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Despite efforts to attain a more balanced approach, Western historians have largely interpreted China's modern period in terms of China's "response to the West." To a surprising extent, this bias has prevailed even among Chinese historians, for whom the reaction to imperialism has remained a dominant concept. This book, by a scholar who is neither Chinese nor Western,goes far to set the balance right. Min Tu-ki, Korea's leading Sinologist, shows how China's own internal agenda has conditioned Chinese political life during the transition to modernity. Min sets the stage with two chapters about Chinese scciety under Ch'ing rule, one on a Korean visitor's reaction to eighteeenth-century China, the other on the social condition of the lower gentry. Each casts new light on the Chinese elite and their relation to state power. The chapters that follow-particularly the discussion of "political feudalism"-examine the conceptual resources available within the Chinese tradition for coming to terms with modernity. Min's internalist approach provides both a creative new vision of the encounter between two civilizations and a distinguished introduction to Korean Sinology.
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International scholars and sinologists discuss culture, economic growth, social change, political processes, and foreign influences in China since the earliest pre-dynastic period.
In "Facing Japan", Parks M. Coble focuses on how events that took place during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria - from 1931 until war erupted in 1937 - affected the Chinese goverment and public opinion. Both in the places where incidents occurred and in other centres of power, Japanese threats, attacks, and economic demands pressed Nationalist China relentlessly and aroused popular indignation. Throughout most of the period, Chiang kai-Shek was trying to wrest control of China from all domestic rivals. Aware that his army was inferior to Japan's, his Nationalist government repeatedly made concessions in response to Japanese provocations. Chiang busied himself with anti-Communist campaign...
This analysis of the interplay among people and of events leading up to the reform acts of 1898--the Hundred Days--and their abrupt termination presents a new interpretation of the late Ch'ing political scene. The Emperor, the Empress-Dowager, and high-court personalities are followed through the maze of motives and relationships that characterized the power structure in Peking. Of special interest is Kwong's treatment of K'ang-Yu-Wei, often viewed as the Emperor's advisor during this period and a major source of reform policy, a prominance largely derived from his own writings and those of Liange Ch'i-ch'ao. Those sources are here examined and shown to be less than objective, and K'ang's role is assessed as far more peripheral than heretofore believed.
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