One, two, many revolutions

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful for the helpful advice of Professors Richard Lufrano and Robert Culp, who are not responsible for the opinions and mistakes herein.

Notes

1 Promoting this view were the historians John King Fairbank and Mary Wright and the sociologist Theda Skocpol. John King Fairbank, The Great Chinese Revolution, 1800–1985 (New York: Harper & Row, 1986); Mary Clabaugh Wright, ed., China in Revolution: The First Phase, 1900–1913 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968); and Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

2 Luo Zhitian, Minzu zhuyi yu jindai zhongguo sixiang [Nationalism and Modern Chinese Thought] (Taipei: Dongda tushu, 1998); Luo Zhitian, Jibian shidai de wenhua yu zhengzhi: cong xinwenhua yundong dao beifa [Culture and Politics in the Age of Radical Change: From the New Culture Movement to the Northern Expedition] (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2006); Xiong Yuezhi, Zhongguo jindai minzhu sixiang shi (xiuding ben) [History of Democratic Thought in Modern China (updated version)] (Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 2002).

3 Jay Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 1.

4 Ibid.

5 Of course, the nineteenth century was not a peaceful era, but unlike twentieth-century revolutions, which led to permanent changes even if they “failed,” the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, the Taiping Rebellion, and the Indian Rebellion were thoroughly suppressed, and essentially the status quo ante was restored in each case. The never-ending violence of colonialism could be largely ignored in the metropole.

6 Charles Kurzman, Democracy Denied, 1905–1915: Intellectuals and the Fate of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). For Chinese intellectuals’ interest in global movements at the time, see Rebecca E. Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).

7 The structural weaknesses of the late Qing and post-Qing governments are discussed in Philip A. Kuhn and Susan Mann Jones, “Dynastic Decline and the Roots of Rebellion,” in The Cambridge History of China, ed. John K. Fairbank (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), vol. 10, 107–62; Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).

8 For China, see Xiong Yuezhi, Xixue dongjian yu wan Qing shehui [Western Learning Introduced to the East and Late Qing Society] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1994).

9 Sha Peide, “Minquan sixiang yu xianfeng zhuyi: minguo shiqi Sun Zhongshan de zhengzhi zhuzhang” [Democratic Thought and Vanguardism: Sun Yat-sen’s Political Views in the Republican Period], Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo jikan [Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica], no. 78 (December 2012), 1–28.

10 See Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

11 Much recent research has shown how much the Communist Party of China owed to the Kuomintang. See Frederick Wakeman, Jr., et al., “Reappraising Republican China,” China Quarterly, no. 150 (June 1997), 255–458; Joseph W. Esherick, “War and Revolution: Chinese Society during the 1940s,” Twentieth-Century China, vol. 27, no. 1 (November 2001), 1–37.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter ZARROW

Peter ZARROW is currently professor of history at the University of Connecticut. He was a research fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Taipei from 2001 to 2013, and previously taught in the United States and Australia. Zarrow has written extensively on late Qing and early Republican intellectuals and political thought, including most recently After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885–1924 (Stanford University Press, 2012). He is currently conducting research on textbooks, historiography, and museums.