China's Revolutions in the Modern World

Product Description

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.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.
Rebecca E. Karl is Associate Professor of History at New York University. She is the author of The Magic of Concepts, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World and Staging the World.