Synopses & Reviews
This fully updated second edition provides a succinct and self-contained history of China. The text emphasizes the relationship between China's modern era and its past, employing a unique approach that presents the story in terms of traditional Chinese historical theories. When the West enters the scene in modern times, Schrecker fits its impact into the Chinese story, rather than the reverse, as is commonly done. This study demonstrates that traditional China was not homogeneous or changeless, thus offering a much-needed corrective to common stereotypes about other cultures that is essential for both classroom use and for the general reader.
Review
John Schrecker has neatly sabotaged the habit of shoe-horning Chinese history into categories of analysis derived from Western experience. He recasts the familiar narrative in a vocabulary drawn from old Chinese ways of understanding Chinese politicds. While retaining a social scientist's sensibility, he challenges the implicit conclusions about Chinese history that ineveitably flow from a Western frame of reference. The effect is to see it all afresh.Ernest P. Young University of Michigan
Review
In this remarkably original synthesis, John Schrecker integrates Chinese and Western history in the last two hundred years. Instead of applying Western concepts of historical analysis to China, he seeks to understand modern history, both of China and of the West, through Chinese historiographical categories. The reader will appreciate not only the Chinese historiographical tradition but also the way this tradition enriches one's understanding of world history. An ambitious, much needed study.Akira Iriye Harvard University
Review
...a historical narrative certain to be of great value to students of politics and society. It is at once lively and engaging and theoretically sophisticated. By adopting a Chinese perspective and applying it not only to China itself but also to the interventions of the West, Schrecker opens the way for a new comparative history.Michael Walzer The Institute for Advanced Study
Synopsis
Offers a succinct history of China in terms of traditional Chinese historical theories, emphasizing the relationship between China's modern era and its past.
About the Author
JOHN E. SCHRECKER is Professor of History and Chair of the East Asian Studies Program at Brandeis University. He is also a member of the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University. Among other works, he is the author of Imperialism and Chinese Nationalism, the co-author of Mrs. Chiang's Szechwan Cookbook, and numerous articles. In 1998, the first edition of The Chinese Revolution in Historical Perspective appeared in Chinese translation.
Table of Contents
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION
China through 1800
Ancient China and the Development of Chinese Thought
Junxian China
Foreigners and the West
The Revolution
Rebellion and Western Pressures
The Fall of the Qing
Disunity, the Nationalists, and the Communist Victory
The People's Republic of China
APPENDIX
NOTES
GUIDE TO PRONUNCIATION
GLOSSARY OF CHINESE TERMS
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MATERIALS CITED
INDEX