Given that China has been ruled for over half a century by a Communist party that has its ideological roots in Marxism, one might suppose that Darwin’s impact on modern China was primarily due to the fact that Karl Marx embraced Darwin’s theory as a satisfying explanation of human existence without the need for belief in a Creator. In other words, Darwin’s influence was somewhat indirect, providing a “scientific” basis for the atheism underlying Marxism and its political progeny Communism. However, as Pusey points out, in fact, Darwin had an influence on China’s political development prior to the advent of Communism. He notes that during the late 19th century, as a weak China faced humiliation after humiliation at the hands of foreign powers, some Chinese political reformers turned to Darwin as a “foreign authority…who had discovered a cosmic imperative for change.” From their viewpoint, Darwinism implied the idea that human history passes through a series of evolutionary stages, inevitably leading towards greater and greater progress. Thus, China had to move on to the next stage in history to become strong and restore its greatness. For Chinese reformers, this meant moving China away from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy. After all, “the [evolutionarily] fittest nation on earth, Great Britain, had shown the way.”
However, Chinese revolutionaries, perhaps most notably Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen, the future leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party), in contrast with the reformers, sought more dramatic change. They argued that China “could 'lie deng' (leap over stages) to catch up to the West and that civil war was an indispensable precondition of China's evolution or progress.” In the end, the revolutionaries won this debate due to the apparent failure of the reform movement to revive China. However, the first wave of revolution, led by Sun and his follower Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), still failed to restore China’s greatness. Consequently, a second and more radical revolutionary movement emerged, the Chinese Communists, led ultimately by Mao Zedong. As Pusey says, Mao and his fellow Communists, “found in Marxism what seemed to them the fittest faith on Earth to help China to survive.” He concludes his article thus:
This was not, of course, all Darwin's doing, but Darwin was involved in it all. To believe in Marxism, one had to believe in inexorable forces pushing mankind, or at least the elect, to inevitable progress, through set stages (which could, however, be skipped). One had to believe that history was a violent, hereditary class struggle (almost a 'racial' struggle); that the individual must be severely subordinated to the group; that an enlightened group must lead the people for their own good; that the people must not be humane to their enemies; that the forces of history assured victory to those who were right and who struggled.
Who taught Chinese these things? Marx? Mao? No. Darwin.
To me, the greatest irony in all of this is that China, a country that has long prided itself on its cultural uniqueness, has been deeply influenced by ideas from foreigners over the course of its history. A millennium and a half ago, it was the beliefs of an Indian prince (the Buddha). In the past century or so, China has been shaped by the ideas of a German philosopher (Marx) and a British scientist (Darwin). And now, as the Church grows in China, it has perhaps begun to be influenced by the teachings of a certain Jewish carpenter, who taught of the need for an even more radical revolution, that of the human heart.