The Age of Openness: China Before Mao (Understanding China - New Viewpoints on History and Culture Series) [Paperback]

Professor Dikotter from the University of London has collected and analysed abundant secondary literature to dispel the widely-held belief that the history of contemporary China between the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the rise of communism in 1949 was an age of political, social, and economic turbulence. According to him, the history of the Republican China represents an unique age of openness in which internationally diverse cultures were everywhere, ranging from coastal cities to the rural hinterland. This 6-chapter book aims at demonstrating that China in the first half of the twentieth century was in fact vibrant and cosmopolitan, particularly in four key aspects including governance, borders, minds, and markets.

The Nationalist Party is portrayed by Professor Dikotter as a staunch advocate of western democracy, penal administration, and judicial reform in both national and provincial level instead of being a fragile and corrupt political party. Due to political patronage and protection from foreigners and regional governors (P.25), freedom of publication and association proliferated to sustain democratic debate. People from all walks of life acquired a global outlook and travelled beyond China. Many of the Diaspora and indigenous Chinese were bicultural and bilingual with polyglot knowledge (P.60) and they became more influential in arts, religion, politics, business, education, and philanthropy. Besides, Chinese society was more cosmopolitan with huge presence of foreigners in treaty ports such as Shanghai and Tianjin. Professor Dikotter has posited that foreigners were powerful agents that contributed to the flows of "people, goods, technologies and ideas" (P.51) between China and the outside world.

The meaning of openness in the Republican China can be represented by proactive participation into international political affairs such as the First World War, the League of Nation and the Hague Court. Moreover, economy was more international with phenomenal growth in foreign trade and innovations in money and finance. A more open and prosperous market also enormously induced high growth and change in transportation and material culture (P.89).

Professor Dikotter concludes that China under Mao was a radical reversal of being openness to international connections but the Republican China had witnessed an "unprecedented intensification" (P.100) towards openness. The Open door policy in the Communist China since 1978 can be interpreted as a mere rebuilding of international connections that had occurred in China since the first half of the twentieth century. This book is not lengthy and Professor Dikotter provides readers with fresh insights into the history of contemporary China. However, his view towards the Republican China certainly leads to fierce debate, particularly from politicians and historians in mainland China who might find it difficult to accept his view that the openness experience of the Republican China period can be of greater relevance to China nowadays.

I actually wrote a much longer review of the book, but duh, my internet explorer had a bug, the review disappeared, so I'm left rewriting another review.

To summarize what I originally wrote, I lauded Dikötter for a succinct, well told book on China's history of 1900-49. It is not verbose, and the book flows along nicely. He is clearly intending to present a "revisionist" idea of 1900-49 China as being progressive and open, as can be seen from the titles of the four main chapters: open governance, open borders, open minds and open markets. In "Open minds", he even lauds some Chinese intellectuals from being progressive. Dikötter is clearly anti-Marxist in presenting his ideas that the 1900-49 era before Mao might well be one of the most open and progressive societies China has ever seen.

Dikötter's book is well written and presents a cogent argument. But is it the whole picture? A Chinese living in 1900-49 might see things somewhat differently, as I would offer to suggest:

1) Wen I-To, China Democratic League poet, political activist, was murdered by Nationalist agents in 1946. It is an openly acknowledged fact recognized both inside and outside China, by orthodox historians even in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Europe and the USA. His crime was openly criticizing the Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist regime during Li's funeral after the KMT secret agents assassinated Li Gongpu, another fellow party member and democrat. Note that both Wen and Li were democrats and not communists.

2) The 1900-49 "age of openness" followed a period of insularity and extreme conservative backwardness that was perhaps the most serious in China's history up till that point. Lots of reading materials availing in the 1900-49 should have been long made available in the late 19th century.

3) Movies in the late 1930s and 1940s prior to the Communist takeover didn't paint as golden a picture as Dikotter does of that era. 1937's "Crossroads" depicts college students committing suicide due to massive unemployment. 1949's "Crows and Sparrows", made just before the Communist takeover, paints a very critical picture of Shanghai-ruling Nationalists indiscriminately killing intellectuals.

4) Lu Xun, China's pre-eminent intellectual then, opined the 1911 revolution was a failure. Incensed at the March 18 student massacre, he exiled himself to Amoy and then to Shanghai (note Lu Xun was primarily a liberal who had leftist leanings, but never identify himself with the communist party). James Reeve Pusey's "Lu Xun and evolution" (p 154) quotes Lu Xun as saying: "I left Guangzhou in 1927 speechless by the blood." He also said, in 1925, "I feel the so-called Republic of China has ceased to exist. I feel that, before the revolution, I was a slave, but shortly after the revolution, I have been cheated by slaves and have become their slave".

5) Louis Cha, wuxia novelist now in Hong Kong, studying in Chongqing in his youth, once recalled the Nationalist school he attended kept drumming into students that "Yue Fei (a Song Dynasty Chinese patriot and General) was politically short-sighted", apparently because they wanted to sell out some parts of China to imperial Japan. Cha criticized the school's autocracy, landing him with an expulsion.

6) Hou Hsiao-Hsien' "A City of Sadness" (1989) paints a very different picture of the Chiang regime. The White Terror era of 1945-9 was a terrible memory for many Taiwan natives. Hou won the Venice Golden Lion in 1989 for this film. Yonfan's "Prince of Tears" (2009) recounts a similar story from his childhood memories. [...].

Part of Dikötter's argument holds water. China in 1900-49 was immensely more open than in the late 19th century under the disintegrating Qing dynasty rule. Yet he doesn't put this the proper context: yes, while it was true, one must also acknowledge the period before was probably the most backwards in the whole of China's history, where she was virtually isolated from Western imperialist powers and the rest of the world (save for Shanghai and a few ports).

Seen from this perspective, plus other certain facts, one can tell Dikötter is telling one side of the story, quite selectively. But the other side of the coin? Eyewitnesses' accounts from that period don't exactly endorse an "age of openness" where people (Lu Xun, Wen, Li, Cha - the last still alive) could be murdered in the streets for opposing the dominant political party, or in late 1940s-50s Taiwan (Hou and Yonfan grew up there), where massacres still existed under General Chiang Kai-shek.

"The Age of Openness" is on the ROROTOKO list of cutting-edge intellectual nonfiction. Professor Dikotter's book interview ran here as cover feature on June 5, 2009.