Content area
Full Text
Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution. By JOHN FITZGERALD. Stanford, Calif,: Stanford University Press, 1996. 461 pp. $45.00.
Napoleon once remarked, "when China awakes, the world will shake." The process has already begun. In recent decades, China has come from a poverty-stricken nowhere to the economic forefront. With China emerging as a world-class economic power and a force to be reckoned with in the Asia-Pacific region, this book will be essential for understanding the process of awakening China which started with the Republican Revolution in 1911. Successes and failures of the Chinese awakening provide important lessons for other developing countries.
Based on a wealth of primary and secondary sources as well as on recent fieldwork, John Fitzgerald, a professor of Asian Studies at La Trobe University, Australia, offers a vivid account of how Chinese revolutionaries and intellectuals awakened China during the Republican Revolution. Spanning from reforms in the late Qing to the struggle between Chiang Kaishek and Mao Zedong in the early 1930s, the book narrates the great episodes that highlight the awakening of modern China: the Wuchang uprising, the May Fourth Movement, the May Thirtieth Movement, the impact of Lenin and Comintern, language reform, and the New Culture Movement. In addition to an introduction and conclusion, the volume is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 1 discusses efforts and...