Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introductions series gives academics the chance to play a kind of intellectual game: being given an extremely broad subject and asked to condense it into one hundred and fifty small pages.  The most ambitious game so far is probably John H. Arnold’s A Very Short Introduction to History, though this may have been surpassed by Terry Eagleton’s A Very Short Introduction to the Meaning of Life. Rana Mitter has been given the task of introducing modern China. 

This is a game, though, which Rana Mitter has practised. His previous book, A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World (weighing in at a monstrous 314 pages), viewed twentieth century China through the lens of the 1919 May Fourth Movement. In Modern China Mitter touches on a few of his favourite topics, the early twentieth-century advice columnist Zou Taofen, for example, and the 1980s television series Heshang (River Elegy). Though Modern China gives him duties to discharge, the first providing a narrative history of late nineteenth and twentieth century China.

This is fluently written, and complete as can be expected given the space restrictions, but the interest comes from what is emphasised and left out. Mitter refuses to reduce the twentieth century to the story of the Communist Party. Many Communist historians see the May 30th incident (a series of anti-imperialist strikes and protests sparked by the killing of Chinese by British police) as the beginning of the second revolutionary period; here it’s dealt with in one sentence. The Long March, one of the great heroic tales of the People’s Republic, is done quickly and unemotionally. Much more space is given to the common ground between the Communist and Nationalist (Kuomintang) Parties: science, industrialisation, anti-superstition campaigns. Mitter suggests the difference between them was only the Communists’ class-war agenda and that the Communists’ control over China was more complete than the Nationalists’. In fact, in today’s China, Mitter sees a country more resembling Chiang Kaishek’s vision than Mao Zedong’s.

In drawing these comparisons Mitter occasionally makes doubtful similarities. Chiang Kaishek’s cultural programme, the New Life Movement (a reassertion of Confucian values along slightly more progressive lines), is generously said to have been an attempt ‘to create a citizenry that was self-aware, politically conscious, and committed to the nation’.  Many intellectuals at the time, who for two decades had fought to free themselves from Confucianism, plausibly thought it was the opposite: an attempt to subjugate politically conscious citizens under a conservative programme of oppression. The Communist Party would turn out to be at least as oppressive, but in the 1930s the Communist Party’s cultural programme was one of its strengths.

Mitter then addresses himself to the question he clearly finds more interesting: is China modern? The difficulty is in deciding the criteria. The beginning of the book dealt with a vague mix of secularism, individualism, self-awareness and equality, but he’s aware it’s unsatisfactory to equate modernity with ‘the West’. This leads to some slightly contradictory conclusions. Mitter sees modernity during the Mao era, ‘This was the modern politics of the totalitarian state’; but also sees as an example of China’s modernisation that ‘China today is overall not a totalitarian state, nor a military junta, nor a state run at the personal whim of a dictator’. The Cultural Revolution, we are told, was meant to create a self-aware citizenry. But if ‘self-aware’ means being critical of your own actions, then the Cultural Revolution was one of the least self-aware periods of world history; and if it means knowing you’re part of a citizenry, then is this really part of being modern?  The difficulty of settling on any fixed criteria means the chapter ‘Is Chinese Society Modern?’ drifts rather unstably from equality of the sexes, to the effects of war, to whether China is richer now than under Mao, to whether China is free, to self-improvement, to Taiwan, Hong Kong and overseas Chinese communities.

What’s significant is that we feel so comfortable asking the question ‘is China modern?’. Since the early twentieth century, the Chinese have been fairly accepting of Hegelian World History. Chen Duxiu, a co-founder of the Communist Party, and Mao Dun, a celebrated writer and former Cultural Secretary of the People’s Republic, both saw China as travelling along an inevitable historical timeline with the West way out in front, not just different but more modern. Chinese society today, though it uses terms like ‘developing country’, is sure about what it wants: modernisation. Less confident nations might speak about different versions of modernity, but China, for now, is willing to accept the West is more modern: because China knows it can catch up.

And so as to whether China is modern, it’s perhaps enough to say that to understand the modern world, it’s necessary to understand China. Rana Mitter’s book contains lots of information and, despite its necessary omissions, will help many readers do just that.