| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Bruce A. Elleman. Wilson and China: A Revised History of the Shandong Question. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe. 2002. Pp. xviii, 227. Cloth $62.95, paper $28.95.

At the Paris Peace Conference in May 1919, President Woodrow Wilson, Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and Premier Georges Clemenceau accommodated their Japanese ally's demand that imperial Germany's economic and political concessions in China's Shandong province be formally transferred to Japan—which had seized them by force in November 1914—rather than returned to China as the Chinese delegation requested. News of this decision unleashed a tsunami of patriotic fury in Peking that engulfed China, precipitated the rise of modern Chinese nationalism, and helped turn Chinese intellectuals away from Western liberalism, which they thought had betrayed them, and toward Bolshevism. The thesis of Bruce A. Elleman's provocative monograph is that these weighty consequences of the Shandong decision were the result of an unfortunate misunderstanding that he has finally cleared up. The Chinese themselves were to blame, not Wilson, who tried his best to defend China's interests under difficult circumstances and was then made the scapegoat. Elleman asks us to believe that if only the Versailles decision on Shandong had been correctly understood at the time, China might have been spared the ravages of communism, "a road ultimately paved with the corpses of tens if not hundreds of millions of Chinese" (pp. 1–2). In reality, although the Shandong decision was certainly important in its time, it was hardly the only factor that gave rise to the Chinese Communist Party and the communist revolution. Elleman's assertions are extravagant, and his little book is made to bear an impossible burden.

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