A well-made book belongs, as indicated in the output data, to the number of scientific and educational publications. The author has done a lot of work on collecting and systematizing material on a very complex topic, as evidenced, in particular, by the bibliography attached to the text. However, the text itself is so full of event descriptions, names, and details that it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to use it for educational purposes. And as a scientific monograph, it is clearly inferior to many others, who otherwise choose the topic and goal. My idea boils down to the fact that when creating a work on such a topic, you should probably prefer a different genre, less capacious in terms of texture, but more saturated with understanding what exactly happened to China over the recent past century.

I do not want to say that there is no author's position or not enough. The concept that interprets the material as a whole, with its voluminous cycles, not precisely defined terms like "formations" and the obvious desire to be in the presentation and interpretation of events as if above the battle (the Chinese and the West, the Kuomintang and the Communists, the Maoists and their opponents) is constantly present, obsessively and repeatedly repeated and explained. But the weakness, from my point of view, is that it does not give the impression of being thoroughly thought out and strictly verified. And this is despite the fact that the author has written more than one book about China in the XX century. However, maybe that's why. So much has changed in the world, in Russia, and in thinking in the decades that have passed since he and I lived together in science that it is not easy to compare what was written about and how it was written in the past with what it actually was and even more so looks like today. Much has been left unsaid by the author. That is why my comments will be primarily not on the text (although there are many of them), but on what is not in the book, but what should be said.

I would title my review "From Hatred of the West to the Triumph of Westernization", which I think would make sense to focus on. But there is almost nothing about this in the peer-reviewed book. We are talking about the cardinal importance of the changes that are fateful for the country, how it relies on its unique and positive traditional foundations, which over the millennia have forged a certain socio-political standard of being, and therefore the corresponding worldview and value system of views and the mentality of the population caused by it, far from being reduced to cycles with peasant wars (which, however,, was a very important manifestation of all that is inherent in China), in the XIX-XX centuries. managed not only to survive, but also to flourish unheard of. Faced with new realities, like the rest of the world outside the European West, China did not become a colony, was not destroyed in incessant wars, and although it did not escape the plagues of totalitarianism, it succeeded and became a great power. In fact, this was the content of all that China was and achieved in the twentieth century. But this is my understanding of the essence of events. In O. E. Nepomnin, it is not that it is completely different, but it is not very clearly defined, and even more so summed up.

I am far from calling on the author of the book to take my position and blame him for writing the wrong thing and not the way I would have done it in his place. And it's not really about what it's more important to talk about, and many people would not support me in case of an argument. But what is the main meaning of events? You can, of course, just conscientiously describe what happened to China in the twentieth century. And this has already been done a hundredfold. Given that the process and concrete steps of history are unpredictable, and every country, big or small, has its share of accidents at any time, and the road always has a fork in the road, one can be happy that China has successfully survived everything that has befallen it. But when, with all possible forks, the steps, taking into account their speed and taking into account movements in different directions, and even with reversals, still led to the maximum

If the result is successful, we can judge what contributed to it, and why it turned out that way.

From this point of view, it is important to evaluate the work devoted to the history of China in the XX century. I repeat, it is sound both in terms of the material collected by the author and in terms of the breadth of coverage of problems related to the history of the long-suffering population of the country. Another thing is how much it fits all this history into the context of modernity. O. E. Nepomnin has a predominant intention, not too pronounced, but quite obvious, to limit himself to describing its various stages, and there is a lack of desire to give a general principled assessment of what China has come to (totalitarianism has been replaced by authoritarianism and that seems to be all), i.e. the reader must judge for himself. This style of presentation can be considered an ideal to strive for. And in this case, the reviewer usually has to deal with numerous minor quibbles in order to reproach the author for all the inaccuracies or errors, which are always quite a lot in any large work. Especially for all the things in which it is unacceptable to go beyond what has long been generally recognized.

I won't do it. And O. E. Nepomnin often allows himself to go beyond the limits, which I see as the advantage of his work. For example, it does not abuse the concept of "revolution" in relation to the events of the first half of the century. And rightly so, because all the coups or wars that led to major changes in China were anything but revolutions in the normal sense of the word (the transition from one socio-political structure to another is not the result of an evolutionary process that ends with political changes, but a powerful short-term explosion that forcefully sweeps away the former regime, which happened in history extremely rare ¹). In general, there are a lot of not very noticeable, but still novelties in the book, which can be seen already when you get acquainted with the table of contents, indicating the search for a way to understand well-known and repeatedly overestimated events. However, not all of them should be recognized as successful. Thus, the difference between China and Taiwan is not that on the mainland the Communist Party has brought the country to a mixed-transition type of multiculturalism, but that Taiwan has succeeded in creating a developed capitalist society (p.654). That is, this complexity is nothing more than forced, and after it-the movement to the same Western standard. And this is the whole point of the history of modern China.

The twentieth century began in China with the primitive and superstitious Yihetuan movement, which sought to expel Western "barbarians"from the country. It was the reaction of a great country that was in a state of crisis due to its violent Westernization. After all, China is a very ancient civilization, the outstanding creator of which is rightly considered to be the sage Confucius (551-479 BC). Not being the founder of a religion or a prophet, he taught people to live according to strictly verified rules of highly respectable human ethics, the essence of which is that the main thing in everyone's life is to be worthy in this worldly life, cultivate virtue, respect people, and have a deep sense of duty. Taking care of the elders (ancestral worship, filial piety - xiao) and learning from them a righteous life, everyone should strive to achieve the maximum possible. In particular, to be able to achieve prosperity through hard work and great effort, combined with a high level of self-control and discipline, in conditions of constant self-improvement and competition with others. The pursuit of petty profit and gain must yield to the great nobility of wisdom of the intelligent and capable, who can and are willing to lead others on the right path of truth and justice.

Confucianism has played an unsurpassed role in the history of China, and perhaps of all mankind. I call it the Yang tradition. This masculine constructive tradition was counterbalanced by the opposing Buddhist-Taoist yin² tradition, characteristic of the illiterate peasantry, which appealed more to instinct than to reason, and therefore differed in other attitudes. In times of crisis, with its accompanying internal instability, it usually led China to violent protest movements aimed at returning to its usual social stability. Both traditions co-existed consistently. In harsh periods, destructive yin came to the fore. Its manifestation was the Yihetuan movement. Mao and Maoism, as well as the peasant war described in detail by O. E. Nepomnin, which decided the fate of China in the middle of the XX century.-

¹ This is my understanding of this phenomenon. I cannot insist that the author perceives it in the same way as I do, but the fact that he does not use the concept to refer to something completely different from what should be called a revolution deserves to be noted (see: [L. S. Vasiliev. Universal History in b vol. Vol. 3: From the Middle Ages to the New Time (XVI-XVIII centuries). Moscow, 2008, ch. 23, p. 542 et al.]).

² L. S. Vasiliev. Istoriya religiy Vostoka [History of Religions of the East], Moscow, 2006, p. 634. History of Religions, Moscow, 2008, p. 723.

7*

li (the red color of Maoism is only an entourage). It is very important that the short duration of the violent explosion caused by yin, as well as the impressive duration and conspicuous constructiveness of Confucian yang, was a reasonable norm for the dynamics of cycles.

The clever Empress Cixi, who ruled the country, decided to rely on Yihetuan in the hope of getting rid of the West that she hated. And although she had to get out of it later, and most of her advisers understood that the fight against Westernization was useless and it was time to adapt to the new one, the fact is worth paying attention to. It should also be recalled that the empire, which was in a state of crisis for a long time, was penetrated not only by Western goods, especially weapons, but also by new ideas, creative and destructive. The first, which led to the emergence of ideas about the republic, democracy, rights and freedoms, and the separation of powers, were associated with those who, like Sun Yat-sen, received an education in the West and then became the first president of China. However, the destructive, Marxist-communist ideas came from the same place, from the West. Thus, from the beginning of the twentieth century, a country that opposed the obsolete Manchu dynasty, and with it the empire, began the path to a new one under the banner of Westernization that was alien to it, although few people were aware of this. The main thing then for everyone was different.

Nevertheless, de facto, tacitly, westernization took its toll. In less than two decades of the new century, the empire was replaced by a republic, a parliament led by Sun emerged in the West's most turbulent south, then, one by one, barely breathing republics with other presidents, communists appeared, and with them the first Soviet advisers. And once established, both sides, the bourgeois Kuomintang of Sun, and after it with the new leader Chiang Kai-shek, as well as the Communists with Mao, who did not come to the leadership immediately, began to prepare for a power struggle. This is described in detail in the book of O. E. Nepomnin, and I only emphasize the role of the Westernization process (note, not colonization) in everything, considering this to be the most important.

Westernization is a fundamentally new way of life for the country, first for the cities, then for everyone. These are railways and steamships, telegraphs and banks, new goods and urban buildings, factories and factories, the bourgeoisie (foreign, then their own) and bourgeois private property, the transformation of income into interest-bearing capital, the world market and the flourishing of market entrepreneurship. Later, cars and planes, radio and television, electronics and mobile phones, computers and the Internet, rockets and space. Everything came and was borrowed from the West, forming the essence of Westernization. Finally, new institutions and ideas that promoted positive transformation were also Western. For a pragmatically minded China, all these values were not, as for more backward countries and peoples, something completely incomprehensible and alien for a long time. On the contrary, desperate resistance in the country quickly gave way to active adjustment. The only tragedy was that two different traditions (as in the past) violently clashed - constructive and destructive.

Faced with a severe, all-encompassing crisis and the usual state of peasant war, the country quickly and easily accepted Marxism, reinterpreted for the needs of the backward peasantry and introduced from the West. The Kuomintang of Sun, and especially of Chiang, also relied on the West in its struggle against the Communists, and at one time, having succeeded in single combat (the Nanking Decade, 1928-1937), achieved a lot, which the author of the book clearly underestimated (p. 308 et seq.). But the fate that emerged in 1937 in the form of the Japanese war with China, and then World War II, was unfavorable for constructive Westernization. The Chinese peasants, who were no different in this respect from any other, preferred the promises of the Communists. This led to the defeat of the Kuomintang. The boundary of the 1940s and 1950s defined the territorial separation of the two Chinas. However, the competition between constructive and destructive ways of Westernization (Taiwan's prosperity and the collapse of the foundations of the unviable regime built by Mao) put a fat end to the competition after Mao.

The post-Mao leadership, forgetting about his experiments, began in 1978 to implement the reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping, which cost so much and took the country three decades, and quickly began to catch up. Drawing on the traditions of antiquity and keeping in mind the precepts of Confucius, China, organized to the limit by strict tradition, was ready for a decisive change of course. Accustomed to the well-recognized social discipline and accustomed for centuries to constant productive work, the people did the most important thing - instead of sociopolitical experiments, everyday work came, which surprised the world with how quickly and successfully the turn was made by the CCP's party workers. It turned out that as an organization, this new type of party turned out to be very different from the CPSU in something very important: its functionaries (ganba), it seemed

the old Chinese imperial administration and its officials, the privileged social stratum of the literate (shengshi), would have remained so similar to our domestic nomenclature³. Without understanding the fundamental difference between the two, much will remain misunderstood.

The book says something about this, but somehow casually, with a dig, especially at the address of "reform" (author's quotation marks, p.623) Dan. Meanwhile, these reforms were not just radical and decisive - they proved to be a salvation for the country. It is thanks to them that China has become what it is today. Westernized, but burdened by the tradition of imperial governance, the administration clearly understood its status and responsibilities to the country, people, and social order. Her recent task of upholding an obscurely accepted destructive ideology that might now be considered transitory, not even mandatory (Dan:" it doesn't matter what color a cat is, as long as it catches mice properly"), has gone without much guidance. And instead of it, while maintaining the communist entourage, without changing it overnight, came the usual: to ensure that society is managed in such a way that it does its job. And if the business goes smoothly and brings income, and not to the authorities, but to society as a whole, which will not offend anyone in vain, the administration was able to quickly change and actively promote a prosperous society.

If this requires a developed, recently called capitalist (now this term is often dispensed with, because capitalists in the developed world have been replaced by managers), market-private entrepreneurship and well-run millionaires, then all this will be given due preference, because it is beneficial for China. If a rotation of top management is needed, this will also be the case, since the guarantee against claims to dictatorship is also beneficial for China. And if soon the country and the people will be ready for elections, for multi-party parliamentarism, and even in general for the ideological and institutional ancient-bourgeois and, even scary to say, liberal-democratic system of life, then there is no doubt that in time the communist power will still go for this, as a result of which China will turn into a communist country. almost a Western-style society. Almost - because the country will always, no matter what, remain Confucian, this is the basis of its repeatedly justified civilizational identity.

This, in fact, is the triumph of Westernization. It cannot be said that O. E. Nepomnin did not pay attention to the changes in modern China (the turn of the XX-XXI centuries). On the contrary, he wrote the whole part " Return to the authoritarian regime "(pp. 589-636). From the title, it is clear that they perceive the changes in a different way. There is nothing about Westernization, not to mention the great civilizational identity of the country, except perhaps the word "modernization" (p. 624 et seq.). I am far from thinking that the author should join me in seeing modernization in the non-European world as the result of a long, intensive Westernization, ⁴ which has not spared Russia either. But that's why I formulate my attitude to China today, because I think this, and not anything else, is the most important thing that is happening and will continue to be implemented in this country for a long time.

China is on the rise and continues to surprise the world. As for the problem of power, we are faced with the traditional Eastern structure of power-property, which I have described many times in my works on the history of Ancient China, the East, and the entire history of mankind. But there is no emasculation of the private owner typical of this structure in modern China; on the contrary, it is given considerable opportunities. One gets the impression that the authorities and the entire ruling elite in China are concerned not only with the interests of the treasury and the ability to make billions at its expense, which sometimes happens, but also with the desire to quickly improve the situation of the people who are working hard for this. Those who have not yet understood such a policy and are trying to snatch their own, easily find themselves, regardless of rank and position, in the dock, and sometimes lose their lives. In other words, the rigid Marxist dogma - with all the outwardly still expressed respect for it - was naturally and expectedly replaced by traditional pragmatism. And the Chinese courts are strict on anyone, and no one can hide from them. Everything in the sphere of law and law enforcement is based on punishments for crimes, and not on the choice of the authorities. All this should be taken seriously in a book about twentieth-century China.

³ Let me remind you that it has been the responsibility of the administrative staff to nominate the smart and capable since ancient times, and the exam system also assumed rotation of officials, which does not correspond to the rigidity of the Soviet and post-Soviet nomenclature systems.

⁴ L. S. Vasiliev. Modernization as a Historical phenomenon, Moscow, 2011, pp. 116 et seq.

Of course, it would be necessary to accompany the story about this with what made it possible to achieve this. Of course, it is not yet a Western-type democracy, which practically does not exist. The electoral system in China cannot be considered democratic in any way, it is regulated and restricted from above. But let's just say that there was hardly any reason to hope that in a country with such a large peasant population, completely unfamiliar with the basics of democracy, the situation could have been different. It is worth remembering that China, unlike island Taiwan, was freed from the totalitarian regime with all its experiments only in 1978. But today, as a mixed-type society, it actively seeks to adopt and transform Western standards in a suitable style. How does this manifest itself? The country is almost free of the unabashed arbitrariness that characterizes totalitarian societies. The strictness of its laws - written and unwritten, traditional, as mentioned above-more than captures this, without disturbing the constructive rhythm of life that is so familiar to a disciplined people in the absence of a severe internal crisis. And the main thing is that in China everything is done in order to direct people's energy to the sphere of useful and productive work, in order to promote their initiative and ingenuity. The country, not hesitating to continue actively pursuing a policy of vigorous Westernization, including borrowing everything that is useful to it from developed countries and sending the best to study in these countries for many years to come, as if shows the world what its success is all about. But why does its current supposedly communist leadership pursue such a policy? This should also be mentioned in the book.

Let's pay attention to this guide. Where else can you find an authoritarian regime in which every ten years, regularly, as in some USA, one supreme ruler (even if not the president, but the chairman) replaces another? And this is done not by the choice of the authoritarian ruler, but by the decision of the collective. This may not be a popular decision, but it does not depend on the choice of the bearer of power and therefore does not have the character of inheritance, which significantly distinguishes it from the authoritarian principle of governance. In reality, this means that no one feels unpunished, free from responsibility for their actions. No doubt, the reason for this is the strict Confucian tradition of an honest approach to the country's governance process. About all this, at least in the conclusion of the book, O. E. Nepomnin also needed to say.

The Constitution of the country, as is well known, insists on the priority of the socialist system and even the democratic dictatorship of the people; socialism is still forbidden to be undermined. But what is significant is that very interesting amendments are constantly made to the text (for example, the amendment on the creation and improvement of the social security regime, protection of private property, respect for and guarantee of human rights, adopted in 2004). It is clear that innovations of this kind at the level of a high constitutional text are intended to indicate that the country is moving in a very specific direction. This is also evidenced by the rapprochement with bourgeois-democratic Taiwan. Under the new Taiwanese President, Ma Yin-ju, who was elected in 2008, regular air and sea links with the continent were opened and a mutual course of rapprochement was taken. And since Taiwanese people who invest heavily in the continent's economy are already frequent visitors to China, this means that the road is open for Chinese tourists who want to visit the island. So far, there are not many of them, only a few thousand a year, but the main thing is that the very important task of bringing China, which is still firmly holding on to the socialist system and led by the CCP, closer to the liberal-bourgeois republic and a Western-type society, such as modern Taiwan, is that Taiwan is not an enemy, but part of China. However, this is not mentioned in the special ninth part of the book on Taiwan (pp. 637-655).

For such a huge block as China, the speed of change is mind-boggling. This is also supported by the Confucian tradition. The country, without oil, gas, metal ores, or timber, is now making such rapid progress and in a short time has achieved such results in the process of successful Westernization that one can only marvel. But why does the natural course of events move it in this direction? Because this is a country of very smart, skilful and capable practitioners who are guided by what leads to success. Of course, not everything in this great country today is absolutely going well, as it may seem. We should not forget that almost the largest part of the population living in the west of China, far from the sea and all the over-developed coastal and adjacent infrastructure with its huge, bursting cities, is still far from the prosperity that the eastern part of the country has achieved. And this glaring difference is not only striking in the eyes, but also strongly affects the prospects of the country. Raise the backward periphery, give work to many hundreds of millions of diligent workers and skillfully fit everyone into a successful promotion

Moving forward is not easy. I am not sure that this is even possible, although I have no doubt that the Chinese leadership thinks about this no less than about the real future overpopulation of the country, which also cannot but be considered one of its most painful places.

China is on the path of becoming a bourgeois liberal democracy with the preservation of a Confucian civilizational identity - this is my main conclusion, which I have formulated in a careful form in my works before. It is still far from being a Western-type society, but it has already chosen this path, and this choice has brought unprecedented success to the country. And the advantage of such a path is proved not only by China, but also by countries that are civilizationally close to it, such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Vietnam, as well as some Southeast Asian countries, follow the same path, and the similarity between them is that, despite their dominant religion and corresponding traditions (Buddhism, Islam, and even Christianity, as in the Philippines), Chinese migrant colonies that set the tone for the economy (huaqiao) live there as a significant intersperse.). And they - these interspersions from Huaqiao - are yet another convincing evidence of the power of the Sino-Confucian principle in the process of Westernization of the non-Western world.

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