A Bitter Revolution: China's Struggle with the Modern World [Hardcover]

Rana Mitter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2004

China today is poised to play a key role on the world stage, but in the early twentieth century the situation was very different. In this powerful new look at modern China, Rana Mitter goes back to a pivotal moment in Chinese history to uncover the origins of the painful transition from pre-modern to modern world.
Mitter identifies May 4, 1919, as the defining moment of China's twentieth-century history. On that day, outrage over the Paris peace conference triggered a vast student protest that led in turn to "the May Fourth Movement." Just seven years before, the 2,000-year-old imperial system had collapsed. Now a new group of urban, modernizing thinkers began to reject Confucianism and traditional culture in general as hindrances in the fight against imperialism, warlordism, and the oppression of women and the poor. Forward-looking, individualistic, embracing youth, this "New Culture movement" made a lasting impact on the critical decades that followed: the 1940s, with the war against Japan and the civil war between the Nationalist Party and the Communists; the 1960s, with the bizarre, seemingly anarchic world of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution; and the 1980s, with the rise of a semi-market economy against the backdrop of continued single-party rule and growing inequality. Throughout each of these dramatically different eras, the May 4 themes persisted, from the insanity of the Cultural Revolution to the recent romance with space-age technology.
China, Mitter concludes, still seems to be in search of a new narrative about what the country is, and what it should become. And May 4 remains a touchstone in that search.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This is a fascinating look at a pivotal time in the formation of the culture of modern China. The "Bitter Revolution" of the title is not the Communist Revolution of 1949 or the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, but the revolution of ideas that climaxed in the mass anti-imperialist protests of May 4, 1919. Known as the May Fourth Movement, these student-led protests engendered tumultuous cultural eddies that disturbed all aspects of Chinese life. Mitter's focus on this underappreciated fulcrum of modern Chinese history is refreshing. Chinese Communist historiography has mythologized the May Fourth Movement as the youthful harbinger of the 1949 revolution. Mitter goes beyond such teleological myths to recapture the often desperate and heady atmosphere of the "New Culture Movement," which paralleled the political tumult. She reveals antecedents to later events, including developments as disparate as the Cultural Revolution and the recent decades of economic and cultural liberalization. Especially interesting were new attitudes toward gender relations, sexuality, marriage and family. In many ways, the individualism and experimentation of that era have more in common with contemporary China than the intervening decades of wartime and Communist collectivism and conformity—a compelling reason why this history of early 20th-century China is so relevant today. What is most intriguing about Mitter's account is not what was lost in the dark decades that followed, but how much endured.
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Review

"In his impressive and inventively researched book, Rana Mitter uses the May Fourth movement as a theme around which to explore China's bitter 20th century, with its repeated upheavals, foreign invasion and the death of more than 100 million people from man-made and natural disasters. He brings alive the promise felt by the intellectuals, journalists, writers and entrepreneurs who subscribed to the movement. The book is also peppered with excellent summaries of events to keep the non-expert reader up with what was going on, which is often at odds with the version propagated --and still largely accepted--after the communist victory of 1949."--Jonathan Fenby, Financial Times

"With compelling prose and insightful analysis, Rana Mitter paints a brilliant, lively portrait of the intellectual and political fervor behind the May Fourth Movement, and how it has shaped, and continues to shape, China's national identity. A Bitter Revolution is critical to understanding the soul of modern China."--Iris Chang, New York Times bestselling author of The Rape of Nanking and The Chinese in America

"A fascinating look at a pivotal time in the formation of the culture of modern China.... What is most intriguing about Mitters account is not what was lost in the dark decades that followed, but how much endured."--Publishers Weekly

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (July 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0192803417
• ISBN-13: 978-0192803412
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,172,688 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars China from 1919 to the 21st Century., November 27, 2005

By 

J. E. Robinson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Bitter Revolution: China's Struggle with the Modern World (Hardcover)

This is a well written and well researched book by the young university lecturer Rana Mitter at Oxford. He is also the author of at least two other books on China. The author attempts to tell us the 20th century story of China's political awakening by tracing many of the historical figures and writers to the small number of universities primarily in Beijing and Shanghai and the demonstrations of May 1919 in Beijing.

The book starts around the time of the May 4, 1919 demonstrations or what the author calls the first Tian'anmen Square (gate) demonstrations. The small number of protestors served as a touch stone or reference to future generations of Chinese as the century unfolded. In summary that group wanted to free China of its past ties to Confucianism and replace it with science and democracy. The author tells us the story of the development of China from that date and we read about a general "awakening" and the recent history of modern China. At the time of the 1919 demonstrations China was fragmented politically and had only 28,000 university students. Although the Nationalists had seized power, it lacked its own central authority and unifying government and was dominated by war lords and by colonial powers, the latter at its major seaports. The author believes that the students from the 1919 era and their contemporaries or those that followed in the decade after - the 1920s - set in motion the ideas, the political philosophies, and provided the leaders that changed China into a more modern state.

The modernization of China sharply lagged behind its Asian neighbor Japan, who started to modernize in the early 1850's building steel plants, railways, shipyards, and universities, in a unified effort among banks, the government including the military, and industry. China on the other hand remained fragmented, divided, a vast agrarian society with its costal cities dominated by colonial powers. The universities and intellectual base were very small by any standards, and for a country of the size of China were very small. In some ways China was similar to Russia in that it had a revolutionary spirit and rural unrest but a political vacuum. There was a general yearning for a new government or economic system and the communists filled that void almost by default after the Nationalists were weakened by WWII.

In any case the author tells a very detailed story about the people and ideas of the early café societies in Shanghai and the Beijing University that produced many popular writers and famous politicians including Mao and others. The author tells us about other writers such as Zou Raofen, Lu Xun, and the woman Ding Ling who wrote her "Miss Sophie" about her inner thoughts including sexuality in her writings, and about popular magazines such as "Life". The author goes on to lead us through the Nationalist movement, the communists, the invasion by Japan, the rise of the communists, the great leap forward, the cultural revolution, the failures of communism, the 1989 Tian'anmen massacre, etc. Instead of science and democracy China suffered through a series of crisis with as many as 60 million or more dead by famine and wars, with the people sometimes turning to cannibalism. Through all of the politicians and writers including Mao and others would reference the spirit of May 1919 although their own actions were no longer a reflection of the early ideals.

The book is just over 300 pages in medium font and gives a good introduction and overview to the development of modern China with many details on writers and political figures. As an added feature he includes nine pages of comments on follow up readings - mostly academic books or histories or other popular books - and mostly in English divided by category.

I enjoyed the book but thought it a bit short. Still it is worth 5 stars.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Modern Chinese Culture, April 5, 2009

By 

Dustin D. Ooley (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Bitter Revolution: China's Struggle with the Modern World (Making of the Modern World) (Paperback)

The premise of this book is that everything happening in China after May 4, 1919 and the signing of the discriminatory Versailles Treaty was essentially influenced by that event. This is fairly readable and offers a lot of modern Chinese history, though I don't believe Mitter carefully relates events back to the movement, nor do I think he is able to clearly explain what the movement meant for the Chinese. Part of the reason for this is the difficulty of understanding Chinese culture. I would only recommend the book to those who have spent some time in China and understand the culture.

That being said, I am a little upset that this review may drag the total stars to "4," when it really deserves 4.5 stars. It goes into details about authors who emerged around or after the May 4th movement and discusses how they were a part of the movement. This kind of analysis can't be found elsewhere unless you read specific books about those authors.

If you want to focus on modern Chinese history, I would recommend Spence's "Modern China," which covers everything from the fall of the Ming Dynasty to present day.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars These books focus on what might seem like narrow topics, but, January 9, 2005

By 

Kaushik "Dance to the tension of a world on edge" (San Jose, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Bitter Revolution: China's Struggle with the Modern World (Hardcover)

they contain more novel insights and findings than do most general histories of modern China, illustrating the complexity and intractability of the difficulties China has faced in its struggle with the modern world. Mitter begins with the founding of the May Fourth Movement during student demonstrations against the decision at Versailles to grant Germany's Chinese concessions to Japan. She then traces how May Fourth, with its idealization of democracy and science and its denunciation of Confucianism as the cause of China's backwardness, has surfaced in one way or another at every turn in modern Chinese history. In every fight over discarding old traditions and adopting modern advances, May Fourth has been central; even Mao's Cultural Revolution, with its call for a new Chinese culture, bears its mark.

Through a detailed case study of attempts to suppress opium use in Fujian Province, Madancy shows that, in the interactions of state and society during the late Qing and early republican years, even the most well intentioned policies could produce undesirable results. Time and again, national and local suppression only created new problems, and so there was a repeat of Commissioner Lin Zexu's effort to cut off the British trade in opium that triggered the Opium wars, which ended in China's humiliation.