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Rating: 
Summary: a view of china from the west, in 1975, with no glasses
Review: Sheridan published his book in 1975, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), a period of turmoil, mass killing, disintegration, unjustice, economic failure and human tragedy in general as disastrous as no other in the Chinese history, maybe with the sole exception of the Great Leap Forward (1957-60), another Mao Zedong's orchestrated descent into hell, this time featuring mass starvation (30 million deaths?) and stupidity as signs of the era. Apart from this, the whole Mao tenure was marked by the Gulag. Sheridan was, one have to suppose, a scholar on the subject of China in general, even if his book is devoted to the so-called Republican Era (1912-1949). How could he ignore so blatantly the consequences of the movements, decisions and political clashes he was reviewing? Because he was obsessed with words. Sheridan loves one word above any other: integration. His book is all about integration, his central theme: integration is supposedly that thing that turns feudal or semi-feudal or backward countries into modern players in the world stage, like Mao's China, as he naively suggests in his introduction. The book itself is named China in disintegration, and his message goes like this: the Kuomintang didn't integrate, so it lost. The Communists did integrate, so they won. Quite simple. There's other words Sheridan loves too, like modernization: like so many other 60s and 70s scholars, he hails Mao as the founder of the "modern" China, whatever it means, like that's good (or bad), like it wasn't Chiang Kai-shek who won the beloved seat and veto in the Security Council for the Republic of China. Maybe, he had to say all this empty words to make a point in the furiously anti-communist environment of Vietnam War U.S. I don't care. That's over now, the people who were supposed to listen to him are doing something else now, and his empty words remain empty. In A People's Tragedy, the Brit Orlando Figes portrays the Russian Revolution and the Civil War as a bloody business from both sides points of view. In his study of the other Great Agrarian Uprising, he shows clearly how the communist won not because they were nice guys who wanted to help the peasants and won their simple hearts, as Sheridan tries to demonstrate in the Chinese case, but because their policies looked better in the long run for the majority of a largely apolitical mass of people who wanted Land. Only Land (even if they were finally cheated, and ended up with No Land At All). Mao Zedong knew perfectly the basics of the Kidnapping of the Agrarian Revolution, that old communist strategy, as expressed in the notes written by the CIA case officers in Arbenz Guatemala (1954) or later by J.P.Vann in South Vietnam. Sheridan ignores it all. His revolution is a Bad Guy-Good Guy struggle, a young, brilliant, idealist Communist with History blowing his sails, versus that old creep who would kill his mother for money, the Kuomintang Confucionist Chinese. That's the weakest point of the book and one real important, because the Communist-Nationalist struggle is the key of the Republican Era, the one thing that basically weakened the Kuomintang's capacity to "integrate" China and finally gave birth to another China, 39 years of bloody soul-searching that ended up with a sell-out in exchange for Coca-cola. Sheridan, apparently unable to read either Chinese or French (the language in which so many excellent books about China are written), as I suppose after checking his sources, didn't have access to many authors that traveled behind the communist lines during the 30s and the 40s and wrote what they saw before 1975. In fact, when he's got to speak about Mao's revolutionary base in Yenan, he doesn't provide a single footnote identifying the sources of his lack of any knowledge whatsoever about the place, though he later states how helpful was for him Red Star over China, that piece of propaganda rubbish courtesy of Mao's friend and frequent guest Edgar Snow. The rest of the book, when one doesn't have to cope with the idealization of Mao and the reds, is well written, even occasionally insightful about the many flaws of the Kuomintang regime and the Warlords wars. Too bad all the names are in the Wade-Gilles transcription, which is currently used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, and is (I believe) inferior to the pinyin transcription used in communist China, and confusing, especially since there is no Chinese characters or pinyin translations anywhere in the book. There you have one of the very few communist successes in history, and Sheridan doesn't take advantage of it.
Rating:
Summary: a view of china from the west, in 1975, with no glasses
Review: Sheridan published his book in 1975, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), a period of turmoil, mass killing, disintegration, unjustice, economic failure and human tragedy in general as disastrous as no other in the Chinese history, maybe with the sole exception of the Great Leap Forward (1957-60), another Mao Zedong's orchestrated descent into hell, this time featuring mass starvation (30 million deaths?) and stupidity as signs of the era. Apart from this, the whole Mao tenure was marked by the Gulag. Sheridan was, one have to suppose, a scholar on the subject of China in general, even if his book is devoted to the so-called Republican Era (1912-1949). How could he ignore so blatantly the consequences of the movements, decisions and political clashes he was reviewing? Because he was obsessed with words. Sheridan loves one word above any other: integration. His book is all about integration, his central theme: integration is supposedly that thing that turns feudal or semi-feudal or backward countries into modern players in the world stage, like Mao's China, as he naively suggests in his introduction. The book itself is named China in disintegration, and his message goes like this: the Kuomintang didn't integrate, so it lost. The Communists did integrate, so they won. Quite simple. There's other words Sheridan loves too, like modernization: like so many other 60s and 70s scholars, he hails Mao as the founder of the "modern" China, whatever it means, like that's good (or bad), like it wasn't Chiang Kai-shek who won the beloved seat and veto in the Security Council for the Republic of China. Maybe, he had to say all this empty words to make a point in the furiously anti-communist environment of Vietnam War U.S. I don't care. That's over now, the people who were supposed to listen to him are doing something else now, and his empty words remain empty. In A People's Tragedy, the Brit Orlando Figes portrays the Russian Revolution and the Civil War as a bloody business from both sides points of view. In his study of the other Great Agrarian Uprising, he shows clearly how the communist won not because they were nice guys who wanted to help the peasants and won their simple hearts, as Sheridan tries to demonstrate in the Chinese case, but because their policies looked better in the long run for the majority of a largely apolitical mass of people who wanted Land. Only Land (even if they were finally cheated, and ended up with No Land At All). Mao Zedong knew perfectly the basics of the Kidnapping of the Agrarian Revolution, that old communist strategy, as expressed in the notes written by the CIA case officers in Arbenz Guatemala (1954) or later by J.P.Vann in South Vietnam. Sheridan ignores it all. His revolution is a Bad Guy-Good Guy struggle, a young, brilliant, idealist Communist with History blowing his sails, versus that old creep who would kill his mother for money, the Kuomintang Confucionist Chinese. That's the weakest point of the book and one real important, because the Communist-Nationalist struggle is the key of the Republican Era, the one thing that basically weakened the Kuomintang's capacity to "integrate" China and finally gave birth to another China, 39 years of bloody soul-searching that ended up with a sell-out in exchange for Coca-cola. Sheridan, apparently unable to read either Chinese or French (the language in which so many excellent books about China are written), as I suppose after checking his sources, didn't have access to many authors that traveled behind the communist lines during the 30s and the 40s and wrote what they saw before 1975. In fact, when he's got to speak about Mao's revolutionary base in Yenan, he doesn't provide a single footnote identifying the sources of his lack of any knowledge whatsoever about the place, though he later states how helpful was for him Red Star over China, that piece of propaganda rubbish courtesy of Mao's friend and frequent guest Edgar Snow. The rest of the book, when one doesn't have to cope with the idealization of Mao and the reds, is well written, even occasionally insightful about the many flaws of the Kuomintang regime and the Warlords wars. Too bad all the names are in the Wade-Gilles transcription, which is currently used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, and is (I believe) inferior to the pinyin transcription used in communist China, and confusing, especially since there is no Chinese characters or pinyin translations anywhere in the book. There you have one of the very few communist successes in history, and Sheridan doesn't take advantage of it.
Rating: 
Summary: Brian Wayne Wells, Esquire, reviews China in Disintegration
Review: This is the second in a series of books on modern China published by The Free Press, a division of McaMillan Publishing Co. Although published in the mid 1970's the series still has value for college undergraduate and graduate level instruction. The writing style of the entire series easy to read and yet conveys much correct scholarly history. Professor Sheridan is the author of a number of books on China and he seems to favor writing on the warlord era of China--1912 thru 1949--having written this book and a biography of the famous "Christian Warlord," Feng Yu-hsiang. This particular book, "China in Disintegration" deals with the period of time from the 1911 Sun Yat-sen democratic bourgeois revolution up to the time of the 1949 Revolution in China. During this time much of the centralized character of Chinese society and governance was broken apart. Various regional warlords controlled local areas of China and ran them independently from the wishes of the central government under Kuomintang Party of Sun Yat-sen and later of Chiang Kai-shek. Thus the title of this short 294-page book.
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