With each passing decade, it becomes harder to write a history of modern China. The problem is not merely the accumulation of events, but the proliferation of competing themes. As China seemingly presents a new face to the world in each succeeding decade – as imperialist victim, revolutionary ideologue, pragmatic reformer or energetic entrepreneur – a background must be sought in the recent or not so recent past. The search for modern China is in a sense unending. Pamela Crossley is both honest and straightforward when she writes: “This book has put the pieces of Chinese history since roughly 1800 into a shape that makes sense to me. Nevertheless, I have attempted to supply the reader with sufficient pieces that he or she may rearrange them if the need to create a more sensible shape is felt” (p. ix), and she is as good as her word. The book she has produced is organized around a singular perception of modern Chinese history, but it offers a thorough and engaging narrative that provides the detail necessary for teaching and learning.

What is most intriguing about this volume is its vision of what has remained constant in the past two hundred years in China. The book is not about rebellion (“not a major theme here” [p. 16]), or, for that matter, revolution. Nor is it foreign imperialism that drives the story here, although the episodes of Sino-foreign interaction that punctuated China's history are richly and thoughtfully told. Rather, a “small paradigm of arousal and pacification” underlies the story. The arousal is from the people. From earliest times, Crossley writes, Chinese governments have been confronted by protest from elites and masses, and have responded with measures of repression and appeasement appropriate to the scale of the event. Chinese government, today as in the past, is thus neither democracy nor despotism, but a field of negotiations between state and society in which each uses its own weapons and bargaining chips, and neither achieves long-term dominance, although through a temporary “hypertrophy” one side may gain the upper hand at a particular moment. Issues change, technology changes, and state and society play for different stakes, but the pattern of state-society interactions does not change, and history finds its expression in the ebb and flow of petition and response, protest and reaction. Ultimately, order is kept through a kind of “surface tension.”

Given this view, changes in the political form of governments are not as decisive in this volume as they would be in more conventional political narratives, and perhaps the most interesting feature of The Wobbling Pivot, apart from its ingenious title (explained early in the volume), are its chapter divisions. Four divisions are particularly interesting. The period from 1895 to 1913, an era which saw the fall of a dynasty, the birth of the republic, the rise of constitutional assemblies, and much Japanese imperialism, is here treated as the “Beiyang Ascendancy,” a title which points to the continuing influence of a group of military figures whose careers began in the Beiyang Superintendancy of Trade. Warlord conflicts, world war and civil wars are treated in a single chapter entitled “War.” This may seem inapt to those who see wars as conflicts over values or ideas, but it probably closely approximates the experience of those who lived in China from 1925 through 1949, and experienced the period as one of endless armed conflict. Events from 1949 through 1976 are treated in a single chapter that specialists accustomed to seeing some break at the Great Leap Forward may find frustrating. But Crossley's concern is with the re-constitution of the “Ubiquitous Center,” which continues to pay its eternal “cat and mouse” game with Chinese society. The twists and turns of the post-Mao years are treated as the product of “Gravity,” the title of the last chapter.

This is not to say that major political events or social developments are not treated in the book; the story is narrated carefully and intelligently, but occasionally with the mute button pressed. In the experience of war, as in other respects, the book may in fact capture Chinese perceptions of events better than histories which impose Western categories. The book serves as a fascinating set of short essays on what surely are major concerns of the China field at present. As a textbook, The Wobbling Pivot is accessible, complete and readable, and a synthesis of twentieth century Chinese history, it is both original and provocative, and a valuable introduction to the perennial issues that China poses in the undergraduate classroom.