Book: China's Millions

Overview
Anna Louise Strong's "China's Millions" (1928) offers a lively, first-hand portrait of China during the fragile aftermath of the Northern Expedition and the early consolidation of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government. Written by a journalist who moved through cities, factories, and the countryside, the narrative balances reportage, social observation, and political commentary. Strong aims to capture the energy and contradictions of a country trying to remake itself after decades of warlord rule, foreign encroachment, and social upheaval.

Historical Context
The book is set against the decisive years when the Kuomintang attempted to unify China and assert central authority. The urban transformations of Shanghai, the tremors of labor and student movements, and the continuing plight of peasants and rural areas all frame the Nationalist leaders' struggle to translate military success into stable governance. International pressures, treaty ports, and foreign capital are constant backdrops to the domestic efforts at reform and modernization.

Major Content and Scenes
Strong moves between vivid city scenes and quieter rural portraits. She records the bustle of Shanghai and other treaty ports where commerce, foreign influence, and political intrigue intersect, describing factories, unions, and the new public life in streets and cafés. Encounters with workers, students, teachers, and local officials yield concrete sketches of the social forces reshaping China. She also travels through provinces where land questions, banditry, and local power structures show how tenuous central control remains and how modernization often falters at the village gate.

Political Observations
The assessment of Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist leadership is nuanced and occasionally critical. Strong admires the attempt to impose order and build institutions, yet she repeatedly points to compromises with landlords, business interests, and foreign powers that undermine social justice. Her attention to suppressed labor organizing and the marginalization of radical reformers leads to a sustained worry that political consolidation without meaningful social reform will leave China's masses dissatisfied. At the same time, she notes genuine attempts at educational and administrative reform that give a sense of cautious hope.

Social and Economic Change
A central concern is the uneven nature of modernization. Railways, factories, and modern schools coexist with antiquated land tenure, illiteracy, and precarious peasant livelihoods. Strong foregrounds how economic change alters social roles, particularly for women and young urban workers, and she examines migration patterns that feed industrial labor pools. Her reporting emphasizes the human face of statistics: the anxieties, aspirations, and informal networks that accommodate or resist change.

Style and Perspective
Strong writes in a direct, accessible journalistic voice that blends anecdote with broad interpretation. Her sympathies toward labor and reform give the account an activist edge, and she often frames events through the experiences of ordinary people rather than elite policy pronouncements. While this gives the narrative immediacy, it also colors her political conclusions; readers should note the blend of observation and advocacy.

Legacy and Usefulness
"China's Millions" remains valuable as a contemporary eyewitness account of a pivotal moment in modern Chinese history. It supplies color and detail often missing from purely academic studies and illuminates the social dynamics behind political developments. At the same time, the book reflects the author's political commitments, making it most useful when read alongside other contemporary accounts and later historical analysis to balance perspective and trace longer-term outcomes.