China and in the context of world history

Recently I attended a talk about Liang Qichao, the Chinese scholar, journalist and politician, and it brought home to me how little I know about Chinese history. With this in mind, I read Rana Mitter's A Bitter Revolution: China's Struggle with the Modern World. Mitter sets what was going on in China in the context of what was happening in the rest of the world, a very broad approach to understanding history. China was the victim of imperialism since the Opium Wars of 1839. The British, and later the French and the Germans, and ultimately the Japanese, saw China as a backward country there to be exploited. In 1919, the Treaty of Versailles, where China failed to regain the Shandong province that was until then occupied by the Germans, brought home the high-handed imperialist view of China, and the resentment over this issue lead to the May 4 uprising. The protest was against imperialism, and colonialism. The protesters demanded modernization, democracy, and the end of Confucian domination of the Chinese social order. These demands kept recurring throughout the turbulent history of twentieth century China, although the meaning of these terms was understood differently by Nationalists, Communists, and other reformers. Just as in the rest of the world, particularly in Europe, modernization could mean the tradition of eighteenth and nineteenth century enlightenment, empirical science, and a rejection of religion, superstition, and myths about nationhood. It could also mean the exact opposite, a romantic view of the myths of the 'volk' the primitive wisdom of the simple people of the land, folk stories, tradition. Democracy was seen as a political system that enfranchised the individual, or alternatively, as seen though Fascism, the embodiment of the will of the people as manifested through a supreme leader. Just as in Europe, these conflicting views are reflected in the history of modern China. Mitter describes the changes in Chinese thinking through a re-evaluation of the writings of a handful of significant writers, Zou Taofen, Lu Xun, Ding Ling, and others, and the way these were interpreted at different times. He also draws parallels between Mao Zedung and his views of communism and that of Stalin, Gorbachev, and the disintegrating Soviet empire. Using a very broad brush, Rana Mitter not only wrote a fascinating account of modern China, but provided an insight into the key developments of world history.