Home › Books & Reviews › Capsule Reviews › The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895-1980

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

Jonathan D. Spence
Reviewed by Donald S. Zagoria
Winter 1981/2
The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895-1980
Jonathan D. Spence
Viking
1981
465 pp.
0140062793
$19.95
Login or Register to leave a comment.

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.

Related

Essay, Spring 1984
China's Quiet Revolution
Donald S. Zagoria

Since Mao Zedong's death in 1976, and particularly since the rise of Deng Xiaoping in 1978, the post-Mao leaders of China have sought to develop a new strategy and new institutions for modernizing China. In the economy, they have sought a more decentralized, quasi-market socialist system better suited to Chinese conditions than the highly centralized, Soviet-type system they adopted in 1949. Perhaps the most significant step has been a de facto decollectivization of agriculture.

Read
Essay, Mar/Apr 1995
Profile: Japan's Invisible Leviathan
Eamonn Fingleton

The West often ascribes mystery and chaos to political and economic power in Japan. Yet Japanese power is actually a carefully structured hierarchy, and the capstone is neither big business nor the Ministry of International Trade and Industry but the little-understood and low-profile Ministry of Finance. The MOF controls Japan's equivalents of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, Internal Revenue Service, and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. It is the prime mover behind Japan's savings rate, distribution of overseas aid, and regulation of monopolies. However obscure, it may well be the most powerful bureaucracy in the world.

Read
Essay, Sep/Oct 1995
Ichiro Ozawa: Reformer at Bay
Edward W. Desmond

Ichiro Ozawa, a former power broker in the Liberal Democratic Party, has become a seminal figure of Japan's reform movement. A leader of the up-and-coming New Frontier Party, in 1993 he wrote an influential bestseller, Blueprint for a New Japan, that helped define the national debates over democratic reform, social issues, and foreign policy. He views himself as Meiji-type leader, trying to awaken Japan to the changes in the outside world. But many of the Japanese are wary of the savvy backroom dealmaker. In any case, his views are helping chart Japan's diplomatic course: a more engaged global role coupled with a resilient U.S. partnership.

Read
Cover image

In the Magazine

November/December 2009 / 6, 88
Essay
The Dollar and the Deficits
C. Fred Bergsten

The global economic crisis has revealed the folly of large U.S. budget and trade deficits, as well as of the strong dollar that makes them possible. If it is serious about recovery, the United States must balance the budget, stimulate private saving, and embrace a declining dollar.
Read