Sources and References

• R. Keith Schoppa, Revolution and its Past: Identities and Change in Modern Chinese History, 4th ed. (Routledge).
• Ida Pruitt and Ning Lao T’ai-t’ai, A Daughter of Han: The Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman.
• Michael David Kwan, Things That Must Not Be Forgotten: A Childhood in Wartime China.
• Sang Ye, China Candid: The People on the People’s Republic.
• Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China.
• John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History.
• Philip A. Kuhn, Origins of the Modern Chinese State and Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768.
• Rebecca E. Karl, Modern China: A Very Short Introduction and Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World.
• Odd Arne Westad, Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750.
• Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World and Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945.
• Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, The Tragedy of Liberation, and The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History.
• Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and After.
• Open-access supplements: Columbia University’s Asia for Educators portal; MIT OpenCourseWare materials on modern East Asia; the Hoover Institution’s digitized collections on twentieth-century China.

Chapter 1: The Qing World Order and Its Foreign Encounters

The Qing as a Multi-Ethnic Empire

Modern Chinese history begins not with weakness but with astonishing strength. When the Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) consolidated their authority over China after defeating the Ming, they inherited one of the world’s oldest bureaucratic civilizations and reshaped it into a sprawling, cosmopolitan empire. Under the three great emperors Kangxi (r. 1661–1722), Yongzheng (r. 1722–35), and Qianlong (r. 1735–96), Qing territory nearly doubled, incorporating Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang (the “New Frontier”), and Taiwan. Schoppa’s Revolution and its Past opens with this expansive vision because it sets the stage for everything afterward: the nineteenth and twentieth centuries must be read against the memory of eighteenth-century Qing grandeur, not a timeless village stasis.

Qing rule was distinctive because it was deliberately pluralistic. The Manchu court governed Han Chinese through the Confucian examination system and the Six Boards in Beijing; it governed Mongols and Tibetans as a universal Buddhist overlord; and it governed Inner Asia through the Lifanyuan, a separate colonial office. Philip Kuhn and more recent “New Qing History” scholars emphasize that the dynasty was an empire of multiple identities, held together by the emperor’s ability to wear many crowns at once. As Odd Arne Westad argues in Restless Empire, any narrative of decline that ignores Qing imperial success mistakes the scale of what later Chinese reformers and revolutionaries were trying to repair.

The Canton System and the Foreign Presence

Before the nineteenth century, the Qing engaged Europeans on its own terms. Foreign merchants were confined to the port of Canton (Guangzhou) and channelled through the Cohong, a licensed guild of Chinese brokers who handled all trade and served as a buffer between foreigners and officialdom. The system reflected the Qing conviction that the empire possessed everything it needed and that foreign traders were being granted a favour. The Qianlong emperor’s famous 1793 edict to Lord Macartney, the British envoy seeking expanded commercial access, declared that the Celestial Empire had “no use for your country’s manufactures.” As Spence notes in The Search for Modern China, this was not naive arrogance but a coherent worldview in which the emperor stood at the centre of civilization and tribute from peripheral peoples was the natural order of diplomatic life.

Chapter 2: The Opium Wars and the Unequal Treaty Century

Opium, Silver, and the Coming of War

By the early nineteenth century the British East India Company had found a commodity that could reverse its chronic silver drain to China: opium, grown in Bengal and shipped illegally into southern ports. The drug’s social effects horrified reformers inside the Qing government, and in 1839 the commissioner Lin Zexu seized and destroyed roughly twenty thousand chests of British opium at Canton. Britain responded with gunboats. The First Opium War (1839–42) ended with the Treaty of Nanjing, which ceded Hong Kong, opened five treaty ports, abolished the Cohong monopoly, and imposed a fixed tariff. The Second Opium War (1856–60), fought alongside France and ending with the Anglo-French burning of the Yuanmingyuan summer palaces, forced still wider concessions and legalized opium outright.

Extraterritoriality and the Treaty Ports

The mid-century treaties created what Chinese reformers came to call the “unequal treaty” system. Foreign nationals enjoyed extraterritoriality, meaning they were tried in their own consular courts rather than under Qing law; treaty tariffs were fixed by agreement and could not be raised; Christian missionaries gained the right to preach throughout the interior; and foreign concessions in cities like Shanghai and Tianjin became self-governing enclaves. Westad captures the ambivalence well: the treaty ports were simultaneously sites of humiliation and laboratories of modernity, places where Chinese merchants, journalists, and students encountered the ideas and technologies that would fuel later revolutions. Fairbank’s influential framing of an “impact-response” relationship has been criticized, but the treaty system unquestionably reshaped how Chinese elites imagined their place in the world.

Chapter 3: Rebellion, Reform, and the Limits of Self-Strengthening

The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom

While foreign cannons battered the coast, the empire nearly tore itself apart from within. The Taiping Rebellion (1851–64), led by the failed examination candidate Hong Xiuquan, fused Protestant Christian millenarianism with Hakka ethnic solidarity and radical egalitarian promises. Hong, convinced he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, built the “Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace” in Nanjing and at its height controlled much of central and southern China. The war that followed killed somewhere between twenty and thirty million people, making it the deadliest civil conflict in human history. Spence’s God’s Chinese Son treats Hong’s movement with unusual sympathy as a genuine religious and social vision; Schoppa emphasizes the scale of the destruction and the administrative transformation that followed.

The Qing court could not suppress the rebellion with its own hollowed-out banner armies. Instead, provincial gentry scholar-officials—most famously Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang—raised new regional armies recruited on kin and village lines. Their victory reshaped Qing politics: real military and fiscal power now flowed outward from the provinces, foreshadowing the warlord fragmentation of the Republican era. Meanwhile, the Nian rebellion (1851–68) in the north and large Muslim revolts in the southwest and northwest compounded the crisis.

Self-Strengthening and Its Discontents

From the 1860s through the 1890s the “self-strengthening” movement attempted to graft Western military technology and industrial enterprise onto a Confucian political order. Arsenals, shipyards, a navy, railways, and translation bureaus were built under slogans such as “Chinese learning as the essence, Western learning for use.” The movement’s limits were brutally exposed in the Sino-French War of 1884–85 and, more decisively, in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, when Meiji Japan destroyed the Beiyang Fleet and imposed the Treaty of Shimonoseki. Taiwan was lost, a staggering indemnity paid, and the myth of Qing invincibility collapsed.

Hundred Days, Boxers, and the Last Reforms

In 1898 the young Guangxu emperor launched the Hundred Days Reform in collaboration with the scholars Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao; the Empress Dowager Cixi’s coup ended the program within months. Two years later, the Boxer Uprising—a millenarian anti-foreign and anti-Christian movement drawing on martial arts and spirit possession—besieged the foreign legations in Beijing. The Eight-Nation Alliance sacked the capital and extracted another crushing indemnity. Paradoxically, it was in the aftermath of the Boxer disaster that the Qing finally embraced systematic reform: modern schools, a new army, provincial assemblies, and in 1905 the abolition of the thousand-year-old examination system. As Spence and Mitter both note, dismantling the examinations severed the tie between the imperial state and the scholar-gentry class, and without that tie the dynasty could not survive.

Chapter 4: Republic, Warlords, and the May Fourth Generation

The 1911 Revolution and Yuan Shikai

The revolution that toppled the Qing in October 1911 was less a planned uprising than a cascade of mutinies and provincial declarations of independence. Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan), the returning exile who had spent years organizing among overseas Chinese, became the provisional president of the new Republic of China, but real power passed quickly to the northern general Yuan Shikai. Yuan presided over the formal abdication of the last emperor, Puyi, then dismantled the parliamentary order, banned the Nationalist Party (Guomindang), and in 1915–16 briefly tried to make himself emperor. His death in 1916 removed the last figure capable of holding the country together.

The Three Stages of Warlordism

Schoppa describes the warlord era (1916–28) in roughly three stages. First, large coalitions of militarists associated with the old Beiyang Army contested national power through Beijing. Second, as those coalitions fractured, regional strongmen carved out personal fiefdoms—Yan Xishan in Shanxi, Feng Yuxiang the “Christian general,” Zhang Zuolin in Manchuria, the brutal Zhang Zongchang in Shandong. Third, warlord politics dissolved into a volatile landscape of shifting alliances and predatory taxation that the Northern Expedition of 1926–28 only partially resolved. For ordinary peasants and working women—like Ning Lao T’ai-t’ai, whose life is recorded by Ida Pruitt in A Daughter of Han—the warlord years meant levies, conscription, soldiers quartered in villages, and the constant threat of banditry. Ning’s memoir gives modern readers an irreplaceable ground-level view of how dynastic collapse felt to those who lived through it: not as an abstract political event but as the rising and falling of grain prices and the comings and goings of armies.

The May Fourth Movement

On 4 May 1919 thousands of Beijing university students marched in protest against the Versailles decision to transfer Germany’s former concessions in Shandong to Japan. That demonstration gave its name to the broader May Fourth Movement, which Rana Mitter in A Bitter Revolution treats as the defining cultural rupture of modern China. May Fourth intellectuals rejected Confucianism as the source of Chinese weakness, championed baihua vernacular writing, and embraced the twin slogans of “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy.” Lu Xun’s savage stories, Hu Shi’s essays on pragmatism, and Chen Duxiu’s journal New Youth defined a generation. The movement also radicalized politics: in 1921, with Comintern advice, Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao helped found the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In 1924, under Soviet pressure, Sun Yat-sen’s reorganized Guomindang (GMD) entered the First United Front with the CCP.

Chapter 5: Nationalist China and the Communist Challenge

The Nanjing Decade

Sun Yat-sen died in 1925. His successor, Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), led the Northern Expedition that nominally reunified the country, and in April 1927 he violently purged his communist allies in Shanghai. The Nanjing Decade (1927–37) that followed has been read in sharply different ways. Nationalist sympathizers point to legal reform, a new currency, road and rail construction, public health campaigns, and the rebuilding of a modern state apparatus. Critics, including Lloyd Eastman, emphasize authoritarianism, factionalism, corruption, and the regime’s failure to address rural misery. Schoppa’s textbook strikes a balance: the Nationalists built more of a state than their warlord predecessors but never secured the countryside or the loyalty of China’s peasant majority.

Communist Base Areas and the Long March

Driven out of the cities, surviving communists regrouped in rural “soviets,” most importantly the Jiangxi Soviet led by Mao Zedong and Zhu De. Chiang’s fifth encirclement campaign in 1934 forced the Red Army to abandon Jiangxi and embark on the Long March, a year-long retreat of roughly 9,000 kilometres that ended with a vastly reduced army reaching Yan’an in the northwest. The march became the CCP’s founding myth, and it was during the Zunyi conference along the way that Mao consolidated his leadership. In Yan’an, through the rectification campaigns of the early 1940s, the party developed the ideological discipline, land-reform practice, and mass-line techniques that would eventually carry it to national power.

Chapter 6: War, Occupation, and Revolution

The War of Resistance Against Japan

When Japanese troops manufactured an incident at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing in July 1937, full-scale war erupted. Rana Mitter’s Forgotten Ally has done more than any recent work to restore the centrality of China’s eight-year War of Resistance to the global history of the Second World War. Shanghai fell after brutal street fighting; the Nationalist capital Nanjing fell in December 1937, and Japanese troops carried out the massacre and mass rape that scarred Chinese memory for generations. Chiang Kai-shek retreated to Chongqing in the mountainous southwest, where his government endured years of bombing, inflation, and American impatience. Roughly fourteen to twenty million Chinese died in the war.

Michael Kwan’s memoir, Things That Must Not Be Forgotten, gives this chapter a human face. A mixed-heritage child caught between a Chinese father and an Austrian mother in occupied Manchuria, Kwan describes collaborators and resistors, hunger and small kindnesses, and the moral ambiguity of daily life under Japanese rule. His book refuses the simple binaries of wartime propaganda and insists, like Mitter, that Chinese experience cannot be reduced to heroes and traitors alone.

The Civil War and 1949

Victory over Japan in 1945 did not bring peace. The CCP and GMD resumed their struggle in a four-year civil war. Despite initial American military aid to the Nationalists, Chiang’s regime was consumed by hyperinflation, desertion, and the loss of legitimacy among urban intellectuals and rural peasants alike. The communist People’s Liberation Army, battle-hardened and ideologically coherent, swept south through 1948 and 1949. On 1 October 1949, Mao stood atop Tiananmen and proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. Chiang’s government fled to Taiwan. Fairbank once called 1949 the greatest single political event of the twentieth century in terms of the number of people whose lives it reshaped.

Chapter 7: Mao’s Revolution, 1949–1976

Land Reform and the First Five-Year Plan

The early People’s Republic moved swiftly. Land reform redistributed fields from landlords to peasants, with mass “speak bitterness” meetings and the execution, by conservative estimates, of hundreds of thousands of so-called class enemies. Frank Dikötter’s Tragedy of Liberation and Maurice Meisner’s older Mao’s China and After give starkly different moral accounts, but both agree that the campaigns broke the rural gentry forever. The Korean War (1950–53), in which Chinese “volunteers” fought American forces to a standstill at the 38th parallel, cemented Mao’s prestige and drove the new regime deeper into Soviet alliance. A Soviet-style First Five-Year Plan (1953–57) industrialized key sectors and introduced centralized planning.

Hundred Flowers and Anti-Rightist

In 1956 Mao invited intellectuals to “let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.” When criticism of party rule grew sharper than expected, the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 reversed course, branding roughly half a million intellectuals as “rightists” and sending many to labour camps. The episode destroyed what remained of an independent Chinese intelligentsia and revealed the brittleness of party tolerance.

The Great Leap Forward and the Famine

In 1958 Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to vault China past the Soviet Union into communism through mass mobilization. Peasants were herded into gigantic communes; backyard furnaces melted cooking pots into useless pig iron; grain output was wildly exaggerated in local reports so that procurement quotas kept rising even as the countryside starved. The resulting famine (1958–62) killed somewhere between thirty and forty-five million people, a number that Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine, drawing on newly opened provincial archives, pushes toward the upper end. It remains the deadliest famine in recorded history. Mao stepped back from daily administration, but he never accepted personal responsibility, and his resentment of those who had criticized the Leap fed directly into the next catastrophe.

The Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution (1966–76) was Mao’s attempt to reclaim revolutionary purity by turning the young against the party he himself had built. Red Guards denounced teachers, smashed “four olds,” and in some regions descended into open factional warfare; intellectuals, former landlords, and officials were beaten, sent to the countryside, or killed. Lin Biao rose and then fell in a mysterious 1971 plane crash after an alleged coup attempt. Zhou Enlai worked quietly to restrain the worst excesses and to open a door to the United States with Nixon’s 1972 visit. The death of Mao in September 1976 and the swift arrest of the “Gang of Four” ended the era. Sang Ye’s China Candid preserves dozens of oral histories from people who lived through the Mao years, from former Red Guards to rural women and factory workers; taken together they form a mosaic of trauma, nostalgia, humour, and disillusionment that no top-down narrative can replace.

Chapter 8: Reform, Opening, and the Rise of a Global Power

Deng Xiaoping and the Four Modernizations

At the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee in December 1978, Deng Xiaoping consolidated his leadership and set China on the road of “reform and opening.” The Four Modernizations—of agriculture, industry, science and technology, and national defence—replaced class struggle as the official priority. Communes were dismantled; the household responsibility system gave peasants long-term use rights to land and the freedom to sell surplus produce. Special Economic Zones at Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou, and Xiamen were opened to foreign investment. The one-child policy, introduced in 1980, tried to brake population growth at enormous human cost, producing a generation of demographic distortions whose consequences China is still negotiating.

Tiananmen 1989

Reform also unleashed inflation, inequality, and intellectual ferment. In the spring of 1989, student and worker protests in Tiananmen Square—triggered by the death of the reformist leader Hu Yaobang and fuelled by demands for political liberalization—drew millions into Beijing’s streets and spread to cities across the country. On the night of 3–4 June the army cleared the square by force. The bloodshed, broadcast to a watching world, ended the 1980s reform mood and drew a sharp line: economic liberalization would continue, political liberalization would not.

The Xi Jinping Era

Deng’s successors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao oversaw two decades of extraordinary growth. China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, hosted the spectacular Beijing Olympics in 2008, and by the early 2010s had become the world’s second-largest economy. Since taking power in 2012, Xi Jinping has concentrated authority in his own hands to a degree unseen since Mao: anti-corruption campaigns have remade elite politics, constitutional term limits have been abolished, and the Belt and Road Initiative has projected Chinese infrastructure and capital across Eurasia and Africa. As Westad and Karl both emphasize, China’s return to the centre of global politics is not a rupture with the modern Chinese story but its latest chapter, continuous with the ambitions of Qing statesmen, May Fourth reformers, and revolutionary communists alike.

Chapter 9: Themes in Modern Chinese History

Continuity and Rupture

One of the oldest debates in the field concerns how much of imperial China survived the twentieth century. Fairbank once emphasized deep cultural continuities in bureaucracy, family structure, and statecraft; later scholars, from Philip Kuhn to Rebecca Karl, have stressed genuine revolutions in economy, identity, and political imagination. Schoppa’s textbook argues for a dialectic: every generation has had to reckon simultaneously with inherited patterns and radical new conditions.

China and the World

A second theme is China’s shifting relationship to the wider world. The Qing “world order” gave way to the treaty century, then to the May Fourth search for foreign models, then to Soviet alliance, then to autarky, then to reform-era globalization, and now to Xi-era great-power rivalry. Westad’s Restless Empire argues that across all these phases China has been not an isolated civilization but a participant—sometimes victim, sometimes actor—in a global history it helped to shape.

Memory and the Uses of the Past

Finally, modern Chinese history is a contested terrain of memory. The Nanjing Massacre, the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen, and even the Qing itself are remembered differently in Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong, and the diaspora. For students of HIST 239, learning to read Schoppa alongside Pruitt, Kwan, and Sang Ye—and alongside Mitter, Dikötter, and Karl—is practice in holding multiple accounts of the same events in mind at once. That, more than any single narrative, is what it means to study modern China historically: to see a civilization transformed many times over in a few generations, and to listen for the human voices inside every transformation.