Bitter Revolution: China's Struggle With the Modern World

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Summary: These books focus on what might seem like narrow topics, but
Review: they contain more novel insights and findings than do most general histories of modern China, illustrating the complexity and intractability of the difficulties China has faced in its struggle with the modern world. Mitter begins with the founding of the May Fourth Movement during student demonstrations against the decision at Versailles to grant Germany's Chinese concessions to Japan. She then traces how May Fourth, with its idealization of democracy and science and its denunciation of Confucianism as the cause of China's backwardness, has surfaced in one way or another at every turn in modern Chinese history. In every fight over discarding old traditions and adopting modern advances, May Fourth has been central; even Mao's Cultural Revolution, with its call for a new Chinese culture, bears its mark.

Through a detailed case study of attempts to suppress opium use in Fujian Province, Madancy shows that, in the interactions of state and society during the late Qing and early republican years, even the most well intentioned policies could produce undesirable results. Time and again, national and local suppression only created new problems, and so there was a repeat of Commissioner Lin Zexu's effort to cut off the British trade in opium that triggered the Opium wars, which ended in China's humiliation.



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Summary: China from 1919 to the 21st Century: Writers and Ideas
Review: This is a well written and well researched book by the young university lecturer Rana Mitter at Oxford. He is also the author of at least two other books on China. The author attempts to tell us part of the 20th century story of China's political awakening by tracing many of the historical figures and writers to the small number of universities primarily in Beijing and Shanghai and the demonstrations of May 1919 in Beijing.

The book starts around the time of the May 4, 1919 demonstrations or what the author calls the first Tian'anmen Square (gate) demonstration. The small number of protestors served as a touch stone for future generations of Chinese as the 20th century unfolded.

In summary, that group wanted to free China of its past ties to Confucianism and replace it with science and democracy. The author tells us the story of the development of China from that date forward and we read about a general "awakening" then on to the more recent history of modern China. At the time of the 1919 demonstrations, China was fragmented politically and had only 28,000 university students. Although the Nationalists had seized power, China lacked its own central authority and unifying government and was dominated by war lords and by colonial powers, the latter at its major seaports. The author believes that the students from the 1919 era and their contemporaries or those that followed in the decade after - the 1920s - contributed to and help set in motion the ideas, the political philosophies, and provided the leaders that changed China into a more modern state.

The modernization of China sharply lagged behind its Asian neighbor Japan that started to modernize in the early 1850's building steel plants, railways, shipyards, and universities with the support of the government, the military, banks and industry. China on the other hand remained fragmented, divided, a vast agrarian society with its coastal cities dominated by colonial powers. The universities and intellectual base were very small by any standards and for a country of the size of China they were very small. In some ways China was similar to Russia in that it had a revolutionary spirit and rural unrest but a political vacuum or at least an ineffective central government. There was a general yearning for a new government or economic system. The communists filled that void almost by default after the Nationalists were weakened by WWII and were unable to defend the country against Japan.

In any case the author tells a very detailed story about the people and ideas of the early café societies in Shanghai and the Beijing University that produced many popular writers and famous politicians including Mao and others. The author tells us about other writers such as Zou Raofen, Lu Xun, and the woman Ding Ling who wrote her "Miss Sophie" about her inner thoughts including sexuality in her writings, and about popular magazines such as "Life". The author goes on to lead us through the Nationalist movement, the communists, the invasion by Japan, the rise of the communists, the great leap forward, the cultural revolution, the failures of communism, the 1989 Tian'anmen massacre, etc. Instead of science and democracy China suffered through a series of crisis with as many as 60 million or more dead by famine and wars, with the people sometimes turning to cannibalism. Through all of the turmoil, politicians and writers including Mao and others would reference the spirit of May 1919 to justify their actions although their own actions were no longer a reflection of the early ideas.

The book is just over 300 pages in medium font and gives a good introduction and overview to the development of modern China with many details on writers and political figures. As an added feature he includes nine pages of comments on follow up readings - mostly academic books or histories or other popular books - and mostly in English divided by category.


I enjoyed the book but thought it a bit short. Still it is worth 5 stars.