Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850 to the Present by Jonathan Fenby (PDF)

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No country on earth has suffered a more bitter history in modern times than China. In the second half of the nineteenth century, it was viewed as doomed to extinction. Its imperial rulers, heading an anachronistic regime, were brought low by enormous revolts, shifting social power patterns, republican revolutionaries, Western incursions to “split the Chinese melon” and a disastrous defeat by Japan. The presence of predatory foreigners has often been blamed for China’s troubles, but the much greater cause came from within China itself. In the early twentieth century, the empire was succeeded by warlordism on a massive scale, internal divisions, incompetent rule, savage fighting between the government and the Communists, and a fourteen-year invasion from Japan. Four years of civil war after 1945 led to the Maoist era, with its purges and repression; the disastrous Great Leap Forward; a famine that killed tens of millions; and the Cultural Revolution.Yet from this long trauma, China has emerged amazingly in the last three decades as an economic powerhouse set to play a major global political role, its future posing one of the great questions for the twenty-first century as it grapples with enormous internal challenges. Understanding how that transformation came about and what China constitutes today means understanding its epic journey since 1850 and recognizing how the past influences the present. Jonathan Fenby tells this turbulent story with brilliance and insight, spanning a unique historical panorama, with an extraordinary cast of characters and a succession of huge events. As Confucius said, To see the future, one must grasp the past.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “A sweeping, reasoned history…Essential desk-side reference to help with the sifting and understanding of the enormous changes taking place in a China poised between the old and the new.” (Kirkus Reviews) From the Publisher “[T]he most compelling and judicious account of China’s phoenix years that is currently available. If it cannot exactly delight, it certainly impresses…a journalist’s eye for detail, undemanding prose and a thunderous sense of narrative assure Jonathan Fenby of a triumph. The highly readable trounces the nigh unspeakable.” –Times Literary Supplement (London) “Panoramic narrative… a wonderful resource…One does not often feel that an author has got it just about all covered but Mr. Fenby is approaching the mark.” –Far Eastern Economic Review”His book is a powerful revisionist account of a country whose history needs to be understood if the west is to comprehend China’s role in the present and future…That century-old dilemma of how to create a strong China in a world buffeted by global forces in painfully relevant today. Jonathan Fenby’s account of how China has coped with that dilemma makes his illuminating book the first major history that looks at the country with the eyes of the 21st century rather than the 20th.” –Financial Times About the Author Jonathan Fenby has edited the Observer, the South China Morning Post and Reuters World Service as well as held senior positions at the Economist, the Independent and the Guardian. His books include Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the China He Lost; Dealing with the Dragon: A Year in the New Hong Kong; Seventy Wonders of China; Dragon Throne; and Alliance: How Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill Won One War and Began Another. He is the China Director of Trusted Sources. He has been made a Commander of the British Empire and a Knight of the French Order of Merit for services to journalism. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This book covers more than one hundred years of Chinese history, with a special focus on the 20th century. I approached this book as a potential overview of what has happened in China that led to its present status as a rising economic and political power. In this sense, I have not been disappointed. The book is divided in six parts, covering different historical periods, starting with the end of the empire, and finishing with Hu Jintao’s leadership. Because of the span of time covered in the book, the author cannot go particularly deep in any particular issue, but enough information is provided to have a clear and general idea of China’s recent history.Still, and that is why I am giving the book 4 stars and not 5, I feel that a more sharp interpretation of events could have been possible. Even though the books helped me to have a basic understanding of the reasons behind the most significant events, such as the fall of the Empire, the raise of Mao to power, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution or the Tiananmen Square revolt, I ended the book thinking that, yes, I know a lot more about China, and definitely I will understand better any China-related piece of news, but something was missing in the explanation of why those things happened.In spite of its minor shortcomings, though, I recommend Fenby’s book to those looking for a general overview of modern Chinese history.

⭐I found the book well written, and it improved my understanding of the country from a historical perspective. The breath and depth of coverage was just right, and it even motivated me to do additional research of my own. This was when the flaws started appearing.For instance, the book introduces a whole gamut of important players, and I found myself turning several times to the index to remind myself who these were. Unfortunately more often than not, the page numberings in the index were just wrong, which was a minor annoyance throughout. Misspellings of names crop up every now and then – it may not matter much to the casual reader, but it is slightly irritating when you decide to read up more on Zong Zizhen, only to discover that his surname is Gong rather than Zong.The book could also do with better cross references. I was intrigued by a reference to the Confucian Book of Odes, and tried looking up some lines which were quoted in the book, but never been able to find it till today.Don’t get me wrong, I would very much still recommend this book for someone who wants to understand what happened in China over the last 200 years, but it could have been so much better.

⭐Covers a huge period. Deep on detail and lists of who was who but could use a lot more insights and conclusions.

⭐The book ain’t light but definitely China’s history deserves all that much space. The author introduces you from the fall of the last emperor until the current issues affecting China. It is 95% well written. the reading is most certainly enjoyable and gives you good knowledge in the understanding of the reasons for current behavioral ways of the chinese people. The Glossary and the appendixes definitely are useful due to the multitude of people that are mentioned in this book.

⭐I gave up after the first two hundred pages. The book has lots of names and details and perhaps if you are a professional historian, it may be a useful resource. If you are like me-not a professional historian, just curious about recent Chinese history-my guess is you will find it boring, tedious and confusing.

⭐Fascinating read from 1850 to 2008. Very comprehensive, yet not boring.

⭐This is a formidable book and certainly the topic it covers is crucial to an understanding of the world today. China was the West and Japan’s whipping boy for a hundred years. The glories of the heavenly empire were ground under the heel of imperialism. It was easy pickings. And China’s decadence contributed to its own downfall. When China turned away from its costs in the fifteenth century because the outside world might have challenged the Confucian rulers arrogant sense of superiority, that hubris was its undoing. Ironically this was not too different from the stance that the Lamistic reactionaries of Tibet took in the first half of the twentieth century which made Tibet fatally vulnerable to British and Chinese predations. The outside world had nothing to teach those whose mandate came from heaven or from Padmasambhava. What is good and what wanting in this book? The good is the power of the narrative. It goes from the collapse of the Manchu to the failure of the Sun Yat-sen revolution to the warlords, the Japanese occupation, Kuomintang, and finally the communists: Mao and Deng Xiaoping’s capitalist road. Several wake-up facts stand out. In contradiction to what I had always assumed, it was the communists who held back during much of the Japanese occupation, not the KMT. Mao did the exact opposite of what the communists, with Stillwell’s help, convinced the world of, that they fought the Japanese while Chiang Kai-shek cowered in Chungking. That may have been true before the latter’s kidnapping but during most of WWII it was the KMT which took the brunt of the battle while the Communists, though a lot less corrupt, did some guerilla fighting but mostly held back so as to survive to fight the civil war. It is interesting to do a bit of number crunching. The author, as others, portray Mao’s disruptions during the Great Leap Forward as the most catastrophic human induced event in China. But was it? Fenby points out that the Taiping and other uprising killed about 20 million people. How many people died in China in the 19th century because of fighting and its aftermaths? Is it more or less than Communist inspired events? What proportion of those who died in the famine in the wake of the Great Leap did so because of the Leap and how many because of natural catastrophes which were also then occurring. And was the Cultural Revolution any worse than Taiping? I am not sure. China was (and may still latently be) a pretty violent place. Skinning, burning, and beating people to death happened a lot in Chinese history. (What was the Japanese toll including as a result of economic dislocation—my mammy never told me to eat of because of starving Chinese but starving Indians whose great ’43 famine may be laid at the feet of their British overlords—.) The Taiping and their royal enemies brutalized each other. In all those movies about missionaries in China saving themselves and innocent children from ravaging crowds who objected to their presence, we are never given the historical background of British, American, German or Japanese exploitation or bombardments. During Tiananmen Square, the crowds managed to beat to death and tear the skin off soldiers who had yet to attack them. When the attacks came it got even nastier. That the Commies execute hundreds in the uprisings in Tibet and Singkiang is not so out of place with the facts that the crowds of Tibetans and Uyghurs do their own murder even if it is not nearly on the scale of the oppressor. What I find a bit wanting in the book, is a more structural explanation of what happened. We get some of that in the pre-communist era, the warlords etc. But when the Communists take over the madness of Mao’s policies seems to come entirely from palace politics and there are endless pages of what was going among the leaders jockeying for position and power. (When I asked a friend for some information on Brezhnev, he responded that he was no Kremlinologist.—-Are their Bejing-ologists?) I keep wondering what were the forces in the cities and hinterland that enabled all these peregrinations to take root and spread. The picture the author picture painted of the different movements within the Cultural Revolution isn’t detailed enough. He says something about the students, a bit about peasant discontent, but a lot more needs to be told to make sense of why what is going on at the top moves the country as it does. After all the Cultural Revolution went on for ten years or more and China did not fall apart as a nation. That it might have spent a third of its governmental revenues making trouble in the third world might be why it loomed so large in international competition when it was actually a basket case. It may be that we need another generation of historians and much more access to Chinese historical sources before a structured picture of China emerges. This is a worthwhile book to read. China looms large in our future. It may not be such an amenable adversary. Certainly its history over the last century and half does not inspire confidence. But then again it has changed in ways no one would have predicted. There is hope.Charlie Fisher author of

⭐Bought as a gift for someone

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