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AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF MODERN CHINA by Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-Fan Lee (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
China's 20th Century history was one of great social, political and economic change. This included the decline and collapse of the Qing dynasty, the instability of the early years of the Republic and the era of warlordism that ensued, the Chinese Revolution led by Mao Zedong and his attempts at socialist construction following the Chinese Communist Party's seizure of power in 1949, the Cultural Revolution from 1966-76, and the reform process under Deng Xiaoping and his successors which has seen China chart an economic course heavily reliant on capitalism overseen by an essentially Leninist state. Accompanying, and in some cases driving these upheavals and transformations have been very different conceptions of how China should respond to the opportunities and challenges posed by a modern world of nation-states, industrial capitalism, imperialism and more recently, globalisation. Early reformers of the late Qing, such as Yan Fu, sought "wealth and power" for China through emulation of the West without abandoning China's essential cultural and political values. Their formulations, in an important sense, defined the parameters of intellectual debate in China for the next century, and many commentators now believe that the contemporary Chinese state is as much motivated by the search for wealth and power as were the early reformers.
Nevertheless, the search for wealth and power did not come with an easily decipherable road map, and different Chinese intellectuals developed quite different responses to China's many dilemmas. One of the most significant responses was rejection of China's Confucian tradition during the May Fourth period (1915-21), and endorsement of everything Western, particularly democracy and science. The more radical intellectuals turned to Marxism in the hope of finding a...