Making China Modern

When the Qing finally fell in 1912, China did not become a functioning republic so much as a contested space. Mühlhahn spends real attention on the decades that historians often rush through — the warlord fragmentation, the Republican experiment under the Nationalists, the years of Japanese invasion. His argument is that this was not a void between empire and communism but a laboratory. Modern universities, professional armies, chambers of commerce, newspapers, banks, legal codes and a genuine urban culture all took shape in these turbulent years, especially in cities like Shanghai.

The Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek, which nominally unified the country in 1928, gets a more textured treatment than the usual portrait of corrupt failure. It built state institutions and had a coherent modernizing project. What it lacked was time and peace. The Japanese invasion from 1937, the horrors of Nanjing, and the grinding war that followed shattered whatever state capacity had been assembled. Mühlhahn treats the war years as the decisive rupture — the catastrophe that discredited one modernizing elite and cleared the ground for another.

The turn most readers come to the book for is 1978, when Deng Xiaoping and his allies began dismantling the command economy. Mühlhahn frames the reform era less as a sudden conversion to capitalism than as another round of the old improvisation — pragmatic, experimental, and consciously incremental. Deng's crossing-the-river-by-feeling-the-stones approach meant piloting changes locally, watching what worked, and scaling it. Special economic zones like Shenzhen, decollectivized farms, and township enterprises were tried before they were doctrine.

What Mühlhahn stresses is that this worked precisely because it drew on capacities accumulated over the previous century. The reformers did not start from zero. They had a literate population, a disciplined party-state that could enforce decisions, basic industrial infrastructure, and a diaspora and neighbors — Hong Kong, Taiwan, overseas Chinese networks — ready to supply capital and know-how. The growth that followed, sustained near double digits for three decades, was extraordinary, but it rested on foundations laid, painfully, in the eras of crisis before it.

Step back, and Mühlhahn's larger claim comes into focus. He is arguing against two familiar stories at once. One says China stagnated for centuries and only became modern by importing Western models. The other says China's rise is a smooth, almost inevitable return to natural greatness. Both are too tidy. His China is neither frozen nor destined — it is a country that has repeatedly been knocked down and has repeatedly rebuilt itself with whatever materials were at hand, borrowing freely, discarding what failed, and improvising institutions under enormous pressure.

The point of reading two hundred years as one continuous process is that it dissolves the line between the country's achievements and its anxieties. The same instinct that produced Shenzhen produced the surveillance state. The same fear of chaos that motivated genuine development also motivates repression. In Mühlhahn's telling, the party's obsession with stability, its distrust of independent civil society, its readiness to mobilize the whole society for a single goal — these are not new communist inventions. They are inherited reflexes, forged in the Taiping catastrophe, the warlord years, the Japanese occupation, the famines.

Return, for a moment, to Macartney's dismissal and the century of humiliation that seemed to follow it. Mühlhahn's book asks us to read that whole arc differently — not as proof of a civilization's decline and rescue, but as the first chapter in a long story of a society improvising its way through disaster. The empire that turned away the British was not asleep; the republic that failed was not empty; the reforms that made China rich were not a break with the past but its continuation by other means.