Historical study of international relations between China and the USA - covers Chinese demographic aspects and social structure, political leadership, the revolutionary nationalist social movement, the rise of the communist political party, the role of USA foreign policy, the role of USSR economic aid, socialist ideals, social change, cultural change, etc. Bibliography pp. 425 to 476 and maps.

These studies examine writings by Protestant missionaries in China from 1819 to 1890. The initial aim of the missionaries was religious--to bring the Gospel message to a Chinese audience. The social and cultural milieu tempered missionary efforts, however, and the scope of their writings--tracts, translations of scripture, periodicals, and books in Chinese--enlarged to include secular topics and information for the Chinese about the world outside. Simultaneously, Protestant missionaries wrote about China for American readers at home and thus became the strongest link between village China and small-town America.



Nine historians contribute to this composite picture of the missionary pioneers, the literature they produced, the changes they sustained through immersion in Chinese culture, and their efforts to interpret that culture for their constituencies at home.

Asian Studies, Sino Studies

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 Tienanmen Square demonstrate - eminently expendable. And here are China's farmers engaged in a never-ending backbreaking attempt to tame their temperamental countryside only to face repeated famine as China's agrarian-based economy fails to develop. At the center 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 in the style that is quintessentially Fairbank.
Show More
Show Less

作者对远古至现代的中国历史进行了系统论述,并提出许多有关中国史的论断.

"[A] masterful account of China's long and turbulent quest for modernity."
-- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. "The best one-volume account of what has happened in China, and to China, during the past two centuries."
-- Times Literary Supplement (London)