This book is not only a family history. Joseph Esherick tells us in his preface that the book is “founded on the proposition (borrowed shamelessly from feminist theory) that ‘the personal is political’” (p. xiv). In his conclusion he identifies the “central thread” of the story as “the impact of great events of modern Chinese history on several generations of a Chinese elite family” (p. 313), but he also argues that everyday life—the concerns, attitudes, and decisions that emerge from within the family—have a major impact in shaping the social and political events that historians try to explain.
In order to persuade us that the Ye family's journey is more than just a collection of life stories from the family of the author's in-laws (p. xv), Esherick needs to combine the analytical and historiographical skills for which he has long been respected with a fluid, highly original narrative. He must introduce both the personalities and the politics of strikingly different eras precisely and critically, but empathetically, to readers with varying degrees of familiarity with Chinese history. In this reviewer's judgment, he succeeds masterfully at this.
In the course of this personal-political narrative, the author identifies a number of watershed moments. The first occurs when Ye Kunhou and his son Boying, scions of a middling gentry family from Anqing, serve as provincial-level officials, helping the Qing to defeat Taiping rebels and restore order (1853–68). Another occurs with the rise of Social Darwinism and radical reform movements and their influence on both family and state after 1900. A third arises with the emergence of a new generation of Ye siblings from Tianjin into a world of war and revolution in the 1930s. With our eyes focused on the interactive influences of family life and political events, these particular watersheds take on special significance.
In brief, the nineteenth-century Ye were distinguished from their forebears by their different path to official rank and their ultimate alienation from their Anqing roots. They owed their careers and their status not to examination success but to meritorious service. Esherick finds that “their careers were important precisely because they were unremarkable” and pronounces their concerns and achievements “typical of the late Qing officials who emerged during the Tongzhi Restoration” (p. 70).
Two generations later, the Ye family in Tianjin was heir to the dramatic changes that followed the restoration. The civil service exams now extinct, even the preface to the family genealogy of 1906 expounded “a popular modern notion of the family as a building block for national unity” (p. 108). The wife and two concubines of the Tianjin patriarch also joined his noble mother in shaping such a “modern” family. The core family relationships involved the grandmother, mothers, nannies, and tutors, along with eleven siblings born between 1908 and 1924. This generation improvised their ways through transitions from arranged marriages to independent nuclear families. For four of the Ye brothers, this transition was inseparable from their experience at Nankai middle school and the politicization of students that continued through the war against Japan.
The author deftly weaves together the life stories of these four brothers through the war years in order to underscore the significance of his “central thread” connecting familial and national events. As each man “charted his distinct professional and political course,” these choices decisively shaped their roles and experiences under the People's Republic (p. 219). The thread continues through the brothers' adaptations and contributions to the New China, their persecutions and incarcerations through the Mao years, and their return to families and professional communities in the years that followed.
Neither historians nor social scientists will be able to ignore the analysis of the family's personal experiences during the Anti-Rightist and Cultural Revolution campaigns, which Esherick bases on memoirs, public documents, and conversations. Democratic League leader Ye Duyi's memorization of his interrogations in Qincheng Prison (p. 298), the perceived impact of international contingencies on Ye Duzhuang's incarceration and rehabilitation (pp. 276, 298), and the experience of provincial-level cadre Ye Fang's entire family, which Esherick calls “quite typical of what happened in many party members' households” (p. 289), are all invaluable contributions to our understanding of the era. Historians should also pay close attention to the details and sources the author brings to bear regarding late Qing and Republican social and political history.
Esherick finds the resilience of the Chinese family to be “one of the most striking lessons of this chaotic period” (p. 294). He does not mean to imply some sort of essential continuity of “the Chinese family.” Indeed, he underscores the changes in the “nature and meaning of family” itself over the past century (p. 313). Yet he concludes that despite all claims to the contrary, “the actual result of the Cultural Revolution may have been a strengthening of family ties” (p. 296). The evidence for “elite” family bonding and resilience over the decades of political upheaval and social change is persuasive. The extent to which this resilience persists is part of a history that, in Esherick's words, “waits to be written” (p. 316).
