The Penguin History of Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850 to the Present is a non-fiction book about the history of China by Jonathan Fenby. The popular history book was published in 2008 by Allen Lane. Split into six parts, the book covers the Qing dynasty's final decades; Sun Yat-sen's establishment of the Republic of China and the Warlord Era; the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War; Mao Zedong's reign including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; Deng Xiaoping's reign including the policy of socialism with Chinese characteristics and the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre; and the last 20 years where China was ruled by collective leadership.
Fenby, the author, edited the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post between 1995 and 1999. He began to write books about China after his retirement, including The Penguin History of Modern China, his sixth book about the country. The book received mixed reviews. Reviewers praised it for providing captivating portraits of the book's characters through interesting anecdotes. They recommended it for providing an engaging overview of China's history over the past century and a half. Some commentators criticised the book for not relying on Chinese primary sources. They noted the book had errors and omissions as well as overemphasised less significant topics while undercovering more important ones.
Biographical background and publication The author, Jonathan Fenby, is a historian and a previous editor for The Observer. After being fired from The Observer in 1995, he received a job opportunity to move to Hong Kong to edit the South China Morning Post. Fenby's initial professional experience was largely in Europe, working in Paris for Reuters. In the 1960s, he was a war correspondent in Vietnam. He had no professional experience with China. Viewing the opportunity as a learning experience, Fenby decided to move to Hong Kong, stating, "For me, it was a push-pull thing. I didn't know what I would do if I stayed in England and this part of the world was interesting and something new to get to know."
Fenby edited the South China Morning Post between 1995 and 1999. In his post-retirement years, he started to author books on China. Fenby penned a memoir about what it was like living in Hong Kong. Titled Dealing with the Dragon: A Year in the New Hong Kong, it was about the first year after the handover of Hong Kong. It was Fenby's first book about China and was commercially unsuccessful. According to Fenby, "It got decent reviews but died a death because everyone had lost interest in Hong Kong by then." Despite this, the publisher Little, Brown and Company asked him to write a second book about China and suggested he write about Chiang Kai-shek, the adversary of Mao Zedong, the People's Republic of China founder. The result was Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the China He Lost, a book published in 2003. Before Fenby, English-language biographers accorded Chiang little attention. The historian Rana Mitter called that the book a "thoughtful, post-cold war interpretation" that demonstrated Fenby did not follow the conventional beliefs regarding the contemporary history of China. Fenby called Chiang "a major figure who made major mistakes. Like Chairman Mao." According to Mitter, Fenby's book did not depict Chiang as nascent supporter of democracy and did not portray him as ruthless ruler unconcerned with the hardships the population faced. Fenby later wrote Dragon Throne: China's Emperors from the Qin to the Manchu, a book profiling the Emperor of China, covering every emperor between Qin Shi Huang, the first one, to Puyi, the last emperor.
The Penguin History of Modern China was published in 2008 by the Penguin Books imprint Allen Lane. It is Fenby's sixth China-related book. It drew on Fenby's own experiences and the substantial research in English-language sources on China's history in the past century and a half. To bolster his narrative, he relied on contemporaneous English-language news articles. Fenby's method involves supporting his arguments after culling small portions of the primary sources. The book's discussion of the Cultural Revolution relied on the 2006 book Mao's Last Revolution by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals. His chronicling of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre relied on The Tiananmen Papers, a book edited by Andrew J. Nathan and Perry Link that compiles Chinese official documents about the massacre. Devoting 52 pages to a bibliography and notes, the book incorporates the most up-to-date scholarly work about the history of China. In response to criticism that the book omits original content based on Chinese sources and does not rely on interviews conducted with Chinese individuals, Fenby explained, "I read Chinese very badly. You could spend years in some of the Chinese archives and come up with little nuggets but it would be just a few paragraphs and it wasn't that kind of book. If you found an undiscovered letter from the Dowager Empress about gardening or something, it would only be of interest to historians."
The hardcover version of the book was quickly sold out. A paperback version was released in 2009. To publicise the book, Fenby make a three-week trip to Asia in 2009. He travelled on the Queen Mary 2 ship, gave talks in Hong Kong and Shanghai, and visited the Bookworm Literary Festival organised by the Beijing bookstore The Bookworm.
Style The Penguin History of Modern China is a popular history book. The Australians Rowan Callick characterised Fenby's tone as "dependable, humanist and wry rather than judgmental" as he discusses bleak 20th-century China. The historian Rana Mitter said that Fenby is "not afraid of directness". When he discussed the Great Leap Forward, which caused numerous deaths by starvation, he did not use "academic euphemisms" like "misguided" or "ill-judged". Instead, he described the campaign as "mad". According to the historian Graham Hutchings, the book is "an engaging, convincing account" that both students and the public at large will find worthwhile. Fenby's book delves into people's characters with a particular focus on their quirks and flaws. Hutchings said that this, combined with Fenby's meticulous focus on specifics, animates the story and could retain an everyday reader's attention across the 700-page book.
According to Rosemary Righter of The Times, Fenby "excels at weaving the strands of his complex narrative into heroic and more often harrowing tales". She said that protagonists and antagonists get "sharp pen portraits". Fenby profiles the Dog Meat General and the Christian General, whose army move to the beat of "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing". Sun Yat-Sen is portrayed as "a disorganised lightweight", while Zhou Enlai comes across as a cold-hearted partner in Mao's atrocities. He includes a story about Soong Mei-ling, Chiang's wife, who visited Washington, D.C. to sway politicians and the rumour of her tryst with Wendell Willkie, the United States Republican Party presidential candidate. The Sunday Telegraphs George Walden said the anecdotes about unsavoury characters "lighten the tone" while Fenby discusses their misdeeds. Walden cited the Dog Meat General and Pockmarked Huang, as well as Big Ears Du, who hosted a dinner where each course was paired with a lady for the General. Edward Peters of the South China Morning Post wrote that the book "places the key events of the past century and a half into a broad, flowing narrative that is at once gripping and illuminating, yet is spiced with anecdotes and sketches that bring the book to life and raise some interesting questions". He cited Fenby's story about a 17-year-old girl who was sent to a Manchuria labour camp for praising shoe polish produced in the United States after Mao Zedong decided to stop the Hundred Flowers Campaign.
The Daily Telegraph book reviewer David Rennie said that Fenby employs "spare prose reminiscent of a war-crimes prosecutor" when discussing firsthand testimonies from survivors of the Nanjing Massacre. Fenby writes that people were "used for bayonet practice, nailed to boards and run over by vehicles, mutilated and disembowelled, sprayed with acid, or hung up by their tongues". Rennie said the book's tone is like that of an editorial, which is unsurprising owing to Fenby's background as a previous editor at The Observer and the South China Morning Post. Fenby shifts his tone multiple times. According to Rennie, Fenby acts sometimes as a prosecutor, aiming to pierce through the Chinese propaganda to uncover the facts. For example, he reports on how Zhou Enlai, a "moderate", directs that everyone in a traitor's family be killed and how the Communists created and peddled opium during the war. Rennie said that in a shift in tone, Fenby reveals "a journalist's eye for telling details" by discovering nuggets of information that "jolt and surprise". He cited Fenby's report that a colonel from the United States saw the low-spirited Nationalist soldiers entering the battlefield bound together to prevent any desertions. Another example Rennie cited was that during the Cultural Revolution, one group chose to save their ammunition by cutting off the ears of their adversaries instead of shooting them and let them die from the bleeding.
Content The Penguin History of Modern China is split into six parts. The first part of the book encompasses the Qing dynasty's final decades. The second part covers how Sun Yat-sen established the Republic of China before the country was nearly immediately plunged into the Warlord Era. The third part reviews the Second Sino-Japanese War and the fighting among the Japanese, Kuomintang, and Chinese Communists. The fourth part discusses Mao Zedong's reign. The fifth part reviews Deng Xiaoping's reign in which he promoted the policy of socialism with Chinese characteristics. The sixth part covers the last 20 years where China was ruled by collective leadership.
1850 is the book's starting point for China's contemporary history. Starting in chapter six, the book reviews China's turbulent 20th century. The book discusses Empress Dowager Cixi. Fenby chronicles the Qing government's insufficient reaction to local and global catastrophes led to the 1911 Revolution. He profiles the leadership of Sun Yat-sen, the Warlord Era, and the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek. Fenby reviews how the Chinese Communists went from the Long March to winning the civil war against the Kuomintang. Their triumph was owing to a confluence of factors: the Second Sino-Japanese War, Stalin's goal of maintaining China as a weak nation, the United States' involvement, the corruption of the Kuomintang, and the turbulent relationship between the Kuomintang and the Communists that went from working together in the 1920s to armed conflict later.
Fenby profiles Mao Zedong, describing him as a magnetic and mighty ruler who the citizenry supported following 50 years of strife and poor governance. He portrays Mao as cruel and egocentric. The book covers the Great Leap Forward, a collective farming initiative between 1958 and 1962 that caused the starvation deaths of millions of peasants, and the Cultural Revolution. Roughly one-third of the book is focused on China after Mao. It grapples with Deng Xiaoping's principle of socialism with Chinese characteristics in which the country adopts market economics while the Communist Party sustains its firm grip on power. The book spends four chapters on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre.
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