Sun Yat-sen by Marie-Claire Bergére; Janet LloydReview by: Diana LaryThe American Historical Review, Vol. 104, No. 3 (Jun., 1999), pp. 878-879Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2651004 .
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878 Reviews of Books
intellectuals under study concluded that these catego- ries divided rather than united the nation. They were too deeply embedded in the old society to work in creating a new one. They kept the nation weak and divided, focused on its constituents, rather than strong and united. New groupings were needed to build a nation.
Gradually, most of the writers discussed by the authors of these essays began to understand they would have to make a radical break with Chinese tradition. Traditional modes needed to be discarded and new ones developed if China was to meet the challenge posed by the modern world. As they dis- cussed citizenship, these writers began to realize that in order to create a new type of state, they needed a new kind of civil society.
Recently, some academics in both Asia and the West, as well as autocratic rulers in places like Singa- pore, have argued that Confucianism can provide the basis for a modern industrial society, one that may result in a special kind of "Asian democracy," a more elitist and group-centered form of democracy than that which exists in Europe and the United States. Almost a hundred years ago, many of the writers considered in this volume began with similar hopes but ended up concluding that such a task was impossible.
Unlike those contemporary partisans who somehow see a Confucian democratic society as a future (and never yet implemented) possibility, the thinkers con- sidered here came to feel that Confucian ideals were firmly embedded in a traditional political and social structure and could not be adapted. Given this empha- sis, it is not surprising that many of the contributors to this volume seem to be attempting to return to the notions pioneered a number of years ago by Joseph Levenson, who talked about the discontinuities of the present with the past. Indeed, Levenson is cited in a number of these essays. Although his ideas have been discarded by many in recent years, it would appear that they are perhaps coming back into vogue.
Moreover, the essays that editors Joshua A. Fogel and Zarrow have selected for this work discuss many of the writers analyzed in the past by Levenson, as well as by Benjamin Schwartz and others: Tan Sitong, Liu Shipei, Yan Fu, Zhang Binglin, Fu Sinian, and espe- cially the towering personage of Liang Qichao. By using the concept of citizenship, the authors bring a new, if necessarily somewhat narrow, perspective to these thinkers and allow us to see them in a new way. This is a valuable exercise.
The authors (with one exception) do not draw connections between the new ideas of citizenship considered by the thinkers in this volume and the later transformation of the Chinese state, although, in his afterword, Fogel suggests that future writers might want to do research on the relationship between revolution and citizenship. This is too bad, because there is a lot of material here for speculation, as can be seen in the one exception. Wang Fan-shen, a scholar from Taiwan, makes an explicit connection between
these ideas and those of Mao Zedong, whose most important and influential early article, "The Great Union of the Popular Masses," maintained that the masses should join together through their existing groups. According to Mao, peasants, workers, stu- dents, women, school teachers, rickshaw boys, police- men all needed to form their own groups that would in turn then join into one great union. This great union would transform China. Because of the power they would achieve through this union, Mao argued that the Chinese people could no longer allow one person like the emperor to dominate them. "Our Chinese people," he asserted, "possess great inherent capacities! The more profound the oppression, the more powerful its reactions ... I venture to make a singular assertion: one day, the reform of the Chinese people will be more profound than that of any other people, and the society of the Chinese people will be more radiant than that of any other people. The great union of the Chinese people will be achieved earlier than that of any other place or people." It was precisely this idea of small groups as the basis of a greater nation that was, as Wang points out, the concern of virtually every one of the thinkers in this volume. Seen in this context, the structure and thinking that ended with the develop- ment of the Chinese Communist Party, while not having a Confucian basis, did, nonetheless, have clear antecedents.
This is, however, just one of the many ideas illumi- nated by the many lucid and considered essays in this book. As Fogel's afterword sums up the work: "The meaning of citizenship for late Qing and early Repub- lican intellectuals forms the prism through which we have approached their perceptions of the common people. We have argued that this hitherto little-studied topic is a critical aspect of understanding China's emergence into the world arena, and the three decades upon which we center our attention thus became even more important in appreciating the evolution of mod- ern Chinese intellectual and cultural history" (p. 280). Ideas of nationalism, ethnicity, and class are all given new perspective through the volume's focus "on the nexus of intellectuals, the populace, and the state" (p. 280).
Although the perspectives of the contributors differ greatly, the quality is high throughout the work. The editors should be congratulated for their choices.
One final point should be made about this book. The volume brings together authors from Taiwan, the People's Republic of China, Europe, and the United States, a number of the essays having been translated by Fogel and Zarrow. It is nice to see scholars from so many different areas working together so well.
LEE FEIGON Kellogg Gradutate School of Management, Northwestern University
MARIE-CLAIRE BERGERE. Sun Yat-sen. Translated by JANET LLOYD. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1998. Pp. ix, 480. $49.50.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 1999
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Asia 879
This is a most welcome book, one that everyone interested in modern China has wanted for a long while. It is a readable, balanced, and judicious study of the most important man in modern Chinese history, the man recognized by all Chinese, whatever their political persuasion, as the Father of the Nation: Sun Yat-sen. Marie-Claire Berg6re's biography is the most thorough book about Sun in a Western language, and it is so minutely researched that it goes far beyond any existing study.
Sun is not an easy subject for biographers. His actual achievements, in terms of deeds, were limited; he had only a few weeks in political office as president of China. Much of his career consisted of setbacks and defeats. His aims so far outran his reach that he was an easy target for disparagement and was seldom taken seriously by foreign commentators. Berg6re does not make this mistake. She brings together all the myriad and often quirky details of Sun's life and then tran- scends them.
Sun's life (1866-1925) was full of ironies, in tune with the confusion of the period in which he lived, the last decades of the dynasty and the first years of the Chinese Republic. Sun was a patriot, but he spent most of his life outside China; he was educated in Hawaii and Hong Kong and spent years roaming the world. When he went to the ancient capital of Nanjing in 1912 to become the first president of the Republic, it was the first time he had been there. Sun was a fierce opponent of foreign imperialism, but he was also a baptised Christian who turned to the British to save him when he was kidnapped by the Chinese Embassy in London. Finally, he was a political revolutionary but a social conservative. Through his marriage in 1915 to the beautiful Song Qingling he became part of the most famous couple in modern China, the epitome of romantic love. Yet his first wife still lived in his native village.
Sun's life was marked by setbacks. His real greatness emerged only after his early, tragic death. Death transformed him into a mythic figure, the fountainhead of wisdom, patriotism, and courage, and nothing in the tortuous history of China since his death has changed this status. His ideology-the Three Principles of the People-is still the official ideology of the Republic of China in Taiwan. The style of clothing he pioneered is still the formal dress for men in China; in Chinese it is called the Sun Yat-sen jacket, in English (most un- fairly) the Mao jacket. Innumerable streets, squares, universities, and parks are named after him, on the mainland and in Taiwan. His widow was the most celebrated woman in Communist China, while her sister (still alive at 101) was Madame Chiang Kai-shek.
Bergere has achieved in this book what has eluded other scholars, both Chinese and non-Chinese: a truth- ful account of Sun that is neither hagiography (the norm in Chinese texts) nor condescension (the fre- quent tone of non-Chinese accounts). This is an enor- mous achievement. She shows both his strengths and weaknesses and, above all, makes us understand his
dedication, his courage, his tenacity, and his vision. These are the characteristics that the Chinese have needed to survive the last tormented century.
This book performs a great service in putting Sun in his rightful position in history. It is also very readable and is packed with details, some edifying, some less so, but none spurious. Berg6re uses a clever device to manage so much material and to make the book available to readers on different levels. Each part has a general introduction, followed by detailed coverage in individual chapters, within each of which there is an introduction and then discussion. The book can thus be read at a general, focused, or very detailed level-a device that should be imitated.
DIANA LARY U7ziversity of Britishl Collumbia
RALPH A. THAXTON, JR.. Salt of the Eartth: The Political Origins of Peasant Protest and Communist Revolution in China. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cali- fornia Press. 1997. Pp. xix, 425. $65.00.
This is an important contribution to the burgeoning literature on the nature of the popular mobilization that accompanied the rise to power of the Chinese Communist Party in the years prior to the 1949 Communist victory. Historians and political scientists have long been interested in this question, but the field has been enriched by the increased data-particularly on local history-available under the less controlling regimes in power since Mao Zedong's death. Several scholars have used reminiscence literature and partic- ularly the documentary record of local Communist movements to produce more fine-grained studies than have been available to date. Ralph A. Thaxton's exhaustively researched study uses all these sources as well as oral history-interviews with some 200 elderly rural people over the course of eight visits between 1985 and 1993-to write the local history of the saltmakers' resistance movements in five counties of the North China plain (just north of the Yellow River where Henan, Hebei, and Shandong come together) in the 1930s and 1940s.
These saltmakers serve as an excellent focus for someone interested, as Thaxton is, in questions of resistance and state-building. The salt in question was illegal, home-produced salt, but the saltmakers had been compelled to take up "salt smuggling" (as the state chose to call it) by the state's failure to maintain hydraulic control of the Yellow River. Repeated floods created saline soil, useless for farming but excellent for salt-making. The Chinese state had maintained a mo- nopoly over the production and marketing of salt for much of its imperial history. The Republican regime, anxious to build a modern state but hampered by lack of revenue and by international pressure (Thaxton's account of international creditors' attempts to capture the salt tax as security makes for particularly compel- ling reading), tried to use its own salt monopoly to generate unprecedented tax monies. The conflict be-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 1999
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