The Chinese Revolution - recomend a good book? [Archive]

BobKKKindle$

16th August 2009, 08:50

Ho Kan-Chih. A History of the Modern Chinese Revolution. Foreign Language Press. Beijing. 1959.

That presumably only goes up to 1959 and therefore misses out on both the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as well as the intervening period, not to mention the reform period after the latter event. There are quite a few comprehensive books that are okay although they aren't written from a Marxist perspective - I just finished reading Fenby's The Penguin History of Modern China which was published recently and contains a lot of material on the late Qing Dynasty, the May Fourth Movement, and the Warlord period, but I felt that it glosses over a lot of what happened after the CPC seizure of power in 1949, and the author seems to infer (as many non-Marxists authors do when writing about the history of China under CPC rule) that Mao was both a hegemonic dictator and essentially the same as historic emperors in the way he governed. In fact, the book contains quite a lot of misplaced comparisions between the PRC and pre-modern China or China under the Qing Dynasty which I didn't find appropriate. You might want to read one of those comprehensive books (I've also got Gray's Rebellions and Revolutions: China from the 1880s to 2000 which includes more socio-economic analysis, including some interesting stuff on Chinese agriculture and industry during the 19th century, and the debates about whether China would have been able to industrialize and become a developed country if it had not been for the impact of imperialism and internal strife) and then follow it up with Mobo Gao's The Battle for China's Past, which is a broad commentary on the historiography of the Chinese Revolution, written by an author who seems to be a Maoist, or at least have Maoist sympathies. If you're looking for something online I would recommend Harris' The Mandate of Heaven, available here (http://www.marxists.de/china/harris/index.htm), which is written from a Marxist viewpoint, and also includes a chapter on the international influence of Maoism, as well as a dissection of Maoist ideology. Also be sure to check out Trotsky's writings on China, available here (http://www.marx.org/archive/trotsky/china/index.htm).

I almost forgot Hinton's Fanshen. It's widely considered an outstanding work of histoty and focuses on events in a single Chinese village, where the author lived as an aid worker during the years surrounding 1949. As you would expect it's written in great personal detail and focuses on the agrarian side of the revolution, as well as relations between CPC cadres and the peasantry. A great read.