Twentieth-Century China: New Approaches (review)

In this thoughtfully edited volume, Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom presents a selection of the most stimulating recent writing on twentieth-century Chinese history. All except two of the twelve essays have been previously published in a heterogeneous range of venues, but in bringing them together Wasserstrom goes beyond the role of compiler to draw them into conversation with one another. The result is a resource that China specialists, historians of other regions, world historians, and comparativists should all find useful.

The volume is divided into four parts. The first, “The Shape of a Century,” calls into question the conventional designation of 1949—the year in which the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was established—as a moment of thoroughgoing rupture with the past. True, 1949 marked off one regime from another, represented the culmination of almost three decades of struggle by the Chinese Communist Party. Encoded in the term “Liberation,” it neatly bisected the century: semicolonial vulnerability before 1949, determined nation-building afterwards. And yet, useful as that formulation might be when the PRC leadership narrates its own past, it obscures as much continuity as it illuminates. Paul Cohen’s opening essay, “The 1949 Divide in Chinese History,” elaborates this point by suggesting that much of what the Communists achieved in the early PRC was the realization of a “consensual Chinese agenda” shared by their rivals, the Nationalists.

Joseph Esherick’s “Ten Theses on the Chinese Revolution” encapsulates in handy aphoristic form much of the best recent thinking about the 1949 revolutionary moment. As he shrewdly points out, we the observers (and historians) no longer live in an era when revolution seems imminent or inevitable, and thus perhaps we are able to perceive continuities and contingencies in the shape that a revolution takes. Esherick sees the Nationalists as precursors to the Communists as well as enemies of them. He points to the influence of large processes (world depression, Japanese expansion) and singular events (the 1936 kidnapping of Chiang Kai-shek, the character of individual Communists) on the course of the revolution. He also calls attention to the complex and striated character of the Communist Party itself, and its multiple moments of re-formation over the course of the almost three decades preceding its triumph. Esherick’s theses will be valuable to historians of other revolutions, providing points of comparison as well as interesting particulars of the China case.

Lin Chun’s “Toward a Chinese Feminism: A Personal Story” shifts registers from the analysis of revolution-as-a-whole to revolution’s effects on family and intergenerational ties. Describing her girlhood as the daughter of dedicated Party members during the 1950s, she contrasts the devaluing of family ties in public life to the importance of those same ties at moments of political danger. She also marvels at the questions that never got asked, either by her mother’s generation or (until much later) by her own, about “the intrinsically contradictory character of a communist feminism” (69). Gender equalities, obvious to her in retrospect, went unremarked.

The second section of the book, “Going Local,” asks how the grand events of twentieth century history might be reinterpreted by attending to the local. Henrietta Harrison reconstructs how educated people in rural China learned about national events at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing from the diary of a conservative tutor in inland north China, she finds that oral reports of the Boxer uprising and other happenings were routinely transmitted in great detail by traveling merchants and soldiers. Daily and weekly newspapers published in the treaty ports became more common in the first several decades of the twentieth century, but Harrison suggests that many educated rural dwellers fit the news they read into their existing interpretive frameworks, and continued to rely upon oral reports to supplement and correct an increasingly politicized press.

In his look at the “Contours of Revolutionary Change in a Chinese County, 1900–1950,” R. Keith Schoppa argues that the Chinese revolution, in both its nationalist and communist phases...