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

by Rana Mitter

Overview

China is now poised to take a key role on the world stage, but in the early twentieth century the situation could not have been more different. Rana Mitter goes back to this pivotal moment in Chinese history to uncover the origins of the painful transition from a premodern past into a modern world. By the 1920s the seemingly civilized world shaped over the last two thousand years by the legacy of the great philosopher Confucius was falling apart in the face of western imperialism and internal warfare. Chinese cities still bore the imprints of its ancient past with narrow, lanes and temples to long-worshipped gods, but these were starting to change with the influx of foreign traders, teachers, and missionaries, all eager to shape China's ancient past into a modern present. Mitter takes us through the resulting social turmoil and political promise, the devastating war against Japan in the 1940s, Communism and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and the new era of hope in the 1980s ended by the Tian'anmen uprising. He reveals the impetus behind the dramatic changes in Chinese culture and politics as being China's "New Culture" - a strain of thought which celebrated youth, individualism, and the heady mixture of strange and seductive new cultures from places as far apart as America, India, and Japan.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191579288
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	05/06/2004
Series:	Making of the Modern World
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	20 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Rana Mitter is University Lecturer in the History and Politics of Modern China at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of St Cross College. He is the author of The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China (2000) and co-editor (with Patrick Major) of Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social Histories (2003). He has broadcast on topics to do with ancient and modern China and Japan on History Channel television documentaries and on radio.

Table of Contents

	Preface	x
	List of Illustrations	xiii
	Chronology	xv
	Pronunciation, Transliterations, and Names	xviii
Part I	Shock
1.	Flashpoint: 4 May 1919: The Making of a New China	3
	Why was May Fourth Important?	12
	The Fall of the Chinese Empire	26
	Uneasy Birth: The Chinese Republic	35
2.	A Tale of Two Cities: Beijing, Shanghai, and the May Fourth Generation	41
	Beijing: Intellectual Centre of the Movement	43
	Shanghai: China's Modern Challenge	49
	People: The May Fourth Generation	54
	Subcultures	65
3.	Experiments in Happiness: Life and Love in New Culture China	69
	New Classes, New Opportunities	70
	Print, Commerce, and Culture	76
	Love, Labour, and Liberty	77
	Ask Taofen!	80
	The May Fourth Entrepreneur	90
	Saving the Nation, Making a Profit	93
	End of an Era?	99
4.	Goodbye Confucius: New Culture, New Politics	102
	Iconoclasm	108
	Goodbye Confucius?	110
	China's Road to Nationalism	117
	Internationalism, Cosmopolitism, and Nationalism	123
	Looking East in Europe	127
	Not Just West and East: Thinking Beyond Europe	129
	Japan's Promise, Japan's Menace	133
	Party Politics	134
	The Communists	135
	The Nationalists	138
	Nationalists and Communists, United and Divided	142
	The Question of Woman	146
	Conclusion: Goodbye May Fourth?	149
Part II	Aftershock
5.	A Land of Death: Darkness over China	155
	China Changes Shape, 1931-7	157
	The Choices of the May Fourth Generation	163
	China Falls Apart, 1937-45	167
	War and Confrontation	178
	The New World	181
	The Cold War	190
	The Great Leap Forward	194
	Conclusion: May Fourth in Abeyance	198
6.	Tomorrow the Whole World Will Be Red: The Cultural Revolution and the Distortions of May Fourth	200
	Considering the Cultural Revolution	207
	What was the Cultural Revolution?	210
	The Cold War and the Cultural Revolution	214
	Life and Death during the Red Guard Period	217
	Changing the Guard	226
	May Fourth or Not?	230
	The Cold War and the Romance of Technology	233
	Divisions: Red, Black, Men, Women	238
	Conclusion: A Strange May Fourth	240
7.	Ugly Chinamen and Dead Rivers: Reform and the 'New May Fourth'	244
	The Late Cold War	246
	Life and Liberty in the 'New Era'	248
	Xiahai: 'Jumping into the Sea' of the New Society	255
	What Sort of Crisis?	258
	The Culture Fever Debates	260
	The Ugly Chinaman and Heshang	262
	Echoes of May Fourth: The Different Crises	269
	Tian'anmen and the End of an Era	272
	The Nature of the New Era: Towards Chinese Democracy?	280
8.	Learning to Let Go: The May Fourth Legacy in the New Millennium	285
	The Two Cities Revisited	289
	Coping with the Past	295
	New Thinking	301
	Across the Straits	305
	Searching for a New Story	308
	Guide to Further Reading	315
	Notes	325
	Index	345

Editorial Reviews

This is a fascinating look at a pivotal time in the formation of the culture of modern China. The "Bitter Revolution" of the title is not the Communist Revolution of 1949 or the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, but the revolution of ideas that climaxed in the mass anti-imperialist protests of May 4, 1919. Known as the May Fourth Movement, these student-led protests engendered tumultuous cultural eddies that disturbed all aspects of Chinese life. Mitter's focus on this underappreciated fulcrum of modern Chinese history is refreshing. Chinese Communist historiography has mythologized the May Fourth Movement as the youthful harbinger of the 1949 revolution. Mitter goes beyond such teleological myths to recapture the often desperate and heady atmosphere of the "New Culture Movement," which paralleled the political tumult. She reveals antecedents to later events, including developments as disparate as the Cultural Revolution and the recent decades of economic and cultural liberalization. Especially interesting were new attitudes toward gender relations, sexuality, marriage and family. In many ways, the individualism and experimentation of that era have more in common with contemporary China than the intervening decades of wartime and Communist collectivism and conformity-a compelling reason why this history of early 20th-century China is so relevant today. What is most intriguing about Mitter's account is not what was lost in the dark decades that followed, but how much endured. (June) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

This book discusses how the fundamental narrative of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 was framed, changed, and transmitted during the 20th century in the Chinese civil war, Great Leap Forward, Chinese Cultural Revolution, and Tiananmen Democracy Movement. Mitter (history of modern China, Oxford Univ.; The Manchurian Myth) identifies May Fourth as a time of "transformative change" in which Chinese intellectuals self-consciously promoted the adoption of international ideas and sought, wholesale, to abandon Confucianism. Among Mitter's observations are that the rise of communism was not the most important story of mid-20th-century China and that while Mao Zedong, Chen Duxiu, and other intellectuals rejected Confucianism for its oppression of women and the poor, they were ignoring the Confucian obsession with ethics and mutual obligation. Mitter's fresh and interesting analysis effectively demonstrates how the May Fourth Movement was reframed, but it tends to force political and cultural development in China into a rigid comparison with the ideals of May Fourth and the accompanying New Culture movement. Recommended only for specialized collections in Asian studies.-Peggy Spitzer Christoff, Rockville, MD Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

"In his impressive and inventively researched book, Rana Mitter uses the May Fourth movement as a theme around which to explore China's bitter 20th century, with its repeated upheavals, foreign invasion and the death of more than 100 million people from man-made and natural disasters. He brings alive the promise felt by the intellectuals, journalists, writers and entrepreneurs who subscribed to the movement. The book is also peppered with excellent summaries of events to keep the non-expert reader up with what was going on, which is often at odds with the version propagated —and still largely accepted—after the communist victory of 1949."—Jonathan Fenby, Financial Times

"With compelling prose and insightful analysis, Rana Mitter paints a brilliant, lively portrait of the intellectual and political fervor behind the May Fourth Movement, and how it has shaped, and continues to shape, China's national identity. A Bitter Revolution is critical to understanding the soul of modern China."—Iris Chang, New York Times bestselling author of The Rape of Nanking and The Chinese in America

"A fascinating look at a pivotal time in the formation of the culture of modern China.... What is most intriguing about Mitters account is not what was lost in the dark decades that followed, but how much endured."—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher