A Bitter Revolution: China's Struggle with the Modern World

by Rana Mitter

Book Overview

China today is poised to play a key role on the world stage, but in the early twentieth century the situation was very different. In this powerful new look at modern China, Rana Mitter goes back to a pivotal moment in Chinese history to uncover the origins of the painful transition from pre-modern to modern world.
Mitter identifies May 4, 1919, as the defining moment of China's twentieth-century history. On that day, outrage over the Paris peace...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0192803417
• ISBN13: 9780192803412
• Release Date: July 2004
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 357 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 9.3" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Modern Chinese Culture

The premise of this book is that everything happening in China after May 4, 1919 and the signing of the discriminatory Versailles Treaty was essentially influenced by that event. This is fairly readable and offers a lot of modern Chinese history, though I don't believe Mitter carefully relates events back to the movement, nor do I think he is able to clearly explain what the movement meant for the Chinese. Part of the reason for this is the difficulty of understanding Chinese culture. I would only recommend the book to those who have spent some time in China and understand the culture. That being said, I am a little upset that this review may drag the total stars to "4," when it really deserves 4.5 stars. It goes into details about authors who emerged around or after the May 4th movement and discusses how they were a part of the movement. This kind of analysis can't be found elsewhere unless you read specific books about those authors. If you want to focus on modern Chinese history, I would recommend Spence's "Modern China," which covers everything from the fall of the Ming Dynasty to present day.

China from 1919 to the 21st Century.

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 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) demonstrations. The small number of protestors served as a touch stone or reference to future generations of Chinese as the 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 and we read about a general "awakening" and the 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, it 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 - 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, who started to modernize in the early 1850's building steel plants, railways, shipyards, and universities, in a unified effort among banks, the government including the military, and industry. China on the other hand remained fragmented, divided, a vast agrarian society with its costal 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 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. There was a general yearning for a new government or economic system and the communists filled that void almost by default after the Nationalists were weakened by WWII. 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 co

These books focus on what might seem like narrow topics, but

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.