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

A BITTER REVOLUTION: China's Struggle with the Modern World. By Rana Mitter. Oxford (UK), New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. xix, 357 pp. (B & W photos.) US$30.00, cloth. ISBN 0-19-280341-7.

In the spring of 1979 Xu Wenli, the Democracy Wall activist and editor of the samizdat April Fifth Forum (Siwu Luntan), told me that the protest movement aimed to hold the Chinese authorities to the Constitution and to the officially propagated moral principles of the Chinese state and the CCP. Righteously upholding such principles is not very rebellious, and Xu--far from being a romantic hero--was merely a calm advocate of gradual introduction of democracy. Later that spring I went to the theatre with his wife and some of his fellow activists to see Brecht's Galileo Galilei. Both "democracy" and "science" were in the air, as they had been exactly 60 years earlier during the May Fourth Movement. Xu's April Fifth Forum (borrowing its name from the turbulence on Tiananmen Square on 5 April 1976) deliberately referred to the May Fourth Movement (Wusi Yundong) for justification. When Xu was arrested three months later, public security personnel burnt out his apartment: the roles were reversed, for in 1919, it was the May Fourth activists who had burnt out the house of a minister.

This and many other experiences lead me to have great sympathy for Rana Mitter's idea that the May Fourth Movement has an all-pervasive presence in Chinese politics, even today.

Mitter's A Bitter Revolution guides the reader to one tableau of China's post-1919 history after the other, presenting highlights, flashbacks, contexts, comparisons and references, vaguely linked by May Fourth themes. Its main claim is that China's history arises from a troubled and contradictory struggle with modernity. Most of the book tells fragments of Chinese history in a straightforward and conventional sense, here and there engaging more deeply with particular aspects. One could have wished for a more conceptually structured analysis, as the theme of "modernity" remains opaque, allowing diverse phenomena to be linked in a blurred way. The lack of a central narrative adds the feeling that the tour of the tableaux is an aimless stroll.

The May Fourth legacy is a highly politicized symbolic reference in PRC and ROC historiography, and therefore a problematic starting point for a book like this. Importantly, the May Fourth theme distorts the view of "early" modernity in China between 1860 and 1919. It introduces a much too polarized view of cultural and political ferment in the 1910s and 1920s, and it arrogates to itself a licence of explanation far beyond the reasonable, stretching into eras when its radical activists had already turned into seasoned manipulators of power. Any critical historiography of the period after 1919 must unpack the politicized discourse of May Fourth that obscures our view of the past; Mitter's book only partially achieves this.

The book deals with modernity as a global phenomenon, pointing at similarities with the Russian Revolution, the Weimar Republic, Fascist Italy, Germany under Hitler, Japan, Turkey and India. However, these comparisons remain indeterminate and superficial pointers. The structural similarity between the language of the Cultural Revolution and the political language in the Third Reich (as examined by Victor Klemperer) is hinted at and then abandoned without serious discussion.

Some protagonists, like the publicist Zou Taofen and the writer Lu Xun, are portrayed with some detail and nuance, while others, like Mao Zedong, are crass caricatures.

Mitter's book brings together many good observations, and gives flashes of interesting insights into China's modern history. But readers who expect a coherent narrative of China's history from 1919 till now will have to look elsewhere, and those who are interested in examining China as a case of modernity will find more questions than answers in this book.

FLEMMING CHRISTIANSEN

University of Leeds, United Kingdom