Product Description

Bringing to bear 60 years of research, travel, and teaching, Fairbank weaves a detailed history that reaches from China's neolithic days to its troubled present. He depicts a country ever-changing and yet constant in its effort to achieve a cohesive identity, an enormous and enormously complex nation perpetually balancing between the imperatives of force and the power of ideas. Here are the Chinese autocrats in their various times and guises, maintaining Confucian civility and order through - paradoxically - the perpetual threat of irrational imperial violence. Here is the intellectual class, revered for its wisdom and counsel and yet - as events from the Cultural Revolution to the massacre in Tiananmen Square demonstrate - eminently expendable. And here are China's farmers engaged in a never-ending attempt to tame their countryside only to face repeated famine as China's agrarian-based economy fails to develop. At the centre of all stands the Chinese family, until recently the model for both obedience and tyranny in society at large. Fairbank traces the growth of a civilization that could embrace so many contradictions and disruptions and yet retain a strong sense of its identity. Following China's ambivalent relations with the West and with the forces of modernization, he identifies, even in the great leap forward signaled by the Communist Revolution, the assumptions that have informed Chinese society for thousands of years. From the influences of Buddhism through the flowering of Song China to the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, this illustrated history unfolds.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #620925 in Books
• Published on: 1998-08-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 568 pages

Review
Will serve for decades to come as a standard reference and textbook. -- Robert L. Worden "Washington Post Book World"

Customer Reviews

Good solid introduction to Chinese history
This is the revised edition of Fairbank and Goldman's introduction to Chinese history since the Neolithic.

It is neatly divided into 4 sections: (1) The rise and consolidation of the various Chinese empires up to 1660; (2) The late Imperial era, 1600-1911; (3) The Republic of China, 1911-1949 and (4) The PRC (and Taiwan), 1949 to the mid 1990s. An introductory chapter develops the recurrent themes of Chinese history - geography, humanity in nature, village, family, lineage, settlement vs. the steppe etc.

The book is well supported by references for further reading and research.

Overall, I would recommend it for use by advanced undergraduates, exceptional senior high school students, or the well-read general reader.