The Birth of Communist China

This Pelican, which is a fully revised edition of the author�s Revolution in China, sets out to access the significance of the Chinese Revolution . After sketching in the background of China�s long history and social structure C. P. Fitzgerald�s, who is now Emeritus Professor of Far Eastern History at Canberra, opens his main account at the fall of the Manchu Emperors in 1911 and traces the origins of revolution through the early republic at Sun Yat-sen and the Nationalist dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek to the military campaigns of Mao Tse-tung. He assesses the varying influences of Confucianism and Christianity, of East and West, and of the Japanese and Russians on this massive movement, and makes it abundantly clear that the China of today is not an inexplicable freak but a logical development of its immensely long past. Professor Fitzgerald has a gift for fluent narrative and a long experience of China, and his interpretation of one of the central political events of this century is as readable as it is reliable. - Back cover.… (more)