China

Republican China

The start of the Republic is the focus of John H. Fincher, Chinese Democracy, rev. and expanded (1989); Mary B. Rankin, Early Chinese Revolutionaries: Radical Intellectuals in Shanghai and Chekiang, 1902–1911 (1971); Edward J.M. Rhoads, China’s Republican Revolution: The Case of Kwangtung, 1895–1913 (1975); and Joseph W. Esherick, Reform and Revolution in China: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei (1976, reissued 1998).

Interpretive texts on the period include Lucien Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915–1949 (1971; originally published in French, 1961); and James E. Sheridan, China in Disintegration: The Republican Era in Chinese History, 1912–1949 (1975). O. Edmund Clubb, 20th Century China, 3rd ed. (1978), is also a standard work. For the revolution of 1911–12 and the early Republican period, scholarly essays are found in Mary C. Wright (ed.), China in Revolution: The First Phase, 1900–1913 (1968). The immediate consequences of the revolution of 1911–12 and the search for an appropriate political form for China are analyzed in Edward Friedman, Backward Toward Revolution: The Chinese Revolutionary Party (1974); and Ernest P. Young, The Presidency of Yuan Shih-K’ai: Liberalism and Dictatorship in Early Republican China (1977). Intellectual and political movements in China in the late teens are presented in the classic work Tse-tung Chow, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (1960). A more critical view of some of the leading participants is Yü-sheng Lin, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era (1979).

Warlordism has been treated in Hsi-sheng Ch’i, Warlord Politics in China, 1916–1928 (1976); Andrew J. Nathan, Peking Politics, 1918–1923 (1976, reissued 1998); and Donald E. Sutton, Provincial Militarism and the Chinese Republic: The Yunnan Army, 1905–25 (1980). Collections of biographies of the leading figures of the period include Howard L. Boorman and Richard C. Howard (eds.), Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, 5 vol. (1967–79); and Donald W. Klein and Anne B. Clarke, Biographic Dictionary of Chinese Communism, 1921–65, 2 vol. (1971).

Economic conditions are discussed in R.H. Tawney, Land and Labour in China (1932, reprinted 1972), a prophetic and still valuable study. Dwight H. Perkins (ed.), China’s Modern Economy in Historical Perspective (1975), is a collection of essays. A penetrating analysis of China’s rural order is Philip C.C. Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (1985).

C. Martin Wilbur and Julie Lien-ying How (eds.), Documents on Communism, Nationalism, and Soviet Advisers in China, 1918–1927 (1956, reissued with corrections, 1972), discusses the Nationalist revolution. The struggles that displaced warlords from centre stage are set forth in C. Martin Wilbur, The Nationalist Revolution in China, 1923–1928 (1984). Richard W. Rigby, The May 30 Movement: Events and Themes (1980), is a study of one of the most energizing of these struggles. The new national government that emerged has been portrayed in Lloyd E. Eastman, The Abortive Revolution: China Under Nationalist Rule, 1927–1937 (1974, reissued 1990). Among the rebuttals to some of Eastman’s arguments is Joseph Fewsmith, Party, State, and Local Elites in Republican China: Merchant Organizations and Politics in Shanghai, 1890–1930 (1985). Events of the war with Japan are discussed in Lloyd E. Eastman, Seeds of Destruction: Nationalist China in War and Revolution, 1937–1949 (1984). Kenneth G. Lieberthal Lynn White