A generous take on China's modern history

A Bitter Revolution is a book about the history of China from 1919 to the end of the 20th century. Contrary to what's suggested by the title, it doesn't really focus on the advent to power of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. In fact, it takes the opposite tack.

Whereas historians until now have tended to see the 1949 take-over as a watershed, and gone on to contrast life in China before and after this date, this author prefers to look at the continuities, the things that didn't change, or changed slowly. His real theme is China's long struggle to adapt itself to the modern world.

Modernization has long been the battle-cry in China, of course. From the moment the rule of the emperors collapsed in 1912, the war was on between those who wanted to follow the West (and increasingly Japan) in the astonishing changes that had overtaken those countries since the beginning of the 19th century and those who wanted to hold on to older ways.

Reformists in China hoped to adopt the railways, industries, rapid communications, universal education, the transparent civil service and the consumer markets they saw in the West and Japan.

Mitter, who is a young lecturer (in the History and Politics of Modern China) at Oxford, opts to begin in 1919 because that was the year of the May 4th demonstration in Beijing. The book is actually the second in a series of volumes from Oxford University Press focusing on epoch-making events in the history of the modern world, so perhaps his subject was to some degree imposed upon him.

Be this as it may, this book begins with a detailed account of the May 4 demonstration and goes on to become something more all-embracing.

The spring of 1919 saw the news arriving in China of the Treaty of Versailles that concluded World War I. China had expected the German-controlled enclaves within its borders to be handed back to it -- 96,000 Chinese laborers had, after all, gone to work in the trenches, and 2,000 had died there. Instead, the enclaves were handed to Japan. This was too much for some 3,000 students and others who assembled to protest at Tiananmen, and went on to burn down the house of the Minister of Communications.

Small though this event was in scale, it became a myth. The May Fourth Movement quickly came to represent the struggle for modernization and internationalization in China, which is still in full swing.

Even so, continuity rather than sudden changes in direction is what this book chooses to focus on. Mitter focuses on the 1920s, 40s, 60s, 80s and the turn of the new century.

Thus the Cultural Revolution is seen, not as a failed step forward but as a retrogressive, introspective, anti-modernizing phase in China's recent history. Deng Xiaoping's (鄧小平) policy of openness, by contrast, is seen as very much back to business as usual, the business of modernizing China by embracing just about anything Western that came its way.

Mitter's general perspective is that the Communists in China, despite their contradictory past of encouraging modernization on the one hand while resisting Westernization on the other, have now unambiguously set their sights in the internationalist direction.

This book is characterized by the way it steers a successful course between an academic pitch and a popular narrative. The style is fluent, and the author has clearly made a conscious decision to explain everything he touches on in a way that the newcomer to modern Chinese history will understand.