What are important but often overlooked events in China's past? What do China’s President Xi Jinping and Pope Francis have in common? Two new books authored and edited by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s Professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, tackle these questions and more. Eight Juxtapositions: China Through Imperfect Analogies from Mark Twain to Manchukuo (Penguin, 2016), which Wasserstrom authored, encourages new ways of looking at China through seemingly unlikely analogies; The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China (University of Oxford Press, 2016), which Wasserstrom edited, takes its readers from the origins of modern China right up through the dramatic events of the last few years, leveraging both academic and journalist expertise to counter misconceptions about China and provide a nuanced history of the world superpower.
Below, Wasserstrom discusses how he became an expert in modern China and what he hopes readers will take away from his books.
How and why did you get started in China studies?
In the late 1970s, when I was an undergrad at UC Santa Cruz, I happened to see a sheet on a bulletin board asking people to put down their names if they wanted to be part of a “friendship trip to China,” and on a whim I signed up to be part of the group. I also enrolled in first-year Chinese. It was unusual then for Americans to have opportunities to go to China, and pretty unusual as well as for American colleges or universities to offer Chinese. In the end, I dropped out of the trip, but stuck with the language, which fascinated me, due partly to how completely differently its written form was from English. I was also taking all sorts of classes as an undergrad—something encouraged at UCSC, which was then more like a liberal arts college than a research university then—and one of these happened to be on Chinese history. The instructor assigned us some wonderful books, including a Judge Dee mystery novel, a whodunit written by a Dutch Sinologist in the twentieth century, but based on Chinese cases and stories from centuries earlier. I was hooked. My route to China studies was pretty haphazard, as I didn’t have any kind of lifelong obsession with the country or culture before starting college. I did, though, have a longstanding interest in history, and I was intrigued by revolutionary upsurges in particular, so it wasn’t a complete fluke that I was drawn to studying China’s modern period, given how important radical movements have been in shaping it.
What are some of the often-overlooked events in China's history that are included in The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China?
One is definitely the Taiping Civil War, which began when a failed Chinese scholar who had been exposed to Christian missionary tracts had hallucinations that convinced him he was Christ’s younger brother. This prophet gained many followers as he called on them to rise up against the ruling Qing Dynasty, something that he claimed would inaugurate a blissful time of “Great Peace” (Taiping). At the height of the rising, the insurgents controlled a part of China about the size of France. The movement lasted from the late 1840s until 1864, so its chronology overlapped with that of the American Civil War, but the number of people killed during it was exponentially higher. I’ve always found it amazing that, while well enough known in China, of course, this strange, dramatic, and incredibly consequential event is not more widely known internationally.
What do you hope to achieve with The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China?
The book’s goal is to provide an engaging introduction to key events, personalities, and issues, via well-crafted, deeply informed and beautifully illustrated chapters by specialists in different periods. I hope that readers will come away from it knowing a lot more about China since the 16th century than they did before picking it up and have a better appreciation of the complex ways that the past influences the country’s present. My collaborators and I also strive in various ways to clear away some common misconceptions about Chinese history and culture. Some of these arise from Western ignorance but others are the result of how the Communist Party strives to use a particular, distorted view of the past to legitimate its rule. One kind of misconception I try to clear up in my Introduction, for example, is that the core of Chinese culture has long been and remains a concern with hierarchy, order, and tradition, all things often associated with “Confucian” values. That cluster of concerns is better seen, I argue, as just one important strand of what is in fact a multi-stranded cultural heritage. To illustrate this, I place two beloved novels side by side, The Dream of the Red Chamber, the action in which takes place within a well ordered family compound, and The Journey to the West, which features the mischief-making Monkey King who loves to turn things upside down. The enduring popularity of both suggests that each speaks to a core part of Chinese culture.
What inspired you to write Eight Juxtapositions: China Through Imperfect Analogies from Mark Twain to Manchukuo?
This book, while totally different in size and structure and format, also tries to correct some common misunderstandings of China and illuminate how its past relates to its present. I didn’t set out to write it—I call it one of my “accidental books”—but realized a year ago that I had published enough occasional commentaries on loosely connected themes that, with some tweaking and updating, they could be pulled together into a volume. What unites the disparate chapters, which move through time from the 19th century to the present and engage with literary as well as political and social issues, is my use of unexpected comparisons and analogies.
Are there any juxtaposition that didn’t make it to the book that you wish did?
One juxtaposition I have been pondering for some time now and have written a bit about, though not in the book, and will likely expand on in an essay before long, has to do with Hong Kong and West Berlin. I’m interested in the way that, during the Cold War, each functioned as a small outpost of capitalism and consumerism surrounded by a large Communist Party-run territory. Hong Kong was literally a city surrounded by water and residents of West Berlin sometimes described themselves as residents of an “island” of sorts. In recent decades, both of these places have been integrated at least partly with that “mainland” that was once right beside it but part of a totally separate political entity. The process of integration, though, has been totally different, of course, with only Hong Kong residents having to worry, as many do now, of restrictive mainland political norms and forms creeping in and eroding the quality of public life.
Why is it helpful for us to employ "imperfect analogies" when thinking about China?
I find them useful in shaking up entrenched modes of thinking about the country. For example, there is a lingering sense, left over from the Cold War, that leaders of Communist countries should only be compared to one another or at least only to other non-elected heads of one-party states. In two chapters in the book, I try to show how we can see new things about Xi Jinping by placing him beside quite different figures, Pope Francis in one commentary, the post-Communist Russian elected head of state Vladimir Putin in another. Xi isn’t “just like” either of those two (how could he be, when they differ from one another so markedly?), but I try to show that it can help us put him into a richer perspective by thinking about characteristics he shares with each. Similarly, I claim in a different chapter that it can be useful, when pondering the story Beijing tells about its right to rule Tibet, to note parallels with tales that Tokyo told in the 1930s to justify its exertion of control, via a puppet ruler, over Manchuria. I stress that these and other comparisons I use in the book—including thinking about how many things Mark Twain, who happens to be my favorite long dead American author, has in common with Yu Hua, who happens to be my favorite living Chinese writer—are flawed and should not be taken too far. I do feel, though, that they each have enough of a pay-off in terms of shaking us free of ruts, and sometimes simply making us think there might be a third choice in a debate on China that seem to me to present us with only two unacceptable choices, to be worth considering.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor's Professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies. He has edited a number of books on China and is the author of five: Student Protests in Twentieth Century China: The View from Shanghai (1991), China's Brave New World-And Other Tales for Global Times (2007), Global Shanghai, 1850-2010 (2009), China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (2010; new ed. 2013), and Eight Juxtapositions: China Through Imperfect Analogies from Mark Twain to Manchukuo (2016). A co-founder of and contributing editor to the influential China Beat blog (2008-2012), he is a regular contributor to the press, including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and he is advising editor for Asia of the Los Angeles Review of Books. A former member of the Board of Directors of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, he has been traveling to China regularly since the 1980s.
Wasserstrom is available to comment on both historical and contemporary issues relating to China and China-US relations.
For a high-res headshot of Wasserstrom, click here
For a high-res cover image of Eight Juxtapositions: China Through Imperfect Analogies from Mark Twain to Manchukuo, click here
For a high-res cover image of The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China, click here