The Penguin History of Modern China: the Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850-2008

Posted October 3, 2008 

The Penguin History of Modern China: the Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850-2008
by Jonathan Fenby

Allen Lane, 763 pages, £30

Jonathan Fenby was an expert on a lot of other things (including Pink Floyd) before he became an expert on China. After decades of editing some of the top English-language newspapers as well as writing vivid, insightful books about Europe, he became editor of the South China Morning Post in 1995. A short time after his retirement from that position in 1999, he began to write vivid, insightful books about China—including a memoir of his life in Hong Kong and a magnificent biography of Chiang Kai-Shek. The past two years have seen the publication not only of this panoramic narrative of China since 1850, but an equally generous history of Chinese emperors from Qinshihuang to Puyi. One does not often feel that an author has just about got it all covered, but Mr. Fenby is approaching the mark.

There are several ways to index our need for a new survey history of modern China. The first is that we have to do something about the received chronology regarding when China began modern life, since what modernity is looks different to us every quarter-century or so. Mr. Fenby has chosen 1850, a refreshing date.

He suggests in the introduction that the goal was just to frame the later 19th century as the transitional era. But rather than dwell at any length on contemporary 1850 subjects, such as the outbreak of the Taiping War or the reign of the Xianfeng Emperor, Mr. Fenby’s object appears to be to hurry on to such subjects as the strong personalities leading the government in the post-Taiping era, the tendency to focus on immediate domestic problems while international tensions rise to a boil, and the ungovernable complexities of China’s vast territories and extensions. He finds compromised reforms, factional disputes and idiocentric miscalculations decisive. They dominate the entire narrative, from the grim 19th century to the ebullient 17th Party Congress in 2007.

The author’s chronological choices reflect upon another reason we have been in need of a new survey history, and that is plot selection. Into the late 20th century, we had only a few master plots to choose from for a modern China narrative. The older one, but still a favorite, was that of imperial China developing itself within itself, doing more and more farming and star-gazing and gunpowder-making until the arrival of the commerce-minded and heavily armed pioneers of European expansion; China fails to adapt to the great world, the splendor is ground to rubble; postimperial Chinese struggle to recapture some measure of material well-being and national pride.

A newer master plot begins sometime in the Qing period, when China is chafing under the reins of a foreign conquest dynasty. The dynasty collapses, only to leave the Chinese pummeled by poverty, ignorance, corruption and foreign invasion; but under revolutionary leadership, China stands up, unifies, industrializes, becomes a giant of international manufacturing, finance, military assertion, and the only country able to produce pandas with any consistency.

Mr. Fenby eschews both the “Lost Splendor of China” plot and the “China Stands Up!” plot. His perspective is closer to that produced in recent decades by the work of Andre Gunder Frank and others who have suggested that the normal condition of China, from the imperial era to today, is to be among the world’s most wealthy, populous, innovative and widely influential societies. The century from about 1850 to 1950 was, in this new plot, a deviation from the normal condition, caused by contingencies of the late 18th and early 19th centuries that produced several anomalies in global experience, among them China’s temporary absence from the ranks of wealth and power.

Mr. Fenby’s title and his narrative tie into this new plot. He evinces far less interest in its causes than in its effects, and he suggests that the greatest effect is a lingering inability of the Chinese leadership to synchronize their perceptions and their ambitions to the rapidly changing conditions of the past century and a half. They acted as if they were strong when they were weak, and now they act as if they are weak when they are strong. One wonders, when the whiplash from the U-turns in modern China’s experience wears off, might China’s leaders finally be able to get a clear view of the underlying constants of China’s position in the world and adjust their affect accordingly?

Mr. Fenby is pessimistic that this will happen anytime soon. The reason appears to be that the current leadership of the People’s Republic of China identifies, in some conditioned way, with the imperial governments stretching back two thousand years before it. This is not a simplistic notion that China is still an “empire” or that the current leaders are “emperors.” It is more a suggestion that the same demographic, geographic, economic, social and technological factors that made China barely governable by the emperors of the late 19th century (and, by implication, millennia before) persist today.

The P.R.C. organizes itself like an imperial government for the same reason that the imperial governments organized themselves as they did. They had to protect themselves from internal factionalism, corrupt local officials, distrustful and uncooperative workers, sharply divergent economic agendas of merchants and officials, traitors willing to sell out to aspiring invaders, capricious natural forces likely to create insuperable catastrophes, and violent, contagious outbreaks of public disorder. The leaders of the P.R.C. are not merely imitating but are literally reliving the paranoia, secretiveness, duplicity and authoritarian distance from the agricultural majority of the population already lived by their imperial predecessors.

Why should the situation persist, and how long will it go on? Mr. Fenby provides no conclusion on this, but he suggests that a crisis is coming, and harks back in his epilogue to the late 19th century as a foreshadowing of the near future. At that earlier time, the commingling domestic and international crises were met by tactical measures that did nothing to address the fundamental problems. When the inadequacy of the imperial response led to the first revolution, the governments of Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-Shek could hope for little more than to restore the patterns of rule used by the emperors; when they failed, local warlords attempted the same approach to governance in their localities.

The communists promised a fresh strategy for government. But the challenges of ruling all the dimensions of China brought calamity upon them in the Great Leap Forward, eventually forcing them into the same tactics used by emperors and nationalists before them. Ideologies—whether Confucian, nationalist or communist—have proven unable to resist the logistical and environmental pressures that keep returning the state to its historical condition. Fending off factional splits or coups d’état by enriching the ambitious, quashing disorder with force, making a show of punishing the corrupt in order to cover up the larger pile of offenses, lying to foreign governments to mask either an inability or an unwillingness to respond, are now tools as essential to the P.R.C. leadership as they ever were to the emperors of China.

It may be that Mr. Fenby has given us a clue to his explanation for this in his allusion to Mark Elvin’s thesis of a “high-level equilibrium trap,” which Mr. Fenby tells us is called “involution” by other scholars. This is a metaphor (I think), so we need not quibble over how Philip Huang and others would feel about this equation. What Mr. Fenby means by it is “growth without development.” While China’s population, economic productivity  and military grasp have grown, the means by which China is governed has not developed. Or, as he puts it in his epilogue, “ ... for all the manifestations of modernity, China’s history is not another country.” The present Chinese government and its predecessors are still a country unto themselves. Mr. Fenby’s final take on his own title is ironic: This is not a narrative of a modern China but a narrative of what Chinese governments have been doing while caught in their high-level equilibrium trap, involuting themselves, waiting for the moment of modernity to arrive.

One does not have to be convinced by Mr. Fenby’s interpretation to enjoy the book’s scope, vivacity and delight in character portraits. About one-third of the book is about post-Mao China, making it a wonderful resource for those needing a both coherent and engaging narrative of the past 30 years. Most of the images are familiar but there are also surprises. I am not sure, for instance, that I have previously seen a photograph of Ronglu (spelled Jung Lu in the book), but a nice one is included. And the collection of maps at the front of the book is superb. These are very welcome delights in a book whose main virtue is that its milling of subplots, boisterous details, impatient anecdotes, and intrusive but very helpful statistics are guided by a tempered, far-seeing, compassionate presence.

Pamela Crossley is a professor of history at Dartmouth College. Most recently she is author of What is Global History? (2008) and the forthcoming The Wobbling Pivot: China since 1800, an Interpretive History.