People’s Republic of China
The bibliography on contemporary Chinese history is vast and is growing as rapidly as the country it describes. In addition to the following sampling of the scholarship available in books, further information may be found in such online sources as “Contemporary China: A Book List” (www.princeton.edu/~lynn/chinabib.pdf) from the Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School East Asian Studies Program; and the “New Books” list (www.fas.harvard.edu/~fairbank/library/newbooks.html) produced regularly by the Harvard University Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
The emergence and growth of the communist opposition to Nationalist rule can be traced in Benjamin I. Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (1951, reprinted 1979); Stuart R. Schram, Mao Tse-tung (1967); Mark Selden, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (1971); and Edgar Snow, Red Star over China, rev. ed. (1968, reprinted 1973). The main treatment of the Red Army is William W. Whitson and Chen-hsia Huang, The Chinese High Command: A History of Communist Military Politics, 1927–71 (1973). Civilian and military phases of the late civil war period are covered in Susanne Pepper, Civil War in China: The Political Struggle, 1945–1949 (1978); and Lionel Max Chassin, The Communist Conquest of China: A History of the Civil War, 1945–1949 (1965; originally published in French, 1952).
Chalmers A. Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937–45 (1962, reprinted 1971), broke new ground by proposing that wartime communist recruitment in northern China came from reaction to Japanese violence during the war and not mainly from endemic social problems. This view conflicts with that of Selden and partially with that of Bianco, in the works cited earlier, and is part of a continuing debate. Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung), Selected Works, 4 vol. (1961–65), published by the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing, is the official translation of Mao’s writings, and numerous other versions of his works have been published. More background is provided in Stuart R. Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, rev. ed. (1969); Stuart Schram (ed.), Mao Tse-tung Unrehearsed: Talks and Letters: 1956–71 (1974; U.S. title, Chairman Mao Talks to the People: Talks and Letters, 1956–1971); and Frederic Wakeman, Jr., History and Wilclass="underline" Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-tung’s Thought (1973).
Roderick MacFarquhar (ed.), The Politics of China: The Eras of Mao and Deng, 2nd ed. (1997); Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, 3 vol. (1974–97); its continuation, Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Shoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (2006); and vols. 14 and 15 of The Cambridge History of China, both ed. by Roderick MacFarquhar and John K. Fairbank, respectively The People’s Republic, Part 1: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1949–1965 (1987), and The People’s Republic, Part 2: Revolutions Within the Chinese Revolution, 1966–1982 (1991), are all thorough treatments. Further interpretations can be found in works such as Frederick C. Teiwes, Politics and Purges in China: Rectifications and the Decline of Party Norms, 1950–1965 (1979).
Cheng Li, China’s Leaders: The New Generation (2001); and Joseph Fewsmith, Elite Politics in Contemporary China (2001), carry this narrative about leadership into the reform period and also discuss the lower levels of administration. Mark Blecher and Vivienne Shue, Tethered Deer: Government and Economy in a Chinese County (1996), focuses on a localized area; as do Lynn T. White III, Careers in Shanghai (1978), Policies of Chaos (1989), Unstately Power, 2 vol. (1998), and Political Booms (2009), though from the perspective of several successive decades. Village politics is beautifully explored in Richard Madsen, Morality and Power in a Chinese Village (1984); Anita Chan, Richard Madsen, and Jonathan Unger, Chen Village: Revolution to Globalization, 3rd ed. (2009); and Edward Friedman et al., Chinese Village, Socialist State (1991).
Anthropological studies undertaken prior to the Cultural Revolution include C.K. Yang, Chinese Communist Society: The Family and the Village (1959, reprinted 1974); and G. William Skinner, Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China (1965, reprinted 2001). Among more recent investigations are Helen F. Siu, Agents and Victims in South China: Accomplices in Rural Revolution (1989); and Pierre F. Landry, Decentralized Authoritarianism in China: The Communist Party’s Control of the Local Elites in the Post-Mao Era (2008).
Dali L. Yang, Calamity and Reform in China (1996), describes that reforms were often based on local reactions to previous bad governance, notably during the famine that followed the Great Leap Forward, and Remaking the Chinese Leviathan: Market Transition and the Politics of Governance in China (2004), stresses ways in which the regime revived after the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident. Orville Schell and David Shambaugh (eds.), The China Reader: The Reform Era (1999), provides useful documents.
Mary Elizabeth Gallagher, Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China (2005), explains how reforms spread geographically. Kevin J. O’Brien, Reform Without Liberalization: China’s National People’s Congress and the Politics of Institutional Change (1990), is one of several books to describe the limits to China’s political reforms; nonetheless, Kevin J. O’Brien and Lianjiang Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China (2006), offers explanations of China’s weakly institutionalized but pervasive popular sense of justice. Randall Peerenboom, China’s Long March Toward Rule of Law (2002), describes the slow but positive changes in the legal system. Elizabeth J. Perry, Challenging the Mandate of Heaven: Social Protest and State Power in China (2002), is one of several studies that explore the conditions under which protest erupts. A culture of regime conservatism is patterned rationally in works such as Susan L. Shirk, The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China (1993); and Melanie Manion, Corruption by Design: Building Clean Government in Mainland China and Hong Kong (2004). Yongnian Zheng, Technological Empowerment: The Internet, State, and Society in China (2008), looks at the new politics brought about by the World Wide Web.
Classic works on China’s foreign relations include Barbara W. Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45 (1970, reissued 2001; also published as Sand Against the Wind, 1971, reissued 1981); and Akira Iriye (ed.), The Chinese and the Japanese: Essays in Political and Cultural Interactions (1980). Major studies of basic motives in China’s security policy include Allen S. Whiting, The Chinese Calculus of Deterrence: India and Indochina (1975, reprinted 2001); and Thomas J. Christensen, Useful Adversaries: Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and Sino-American Conflict (1996). Samuel S. Kim, China, the United Nations, and World Order (1979), was one of the early studies describing China’s multilateral diplomacy. Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (1995), and Social States: China in International Institutions, 1980–2000 (2008), are somewhat contrasting explorations of the conditions for such diplomacy. Susan L. Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower (2007), describes the links between China’s internal politics and external attitudes; and Yongnian Zheng, Discovering Chinese Nationalism in China: Modernization, Identity, and International Relations (1999), explores the origins and types of Chinese patriotism. Lynn White