A Bitter Revolution: China's Struggle with the Modern World. By RANA MITTER. [New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 357 pp. $30.00. ISBN 0-19-280341-7.]

Extract

In A Bitter Revolution, Rana Mitter offers a broad-brushed interpretive essay intended for a general reader rather than a focused academic study. Because of his target audience and the expansiveness of his topic, Mitter's prose is informal and he frequently inserts textbook-style passages. Mitter intermittently offers his own illuminating readings of primary source material and throughout the work he engages with an impressive range of recently published scholarly research findings but, in the main, this book's originality lies in its integrative and sweeping narrative reading of China's modern revolutionary history.

Mitter's account is organized around a number of biographical sketches (most prominently of Zou Taofen and Du Zhongyuan) and several key historiographical contentions. Cumulatively, those contentions serve to open modern Chinese history to a range of new approaches and questions. First, Mitter argues that Chinese historians must resist the habit of centring their interpretive focus on the Communist story given the relative brevity of the Communist revolution and the fact that three very important decades have passed since its high point. This leads to the second contention – namely that in important ways contemporary Chinese politics and society share more in common with the May Fourth period than they do with the Maoist era. As Mitter sees it, the May Fourth movement, and the political and cultural pluralism of the pre-war Republican period more broadly, have remained highly relevant over the course of modern Chinese history. For this reason, he chooses to weave his narrative around that generation's passage through life during the 20th century. Thirdly, interpreters of modern Chinese history must do more to foreground the complex and multiple ways that the broader international political environment influenced China's revolutionary process over the course of the 20th century. And fourthly, it is as important to understand daily life and how it has changed over time as it is to study the large, abstract forces that shape society. In recent decades these historiographical ideas have steadily gained ground within the field of modern Chinese history, yet Mitter is among the first to build a sustained narrative statement on 20th-century China around them. In presenting this synthetic account, Mitter has performed an important and very useful service to the field.