China since 1949 by Linda Benson (review)

From a poor developing country in the mid-twentieth century to an economic powerhouse in the early twenty-first century, China has experienced dramatic changes over the past sixty years. What were the changes and how did they happen? What were their impacts on different sectors of the population? How does the understanding of China’s recent past enrich our appreciation of China’s position in the current world? In this astonishingly concise survey, Linda Benson tackles these questions felicitously, weaving ordinary people’s lives, particularly of women and ethnic minorities, into major historical events to showcase the many faces, as well as many phases, of China’s political, economic, and social change.

Benson centers the history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on four major themes: the tension between traditional culture and revolutionary agendas, the disparity between rural and urban development, the uneasiness between regional/local power and central authority, and the tension between Communism and modernization. The unfolding of these tensions, oftentimes intersecting with one another, reveals the complexity of Chinese society undergoing these changes.

The book contains three parts, with the first part offering an introduction (chapter 1) and a brief account of the geography and a historical overview focusing on the turbulent years from the late Qing to the 1949 revolution (chapter 2). The second section, chapters 3–10, chronicles major events that shaped recent Chinese society, ranging from political campaigns to economic reforms, from Maoist policies of leaping into a Communist paradise to Hu Jintao’s agenda of building a harmonious world. The last part, chapter 11, concludes the book with assessments of China’s achievements and challenges facing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

In two brief chapters (chapters 3 and 4) covering the Mao years from 1949 to 1976, Benson clearly lays out the challenges of the new revolutionary state and attempts of the Communist regime in addressing these challenges. Chapter 3 does a particularly good job of explaining the power structure of the new administration and the relationship between the CCP and the military. The emphasis on land reform, the new marriage law, and the regional autonomous system sets the tone of the book, which gives particular attention to the agricultural sector, women, and minorities.

If grouping the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in one chapter (chapter 4) does support Benson’s claim that “periodization for the book departs from standard treatment in most texts on modern China” (p. 4), the departure actually appears in a simplistic and superficial manner. It makes sense to use the two major political disasters to demonstrate the failures of the radical Maoist attempts, but such treatment overshadows the moderate and yet important changes that helped to salvage China from the turmoil. For example, the reform led by Liu Shaoqi immediately after the three years of famine allowed a rapid economic recovery, and Zhou Enlai, in the early 1970s, had already started to rebuild the CCP and rehabilitate CCP members purged in the Cultural Revolution. Benson’s periodization tends to reproduce the party-line story of a radical transition from political turmoil and economic disaster of Maoist extremes into Deng Xiaoping’s miraculous economic reforms.

While Benson’s brevity is admirable, indeed, these two chapters unavoidably fall short by omitting some important aspects of the Mao era that could have better assisted readers to understand the challenges and importance of post-Mao changes. For example, it is unclear how the rural-based Communist regime established urban order in its early years. Therefore, readers may find it hard to understand how the social and political marks left on the urban landscape by the earlier attempts contribute to the phenomenon of a floating population during the reform era, such as the household registration system instituted in the 1950s and still important today.

The rest of the book, chapters 5–10, tells the story of economic reform and social change...