The Search for Modern China/China Rising:
Clifford, Nicholas R
MODERN CHINA: STILL TO COME THE SEARCH FOR MODERN CHINA Jonathan Spence W.W. Norton & Co., $29.95, 876 pp. CHINA RISING The Meaning of Tiananmen Lee Feigon Ivan R. Dee, $19.95, 269...
...Two years ago, Spence might have ended his book on a cautiously optimistic note...
...Spence examines Lin Zexu, whose war on drugs in the 1830s was doomed when he took on the foreign opium traders...
...PAUL BAUMANN is an associate editor of Commonweal...
...After that came the new "open door policy"-an opening begun not by Deng Xiaoping, but by Mao himself, and which has accompanied Deng's economic reforms...
...without diminishing the importance of the changes that take place, say, with the end of empire in 1912, or the victory of communism in 1949, he is as interested in the continuities of culture and society that have remained over the recent centuries...
...Through the novels and plays of the time, Spence shows both the brilliance of late Ming and early Qing high culture and its oblivious-ness to the problems of ordinary men and women...
...and the spokesmen of the emerging democracy movement since Mao's death, like Liu Binyan and Fang Lizhi...
...Or take his description of Chiang Kai-shek's wedding to Song Meiling in December 1927, "an event that encapsulated many of the crosscurrents roiling Chinese society": Chiang still married to his first wife, going through a Christian ceremony at home, performed by the head of the YMCA, and a Chinese ceremony in Shanghai's Majestic Hotel, performed by Cai Yuanpei, the Confucian scholar turned Nationalist revolutionary...
...in 1971...
...Yet this is by no means primarily an intellectual history as was Spence's earlier Gate of the Heavenly Peace...
...it also takes us out of the narrow parochialism of our own experience, opening our minds to the diversity of other peoples and other times...
...History would have taught them how futile it was to hope that particular individuals, particular factions, in the government could bring about the reforms they wanted, for men like Deng, Li Peng, and their colleagues were concerned only with maintaining their own interests...
...It is a historian's book, which is to say it presumes that China today cannot be understood without a knowledge of China yesterday...
...His splendid eye for detail catches the dangerous glory of the Qianlong emperor at the end of the eighteenth century, whose pronouncements give the air "of a man who has been praised too much and has thought too little, of someone who has played to the gallery in public life, mistaken grandeur for substance, sought confirmation and support for even routine actions, and is not really equipped to make difficult or unpopular decisions...
...EILEEN P. FLYNN is an associate professor at Saint Peter's College,New Jersey...
...After June 4, 1989, his words are still to the point...
...The search for modern China-by Chinese as well as foreigners-continues...
...we catch a foreshadowing of our own academic circles in those early Qing intellectuals who responded to the growth of popular education by developing "new modes of cultured expression that were out of the reach of almost everyone else...
...After publishing a highly respected monograph on Qing dynasty administration, he has since experimented with the writing of history in a variety of narrative styles...
...Surveying the last four hundred years of China's history, his new book uses a more conventional form...
...The book is equally strong on social and economic history, drawing on recent scholarship, introducing the reader to G. William Skinner's division of China into geographical macroregions, or examining the effects of demographic change in the late Qing and the People's Republic...
...REVIEWERS FRANCIS FLAHERTY is a New York-based writer specializing in legal issues...
...Spence avoids the simplistic dualisms that have characterized so much writing about China: nationalists against Communists, pragmatists against revolutionaries, for instance...
...JAMES GAFFNEY is professor of ethics at Loyola University of New Orleans...
...University of New Orleans...
...Of course foreigners play their role-European and American businessmen, advisers, and missionaries, Japanese intellectuals and military men, and others...
...He argues that the first demonstrations were the work of serious graduate students at People's University, men and women who knew their history and believed that the party could and should be reformed...
...ROBERT E. HOSMER, JR., teaches in the department of English language and literature at Smith College...
...Spence is firmly in de Tocqueville's camp...
...Yet history not only helps us to understand the present...
...Hence their willingness to turn to violence, and to beat Beijing into submission...
...Nicholas R. Clifford Jonathan Spence is one of the most interesting writers in America today...
...Like many recent historians, he takes a more nuanced view of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist China than was common ten or fifteen years ago, recognizing its accomplishments as well as its failures (in fact, one might wish that he did more with modern Taiwan, a significant economic power in today's world...
...Her most recent book is Hard Decisions (Sheed & Ward...
...His publisher has done well by him...
...writers like Lu Xun and Ding Ling, facing the struggles of the twenties and thirties...
...CHINA RISING The Meaning of Tiananmen Lee Feigon Ivan R. Dee, $19.95, 269 pp...
...NICHOLAS R. CLIFFORD teaches Chinese history at Middlebury College in Vermont...
...Never mind that he is an Englishman, or that he teaches Chinese history at Yale...
...Norton has produced a handsome book, with superb illustrations, almost fifty maps, and many tables of social and economic data...
...Today that is no longer possible...
...Jonathan Spence has given us a splendid guide to that quest...
...It is a bitter story, and though the book shows a few signs of hurried preparation, this is by far the best treatment of the episode that I have yet seen...
...but today we are more likely to remember de Tocqueville's view that the great Revolution simply acted as a catalyst for certain tendencies already present in the old regime...
...Jules Michelet believed 1789 to be such a watershed in French history that school children would never again need to learn what happened earlier...
...About two-thirds of the book covers the twentieth century, or more precisely, the period since the foundation of the Republic in 1911...
...They lost control, however, to tens of thousands of younger students and other demonstrators, men and women deprived by Beijing's educational system of any knowledge of their country's past, and hence with tragically little understanding of how much they resembled earlier antigovernment demonstrators in both their strengths and their weaknesses...
...The tragedy of Tiananmen is the subject of Lee Feigon's book...
...Books like Emperor of China, The Death of Woman Wang, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, and The Question of Hu have enriched both our knowledge of the past and our appreciation of the way in which a serious historian can use an imaginative literary approach while remaining faithful to his sources...
...Ignoring conventional divisions, he treats as a whole the years of war and revolution from the Japanese invasion of 1937 to the mysterious death of Lin Biao (Mao's heir turned traitor...
...But Chinese history has its own autonomy, and Spence's work is a useful corrective both to Chinese chauvinists who blame their nation's ills on foreign influences, and to Western chauvinists of both the right and the left who argue that their policies, for good or ill, somehow have determined China's experience (President Bush reflects this view, when he says that we must not drive China back into isolation, as if it were somehow within our power to do so...
...He traces the various currents of thought-social Darwinism, anarchism, liberalism, nationalism, fascism, and communism-that went into the turmoil of the twenties and thirties...
...Spence's search for modern China begins around 1600, when the Ming dynasty was staggering to its fall, and his subject throughout is China's history, rather than a China seen through Western eyes, or a China that simply responds to the actions of others...
...I am always ready to think the worst of my fellow countrymen," wrote Lu Xun after warlord troops massacred forty-seven demonstrators before the Tiananmen in 1926, "but I could neither conceive nor believe that we could stoop to such despicable barbarism...
...Feigon is also a historian, author of a study of Chen Duxiu, the first leader of the Chinese Communist party, and he was in Beijing last spring until just before the tanks went into the city...
...RAYMOND A. SCHROTH, S.J., author of Books for Believers (Paulist Press), is a professor of communications at Loyola University of New Orleans...
...Underscoring the importance of the Cultural Revolution twenty years ago in destroying the legitimacy of party and government, he gives us a vivid picture of a China careening out of control in the late eighties...
Vol. 117 • August 1990 • No. 14
