Modern China: A Guide to a Century of Change (review)

Trained in Chinese history at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Graham Hutchings was for more than ten years China correspondent for the Daily Telegraph in London, Beijing, and Hong Kong, completing his duties with that newspaper in 1998. He has traveled throughout China in more than twenty of its provinces. Today he is a senior editor and China analyst with Oxford Analytica, an international consultancy company. His book Modern China is the concisely presented product of a scholarly and journalistic career of information gathering and interpretation. In fact, this one book is a compendium of many possible books in the making, serving as a guide to a century of change. It is meant to be "a reliable and instructive aid to learning as well as encouragement to learn more," and "it tries to be authoritative rather than academic; comprehensive rather than exhaustive; enjoyable as well as enlightening."

The object of Modern China is clearly stated in the preface:

Its subject is China's evolution from a decaying empire in 1900 into a rapidly modernizing state more than a century later. Its purpose is to introduce the major aspects of this transition and explain their significance. Its approach is to examine the people, places, events, movements, organizations and ideas that have shaped China's destiny over the past hundred years in a series of short, critical essays. And its aim is to provide general readers and students, government officials and media professionals, business people and non-specialist academics with a comprehensive, accessible, companionable source of information about a country whose growing importance calls for still greater understanding.

The succinct and perceptive twenty-three-page introduction, "Middle Kingdom to Modern State: China's Unfulfilled Quest for Power and Prestige," is followed by what amounts to more than two hundred expanded footnotes in the form of independent essays arranged alphabetically from A to Z, with each essay being "self-contained and designed to stand alone." Related to the general topic of a modernizing China, these essays cover issues, organizations, prominent persons (such as President Jiang Zemin and his designated successor Hu Jintao), provinces and places, and foreign countries and international organizations important to China. They not only illustrate and amplify the Introduction but open up other aspects of a particular topic of focus, showing its ramifications, complexities, and connectedness to a modernizing China as a whole. In short, each essay is virtually another window into a modernizing China with all its promises and perils, making this one volume a richly nuanced and multifaceted presentation.

Hutchings admits of a "strong opinion" and tries to be "free of the conventions of diplomacy." In a long essay, he sees one Taiwan and one China inevitably as separate entities, and he "exults in their existence as a source of diversity and ultimately, of benefit to China as a whole." Perceptive essays on Hong Kong and Macau are also found in this volume.

Two arbitrary examples will suffice to show how the critical essays in the book interweave with one another to produce the meaningful fabric of Modern China. A focus on environmental issues, for example, leads to cross-references to essays on agriculture, energy, Hebei Province, the Yangtze River, land reform, Beijing, Guangdong, Shanghai, Chongqing, Hong Kong, and the Three Gorges Dam. Likewise, the essay on the May Fourth Movement relates to other discussions on democracy, the Tiananmen Square Democracy Movement, anarchism, and important personages such as Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu.

Boxed inserts highlighting the geography of provinces (including workable maps) and data on organizations and events provide the reader with additional useful information. Eight pages of glossy photos of "China's paramount leaders in the twentieth century" and key events are found in the middle of the book, and it ends with a nine-page chronology of the events of the twentieth century. There is also a six-page bibliography of source material for the...