Pivot of China: Spatial Politics and Inequality in Modern Zhengzhou By Mark Baker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2024. 366 pp. $56.95 (cloth)

Journal of Chinese History · 2025-02-17

John Alekna<i>. Seeking News, Making China: Information, Technology, and the Emergence of Mass Society</i>

The American Historical Review · 2025-09-01

<i>Modern Erasures: Revolution, the Civilizing Mission, and the Shaping of China’s Past</i> by Pierre Fuller

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History · 2023

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Sociology

How should we account for the violence and destruction unleashed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong in the 1960s? Most observers viewed the Cultural Revolution as an extreme manifestation of the Chinese Communist Party’s quest to free the country from imperialism and to build a new society. They usually explained its violence as a result of Maoist China’s rejection of everything old and Western, Mao’s own power struggle, his revolutionary romanticism, the simmering tensions within the country’s social fabrics, or some variations or combinations thereof. Fuller, however, takes a different tack. From his vantage point, the entire Chinese revolutionary project, spanning the years from around 1920 to the 1960s and culminating in the Cultural Revolution, was the by-product of a specific form of “revolutionary memory.” Indeed, the project “was in practice less a defense of the local from imperialism than an outgrowth of colonial modernity” (292). In his venturesome analysis, “the left-right political spectrum collapses and Maoism assumes a striking proximity to rival ideologies” (292). His thesis is, to be sure, provocative. How exactly does Fuller make his case?Fuller begins with the epistemic violence that was constitutive of colonial modernity. More specifically, he focuses on “erasure” as a form of violence (hence the title of the book)—that is, the ways in which twentieth-century colonial discourse systematically removed any reference to, or acknowledgement of, the existence of indigenous communitarian and charitable relief during times of natural disaster in China. Fuller drives this point home by examining the coverage and reporting of the Haiyuan earthquake in northwestern China in 1920 as part of a “sociology of the Chinese” produced by Westerners (108). It had far-reaching consequences: First, such erasure was instrumental in popularizing the common Western representation of the Chinese as uncivilized people who lacked humanity, compassion, and a sense of common good. Second, it enabled Westerners to present themselves as the sole progenitor and provider of charity and assistance—the embodiment of human compassion—to those in need of aid. Third, and most important for Fuller’s argument, this colonial discourse was internalized by many members of the Chinese elite from around the time of the May Fourth movement (1919) onward. Critiques of the Chinese people’s inherent character deficiencies and moral failures, easily found in publications by Westerners since the nineteenth century, became increasingly commonplace among indigenous writers, commentators, artists, political leaders, and activists.Many of those texts portrayed the vast and highly populated Chinese rural area as a bastion of backwardness where communal bonds and public morals did not exist in any meaningful sense, where human fellowship and compassion from the haves to the haves-not was glaringly lacking, and where life was a constant state of struggle for sheer survival with no help in sight (except perhaps from foreign communities). According to Fuller, the political and intellectual elites, including Communists, based the construction of what he calls revolutionary memory on the basis of such representations of Chinese social life. The result was a metanarrative with its own set of vocabularies and discursive conventions designed to tell the story of a China in modern times in desperate need of social renewal and regeneration (in contrast to “communal memory,” which was more localized in nature).Drawing upon an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, Fuller runs through a litany of materials, ranging from Mao’s famous 1927 report about the Chinese peasantry to Pearl Buck’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Good Earth (New York, 1931), educational and popular journals, village drama, and woodcuts to delineate the fueling and dissemination of revolutionary memory.It is next to impossible to do justice to many of the nuances of Fuller’s argument in a short review. Undoubtedly, his claim, shared by other scholars, that Chinese indigenous elites adopted a Western representation of Chinese ills, has the ring of truth. That said, skeptics are unlikely to be swayed by Fuller’s leap of logic and bold assertion of an affinity between colonialism and Maoism, which represents the violence of the 1960s as “what Maoism most closely shares with the colonial project” (7). The effects of epistemic violence or erasure were beyond question, but so were the material circumstances—war, trauma, and social dislocation—that many Chinese experienced at the time. Although Fuller’s focus is decidedly not on the “reality” of those decades (13), the question of whether Maoism was a product of colonial discourse or a reaction to material deprivation will remain a topic to be debated for years to come.

Xiaowei Zheng. The Politics of Rights and the 1911 Revolution in China.

The American Historical Review · 2020-09-05

Right at the outset of her book The Politics of Rights and the 1911 Revolution in China, Xiaowei Zheng muses about the fact that “despite the succession of eleven central government constitutions and constitutional drafts written between 1908 and 1982, China has yet to attain constitutionalism” (1). To Zheng, drawing on the American model, constitutionalism means the institution of checks and balances between different branches of government that effectively limit the exercise of state power. Successive Chinese regimes were quick to invoke the language of popular sovereignty and of people’s power, Zheng reminds us, but their constitutions carried little authority and provided scant constraint on their power. In fact, “the perseverance of republican rhetoric and the failure of constitutional practice,” she notes, “seem to be the very hallmark of modern Chinese politics” (1). Yet despite this intriguing introduction, the story of this rather dense and meticulously researched book is not so much about why constitutionalism failed to take root in China, although toward the end of the volume Zheng does touch on that within the context of the failed parliamentary experience in China in the 1910s. Rather, using the province of Sichuan as her case study, Zheng’s argument focuses on emphasizing how a relatively small group of Chinese elites—the constitutionalists—successfully introduced and disseminated not only the language of popular sovereignty but also a belief in equality and people’s rights in the years prior to the 1911 Revolution that toppled the last dynasty in Chinese history. In so doing, those elites, according to Zheng, irrevocably transformed the political culture of China.

Revolutionary Nativism: Fascism and Culture in China, 1925–1937. By Maggie Clinton. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017. xi, 280 pp. ISBN: 9780822363774 (paper).

The Journal of Asian Studies · 2020

• Sociology
• History
• Media studies

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Imagining “Society” in Early Twentieth-Century China

Routledge eBooks · 2020 · 4 citations

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Political Science

By the early twentieth century, the concept of “society” had emerged to occupy a privileged place in the discourse among Chinese political and intellectual elites. To them, the issue was of critical significance in the construction of a new polity. Instead of exploring the constructed meaning of “society” in its specific historical context, however, it has become quite common in recent years to explore the historical trajectory of late Qing and early republican China through the metanarrative of “civil society/public sphere.” This chapter argues that the constant reference to the emergence of “society” in early republican writings was less the result of the appearance of new civic organizations than a rearticulation of their role. Historians have long been engaged in a debate on the extent of the autonomy of late Qing Chinese “society” vis-a-vis the “state”.

<i>Violence and Order on the Chengdu Plain: The Story of a Secret Brotherhood in Rural China, 1939–1949</i>. By Di Wang (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2018) 280 pp. $90.00 cloth $29.95 paper

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History · 2019-08-01

Toby Lincoln. Urbanizing China in War and Peace: The Case of Wuxi County.

The American Historical Review · 2017-01-31

Toby Lincoln’s book on Wuxi—located about a hundred miles to the west of Shanghai—is well researched and informative. With a good eye for details, Lincoln tells the story of Wuxi city and its surrounding areas in the first half of the twentieth century. That was, needless to say, a period of sweeping political, economic, and social changes in China, and Wuxi’s experience was no exception. Indeed, Lincoln claims that “of all the cities in Jiangnan, Wuxi underwent perhaps the most comprehensive transformation” (19). That might well be the case, although the assertion is difficult, if not impossible, to test or verify. Still, Urbanizing China in War and Peace: The Case of Wuxi County is a welcome addition to the literature, as most of the English-language studies on Chinese urban centers generally focus on large metropolises such as Shanghai, Beijing, and a handful of other places. It is hence useful to have an in-depth study of what is generally regarded as a lower-tier city, at least in terms of size and population, if not necessarily of importance. Furthermore, Lincoln’s chronological account of the changes in Wuxi covers a vast array of topics, traversing issues that range from the transformation of the physical infrastructure of Wuxi to the political and military conflicts that afflicted the place, and then on to problems of migration and economic decline and recovery over those tumultuous decades. While the details might differ, it quickly becomes clear, upon reading Lincoln’s research, that the overall patterns and processes of the myriad changes in Wuxi largely mirrored what went on in many other Chinese urban centers. The (re-)making of the city of Wuxi, in other words, engendered opportunities similar to those in and also encountered problems familiar to other urban locales in their efforts to survive or thrive and to reinvent themselves in the rapidly changing socioeconomic and political landscapes of the period.

Chapter 2. Canton Remapped

University of Hawaii Press eBooks · 2017-12-31 · 1 citations

After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885–1924

The Chinese Historical Review · 2016-07-02 · 4 citations

"After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885–1924." The Chinese Historical Review, 23(2), pp. 165–166