as several thousand items in Chinese and Manchu per year; needless to say, even if I had gained access to all these materials, it would have been impossible to read through them. As a result, at many points I have summarized strenuously in order to condense the material to meet the page limits of modern academic publishing. Among the multitude of state papers available for studying the Grand Council are the palace memorials—high officials' reports to the throne—preserved in their original form (chu-p'i tsou-che ) as well as in reference copies (lu-fu tsou-che ) and record books. All of these may now be tapped for a deeper level of detail and frankness than we have had heretofore.
For the Yung-cheng reign an even more unusual set of documents survives: the numerous holograph imperial responses (rescripts) to the memorials, inscribed in the emperor's own color, vermilion. Frequently the Yung-cheng Emperor composed these when he was off his guard, spontaneously confiding his thoughts for an audience of one or another of his most trusted favorites. Some of these imperial screeds run for several pages and amount to stream-of- consciousness letters. When we read these today we find Yung-cheng speaking to us directly and without subterfuge. We have nothing like their length and self-revelation for any other ruler of imperial China.
Yet although the Yung-cheng documentation frequently reveals what was on the imperial mind, this evidence is also difficult to use. The emperor's ruling style was chaotic at times—to deal with it I developed a card file category headed "Yung-cheng chaos." Notes from the file show that behind Yung-cheng's earnest and frenzied attention to governing there flourished an imperial preference for handling things independently and sometimes haphazardly or even capriciously. For instance, Yung-cheng frequently inscribed his decisions on memorials that were then sent back to the field without any record of what had been said being retained in the capital files. Not surprisingly, the high assisting officials soon developed methods for keeping track of the imperial detritus. Another feature that turned up in the Yung-cheng chaos file was the emperor's proclivity for using different terms to refer to the same thing, or the
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10:48 AM ― 11 ― same term for different things. Researchers familiar with the Yung-cheng materials will have little cause to wonder why officials of the times remedied the situation by instituting strict regularization at the very outset of the Ch'ien-lung reign.
Changes in archival documentation mark the Ch'ien-lung and Chia-ch'ing periods. Although fuller than the previous period, with many more record books (tang-ts'e ), nevertheless materials of these two later reigns lack the numerous spontaneous imperial confidences of the Yung-cheng papers. Thus in contrast with Yung-cheng's long-windedness and frankness, the Ch'ien-lung Emperor usually wrote pithy and routinized rescripts, a fact reflecting the regularization introduced at the beginning of the new reign. As a result, the researcher has to forgo the fascination of the many direct Yung-cheng holograph revelations in exchange for the pleasures of increased general information.
Another Ch'ien-lung–era phenomenon, one of many examples of the increased scope of Grand Council activities, came to light in the archival volumes of the Office of Military Archives (Fang-lueh kuan ). These ledgers reveal the operations and development of the archives and historical compilation offices that were directly supervised by the council. The new publications office was able to censor (approve, gloss, or suppress) original archival documents before publishing the many military campaign histories (fang-lueh ) that were issued in particularly large numbers in the Ch'ien-lung period to extol the dynasty's territorial conquests. The Grand Council also came to be in charge of some of the many publication activities bequeathed from earlier times. Other archival sources depicted the Grand Council's Manchu Division (Man-pan ), a group whose activities have been overlooked until now, possibly as part of the general faith that what the dynasty was claiming about the existence of an evenhanded Manchu-Chinese dyarchy was true. The Grand Secretariat record books of instructions for writing the routine draft memorial rescripts (P'iao pu-pen shih) depicted the previously unimagined extent of the bureaucratization in the Grand Secretariat and Six Boards system, where thousands of details were anticipated and little was left to the possibility of independent action in routing or framing decisions. In the Beijing archives I also ran down the Grand Council's own storage records, regular inventories that suggest the changing range of council responsibilities. Grand Council daybooks containing correspondence below the imperial level opened vistas on the activities of middle-level bureaucrats, a layer of the bureaucracy that heretofore has rarely reached the researcher's eye.
For the entire period the grand councillors' own memoranda (tsou-p'ien ), composed to convey explanations to the Ch'ing emperors, in the twentieth century performed the same service for this grateful researcher.
― 13 ―
PROLOGUE
Preferred Citation: Bartlett, Beatrice S. Monarchs and Ministers: The Grand Council in Mid-Ch'ing China, 1723-1820. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991 1991. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft287004wt/
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