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Chen Jiongming and the Federalist Movement: Regional Leadership and Nation Building in Early Republican China. By LESLIE H. DINGYAN CHEN. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 1999. xx, 357 pp. $50.00 (cloth).
Chen Jiongming is one of the most interesting and able figures in China's modern history-a daring republican revolutionary, an effective member of the Guangdong provincial assembly, a military governor of the province, a patron of Communist educators and peasant activists, a committed federalist, and, most famously, a traitor, who betrayed his master Sun Yatsen. On June 16, 1922, a contingent of Chen Jiongming's Guangdong Army launched an attack on Sun Yatsen's government headquarters in Guangzhou with the intention of assassinating Sun. The attack failed. Chen Jiongming was held accountable by Nationalists and Communists in his own day, and has been held responsible for his betrayal by Chinese historians to the present day.
In this unique and remarkable political biography, Leslie Chen sets out to expound the vision, explain the motives, and exonerate the behavior of his father, Chen Jiongming. He adopts two basic strategies. First, he seeks to demonstrate that Chen Jiongming was as committed a patriot and as broad a visionary as Sun Yatsen. The two men fell apart because they differed on the future of China. Sun was a "centralist" committed to national unification under a strong central government and to the top-down imposition of single-party rule. Chen worked to create a "United States of China," promoting...