China’s Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History

Surveying a dozen transformative episodes across Chinese history, from Taiping to the Chinese Dream of Xi Jinping, Rebecca Karl traces the emergence of mass politics, the worlds they sought to construct, and their dialectical relationship to counter-revolution. For Karl, China’s revolutions have, since the mid nineteenth century, raised questions about and helped clarify what modern China was to be, as a geography and territory, a polity, a nationality, or a cluster of ethnicities, as congeries of cultural entities, as a class politics, and more.

China becomes China through modern revolutions and modern revolutions became as much a mode of articulating past, present, and future ideals in a Chinese and global idiom as they were of attempting to resolve contemporaneous material realities. In brief, revolutions were an essential mode of rethinking the past-history-in the light of new demands for the present and the future. As Beijing anticipates its rise to a destined global power, this study become only more urgent.