Modernization and Revolution in China (review)

Reviews 415© 1998 by University ofHawai'i Press "Blazing the Black Path" refers to the phenomenon ofmarginalizing the intellectual and favoring power-hungry politicians (the "Red Path") and greedy capitalists (the "Gold Path"). Actually there are a number ofmodern films that perhaps do better in explaining how intellectuals have been embalmed by the regime. Nonetheless, weaving literature into the story gives a dramatic and historical sense of meaning to the lives ofcontemporary Chinese scientists and helps us to understand their psychological and emotional context. English-Lueck's methodology should inspire us to find similar ways to enrich our own writings and observations . Richard C. Kagan Hamline University Richard C. Kagan is a professor ofhistory specializing in Eastern Asian intellectual history and human rights. June Grasso, Jay Corrin, and Michael Kort. Modernization and Revolution in China. Second revised edition. Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997. ix, 292 pp. Hardcover $62.95, isbn 1-56324-976-6. Paperback $24.95, isbn 1-56324-977-4. The study ofChina, with its history of the last two centuries, is both so different to the experience ofstudents in the English-speaking world and so detailed that students require "quick fix" introductions. Taken singly, for example as compulsory texts for courses, such introductions ideally provide students with the minimum knowledge base for their studies. Taken together, such introductions begin to provide the student who wants to know more with a greater sophistication in approaching both the past and scholarship on die past. A useful strategy for the student with no previous exposure to matters Chinese is to read a selection of such introductory texts, which necessarily differ in scope, perspective, and interpretation —and sometimes even the accounts ofpast events. Modernization and Revolution in China is an excellent example ofgood writing based on sound scholarship in the genre ofintroductory texts to the study of modern China. Its focus—as its tide implies—is the transformation ofChinese society during the last two centuries. Those who are teaching China's modern history , contemporary Chinese civilization and society, or comparative historywill not hesitate to continue using it, as should certainly have been the case with the 416 China Review International: Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall 1998 publication of the first edition in 1991. It is a very approachable text for beginners: well-written with a flowing narrative and an appropriately loose theoretical framework that attempts to provide a structure to the emergence of a modernizing China. Although they do not in any sense detract from the essential usefulness of Modernization and Revolution in China, the revisions to the text in this new edition are somewhat disappointing. There appear to be about fifteen amendments mainly affecting the occasional paragraph. The only larger alterations include a brief discourse on modernization and revolution in the preface (pp. viii and ix in the new edition); further elaboration on both the "Hundred Flowers" incident of 1957 and its aftermath (pp. 173 ff.) and the popular political violence of the Cultural Revolution in 1966-1967 (pp. 231-233); and several pages describing events in China since 1990 (pp. 264-270). However, even these revisions, on the whole, only add detail to the existing account of change that they present. The presentation of Mao Zedong's role in China's politics provides an example of one source of disappointment with the revision of the text. Scholarship on Mao has changed dramatically not only since the late 1970s but especially during the 1990s. Firsthand accounts by those around Mao, and particularly by Mao's doctor, Li Zhisui, have been published. At the same time academic scholarship has become both more detailed and more sophisticated. In particular the work of Fred Teiwes—in both Politics at Mao's Court and The Tragedy ofLin Biao—has presented new perspectives on factionalism within the Chinese Communist Party. Yet Modernization and Revolution in China maintains the interpretative device of conflict between Mao and others in the CCP leadership that was unconvincing even during the Cultural Revolution. Thus the interpretation of the Hundred Flowers Movement of 1957, its aftermath, and die development ofpolicy during the early 1960s is dominated by accounts of that conflict. Yet, as Teiwes and others argue (and to...