Book Review - 近代中國史綱(下) (A Short History of Modern China, Vol. 2)

I had read Vol. 1 about a year ago (review here).

Vol. 2 covers the period from the establishment of the Nationalist Party under Sun Yat-sen’s leadership in 1912, through the brief Yuan Shikai autocratic reign, then the Warlords Era, the Japanese invasion and occupation of China, right up to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

Having gone through annihilating tumults of the 1800s that various foreign powers incited to gain control over Chinese territories and reap economic concessions, by 1912, China was already a very sick nation with deep internal wounds. European aggression showed brief signs of let-up with the outbreak of First World War, but Japan and Russia immediately jumped at the chance to encroach on Chinese territories and seize other privileges. After declaring war on Germany, Japan seized the moment to impose its so-called “Twenty-One Demands” (i.e. territorial and economic concessions) on China.

Yuan Shikai was never a believer in Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People (i.e. democracy) and was always looking for a chance to become the emperor, even at the cost of selling out to Japan. When his schemes were debunked, other factions rose against him. Thus began the Warlords Era which lasted until the establishment of the Communist Party in 1920 and beyond.

In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, the major Allied Powers approved the transfer of Germany’s concessions in Shandong Province to Japan instead of reverting them back to China, and this ignited the nationalist and anti-imperialist May Fourth student movement, which demanded the government to abstain from signing the Paris Treaty and to refute Japan’s Twenty-One Demands.

From 1925, the year Sun died from sickness, China became the battlefield between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party and Mao Tse-tung’s Communist Party and the remnant warlords. Chiang was repeatedly criticized for his dictatorial ways within his own Party, while Mao firmly believed that using armed force was the only solution to end his contest with Chiang.

In 1937, Japan, who had already seized and occupied Manchuria in 1932 and had tried to take over five northern Chinese provinces, started an all-out war with China (known as the Second Sino-Japanese War) in Shanghai and Nanjing, using some flimsy excuse. In December that year, Japanese soldiers subjected Nanjing to a brutal massacre and mass rape for six days. This bloody war lasted until Japan was defeated by the Allied Forces in 1945. Meanwhile, Russia was eyeing Outer Mongolia and Xinjiang, and sought to continue its influence on the Communist Party.

After this war, China was again plunged into civil war until the Communist Party finally won out in 1949 and set up the People’s Republic of China, forcing Chiang and his Nationalist Party to flee to Taiwan. Unfortunately, both Mao and Chiang imposed despotic rule and inflicted more sufferings on those under their rule.

These two Volumes of Modern China history are a result of painstaking research by the author, which was supported, apart from Chinese-language sources, by research materials found at the University of Hawaii East-West Centre, Harvard University East Asia Centre and Columbia University East Asian National Resource Center. But the author has also stated that the books are not an academician’s work and are meant for a general readership.

Both volumes chronicle a mind-boggling amount of historical account minutiae. They have helped me understand a lot better Modern China's history. I’m glad that I’ve read the books. This Volume warrants 4.5 stars.

      

Book Review - "The Family Romanov" by Candace Fleming

A breezy and concise historical account of Russia’s last imperial reign of Tsar Nicholas II, this non-fiction history book reads a lot like a novel.

Like with many other similar stretches of history, when viewed in retrospect, the course of events would seem to be so natural and predictable that it makes one wonder, had things been handled with more compassion and less hubris by those in power, if the odds of averting tragedies and disasters could’ve increased.

The Family Romanov gives an intimate account of the lives of the Romanov family members, namely, Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, and their four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia and one son-and-heir Alexei. The account starts with the 1884 courtship between teenagers Nicholas and Alix of Hesse (who was Queen Victoria’s granddaughter), and carries us through to the tragic end of the whole family in July 1918.

Juxtaposing narratives of the opulent, hedonistic lifestyle of the Imperial family side by side with anecdotes of the peasant class’s everyday scourge of abject poverty, oppression and despair, the author presents a poignant picture of two diametrically opposite worlds, worlds inhabited by two classes that are distinguished by birth and destiny. Exaggerated sense of entitlement and obtuseness of the privileged ruling class becomes the cause of its own ultimate undoing.

I’m just puzzled as to why the French-educated Romanovs had not learned from the downfall of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

It is interesting to note that it was not until July 2007 that the remains of Alexei and of one of his sisters were finally found. (The remains of the other five family members had been uncovered in 1991.)

I’m giving this well-researched book 4 full stars.

Book Review - "The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe

I had delayed reading this important book for a long time simply out of sheer fear of having the atrocious scenes imprinted on my mind.

In June 2011, I had attended a talk by Iris Chang’s mother, Dr. Ying-ying Chang, in Vancouver about her book The Woman Who Could Not Forget: Iris Chang Before and Beyond the Rape of Nanking. At that event I had also seen a documentary recording the heinous acts committed by the Japanese soldiers during the invasion and occupation of Nanking between 1937 and 1938. (As mentioned in this book, the film documentary was produced by Rev. John Magee, an American missionary.) So I was mentally prepared going into The Good Man of Nanking. Still, I found myself consciously skimming the photos in the book as best as I could.

I had not previously read Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking, the research of which in fact relied heavily on these diaries, which were not published as a book until forty-nine years after John Rabe’s death in 1949. The fact that John Rabe had not intended for his diaries to be published (he had only meant them for his family members’ reading) adds to the value of the book as an authentic and unassailable true account of what really happened, without any hidden agenda. The plain, sometimes emotional, but always from the heart, monologue style of writing, while speaking to readers’ mind and soul, gives good insight into the selfless and compassionate character of this good-hearted German. The monstrosities that he had to try to deflect from some 250,000 Chinese refugees were in ironic contrast to the humanitarian efforts of a handful of Westerners including him who happened to be in Nanking.    

The first entry was made on September 21, 1937 and the last one was dated February 28, 1938.

This January 25, 1938 entry gives a good idea of the gist of the events on record:

“There is one case that we don’t record: A Chinese worker, who has worked all day for the Japanese, is paid in rice instead of money. He sits down in exhaustion with his family at the table, on which his wife has just placed a bowl of watery rice soup: the humble meal for a family of six. A Japanese soldier passing by plays a little joke and urinates in the half-full rice bowl and laughs as he goes his merry way.

The incident made me think of the poem “Lewwer duad us Slaav” (“Better Dead than a Slave”), but one simply can’t expect a poor Chinese worker to behave like a free Frisian. The Chinese are far too downtrodden, and they patiently submitted to their fate long ago. It is, as I said, an incident that is given the scantest notice. If every case of rape were revenged with murder, a good portion of the occupying troops would have been wiped out by now.”

After Rabe and his wife returned to Germany in April 1938, they went through days of hunger and destitution in 1945 and 1946. When the Chinese Military Mission in Berlin made him an offer to resettle in China in exchange for appearing as a witness for the prosecution at the Tokyo war crimes tribunal, Rabe declined.

In a message he left for his grandchildren, he explained: “I didn’t want to see any Japanese hang, although they deserved it…..There must be some atonement, some just punishment; but in my view the judgment should be spoken only by their own nation.”

A Painting and Late Qing History

The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, has recently blogged about how an amazing gem of a Chinese painting came to land on the museum’s doorsteps. It is a moving story, and the serendipitous find in question is a lovely painting of the Garden of Nurtured Harmony 頣和園. In the 1880s Empress Cixi ordered this imperial garden restored, which was located near the site of the Old Summer Palace 圓明園.

Peabody Essex Museum’s Blog Post: “Hidden Treasure”

One paragraph in the middle of the blog post reads:

“At the time, Wang was in the very early stages of planning for the Empresses of China’s Forbidden City exhibition. The donated painting, now on view in the last gallery, helps tell the story of the influence wielded by Empress Dowager Cixi within the Qing dynasty. In the 1880s Cixi personally oversaw the restoration of the property, which had been pillaged by Anglo-French troops some 20 years earlier.”

But the unvarnished official history behind these imperial gardens is far less palatable than that indicated in the above paragraph. Around 1860, the Old Summer Palace 圓明園 had been vindictively burned to the ground by Anglo-French troops under orders of British Commander Lord Elgin, in what came to be known as the Second Opium War (1856 – 1860). All this violence was in retaliation for the Chinese people trying to resist opium trade and the British invasion of Guangdong in the 1850s.

Willfully oblivious to her subjects' long sufferings during the two Opium Wars and foreign countries' relentless military offensives on Chinese soil, and the crippling penalties they imposed, Cixi took the funds earmarked for the modernizing of the Qing naval fleet and lavished it on the restoration of the Garden of Nurtured Harmony 頤和園 for her own private pleasure.

Perhaps this infamous act paled in comparison to her later wicked persecution of patriotic reformists in 1898, it was nonetheless a direct cause of the Qing court’s defeat in various naval battles with France and Japan between 1884 and 1894, which effectively turned China into a sitting duck vis a vis foreign aggressors and set the stage for the 1900 Boxer Rebellion and the invasion of Beijing by the Alliance of Eight Nations (Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, U.S., Italy and Austria), and then the 1911 Revolution.

It makes me think that world history is a super complex chain of causes and effects. Without going deep into our history, we would never be able to understand the conflicts that plague international relations, much less our present human condition.