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THE OXFORD HISTORY OF MODERN CHINA
EDITED BY
J E F F R E Y N . WASS E R S T R O M
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,United Kingdom
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The text of this edition was first published in
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First published 2016
First published in paperback 2018
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PREFACE TO THE 2018 REPUBLICATION OF THE
ILLUSTRATED EDITION
The origins of this book lie in late 2012 and early 2013. This was a
notable moment in China’s history, as it was just then that Xi Jinping,
the current leader of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), was
being chosen first to become head of the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) and then serve as President as well, posts that he was
expected to hold for ten years before relinquishing them to his
successor toward the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023,
respectively. While a changing of the guard was taking place in
Beijing, I was inviting a variety of experts in modern Chinese history,
each of whom had demonstrated mastery of a particular period and
shown a flair for communicating with general readers as well as
fellow specialists, to join me in carrying out a kind of literary relay
race across more than four centuries of China’s past. More
specifically, I asked these scholars, most of them trained as
historians but with some political scientists mixed in as well, to help
me tell the tale of China’s modern period, which I was choosing to
define as beginning in the final years of the Ming Dynasty (1368–
1644), for reasons explained below in my “Introduction” to this
volume.
The finish line in this relay would be the aftermath of the 2008
Beijing Olympics, an event that continues to stand out as a major
turning point in the PRC’s rise to global prominence. After all these
main chapters, though, the baton would be handed off one more
time, for a victory lap of sorts, carried this time by historically
minded journalist Ian Johnson. My brief to him was to write a “Coda”
devoted to the “Presence of the Past” in an era that finds the CCP
presenting itself as an organization that draws on the wisdom of
Confucius while staying true to the traditions of Marx, Lenin, and
Mao Zedong (1893–1976)—a tricky balancing act when we
remember that the last of these considered the first a “feudal”
thinker whose beliefs had long hindered China’s pursuit of modernity.
The hardback edition of the book was published midway through
2016, just a year-and-a-half ago. Given that so little time has passed
since then, the text has not been updated except for the correction
of a few errors. In ordinary times, it might seem unnecessary to
comment in a Preface such as this about what has transpired since
the original version of the book appeared. Sometimes, though,
things that occur in an eighteen-month period can do enough to
alter the domestic situation within a country, the way it is viewed by
people living in other places, its standing in the international order,
or all of these things to justify at least a brief discussion of recent
events. As later chapters will show, for example, in the case of
China, a book initially published in the middle of 1910 and then
reissued in 1912 would certainly have benefitted from prefatory
remarks on the intervening end of dynastic rule, and even though
China’s political system was not altered by the protests and
massacre of 1989, it would have been important to preface a 1990
paperback edition of a 1988 work with comments on the tragedy of
the previous June.
Nothing as monumental as the 1911 Revolution has taken place
since the middle of 2016. It is also too soon to tell if the events of
the last year-and-a-half will come to stand out as a counterpart to
other decidedly lesser but still significant turning point moments,
which left the political system in place while altering other things.
There is a good case to be made, though, that the brief period since
the hardback edition appeared has been so extraordinary when it
comes to Chinese domestic politics and, even more so, China’s place
in the world, that an effort to take stock briefly of the current
context is in order.
Let’s begin with what recent months have revealed or
underscored about Xi. When the original edition was published, he
was already being described as the most powerful figure China had
seen since Mao, who ruled the PRC from its founding in 1949 until
his death in 1976, and Deng Xiaoping, his most influential successor.
There were not yet, though, academic centers devoted to the study
of “Xi Jinping Thought,” as there now are. Nor had Xi, his
eponymous set of ideas, and even the main international policy
associated with him, the “Belt and Road Initiative,” been formally
proposed for inclusion in China’s Constitution. Only Mao, who held
power from 1949 until his death twenty-seven years later, had seen
his name and creed invested with this sort of sacred status while he
was still alive, as even Deng, who was the most powerful person in
China from the late 1970s until his death in 1997, only received it
posthumously.
More generally, in 2016, it was still the norm to break the history
of the PRC into two main chunks of time, with the brief rule by Mao’s
immediate successor, Hua Guofeng, treated as a transitory
interregnum. There were the Mao Years, which ended in 1976, and a
Reform Era, which had begun at the end of 1978 or start of 1979
and was assumed to still be underway. At the 19th Party Congress in
October 2017, however, Xi pronounced that a “New Era,” a third PRC
epoch, had begun. Another important thing happened—or, rather,
did not happen—during that Party Congress. While the CCP
conformed to recent tradition by formally announcing the foregone
conclusion that Xi would be appointed for a second five-year term as
the organization’s head, they did not make it clear who would
succeed him when the next Congress was held. This has fueled
speculation that Xi may diverge from the pattern set by Jiang Zemin
and Hu Jintao, his immediate predecessors, and stay in control of
the country for more than ten years. He might well, some say, as
only a few were suggesting as recently as mid-2016, take a page
from Vladimir Putin’s playbook and find a way to stay in power.
Will the idea of 2017 marking the start of a “New Era” gain
traction in the coming years or fade away? Only time will tell. Some
future historians may argue for continuity stretching from Deng’s
time to the end of Xi’s days in power, whenever that comes. Others
may insist that a third epoch has started, but claim it began at the
moment Xi took power or earlier still. After all, the ratcheting up of
controls on civil society that are among the hallmarks of the Xi era
can be traced back as far as the midpoint in Hu’s decade in power,
and while China’s current leader has shown greater proclivity for
quoting the classics than any previous one, the wave of renewed
reverence for Confucius began around the turn of the millennium
and made its mark on the Opening Ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing
Games. Still, regardless of just how large they end up looming in
future works of history, the recent domestic developments
associated with Xi noted above deserve mention here.
If these were the only significant political events that had taken
place since the middle of 2016, however, writing this Preface would
have been merely optional, not essential. What makes it feel crucial
to include it is something that occurred across the Pacific from the
PRC, which may have profound implications for the trajectory of
Chinese history. At this writing, the unexpected election of Donald J.
Trump to the presidency of the United States seems to have
provided Xi with new opportunities in the international arena, and
distracted global scrutiny of the ongoing moves to silence opposition
within the PRC, that in another period would have gotten more
attention from foreign commentators and observers. The broader
slide of America’s global reputation, and, in Asia at least, doubts
about its full commitment to treaty obligations, has been a political
gift for Xi. This has led to seismic shifts in the world order that make
the centuries-long trajectory of China’s decline from, and return to,
international prominence feel differently than it did in mid-2016.
Then, the PRC was a country that had surged ahead economically in
extraordinary ways, but which still seemed more of a regional than a
truly global power, a secondary rather than primary player in some
key international spheres. Now, this is no longer the case.
One way to put this issue into perspective is to ponder the
question of which world leaders at different periods of time have
been credible candidates for the title of most powerful individual on
earth. China’s emperor might have been a good candidate for this
position at various points in the distant past, but thanks to the
military and diplomatic defeats that the country experienced during
the final decades of rule by the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912), no one
would have thought of asserting that any Chinese leader of the
1830s through the early twentieth century was the most powerful
person on the planet. During much of the late Qing era and the
entire Republican period (1912–1949), in fact, thanks to Japan’s
surge, China’s top leader was not even the most influential individual
in Asia.
Even in mid-2016, it was still assumed that when China’s top
leader met the President of the United States, the most that could
be said of the former was that this person might be a fairly close
second in influence and clout to the latter. By the fall of 2017, by
contrast, The Economist was describing the Xi-Trump summit in
Beijing as one in which the more “powerful” individual was the one
playing host. The magazine was not alone in this assessment.
Eighteen months is a very short period when it comes to the
centuries-long view of China’s past provided in the chapters that
follow, let alone within the much longer sweep of Chinese history as
a whole. In addition, if history is any guide, one thing we can be
sure of is that Xi and Trump, a pair of strongman leaders who share
important traits even while the restrained speaking style of the
former and bombastic one of the latter are a study in contrasts, will
be viewed differently than they are today, both within their own
countries and globally. Still, there is no question that, thanks in part
to these two men, the international order is not the same now as it
was a year-and-a-half ago. And the changes that have taken place
have implications for not just the present and the future but also, in
less obvious ways, for how the past is viewed and understood.
Coincidentally or not, Xi and Trump both like to tell simplistic stories
about history to present themselves as leading grand missions to
revive past glories. This book strives to show the value of taking a
longer and more nuanced view, which emphasizes, along with other
things, how politically charged stories about the past are themselves
one of the results—but not the only result—of complex historical
processes.
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom,
January 2018
CONTENTS
List of Maps
A Guide to Pronouncing Romanized Chinese
INTRODUCTION
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
1. FROM LATE MING TO HIGH QING, 1550–1792
Anne Gerritsen
2. NEW DOMESTIC AND GLOBAL CHALLENGES, 1792–1860
Stephen R. Platt
3. RESTORATION AND REFORM, 1860–1900
Robert Bickers
4. FELLING A DYNASTY, FOUNDING A REPUBLIC
Peter Zarrow
5. THE RISE OF NATIONALISM AND REVOLUTIONARY PARTIES,
1919–1937
James Carter
6. THE WAR YEARS, 1937–1949
Rana Mitter
7. THE EARLY YEARS OF THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC, 1950–1964
S. A. Smith
8. THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION ERA, 1964–1976
Richard Curt Kraus
9. REFORM AND REBUILDING, 1976–1988
Timothy Cheek
10. TIANANMEN AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1989–1999
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Kate Merkel-Hess
11. CHINA RISING, 2000–2010
William A. Callahan
12. THE PEOPLE’S LEADER: THE XI JINPING ERA OF CHINESE
POLITICS
Diana Fu and Emile Dirks
THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST—A CODA
Ian Johnson
Timeline
Further Reading
Index
LIST OF MAPS
J E F F R E Y N . WASS E R S T R O M
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