Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping by Klaus Mühlhahn (review)

In Making China Modern, Klaus Mühlhahn provides an institutional explanation of what happened in China during the past 270 years. Mühlhahn seeks to maintain a consistent and systematic account of China’s modern history from the fall of imperial China, the Chinese revolutions, and the new People’s Republic of China (PRC) and its transformations to the ongoing rise of China on the world stage. For any China specialist, it is a daunting task to cover such an extended period. It is equally challenging to describe each section of this long period with a judicial temperament and to provide an adequate amount of information in each part of the book. It is an intimidating task for historians to cover the recent decades of PRC history because political scientists, sociologists, policy wonks, and journalists have claimed them extensively. On top of the social scientific expertise, historians are unsure whether the current unfolding events are part of future patterns or whether instead something unexpected might overtake such trends and drastically alter the future course of events. Surmounting all of the above difficulties, Mühlhahn has written a relevant and timely book to account for how the rise of China has irreversibly changed the world’s perception of China and its past. Today the transformed Chinese landscape and cityscape are there for the world to see. With an extensive network of highspeed rail lines crisscrossing the nation and sprawling megacities across coastal China, few would doubt that China has now made it.

China will overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy soon. By 2050, Goldman Sachs economists predict, the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries’ contributions to the world economy may reach 40 percent, while the broader set of emerging markets will account for 73 percent of the world economy. Goldman Sachs’s predictions tell a story of the rise of non-Western economic power. China and Russia in the global North have become the primary threats to US supremacy. The increasing prominence of the non-West on the worldwide stage has gradually found its way into everyday life. So has the surge of the West’s petulant reaction to the rise of the non-West. The recent wave of China scaremongering in the United States, as Fareed Zakaria perceptively analyzes in his article in Foreign Affairs, demonstrates that China today remains as misunderstood as ever. China has clearly emerged as the sole great-power competitor of the United States on the world stage, and yet we have no idea how China has become so big, so fast. About three decades ago, foreign policymakers were still speaking of the imminent collapse of the PRC. Two decades ago they were predicting the implosion of China’s credit and housing markets. As late as ten years ago, many China specialists still insisted that political change would inevitably follow China’s capitalist development. Now we seem to have no choice but to coexist and cope with the growth of the Chinese leviathan. The mainstream narratives of the COVID-19 crisis in China, as Ian Johnson noted in the New York Times, demonstrate a bizarre sense of “what happened in China could not happen here” attitude in the West. Now that the pandemic is everywhere, Euroamerican hostility toward China has taken off and continues to accelerate at an alarming rate. The blame game and conspiracy theories go back and forth between the United States and China. The worst combination of bigotry and fear toward Chinese and Asian Americans in the United States inexorably continues to metastasize as the pandemic rages through the Western world.

If cooler heads wish to prevail, they should sit down and read Making China Modern. The main text of this book consists of more than six hundred pages of clear explanation, not sophisticated stories and plots. Mühlhahn has written in lucid prose free of academic jargon and unnecessary detours into literature...