China’s Revolutions
in the Modern World:
A Brief Interpretive History
Rebecca E. Karl
First published by Verso 2020
© Rebecca E. Karl 2020
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-559-9
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-560-5 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-561-2 (US EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Karl, Rebecca E., author.
Title: China’s revolutions in the modern world : a brief interpretive history / Rebecca E Karl.
Description: London ; New York : Verso, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “China’s emergence as a twenty-first-century global economic, cultural, and political power is often presented as a story of what Chinese leader Xi Jinping calls the nation’s “great rejuvenation,” a story narrated as the return of China to its “rightful” place at the center of the world. In China’s Revolutions in the Modern World, historian Rebecca E. Karl argues that China’s contemporary emergence is best seen not as a “return,” but rather as the product of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary activity and imaginings. From the Taipings in the mid-nineteenth century through nationalist, anti-imperialist, cultural, and socialist revolutions to today’s capitalist-inflected Communist State, modern China has been made in intellectual dissonance and class struggle, in mass democratic movements and global war, in socialism and anti-socialism, in repression and conflict by multiple generations of Chinese people mobilized to seize history and make the future in their own name. Through China’s successive revolutions, the contours of our contemporary world have taken shape. This brief interpretive history shows how”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019038428 (print) | LCCN 2019038429 (ebook) | ISBN 9781788735599 (paperback) | ISBN 9781788735612 (ebook ; US) | ISBN 9781788735605 (ebook ; UK)
Subjects: LCSH: Revolutions--China--History. | China--Politics and government.
Classification: LCC DS740.2 .K37 2020 (print) | LCC DS740.2 (ebook) | DDC 951.05--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038428
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038429
Typeset in Minion Pro by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
For my teachers:
Arif Dirlik, Marilyn B. Young,
Harry Harootunian
Contents
Introduction
1: The Taipings
Interlude: Post-Taiping “Restoration”
2: The Collapse of the Qing and the Republican Revolution
Interlude: Post-revolutionary Disorder
3: The May Fourth Movement (1919) and Cultural Revolution
Interlude: Uneven and Combined—China in the 1920s
4: Competing Revolutions in the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937)
Interlude: The War of Resistance against Japan
5: The 1949 Revolution
Interlude: The Invasion of Tibet (1959)
6: The Cultural Revolution
Interlude: Assessing Mao, 1979–1989
7: 1989 and Its Aftermath
Interlude: Xinjiang 2009
Conclusion: 2019
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
We are Marxists, and Marxism teaches that in our approach to a problem we should start from objective facts, not from abstract definitions.
—Mao Zedong (1942)1
Ideologies must become dramas if they are not to remain mere ink printed on paper.
—Antonio Gramsci (1917)2
In 1926, Mao Zedong began a short consideration of class analysis in China with a query: “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of primary importance for the revolution.”3 An early attempt to understand China’s social structure in Marxist perspective articulated in the absolutely antagonistic terms of “friends” and “enemies,” class analysis allowed Mao to present China’s past and contemporary situations as necessary revolutionary stages of struggle in the securing of China’s future. This type of rethinking of past, current, and future time is characteristic of all modern historical analysis. Among others, it raises the question: With what facts—which past and which present and in the name of which future—does one write a book on China’s revolutions in today’s profoundly unrevolutionary times? The current volume explores that question by asking what the meaning of revolution is as a problem of and in the modern history of China, as well as of and in the world. In approaching answers to that question, the facts from which we begin matter a great deal.
Here, then, we can find the first of this book’s major approaches to the question: while modern revolutions in China have of course always been Chinese, they always have been global as well, not only because world contexts and texts helped shape the conditions of successive revolutionary struggles in China, but because those successive struggles helped constitute the contexts and texts of the modern world. From the outset, what this intertwining indicates is that revolutions are a modern global phenomenon, even as they are also a fact of and in modern Chinese history. The book’s second major approach flows from this: “modern” is not merely a chronology or description. Rather, it refers to an experience of time—a temporality—and a form of historical becoming—a historicity. When, for example, peasant women after 1949 re-narrated their individual pasts as histories of oppression rather than as ones of gendered fate, they demonstrated, in however a state-managed fashion, that they were ready for and capable of making a future that fate may not have foretold. The conditions of the past became not a restraint on the time of the present, but rather an opening to a new experiential future.
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