CHINA'S RE-EMERGENCE as a global economic powerhouse has compressed into a single generation an industrial and urban revolution on a scale the world has never seen. Its transformation looks to many foreigners, and to millions of newly prosperous Chinese, like a near-miraculous escape from the agonies of its recent history - late imperial, warlord-republican and Maoist. The great merit of Jonathan Fenby's vivid account of the years since 1850 is to underline how heavily that history still weighs on the present.

This book navigates the tortuous, heavily mined paths leading from creaking feudalism to sharp-clawed “Red” capitalism. Fenby traces a pattern of spasmodic lurches towards modernisation, ordained on high often without adequate planning, and “derailed time and again by reaction”.

In 1895, the Guangxu Emperor issued this order to high officials: “Follow the Western model completely, with merchants in full charge and officials defending merchant interests.” In 1992, here is Deng Xiaoping - on the famous Southern Tour when he decisively outflanked diehard champions of the command economy in the Communist leadership: “We must boldly absorb and draw on all fruits of civilisation...including advanced capitalist countries.” What then happened in the century between? People marvel now at how well China has done. They should, rather, marvel at just how badly China fared in the 30 years after Mao triumphed in 1949. Historically, civil peace was all that this industrious people needed to thrive. Mao's reign was a tragic aberration.

The thread that binds this complicated narrative is the raging battles for political dominance. From the weak but well-meaning Emperor who ended up the prisoner of the Empress Dowager Cixi, all the way to the about-turn effected by the arch-survivor Deng, policy shifts were about clinging to power. The upheavals and manmade disasters inflicted on Chinese lives - most monstrously, but not exclusively, by Mao Zedong - did not matter a damn.

The book is divided into six parts: the dying years of the Qing dynasty; Sun Yatsen's founding of the republic and its almost instant descent into warlordism; the three-cornered battle between the invading Japanese, the Nationalists and the Communists and the post-1945 civil war; the horrifyingly destructive permanent revolution of the Mao years; Deng's artful pursuit of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”; and a summary of the past two decades under collective leadership. The truncation of this last segment is surprising because although Chinese politics lost their drama as the dominant veterans of the Long March died off, it is in these years that much of China itself altered beyond recognition.

Fenby excels at weaving the strands of his complex narrative into heroic and more often harrowing tales. There are sharp pen portraits of the heroes and (mostly) villains of the piece: exotic monsters such as the Dog Meat General, or the Christian General whose men marched to the tune (but not the words) of Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, but also leading figures such as Sun Yatsen and Zhou Enlai - the first of whom emerges as a disorganised lightweight, the second as a ruthless accomplice to Mao's crimes.

Usefully, he helps us to see how the quasi-mystic Taiping rebellion and the Boxer rising fed the current Chinese leadership's paranoia about mystic sects such as the Falun Gong, and “people power” in general. He convincingly demolishes the Communist myth of Nationalist "appeasement" of Japanese: Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek's troops fought far harder than Mao's. Mayhem and excruciating cruelty in the warlord and civil war period, where Fenby draws heavily on his earlier biography of Chiang, help to explain why ingrained fears of “chaos” are still today strong enough for most Chinese to put up, grudgingly, with constraints on personal liberty - and why Mao, despite killing more people than Hitler and Stalin combined, attracted adulation as China's “unifier”. Fenby's enthusiasm is infectious.

Enthusiasm, however, leads Fenby into detail that newcomers to Chinese history will find bewildering, all without adding much that goes beyond books already published in the West. The gigantic bibliography inexplicably omits one of the greatest of these, The Communist Party of China and Marxism by the Jesuit priest-scholar Laszlo Ladany, a devastating indictment drawn from 30 years of exhaustive daily analysis of what was being said and written within China itself. There is a dearth of primary Chinese sources.

There are also imbalances. Mao's Great Leap Forward in 1959 engendered “the worst manmade famine ever seen” and caused, Fenby asserts, the deaths of up to 46 million. The Cultural Revolution Mao launched in 1966 deliberately set out to destroy the entire fabric of society through instigated chaos and cruelty. The Tiananmen democracy movement and its suppression, however dramatic and terrible, were nowhere near as significant as these two great traumas, yet that atrocity is treated in more exhaustive detail.

A Penguin History of Modern China should embrace more than politics. There is disappointingly little on how the powerless coped, on intellectual movements and the modern “cultural revolution” or on the deep social, economic and geographical gulfs opened up by lop-sided growth in a country where people over 40, raised in the grey egalitarianism of general poverty, are confronted by the biggest rich-poor gap in the world.

Too much can be made of the “uniqueness” of China. It is, for example, nonsense to assert that “the emperors of China were like no other sovereigns on Earth, claiming to be intermediaries between Heaven and Earth.” So did the Pharaohs, the incumbents of Japan's Chrysanthemum Throne, and Burmese and other Asian dynasties. That said, the contrast between the awe of outsiders at China's rise, and the anxieties surfacing in China's burgeoning think-tanks, has much to do with that ancient question of the Mandate of Heaven.

With the end of Maoism and, now, the dismissal of class struggle as an “incorrect concept”, China's rulers have no unifying belief system or ideology to buttress their control. The lesson of China's history is that nothing is more perilous than that deficiency.

The Penguin History of Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850-2008 by Jonathan Fenby
Allen Lane, £30; 763pp
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