Roads Not Taken: The Struggle of Opposition Parties in Twentieth-Century China

Studies of the political history of twentieth-century China traditionally have been skewed toward a two-dimensional view of the major combatants: the Chinese Communist Party and the Guomindang. Although their struggle undeniably has been the main story, it is neither the only nor the complete story. During the Republican period (1912-1949), many educated Chinese rejected both one-party dictatorships, and some boldly founded or supported alternative movements.
In this volume, the contributors turn their attention to these neglected parties, groups, and figures, making full use of new materials to provide the first English-language book to study these groups systematically. Tracing the post-1949 fates of some of these opposition movements in Taiwan and the People's Republic of China (PRC), the book also explores the contemporary heirs of the oppositionists of the Republican period - the democratic activists in the Overseas Democracy Movement that mushroomed after the June 1989 massacre in China. The book concludes with an insightful assessment of the parallels between opposition figures of Republican China and those in exile today.