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Title: Nation, Governance, and Modernity in China by Michael T. W. Tsin, Michael T.W. Tsin ISBN: 0-8047-4820-9 Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr Pub. Date: January, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $21.95

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Summary: China's first modernist government
Comment: This book is a history of the first attempt at modernity by a government in China. This is not to say there was no economic or social progress before the Republican Revolution, he's using the term "modernist" specifically to mean a government imbued with a particular worldview, reflected in discourse and practice, that is derived largely from intellectual trends during and after the 18th century European Enlightenment. The major elements are the cult of progress, belief in man as an active agent in contructing the world, and a belief that a scientific outlook can solve problems and create a rational order.

The key element in achieving modernity, according to this vision, and thus a goal of all the 20th century modernists--whether neo-Monarchists, republicans, the Nationalist or Communist Parties--is the construction of a unified cohesive social body. They thought that only after achieving this could society be reshaped in the necessary rational way. Interestingly, the author points out that neither Chinese nor Japanese language had a word for "society", in the post-European Enlightenment sense, and one had to be assigned this meaning (shehui), and it quickly took root in intellectual circles.

So how did the early parliamentary republicans, Sun Yat-Sen, and Chiang Kai-Shek (who brought the largely failed republican experiment to an end in 1927) attempt to go about achieving this cohesive unity and order in society? This forms the bulk of this book.

Why Canton? The author explains "The choice of Canton as a case study...is in part dictated by the fact that it was the site of [the first modernist] government. It is also my belief that only through the detailed and textured history of a locality can one have a sense of the life of the people, and the effects of the larger forces which shaped their milieu. This book is hence an exploration of how the lives of the inhabitants of a city intersected with the efforts of a group of modernist elites to reorder the realm."

So this book not only develops a thesis about modernity, but is also an important and detailed social history of Canton in the early 20th century (including the late Qing period).

Two areas that get special attention are the lives of workers and the attempts by the Guomindang (Nationalist Party) and the Communist Party (then working under the umbrella of the Guomindang), to mobilize labor, seen as an important step in reshaping society. But as the author shows, workers were a heterogeneous group, and didn't always follow the path desired by state and intellectual elites. This is perhaps not terribly different from how workers reacted to a different form of elite mobilization during the Cultural Revolution; see Elizabeth Perry "Proletarian Power: Shanghai During the Cultural Revolution". This leads the author to a larger point, that modernity usually cannot be imposed according to elite visions alone, but is "negotiated, contested, or even subverted by the newly mobilized constituents, as the history of Canton clearly demonstrates".

This book could be placed with other books to form a rich history of Canton:

'Heaven is High and the Emperor Far Away: Merchants and Mandarins in Old Canton' by Valery M. Garrett

'Canton under communism; programs and politics in a provincial capital, 1949-1968' by Ezra F. Vogel

'Socialist Welfare in a Market Economy: Social Security Reforms in Guangzhou, China' by Yongxin Zhou, Nelson Chow, Yeubin Xu

As the author notes, given the often conflicting interests between Guangdong province and Beijing today, "a closer look at the social history of a key southern urban center sheds some light on the tensions inherent in the process of national reconstruction."