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China's Twentieth Century: Revolution, Retreat and the Road to Equality
What must China do to become truly democratic and equitable? This question animates most progressive debates about this potential superpower, and in China’s Twentieth Century the country’s leading critic, Wang Hui, turns to the past for an answer. Beginning with the birth of modern politics in the 1911 revolution, Wang tracks the initial flourishing of political life, its blossoming in the radical sixties, and its decline in China’s more recent liberalization, to arrive at the crossroads of the present day. Examining the emergence of new class divisions between ethnic groups in the context of Tibet and Xinjiang, alongside the resurgence of neoliberalism through the lens of the Chongqing Incident, Wang Hui argues for a revival of social democracy as the only just path for China’s future.
368 pages, Paperback
First published August 4, 2015
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About the author
Wang Hui
347 books41 followersWang Hui (Chinese: 汪晖; pinyin: Wāng Huī; born 1959) is a professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Tsinghua University, Beijing. His researches focus on contemporary Chinese literature and intellectual history. He was the executive editor (with Huang Ping) of the influential magazine Dushu (读书, Reading) from May 1996 to July 2007. The US magazine Foreign Policy named him as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world in May 2008. Wang Hui is the recipient of many awards for his scholarship, and has been Visiting Professor at Harvard, Edinburgh, Bologna (Italy), Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, and the University of Washington, among others. In March 2010, he appeared as the keynote speaker at the annual meeting for the Association of Asian Scholars.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
August 8, 2022
Collection of essays by Chinese 'New Leftist' Wang Hui. The second essay, "From people's war to the war of international alliance (1949-53): the war to resist U.S. aggression and aid Korea from the perspective of twentieth-century Chinese history", is utterly brilliant, and the book is worth reading for that alone.
Most of the other essays were rather academic and basically pretty missable in my opinion. His sorta neo-Maoist critique of modern China is interesting enough, but he misses some key factors: the inherent problems and dangers of building socialism in a hostile world dominated by a US imperialism that's hell-bent on rolling back any socialist process; the inherent problems of maintaining a revolutionary process over multiple generations (what the author seems to want is a sort of permanent People's War, but I very much doubt he'd get a consensus for that); the fact that, in spite of vast inequality and enormous contradictions, the vast majority (like pretty much everyone) in China have experienced a significant improvement in their conditions of life since the start of the reform process.
Overall my recommendation would be to read the Korean War chapter and skim the rest.
Most of the other essays were rather academic and basically pretty missable in my opinion. His sorta neo-Maoist critique of modern China is interesting enough, but he misses some key factors: the inherent problems and dangers of building socialism in a hostile world dominated by a US imperialism that's hell-bent on rolling back any socialist process; the inherent problems of maintaining a revolutionary process over multiple generations (what the author seems to want is a sort of permanent People's War, but I very much doubt he'd get a consensus for that); the fact that, in spite of vast inequality and enormous contradictions, the vast majority (like pretty much everyone) in China have experienced a significant improvement in their conditions of life since the start of the reform process.
Overall my recommendation would be to read the Korean War chapter and skim the rest.
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March 19, 2021Honestly unreadable. Dense ass theory that requires a very firm grasp of the history, which I do not have. I thought this book WAS a history, it is not. Could be great at what it’s doing, but I can’t tell.
November 25, 2018
Hui makes some good points and seems to have a lot to say, but his arguments would have been better served if the book were better written. (I honestly never understand why academics don't make more of an effort to write in a clear and engaging manner.) At any rate, what particularly piqued my interest was the discussion of the divide between rural and urban China. I did learn quite a bit but I found myself frustrated by the dry, dense academic style.
October 2, 2018
well researched, convincingly argued.
Read
October 8, 2020China's Twentieth Century by Wang Hui is a study of 20th century China in societal and political manner. Hui is a professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Tsinghua University, Beijing. His researches focus on contemporary Chinese literature and intellectual history. He was the executive editor (with Huang Ping) of the influential magazine Dushu from May 1996 to July 2007. The US magazine Foreign Policy named him as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world in May 2008.
This is a complicated book that had me struggling for the first half of the 20th century. This is mostly because of my lack of familiarity of internal Chinese history outside of the Boxer Rebellion before Mao. The early 20th century does play an important role in understanding China's path through the twentieth century. The book skips periods that I would see as important from my studies but did introduce me to a different thinking about China's role in the Korean War and it hot and cold relationship with the Soviet Union. It also described China's view of WWI. Both of these views are not typical of Western thinking of education.
Hui isn't hesitant about breaking out political philosophers. Although frequently turning to Marx, he does bring in Hegel and others. This book is heavy on philosophy and internal Chinese sociology. The view from inside China is interesting and unique and will give readers a different perspective of China and the troubles and progress. Society is far less monolithic than many believe and there is a growing division in classes. The peasants and the farmers are not the ones who are making the progress and have been left behind in their revolution.
Although a very complex read, the view of a respected Chinese scholar inside of China offers insight that into the culture and workings of society. A detailed account of what Hui calls the short century and the long revolution.
This is a complicated book that had me struggling for the first half of the 20th century. This is mostly because of my lack of familiarity of internal Chinese history outside of the Boxer Rebellion before Mao. The early 20th century does play an important role in understanding China's path through the twentieth century. The book skips periods that I would see as important from my studies but did introduce me to a different thinking about China's role in the Korean War and it hot and cold relationship with the Soviet Union. It also described China's view of WWI. Both of these views are not typical of Western thinking of education.
Hui isn't hesitant about breaking out political philosophers. Although frequently turning to Marx, he does bring in Hegel and others. This book is heavy on philosophy and internal Chinese sociology. The view from inside China is interesting and unique and will give readers a different perspective of China and the troubles and progress. Society is far less monolithic than many believe and there is a growing division in classes. The peasants and the farmers are not the ones who are making the progress and have been left behind in their revolution.
Although a very complex read, the view of a respected Chinese scholar inside of China offers insight that into the culture and workings of society. A detailed account of what Hui calls the short century and the long revolution.
March 29, 2024
The introduction of this book is quite misleading, Wang's main argument is never about building social democracy in China but about revitalizing Maoism and socialism ideology. As a prominent neo-leftist and a literary critic in China, Wang brought all big concepts like revolution, state, empire, people, war, communism. This book did not provide academic rigor evidence, but rather a collection of vague political thoughts.
Wang's criticism of neoliberalism is a cleche narrative but ignores the horrible Hukou system, general discrimination against rural immigrants, and suppression of labor rights. His advocates of revitalizing socialist tradition are interesting, especially considering the tragic past of workers and peasants under Mao's rule.
Its empire & nation-state argument of modern China, the Korean War ignored many positive articles from political scientists and historians. e.g. China's decision-making and intervention in the Korean War does not prove Wang's argument about class struggle, people's war, and communism ideology.
So it's better to read some academic articles in the same areas and compare them with this one.
Wang's criticism of neoliberalism is a cleche narrative but ignores the horrible Hukou system, general discrimination against rural immigrants, and suppression of labor rights. His advocates of revitalizing socialist tradition are interesting, especially considering the tragic past of workers and peasants under Mao's rule.
Its empire & nation-state argument of modern China, the Korean War ignored many positive articles from political scientists and historians. e.g. China's decision-making and intervention in the Korean War does not prove Wang's argument about class struggle, people's war, and communism ideology.
So it's better to read some academic articles in the same areas and compare them with this one.
July 12, 2020
I read this book immediately after Rebecca E. Karl's China's Revolutions in the Modern World. I'm glad I did, because Karl provides a much more digestible overview of the basic facts of recent Chinese history, from the Taiping Rebellion through liberalization. I reviewed that book here
This book was much more dense and academic. I got a few things out of it, but getting through much of it was drudgery. To be fair, this book was translated from Chinese, and each chapter seems to have a different translator.
The main lesson I took away from this book is that Chinese intellectuals and revolutionaries, since the May Fourth Movement in the late 1910s/1920s, have navigated how to contest politics on the terrain of culture versus the terrain of political economy. Wang argues that China has seen, since liberalization, a sustained "de-politicization" of the Communist party as it has lost its organic connection to the working class, which has itself been dramatically restructured over the past 30 years or so.
As a United Statesian, a Leftist, and a political ecologist, I read this book with a perhaps inappropriate bias towards finding parallels between China and the United States, and with an eye towards clarifying my thinking about global ecological crises.
For example, Wang describes an alliance between certain media outlets and the Communist party, in a way that reminded me an awful lot of the Democratic party and MSNBC.
Wang shows convincingly that in China, the "peasant-worker alliance" that forms the ostensible political base of the Communist party clearly does not exist in any meaningful way anymore, and it is rather farcical to suggest that it does. Instead, there is a historically gargantuan stratum of migrant workers, who have been recently displaced from rural areas and moved into cities. These workers are materially deprived and politically disenfranchised to varying degrees. Some retain strong connections to their ancestral lands, but many are now 2nd or even 3rd generation urban denizens, and have come to constitute something of an industrial underclass with no meaningful representation in the Chinese political system.
Conversely, another group that Wang dubs "the new poor" have emerged in the urban periphery of China. These are skilled workers who occupy middle class jobs and have a reasonable position in the Chinese economy, but are nevertheless deeply disaffected because they lack the means to consume as much as the emerging consumerist culture demands.
This disaffected group is politically disjointed. How it is or is not organized will, in Wang's assessment, have dramatic consequences for the political and ecological future of China and, therefore, the world.
It reminds me in some ways of the disaffected masses of middle class White men in the United States, who may be downwardly mobile, may be scooped up by the alt-right, or may be brought into Leftist politics. This a group who does not face the same material economic conditions as the migrant working class, but does have at least some overlapping interests. If I understand Wang correctly, China urgently needs a political program that can unite these groups. Advancing such a program is vital for building a better world and for avoiding a catastrophic sharp turn to the Right.
If you want to avoid some of the more theoretical chunks of this book that seem to require some kind of advanced training in political philosophy to understand, you might skip Chapters 1 and 7 (the first and last substantive chapters).
This book was much more dense and academic. I got a few things out of it, but getting through much of it was drudgery. To be fair, this book was translated from Chinese, and each chapter seems to have a different translator.
The main lesson I took away from this book is that Chinese intellectuals and revolutionaries, since the May Fourth Movement in the late 1910s/1920s, have navigated how to contest politics on the terrain of culture versus the terrain of political economy. Wang argues that China has seen, since liberalization, a sustained "de-politicization" of the Communist party as it has lost its organic connection to the working class, which has itself been dramatically restructured over the past 30 years or so.
As a United Statesian, a Leftist, and a political ecologist, I read this book with a perhaps inappropriate bias towards finding parallels between China and the United States, and with an eye towards clarifying my thinking about global ecological crises.
For example, Wang describes an alliance between certain media outlets and the Communist party, in a way that reminded me an awful lot of the Democratic party and MSNBC.
Wang shows convincingly that in China, the "peasant-worker alliance" that forms the ostensible political base of the Communist party clearly does not exist in any meaningful way anymore, and it is rather farcical to suggest that it does. Instead, there is a historically gargantuan stratum of migrant workers, who have been recently displaced from rural areas and moved into cities. These workers are materially deprived and politically disenfranchised to varying degrees. Some retain strong connections to their ancestral lands, but many are now 2nd or even 3rd generation urban denizens, and have come to constitute something of an industrial underclass with no meaningful representation in the Chinese political system.
Conversely, another group that Wang dubs "the new poor" have emerged in the urban periphery of China. These are skilled workers who occupy middle class jobs and have a reasonable position in the Chinese economy, but are nevertheless deeply disaffected because they lack the means to consume as much as the emerging consumerist culture demands.
This disaffected group is politically disjointed. How it is or is not organized will, in Wang's assessment, have dramatic consequences for the political and ecological future of China and, therefore, the world.
It reminds me in some ways of the disaffected masses of middle class White men in the United States, who may be downwardly mobile, may be scooped up by the alt-right, or may be brought into Leftist politics. This a group who does not face the same material economic conditions as the migrant working class, but does have at least some overlapping interests. If I understand Wang correctly, China urgently needs a political program that can unite these groups. Advancing such a program is vital for building a better world and for avoiding a catastrophic sharp turn to the Right.
If you want to avoid some of the more theoretical chunks of this book that seem to require some kind of advanced training in political philosophy to understand, you might skip Chapters 1 and 7 (the first and last substantive chapters).
February 29, 2024
An interesting but very much an analytical or philosophical read. Wang Hui takes a number of episodes of Chinese history and analyses them in some detail with a view toward the intellectual and political trends of the time. The perspective is interesting, but quite sympathetic to the Chinese communist party and state. This is particularly true in the final segment where Wang Hui talks about the meaning of equality using Chinese regions generally and Xinjiang in particular as a partial case study. This could easily be seen as an apology for the actions of the Chinese state. His assessment that both western democracies and Chinese communist in the neoliberal era are both suffering from a crisis of representation - where both systems no longer truly represent the views of their citizens - is much more insightful.
So, not a narrative description of Chinese history in the twentieth century, but still an interesting Chinese view of key episodes that is at least partially sympathetic to the Chinese state.
So, not a narrative description of Chinese history in the twentieth century, but still an interesting Chinese view of key episodes that is at least partially sympathetic to the Chinese state.
August 6, 2020
While I was hoping for a bit more history of twentieth century China in this one it is really more focused on the political theories that undergirded China's various social movements during the time and still today.
Hui's style is decidedly academic which makes parts of the text challenging to get through. However, his analysis of the political history of China the various forces colliding during the 20th century that shaped and led to what we conceptualize as modern China were fascinating, detailed and very well sourced.
The book provides a vision of what was, what is, but most importantly what could be if China could imagine a better political future than the all consuming state capitalism that has defined it's 21st century so far.
Hui's style is decidedly academic which makes parts of the text challenging to get through. However, his analysis of the political history of China the various forces colliding during the 20th century that shaped and led to what we conceptualize as modern China were fascinating, detailed and very well sourced.
The book provides a vision of what was, what is, but most importantly what could be if China could imagine a better political future than the all consuming state capitalism that has defined it's 21st century so far.
July 29, 2021
Not quite what I expected or was looking for, I hoped for a more in-depth view of internal politics rather than a more wide look at foreign relations and international ideology. Still really good.
June 21, 2024
Wish there was more on Uyghurs and African trade
June 25, 2025
Essays of Marxist analysis on the modern China and it's challenges politically and it's complex class structure. I feel this book might be a good addendum to another book of recent Chinese history. I read it in an attempt to better understanding but instead found this book presupposes the reader enters the work with a basis of thorough understanding of China's recent century. I found the exploration of Chinese challenges and exploration of definition of equality stimulating but I don't have the expertise in China's recent history to critically analyze the books points
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews