Book review: China's Fintech Explosion: Disruption, Innovation, and Survival by Sara Hsu and Jianjun Li

Abstract

settlement . . . was the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek, not the Communist government of Mao Zedong’ (p. 13). Chapters 2 through 5 explore the uneven, often contentious, at times comical elevation of the profiles of Chiang Kai-shek and his party for their World War II and post-war roles. Mitter traces the evolution of historical narrative through the lenses of an expanded latitude for historians, a less constrained public sphere, public memorialization, and the evolving symbolism of Chongqing and Yan’an (the respective wartime bases of Chiang’s Nationalists and Mao’s Communists). Among the interesting episodes discussed are the phenomenon of ‘Kuomintang/Republican fans’ (國粉) and the Nationalists’ 1938 victory against the Japanese in the Battle of Taierzhuang. Praise of the Kuomintang for success in the latter was eased by the fact that one of the generals, Li Zongren, defected to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) after the Communists’ victory in the Chinese civil war. The final chapter follows the new, guardedly pro-Nationalist narrative onto the global stage. Here, the party narrative has highlighted the immediate aftermath of World War II, especially the November 1943 Cairo Conference. That meeting between Allied leaders Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek receives far less attention amongWestern historians than do the earlier Atlantic Charter or the subsequent Allied meetings at Tehran and Yalta – none of which involved Chiang. Mitter sees some justice in Chinese pique at such neglect. ‘Few in the West have explored China’s wartime goals as seen through Chinese eyes’ (p. 28). In post-1980s Chinese narratives, China’s contributions both to the war effort and to the creation of a new post-WorldWar II global order constitute a key rationale for the PRC’s role in helping to shape the still emerging order of the post-Cold War world. AswithChinese public and cultural diplomacymore generally, these efforts have included awkward moments. An early poster for the 2015 movie, Cairo Declaration (dir. Wen Deguang and Hu Minggang), for example, featured Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin (neither of whom attended the conference), along with Roosevelt and Churchill. The film’s semi-fictionalized Roosevelt anticipates Xi Jinping’s China, declaring that ‘China’s war has changed the world. China is a responsible world power.’ Some readers may find helpful the author’s subtle application to his material of theories about vectors and circuits of memory. ‘Soft power’ will be familiar to more readers. Mitter offers occasional observations on contemporary politics beyond (though geopolitically related to) China, such as populism and internationalism. Finally, he includes numerous suggestive analogies – to civil wars in Spain and Greece, to the collaborationist Vichy government in France, to successive wars in Vietnam, to more stable memories of World War II in most Western nations – which might be fruitfully pursued in future scholarship.