Miiya Holmes
Book Review
Gregor, A. James. A Place in the Sun: Marxism and Fascism in China’s Long Revolution.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000.
During an Age when globalization has spread throughout the world and is now including
those countries once in isolation, the question still remains focusing on why has democracy not
come to everyone. The professed communist country of China is beginning to lead the way in
capitalist enterprises and their economy is growing at a steady rate. How can this be possible?
Dr. Anthony James Gregor answered this question in A Place in the Sun as it chronicles the
development of nationalistic thought in China’s revolution.
Gregor is a political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His areas
of expertise lie in the fields of fascism and Marxism. He has written several books on the
fascism of Italy and outside of it such as his 1969 work The Ideology of Fascism and his 1979
work Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship. He has also written biographies of
Mussolini, and Giovanni Gentile. There are also pieces done by him on twentieth century China,
and the ideology of Sun Yat-sen. His political belief that democratic liberalism is the best system
of government really shines through in this work.
Gregor’s main thesis is that China’s long revolution is a consequence of the real or
imagined imperialism by the developed nations, and it has followed patterns similar to the
reactive nationalism of fascist states rather than patterns of a true Marxist one. The author
contends that much of the violence of the twentieth century has been caused by this reactionary
nationalism including the actions of China as nations search for their “place in the sun.” Given
the right circumstances a reactionary regime could easily become fascist. From National
Socialist Germany, fascist Italy, Stalinist Soviet Union, and post Qing dynastic China, to the
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and the Argentinean invasion of the Falklands, reactionary nationalism
more than Marxism has been the driving force for twentieth century revolution and many times
its violence.
Beneath this main thesis are smaller ones dealing with the various aspects and
developments of the revolution beginning with Sun Yat-sen through Deng Xiaoping. One thesis
is that China’s revolution had nothing to do with Marxism and class warfare. Gregor supports
this thesis by explaining what classical Marxism is and what it says about unindustrialized
nations. He points out that in a true proletariat revolution can only happen in a country that has
been industrialized and has a proletariat mass. China, being underdeveloped, missed the first
criteria for a socialist revolution to even be able to form. Not only was China not able to follow
down the path of a genuine Marxist revolution, neither was Bolshevik Russia. From this line of
reasoning, the author alludes to the fact that the United States and its allies during the Cold War
were not in conflict with Communism but reactionary nationalism because there has yet to be a
truly communist nation.
Another sub-thesis expounding the main one was that the principles of Sun Yat-sen were
reactionary nationalistic but in his long range plans for China, democracy was at the end of the
tunnel. Sun Yat-sen recognized that authoritarian rule might be necessary to get China
producing but eventually that would give way to a more westernized democratic form of
government. For him, capitalism and socialism would work together to develop a greater China
by means of joint involvement of state initiative and private capital. To obtain capital, developed
nations had to play a role or the industrialization process would take a long time.
Gregor realized that the revolution of Sun Yat-sen and the Kuomintang had many
features in common with that of fascist Italy because both could be held under the same
classification of reactionary or developmental nationalism. Both sought to loose themselves of
the imperial oppression by the developed nations by becoming industrialized themselves but
unlike with fascism Sun Yat-sen believed that industrialization would eventually lead to
democracy. They were also guided by the belief that a Marxist style revolution would do more
damage than good in their nations’ struggle for industrialization. Gregor emphasized that both
Sun Yat-sen and Mussolini were against a class war that could was designed to split the nation
instead of bring it together in order to do what needed to be done.
Another thesis that Gregor examines was that the Chinese Communist Party used the
principles of Sun Yat-sen as their main slogans. These slogans lead to the success in rural China
that the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek was never able to gain. The author also noted that
when Chairman Mao moved away from these principles, that is when China began to fail and not
progress as economically planned. This lead to the final thesis that only when Deng Xiaoping
returned back to ideas and strategies set out by Sun Yat-sen did China begin to prosper. Deng
Xiaoping’s policy of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” was really just Sun Yat-sen’s
principles finally being used in the way they were intended. One main difference that Gregor
notes is that the new CCP does not seem to want to head towards democracy as Sun’s original
schematics planned.
Gregor spends a great amount of time on the failure of Marxist theory to explain the
occurrences of twentieth century China. He clarified several Marxist and non-Marxists theories
in regards to the development of China. Some of these theorists are J.A. Hobson, Marx and
Engels, N. M. Roy, Mary Matossian, Freidrich List. When he agreed or disagreed with a theory,
it was obvious and he gave support of why for each case citing historical evidence from the
recent history of China.
His criticism of Marxists for not recognizing the aspects of fascism that they shared was
very thorough. He explained that Marxists had missed the mark when they explained fascism as
being a bourgeois ideology when the underlying factors were that both ideologies had more in
common than differences. He was also critical of Marxist not recognizing the importance
nationalism played in events of the twentieth century. He identified the characteristics of the
long revolution of China with the theories of Freidrich List. List examined the necessary traits
an agrarian society would need to be able to develop rapidly. These were the need of the nation
to control, “the flow of trade, capital, and technology that penetrated its sovereign space – as
well as that sovereign space itself” (89).
One criticism of the information provided was that no solutions are provided to remedy
the problems that Gregor lists that have come from a miscalculation of the true type of
government that China has. One conflict of the provided information was that Gregor seemed to
imply that the government of Sun Yat-sen was fascist by the characteristics listed in everything
except the ultimate goal of becoming democratic but he condemned the Marxist theorists and
CCP for doing the same thing. Another slight problem was that Gregor tended to repeat himself
not just between the chapters but within the chapters themselves.
The book is definitely written for an audience of higher learning with a higher
understanding of political science, economics, and philosophy. Each chapter is designed to be
able to stand on its own as an essay with a Notes section following but they also work well
together. The sources used range from primary and secondary works, books, articles, and
previous published works by Gregor. The book provided great insight into the underlying
factors of not just China’s revolution but those of other countries during the twentieth century. If
the policy towards the CCP were to be based on the reality of what the government really is and
not what it is perceived to be, real progress might be capable.