Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850 to the Present Hardcover – June 24, 2008

This book covers more than one hundred years of Chinese history, with a special focus on the 20th century. I approached this book as a potential overview of what has happened in China that led to its present status as a rising economic and political power. In this sense, I have not been disappointed. The book is divided in six parts, covering different historical periods, starting with the end of the empire, and finishing with Hu Jintao's leadership. Because of the span of time covered in the book, the author cannot go particularly deep in any particular issue, but enough information is provided to have a clear and general idea of China's recent history.Still, and that is why I am giving the book 4 stars and not 5, I feel that a more sharp interpretation of events could have been possible. Even though the books helped me to have a basic understanding of the reasons behind the most significant events, such as the fall of the Empire, the raise of Mao to power, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution or the Tiananmen Square revolt, I ended the book thinking that, yes, I know a lot more about China, and definitely I will understand better any China-related piece of news, but something was missing in the explanation of why those things happened.In spite of its minor shortcomings, though, I recommend Fenby's book to those looking for a general overview of modern Chinese history.

I found the book well written, and it improved my understanding of the country from a historical perspective. The breath and depth of coverage was just right, and it even motivated me to do additional research of my own. This was when the flaws started appearing.For instance, the book introduces a whole gamut of important players, and I found myself turning several times to the index to remind myself who these were. Unfortunately more often than not, the page numberings in the index were just wrong, which was a minor annoyance throughout. Misspellings of names crop up every now and then - it may not matter much to the casual reader, but it is slightly irritating when you decide to read up more on Zong Zizhen, only to discover that his surname is Gong rather than Zong.The book could also do with better cross references. I was intrigued by a reference to the Confucian Book of Odes, and tried looking up some lines which were quoted in the book, but never been able to find it till today.Don't get me wrong, I would very much still recommend this book for someone who wants to understand what happened in China over the last 200 years, but it could have been so much better.

Covers a huge period. Deep on detail and lists of who was who but could use a lot more insights and conclusions.

The book ain't light but definitely China's history deserves all that much space. The author introduces you from the fall of the last emperor until the current issues affecting China. It is 95% well written. the reading is most certainly enjoyable and gives you good knowledge in the understanding of the reasons for current behavioral ways of the chinese people. The Glossary and the appendixes definitely are useful due to the multitude of people that are mentioned in this book.

I gave up after the first two hundred pages. The book has lots of names and details and perhaps if you are a professional historian, it may be a useful resource. If you are like me-not a professional historian, just curious about recent Chinese history-my guess is you will find it boring, tedious and confusing.

Fascinating read from 1850 to 2008. Very comprehensive, yet not boring.

This is a formidable book and certainly the topic it covers is crucial to an understanding of the world today. China was the West and Japan's whipping boy for a hundred years. The glories of the heavenly empire were ground under the heel of imperialism. It was easy pickings. And China's decadence contributed to its own downfall. When China turned away from its costs in the fifteenth century because the outside world might have challenged the Confucian rulers arrogant sense of superiority, that hubris was its undoing. Ironically this was not too different from the stance that the Lamistic reactionaries of Tibet took in the first half of the twentieth century which made Tibet fatally vulnerable to British and Chinese predations. The outside world had nothing to teach those whose mandate came from heaven or from Padmasambhava. What is good and what wanting in this book? The good is the power of the narrative. It goes from the collapse of the Manchu to the failure of the Sun Yat-sen revolution to the warlords, the Japanese occupation, Kuomintang, and finally the communists: Mao and Deng Xiaoping's capitalist road. Several wake-up facts stand out. In contradiction to what I had always assumed, it was the communists who held back during much of the Japanese occupation, not the KMT. Mao did the exact opposite of what the communists, with Stillwell's help, convinced the world of, that they fought the Japanese while Chiang Kai-shek cowered in Chungking. That may have been true before the latter's kidnapping but during most of WWII it was the KMT which took the brunt of the battle while the Communists, though a lot less corrupt, did some guerilla fighting but mostly held back so as to survive to fight the civil war. It is interesting to do a bit of number crunching. The author, as others, portray Mao's disruptions during the Great Leap Forward as the most catastrophic human induced event in China. But was it? Fenby points out that the Taiping and other uprising killed about 20 million people. How many people died in China in the 19th century because of fighting and its aftermaths? Is it more or less than Communist inspired events? What proportion of those who died in the famine in the wake of the Great Leap did so because of the Leap and how many because of natural catastrophes which were also then occurring. And was the Cultural Revolution any worse than Taiping? I am not sure. China was (and may still latently be) a pretty violent place. Skinning, burning, and beating people to death happened a lot in Chinese history. (What was the Japanese toll including as a result of economic dislocation---my mammy never told me to eat of because of starving Chinese but starving Indians whose great '43 famine may be laid at the feet of their British overlords---.) The Taiping and their royal enemies brutalized each other. In all those movies about missionaries in China saving themselves and innocent children from ravaging crowds who objected to their presence, we are never given the historical background of British, American, German or Japanese exploitation or bombardments. During Tiananmen Square, the crowds managed to beat to death and tear the skin off soldiers who had yet to attack them. When the attacks came it got even nastier. That the Commies execute hundreds in the uprisings in Tibet and Singkiang is not so out of place with the facts that the crowds of Tibetans and Uyghurs do their own murder even if it is not nearly on the scale of the oppressor. What I find a bit wanting in the book, is a more structural explanation of what happened. We get some of that in the pre-communist era, the warlords etc. But when the Communists take over the madness of Mao's policies seems to come entirely from palace politics and there are endless pages of what was going among the leaders jockeying for position and power. (When I asked a friend for some information on Brezhnev, he responded that he was no Kremlinologist.----Are their Bejing-ologists?) I keep wondering what were the forces in the cities and hinterland that enabled all these peregrinations to take root and spread. The picture the author picture painted of the different movements within the Cultural Revolution isn't detailed enough. He says something about the students, a bit about peasant discontent, but a lot more needs to be told to make sense of why what is going on at the top moves the country as it does. After all the Cultural Revolution went on for ten years or more and China did not fall apart as a nation. That it might have spent a third of its governmental revenues making trouble in the third world might be why it loomed so large in international competition when it was actually a basket case. It may be that we need another generation of historians and much more access to Chinese historical sources before a structured picture of China emerges. This is a worthwhile book to read. China looms large in our future. It may not be such an amenable adversary. Certainly its history over the last century and half does not inspire confidence. But then again it has changed in ways no one would have predicted. There is hope.Charlie Fisher author of  Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World

Bought as a gift for someone