Turmoil, War and Broken Dreams

...Shortly after Sun Yat-sen's death in 1925 the Communists split off from the Nationalists, now led by Chiang Kaishek, and the 24-year civil war between the two was under way...

...Fundamentalist Christian and egalitarian principles inspired the Taiping Rebellion, which rocked the country from 1848 to 1865...

...Reviewed by Timothy Tung Former research professor, China specialist, the City University of New York Among today's crop of Western Sinologists, I can think of no one better qualified than Jonathan D. Spence to write a history of modern China...

...Underlying Spence's choice to start his narrative around the year 1600 is the fact that before China became a republic in 1912, it was ruled for nearly three centuries by outsiders...

...Taking advantage of the troubled state of the Ming dynasty in the early 17th century, the Manchu tribe invaded the country from across its northeastern frontier and founded the Qing dynasty in 1644...

...Mao's 1957 anti-Rightist campaign was the first disillusioning blow for the intellectuals...

...Besides being a meticulous scholar, he is adept at drawing the reader into the world he creates...

...The unrest climaxed in June 1989 with the massacre in Tiananmen Square...

...In the second section of his book, "Fragmentation and Reform," Spence attributes the decline of the Qing in part to the massive British investment in opium manufacturing and distribution...

...But it was not until 1976 that the first spontaneous popular demonstration occurred, under the pretext of paying homage to the recently deceased Zhou Enlai...

...The first, entitled "Conquest and Consolidation," details how the Manchu conquerors imposed their efficient military and administrative systems on China to bring order to the country...

...He writes: "Wittingly or not, those Chinese who marched and spoke out in 1976, 1978, 1986, and 1989 shared a great deal with the anti-Guomindang nationalists of the 1930s, the May Fourth experimenters of the 1920s, the anti-Qing activists of the later 19th century...

...Some of them are still in power...

...In clear and graceful prose, Spence chronicles 400 years of turmoil and war, broken dreams and tragedies—the ironic experience of a people in perennial pursuit of peace, prosperity and happiness...

...Of signal importance among these was a student demonstration that took place in Tiananmen Square on May 4,1919...

...The Search for Modern China, his most ambitious book yet, is an altogether successful attempt to demystify China for the Western reader...

...One can only hope that the present student leaders will do a better job of building a modern and democratic China...

...their respect for the Chinese cultural heritage and their employment of native intellectuals in government helped to consolidate the nation they took over...

...By the end of 1986, frustrations among students and intellectuals gave rise to a wave of demonstrations that spread to Shanghai and other cities...

...His The Death of Woman Wang (1978) vividly recreates the life of an ordinary woman in 15th-century Ming society...

...Known as the December Ninth Movement, this was the second most important mass action by Chinese students in this century...

...These are all fascinating stories, leading one to believe Spence could have been a great novelist...

...In 1935 students in Beijing and Tianjin marched to protest Japanese aggression and Chiang's inability to check it...

...Spence devotes the remaining three sections of his book to the period following the 1911 upheaval, which has been one of political turmoil, warlordism and civil conflict, much of it aggravated by foreign intervention and Japanese aggression...

...Currently the George Burton Adams Professor of History at Yale, Spence has achieved a lofty standing in academia with eight previous books—especially his superbly executed The Gate of Heavenly Peace (1981), an account of China from 1895 to 1980 that includes biographies of poets, philosophers, artists, and story-tellers, giving the events covered a three-dimensional quality...

...From then on such actions became more frequent...

...The year 1978 in particular saw an upsurge in demands for political and intellectual freedom, in the form of the Democracy Wall protests...

...Yuan Shikai, the leader of the powerful North China Army, was given the presidency for his crucial role in expelling the Manchus, but he promptly proclaimed himself emperor and died a short time later...

...It was in celebration of the 70th anniversary of this event that students gathered in Tiananmen Square in May of last year...

...He also has a knackfor choosing subjects...

...As regional warlords emerged and grabbed political power, the new republic began to disintegrate...

...Although Western-inspired impulses toward reform and modernization at the end of the century were stymied by the powerful Dowager Empress Cixi, a growing anti-Manchu nationalism made the eventual toppling of the Qing dynasty inevitable...

...And there was not the faintest reason to believe, despite the Chinese government's intellectual and political repressions, that the protests of 1989 would be the last...

...The Question of Hu (1988) allows us to see the world from the perspective of an early Chinese convert brought to 18th-century Paris by his Jesuit patron...

...Spence has divided the book into five sections...

...Sun Yat-sen, considered the father of the republican revolution, was unable to unite the different factions that had helped bring it about...

...China's 20th-century history is dotted with mass protests initiated by restless students who have been deeply influenced by ideas imported from the West...

...The troubles had their root in the inconclusive founding of the Chinese republic...

...The fall of the Qing early in the present century returned the Han Chinese to dominance, but did not bring stability...

...The great irony in all this is that today's oppressors were yesterday's marchers and protesters...

...Soon, however, came Western influences, spearheaded by the British...

...Imperial resistance to the trade only led to China's defeat by Britain in the Opium War (1839-42...

...Many of its key figures linked up with the Communists in Yan'an after the Long March, and rose in the Party hierarchy once Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic in 1949...

...Confronted by these conditions, educated Chinese took to the streets...

...Some of the young idealists who in the 1930s demonstrated in revulsion against the Nationalists' excesses almost certainly acquiesced in the Tiananmen Massacre...

...Some of the leaders of the May Fourth Movement, as it came to be called, were attracted to Marxist philosophy, and the ferment the protests occasioned led to the birth of the Chinese Communist Party two years later...

...Indeed, the repeated upheavals China has experienced since the end of the monarchy show that it is still struggling to be born as a "modern" nation...

...But the bloody events in the spring moved him to add a final chapter...

...Otherwise—with a few exceptions, such as forcing all Chinese men to wear their hair braided in the Manchu-style queue—the new rulers upheld native traditions and social structures...

...The imposed Treaty of Nanking opened five Chinese ports to the West, making the country more permeable to Western ideas...

...Winning over the students and intellectuals was one of the Communists' greatest coups...

...With the failure of the Great Leap Forward (1958-61) and the disastrous Cultural Revolution (1966-76), disenchantment spread to the masses...

...The three great Qing emperors—Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong—were all scholars of Chinese classics...

...The site was Tiananmen Square, and again students were in the forefront...

...The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (1984) explores the mind of the 16th-century Italian Jesuit priest who was among the first foreign missionaries in China...

...In Emperor of China (1974) he painted a "selfportrait" of the Emperor Kangxi that transports the reader to the 17th-century Qing court...

...Spence finished his manuscript in February 1989, supplying no conclusion because, he says, the search for modern China has not come to an end...

...This monumental work grew out of three decades of painstaking research begun when the author was a graduate student at Yale in 1959...

...Spence's skill as a historian is manifold...