Description

China s emergence as a twenty-first-century global economic, cultural, and political power is often presented as a story of what Chinese leader Xi Jinping calls the nation s great rejuvenation, a story narrated as the return of China to its rightful place at the center of the world.

In China s Revolutions in the Modern World, historian Rebecca E. Karl argues that China s contemporary emergence is best seen not as a return, but rather as the product of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary activity and imaginings. From the Taipings in the mid-nineteenth century through nationalist, anti-imperialist, cultural, and socialist revolutions to today s capitalist-inflected Communist State, modern China has been made in intellectual dissonance and class struggle, in mass democratic movements and global war, in socialism and anti-socialism, in repression and conflict by multiple generations of Chinese people mobilized to seize history and make the future in their own name. Through China s successive revolutions, the contours of our contemporary world have taken shape. This brief interpretive history shows how.