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The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895-1980

Jonathan D. Spence
Reviewed by By Donald S. Zagoria
Winter 1981/2
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Jonathan D. Spence
Viking
1981
465 pp.
0140062793
$19.95

Spence has brought the past 100 years of the Chinese revolution to life with a novelist's flair and an historian's grounding in fact. This is intellectual history of the first order. It weaves together the lives of three Chinese intellectuals-the utopian theorist Kang Youwei, the writer Lu Xun, and the feminist and writer Ding Ling-to capture the meaning of the passage from Imperial to Communist China.

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