Ebook: A bitter revolution: China's struggle with the modern world

Cover -- Contents -- Preface -- List of Illustrations -- Chronology -- Pronunciation, Transliterations, and Names -- PART I: SHOCK -- 1. Flashpoint: 4 May 1919: The Making of a New China -- Why was May Fourth Important? -- The Fall of the Chinese Empire -- Uneasy Birth: The Chinese Republic -- 2. A Tale of Two Cities: Beijing, Shanghai, and the May Fourth Generation -- Beijing: Intellectual Centre of the Movement -- Shanghai: China's Modern Challenge -- People: The May Fourth Generation -- Subcultures -- 3. Experiments in Happiness: Life and Love in New Culture China -- New Classes, New Opportunities -- Print, Commerce, and Culture -- Love, Labour, and Liberty -- Ask Taofen! -- The May Fourth Entrepreneur -- Saving the Nation, Making a Profit -- End of an Era? -- 4. Goodbye Confucius: New Culture, New Politics -- Iconoclasm -- Goodbye Confucius? -- China's Road to Nationalism -- Internationalism, Cosmopolitism, and Nationalism -- Looking East in Europe -- Not Just West and East: Thinking Beyond Europe -- Japan's Promise, Japan's Menace -- Party Politics -- The Communists -- The Nationalists -- Nationalists and Communists, United and Divided -- The Question of Woman -- Conclusion: Goodbye May Fourth? -- PART II: AFTERSHOCK -- 5. A Land of Death: Darkness over China -- China Changes Shape, 1931-7 -- The Choices of the May Fourth Generation -- China Falls Apart, 1937-45 -- War and Confrontation -- The New World -- The Cold War -- The Great Leap Forward -- Conclusion: May Fourth in Abeyance -- 6. Tomorrow the Whole World Will Be Red: The Cultural Revolution and the Distortions of May Fourth -- Considering the Cultural Revolution -- What was the Cultural Revolution? -- The Cold War and the Cultural Revolution -- Life and Death during the Red Guard Period -- Changing the Guard -- May Fourth or Not? -- The Cold War and the Romance of Technology -- Divisions: Red, Black, Men, Women -- Conclusion: A Strange May Fourth -- 7. Ugly Chinamen and Dead Rivers: Reform and the 'New May Fourth' -- The Late Cold War -- Life and Liberty in the 'New Era' -- Xiahai: 'Jumping into the Sea' of the New Society -- What Sort of Crisis? -- The Culture Fever Debates -- The Ugly Chinaman and Heshang -- Echoes of May Fourth: The Different Crises -- Tian'anmen and the End of an Era -- The Nature of the New Era: Towards Chinese Democracy? -- 8. Learning to Let Go: The May Fourth Legacy in the New Millennium -- The Two Cities Revisited -- Coping with the Past -- New Thinking -- Across the Straits -- Searching for a New Story -- Guide to Further Reading -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Y -- Z -- Last Page.;China is now poised to take a key role on the world stage, but in the early twentieth century the situation could not have been more different. Rana Mitter goes back to this pivotal moment in Chinese history to uncover the origins of the painful transition from a premodern past into a modern world. Mitter takes us through the resulting social turmoil and political promise, the devastating war against Japan in the 1940s, Communism and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and the new era of hope in the 1980s ended by the Tian'anmen uprising. He reveals the impetus behind the dramatic changes in.