From Manchu to Mao

“China: The Longest Journey” is a beauty, and a worthy addition to any library.

CHINA: THE LONGEST JOURNEY - 1850-1949

By Jonathan Fenby

Published by Form Asia, 2008

Available at Asia Books, B2S and Kinokuniya Books, Bt2,595.

Reviewed by Paul Dorsey

The Nation

     Jonathan Fenby, the author of "Generalissimo", a gripping 2006 biography of Chiang Kai-shek, now lends his considerable knowledge of Chinese history to a handsome coffee-table book replete with stirring photographs.

 "China: The Longest Journey" is a beauty, and a worthy addition to any library, but it's an odd production.

Fenby can't possibly do full justice in a single volume to a century of events that churned and shifted course like the moody Yang-tse. His text instead seems to be intended as the framework to which the dozens of pictures are affixed.

 And yet the photos, as amazing as they are, and considering how much of weight they give to this book, are treated with diffidence.

 The sources and photographers get scant attention - a jumble of details at the bottom of the title page that's presented alphabetically by origin rather than by page number, which would have been far more convenient for the reader.

 The photo captions tend to triteness and repeat verbatim what's in the text, as if to suggest the text need not be read at all.

 That's hardly the case. The history as related by Fenby is vivid and not overly compressed, even if a little more care in the syntax and punctuation would have been appreciated from the former managing editor of the South China Morning Post.

 Writers never exhaust the tumultuous decades that Fenby tackles in turn, with its unbroken succession of warlords and overlords, all worthy subjects of their own books.

 There are edifying sections on the great tigers of the ages, personalities like the austere and insidious Empress Dowager Tz'u-hsi and the hapless last emperor, P'u-I.

 You learn more about Sun Yat-sen and perhaps meet for the first time the Self-Strengtheners, including Li Hung-chan, the resilient Ming ambassador.

 Among these wielders of overt power, the mandarins of the bureaucracy and the always-strange court eunuchs, intrigue piles up in layers as the nation is folded like some vast, ornate origami.

 For the most part, the needs of the average citizen were ignored.

 Throughout the Manchu reign the fuse of rebellion was lit and re-lit among China's oppressed Han majority, flaring frequently, and occasionally, after appalling bloodshed, accomplishing at least a semblance of reform.

 The Manchus clung to power nevertheless, abetted by unsolicited aid from European imperialists - dope dealers for the most part.

 The Westerners, acutely aware of the fortunes to be made trading with China's immense population, huddling self-consciously in their enclaves and often wielding opium as a weapon, are given a frank and

critical appraisal by Fenby.

 When the Boxers retaliated with brutality, retribution was hard as nails.

 "You can scarcely imagine the beauty and the magnificence of the palaces we burnt," a British

officer in Lord Elgin's 1860 raid on Peking wrote home. "It made one's heart sore to burn them; in fact, these palaces were so large, and we were so pressed for time, that we could not plunder them carefully."

 Fenby doesn't pull punches either with the Russians, who rolled the dice until the Japanese kicked over the table. The Japanese, Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, the warlords and wheeler-dealers, and ultimately Mao all take their licks.

 Fenby does, however, tend to come to rest on banality, as in the book's rather hasty concluding words:

 "Though still suppressed, iconoclasm sprang up in Tiananmen Square in 1989. While political power lay in the north, southern and coastal cities re-emerged as economic powerhouses, and regions asserted their personalities.

 "The tension between authority and the pursuit of freedom that runs through this book thus came forth once more, as in the dying days of Empire or under the Republic. How that tension is resolved will shape the future of China as surely as it did in the century of conflict."