"Chinese adults today have lived through several swings of the ideological pendulum, including periods of repression. Their current adaptation does not necessarily signal support for the government. The high school and college graduates who are being sent to the countryside have an outlook different from that of Mao's Red Guards who preached learning from the people. The students who demonstrated in Tiananmen Square exhibited a cosmopolitanism that would have been impossible a decade earlier. Deng's open-door policy allowed Chinese access to the ideas of reformers as diverse as Thomas Jefferson and Mikhail Gorbachev. They see no need to learn from peasants or workers, and most likely their resentment will fester. If Deng's open-door policy continues, increased disparities in income and opportunity will be exacerbated and the disaffected will again emerge. The CCP might achieve Deng's goal of producing a "moderately" developed China by 2050, but the price may be the repression of much of its population."
At the time of publication, June Grasso was an Associate Professor of Social Science at Boston University. Her two coauthors also taught in the same place. This is the last book on China that any of them were involved with, and it seems to have made little impact beyond the college campuses where it was assigned reading.
As one would expect, this book begins with the sunset years of the Ching Dynasty in the late 19th century. From there it moves on to the Opium War, the treaty ports, the Republic of China, the Japanese incursions, the birth of the Chinese communist movement, the Second World War, the Chinese Civil War, and then concludes with China's decades-long transformation from totalitarian dictatorship to dictatorship softened by elements of a free market economy. It's a story familiar to anyone who's read any other book about modern China, and there is nothing surprising or especially insightful about the way in which the authors tell it.
And as with many such books, there is a gaping hole at its center. This gaping hole would be the lack of primary sources, and the fact that most of this book consists of observations and opinions regurgitated from other, more famous books. Despite Grasso's PhD in Modern Chinese History, not a single Chinese-language source is cited, and the bibliography can be, for the most part, reduced to a handful of works by better informed authors. Immanuel Hsu, for example, and his excellent The Rise of Modern China, or even Edgar Snow, whose Red Star Over China is sadly overlooked.
Taken on its own merits, Modernization and Revolution in China isn't terrible, it just lacks the scholarship and flair for the subject which make books like this much better.
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