The Penguin History of Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850-2008
By Jonathan Fenby
Allen Lane £30, 816 pages
FT bookshop price: £24

“Oppose one-bookism,” Chairman Mao once demanded of writers in socialist China. The task of revolution, he argued, was too urgent to indulge artists who wanted to spend years on just one volume, however finely crafted. Fortunately, writers in the bourgeois capitalist world are still allowed to nurture such a book, and in the case of Jonathan Fenby’s new History of Modern China, we should be grateful for that. His book is a powerful revisionist account of a country whose history needs to be understood if the west is to comprehend China’s role in the present and the future.