The themes of despotism, cultural synthesis or assimilation, and the modern fate of Confucian humanism shaped Franz Michael's choice of topics in his academic work and public advocacy, and his experience in 1930s Germany directly influenced his anti-totalitarian and anti-communist stance. One of his students wrote after his death that "These times no longer welcomed voices like that of Franz Michael who advocated that the Chinese Communists should be taken for what they were and, actually, wanted to be, namely true Marxist-Leninists, and who insisted that the Sino-Soviet conflict needed to be analysed in other than the traditional terms of clashing nationalisms." Michael saw the
Chinese Communist Revolution as a producing Leninist totalitarianism that betrayed the Confucian humanist tradition, not a continuation of the despotic rule of the emperors. Michael argued that Mao Zedong's tactics derived from Lenin's strategy delivered by guidance from Moscow and that these tactics were not an independent Chinese invention. In the 1950s, he argued in such respected periodicals as
World Politics,
Orbis and
Problems of Communism that the story of the Communist takeover in China in 1949 was "not that of a peasant revolution but of a movement organized and led by Communists". The
Chinese Nationalist government was destroyed in a "military defeat" not by an uprising of the people. These concerns also shaped his teaching. One of his students,
David Shambaugh, wrote that as an undergraduate Michael challenged him, "a young liberal, to see how easy it was for unbridled state power to be used in despotic ways." Michael, he went on, "was one of the first scholars of Asia to apply the totalitarian paradigm (developed to understand modern fascism and Stalinist communism) to the study of Chinese communism, as he recognized that dictatorship knew no cultural boundaries." Shambaugh observed that "this recognition also grew out of his understanding of
Oriental Despotism and debates with Karl Wittfogel.
The Qing dynasty Michael's first monograph was his 1942 study,
The Origins of Manchu Rule in China, which addressed the question of whether
conquest dynasties fulfilled the cliche that China absorbed its conquerors. One reviewer at the tme,
Knight Biggerstaff, wrote that successive conquests of the empire by neighboring peoples has been one of the "most perpexing episodes in Chinese history." He continued that Michael's "interesting study" of the Manchus also "throws light upon the earlier alien conquests of China." The Manchus "created a mixed culture on the margin of Chinese society and gradually absorbed Chinese ideas and practises as they strengthened themselves against the day when they would be able to extend their power over the entire country." Scholars later argued that Michael placed too much weight on the Manchus absorbing Chinese culture and not enough on their creation of a Manchu identity and a style of rule that used Central Asian traditions more than Chinese ones.
Mark C. Elliott, a Harvard University scholar of Manchu history, however, distinguished "sinicization", that is the process of becoming culturally Chinese, from "absorption," that is, adding Chinese cultural practices without necessarily losing Manchu identity; he felt that Michael's argument was that Manchus exhibited the former before they embarked on their conquest of China in 1644. The University of Washington Project on Modern History organized translations and monographs on the
Taiping Rebellion, the mid-19th century civil war that nearly overthrew the dynasty. One result of the Project was
Taiping Rebellion in China, published by The University of Washington Press in three volumes, beginning in 1966. The first volume was Michael's narrative history of the movement; volumes II and III contained annotated translations of all of the significant surviving documents produced by the Taipings.
S. Y. Teng, wrote that the project "may be the best analysis of the Taiping Rebellion so far published, but it is by no means the final work". Teng argued that it "should be the best" because the University of Washington group had worked on this period for a long time, with Michael serving as "master writer" who has "judiciously appraised a huge amount of information," and whose "logical organization ties the complicated history together very neatly". Later writers expressed both respect and also reservations for the argument in the book.
Paul Cohen's
Discovering History in China applauded Michael and his collaborators for being exceptions to the general Western emphasis on the "shaping role of the Western intrusion". Cohen added that Michael characterized the Taiping organization as "totalitarian" and as providing a "system of total control of all life by the state which had no parallel in Chinese history."
Frederic E. Wakeman dubbed the approach of Michael and his University of Washington collaborators the "Regionalism-Warlordism-Despotism model". He wrote that Michael argued that "the Manchus... were aroused into founding the Qing only after being exposed to Chinese political institutions through the Ming frontier banner system”. Wakeman argued that later research using Manchu language sources had undermined this view.
Karl August Wittfogel's conception of
Oriental Despotism, Wakeman went on, “appeared to loom behind the entire structure, one imperial dynast after another participating in a steady growth toward greater and great autocracy". The Manchu court's response to the Taiping Rebellion was to allow
Han Chinese military leaders to build regional power, creating a precedent for the development of
Warlord Era in the twentieth century.
H. Lyman Miller replied that Wakeman and others misread Michael’s views when they assumed that he adopted Wittfogel’s concept of Oriental Despotism. In fact, Miller says, although both were at University of Washington, Michael was not Wittfogel’s student, and Michael disagreed with Wittfogel’s idea that Chinese history was “changeless”. In particular, Michael’s work did not imply that the Taiping Rebellion was the forerunner of Mao’s revolution or that its failure meant that the collapse of the imperial Chinese system left no alternative to revolution.
Tibet and Central Asia Michael's work on Central Asia continued in the 1980s with a series of articles and the book,
Rule by Incarnation: Tibetan Buddhism and its Role in Society and State. The reviewer in
Journal of Asian Studies reported that the book used the sociopolitical theories of
Max Weber to analyze the "fully matured religio-political order" of the four centuries before 1959, when the
Dalai Lama left Tibet for India. Michaels asks whether a church-state formed on the principle of "rule by incarnation" can be modernized and whether it could have been if it had not been invaded by China. Michael's answer to both questions is "yes." The reviewer in
China Quarterly wrote that "as a relatively brief and readable introduction to the subject, the reader could do much worse than to turn to it," commenting that "broadly speaking, this is the Tibetans' 'own' case, fairly made." He added that "one might question the author's view of the Tibetan political system as entirely dominated by Buddhism," paying "little attention to the ethnological level of Tibetan life which, it seems to me, gives Tibetan culture much of its resilience and genius...."
The Communist Revolution and the People's Republic In 1956, Michael reviewed recently published works on the Chinese Communist Revolution and how it had come to power in
World Politics, a key journal in international relations. He wrote of "misconceptions" and "hurried statements” that saw Mao leading a peasant revolution, for the peasants themselves "never assumed leadership nor were their aims the aims of the Communist revolution". Looking at the root causes, Michael said of ''
China's Response to the West'' edited by
Teng Ssu-yu and
John K. Fairbank, that in the end the volume "does not pose or answer the question of why the imperial state and Confucian society were 'altogether abandoned.'" The title of the book and the commentaries in it, wrote Michael, appear to put the blame on the “corrosive influence of Western power and Western ideas”, but on the other hand one may ask “whether an inner logic... had not brought the Confucian order to a point of decline where a new beginning would have been necessary even without the destructive Western influence... . Confucianism had become so formalized and so closely allied to the imperial state that the fall of the Chinese monarchy brought with it the disintegration of Confucian institutions.” ==Major publications==