Book Review

Asia

During the last thirty-five years or so, there has been among China historians a growing attention to local history. Beginning with Frederic E. Wakeman's classic, Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839–1861 (1966), and based on rich materials usually compiled by Chinese elites with the sponsorship of local officials, much of the best work done by scholars of China has focused on individual provinces, regions, counties, towns, and villages. So productive have these local studies been, especially in deepening our understanding of China's immense diversity, that most of us think at least twice before venturing any general statement about the country as a whole. Fortunately, the accumulation of excellent local studies has also prompted some venturesome historians (such as R. Bin Wong in his recent book, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience [1997]) to forge boldly ahead and tackle not merely China alone but to reach for an even wider comparative perspective, and with outstanding results.

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The book under review here does not aim quite as high as Wong did, but in his own way Xin Zhang has bravely sought to cross the local/national barrier and vault beyond it toward international comparisons concerning modernity. Based on an in-depth analysis of two regions in one Chinese province, Zhang argues that "modernity" in China must be understood differently from modernity elsewhere. China, he contends in an argument reminiscent of Wong's, has too often been analyzed according to concepts and standards devised to explain Western history. He proposes to treat in China's own terms the country's move into modernity, which he believes was effectively achieved between 1900 and 1937. He draws on Western social science where he finds it applicable but seeks to root himself firmly in Chinese realities and to shape his conceptual framework to suit those realities as he understands them. He offers what he calls an "operational" definition of modernity, in which "the facts do and are allowed to speak for themselves . . . I argue that the crucial distinction between Chinese modernity and that of the West lies in the fact Chinese modernity was based neither on industrialization nor on capitalist development" (p. 18).

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