From abroad, we often see China as a caricature: a nation of pragmatic plutocrats and ruthlessly dedicated students destined to rule the global economy—or an addled Goliath, riddled with corruption and on the edge of stagnation. What we don’t see is how both powerful and ordinary people are remaking their lives as their country dramatically changes.
As the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, Evan Osnos was on the ground in China for years, witness to profound political, economic, and cultural upheaval. In Fortune, Truth, and Faith, he describes the greatest collision taking place in that country: the clash between the rise of the individual and the Communist Party’s struggle to retain control. He asks probing questions: why does a government with more success lifting people from poverty than any civilization in history choose to be the first regime since Germany in 1935 to prevent the relatives of a Nobel Peace Laureate from accepting his prize? And why do millions of young Chinese professionals—fluent in English and devoted to Western pop culture—consider themselves “Angry Youth,” dedicated to resisting the West’s influence?
Writing with great narrative verve and a keen sense of irony, Osnos follows the moving, illuminating stories of everyday people and reveals life in the new China to be a battleground between aspiration and authoritarianism, in which only one can prevail.

This book examines the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5, a significant event in world history virtually ignored in Western literature. Japan so rapidly defeated China that citizens of Europe suddenly perceived Japan, not only as the dominant power of Asia, but also as a key international player. Western disgust with Chinese military performance led to their rapidly growing intrusions on Chinese sovereignty while Japan soon became an ally of the ruling superpower, Great Britain. To the present day, China is still struggling to reverse the judgment of this war and restore its regional dominance.

狄百瑞就中国宋明理学的传统讨论中国思想中的自由主义特质。书中论及新儒学“学以为己”的个人自发色彩，其强调自得，相互激励等价值的教育思想，以及明代知识分子自任于天下的责任感，认为黄宗羲正代表了这种自由主义特质的新综合。在最后一章中，狄百瑞并讨论这种自由思想在当代中国所遭遇的困境。

Recognized for decades as the West's doyen on China, John King Fairbank here offers the full and final expression of his lifelong engagement with this vast, ancient civilization. Fairbank's masterwork, China: A New History, is without parallel as a concise, comprehensive, and authoritative account of China and its People over four millennia.

Favoured by the exceptional economic circumstances of the First World War and the immediate post-war years, Chinese entrepreneurs made their mark by modernising and establishing themselves as a business bourgeoisie. Focusing upon Shanghai, this study explores the astonishing growth of Western-style industry, commerce and banking during the Republic's first decade. Marie-Claire Bergere analyses how the bourgeoisie gradually constituted itself as a specific and coherent social class, with its own ideology and type of political action, built upon family solidarities and regional links; and she examines the relations between this class and the State, the Revolution and the West.

This illuminating study of the evolution of Chinese capitalism chronicles the fortunes of the Song family of North China under five successive authoritarian governments. Headed initially by Song Chuandian, who became rich by exporting hairnets to Europe and America in the early twentieth century, the family built a thriving business against long odds of rural poverty and political chaos.
A savvy political operator, Song Chuandian prospered and kept local warlords at bay, but his career ended badly when he fell afoul of the new Nationalist government. His son Song Feiqing inspired by the reformist currents of the May Fourth Movement developed a utopian capitalist vision that industry would redeem China from foreign imperialism and cultural backwardness. He founded the Dongya Corporation in 1932 to manufacture wool knitting yarn and for two decades steered the company through a constantly changing political landscape the Nationalists, then Japanese occupiers, then the Nationalists again, and finally Chinese Communists. Increasingly hostile governments, combined with inflation, foreign competition, and a restless labor force, thwarted his ambition to create an Industrial Eden.
Brett Sheehan shows how the Song family engaged in eclectic business practices that bore the imprint of both foreign and traditional Chinese influences. Businesspeople came to expect much from increasingly intrusive states, but the position of private capitalists remained tenuous no matter which government was in control. Although private business in China was closely linked to the state, it was neither a handmaiden to authoritarianism nor a natural ally of democracy."

本書的要旨，是要帶出十九世紀英國建立漢學與大英帝國培訓對華外交譯員的緊密關係，以及在這前題下，香港在英國漢學成立過程中的角色、位置及功能。過去討論到中國現代化的著作，都關注到中國如何通過各種翻譯活動而達到現代革新。事實上，不闇中國事務的英國，能夠在中國現代轉化過程中攫取準確的中國情報，讓英國國會及外交部釐訂適時及時的中國政策，大量的在華的英藉譯員功不可沒。這些英籍譯員均長時間在香港及中國生活，掌握中國第一手政情及民情，他們的另一特色，是他們結束遠東外交及政治生涯後，被英國最高學府羅致成為首任中文教授，他們遂利用自己的外交經驗、在地中國知識、管理殖民地願景得出來的一套實用中文知識，建構出有別於歐洲的漢學理念，奠下十九世紀創立的英國漢學基石。

Product Description
Illuminating one thousand years of history, The Pilgrim Art explores the remarkable cultural influence of Chinese porcelain around the globe. Cobalt ore was shipped from Persia to China in the fourteenth century, where it was used to decorate porcelain for Muslims in Southeast Asia, India, Persia, and Iraq. Spanish galleons delivered porcelain to Peru and Mexico while aristocrats in Europe ordered tableware from Canton. The book tells the fascinating story of how porcelain became a vehicle for the transmission and assimilation of artistic symbols, themes, and designs across vast distances--from Japan and Java to Egypt and England. It not only illustrates how porcelain influenced local artistic traditions but also shows how it became deeply intertwined with religion, economics, politics, and social identity. Bringing together many strands of history in an engaging narrative studded with fascinating vignettes, this is a history of cross-cultural exchange focused on an exceptional commodity that illuminates the emergence of what is arguably the first genuinely global culture.
From the Inside Flap
"The Pilgrim Art is a remarkable work of synthesis. With porcelain as his focus, Robert Finlay puts the histories of China, India, the Islamic world, Europe, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, and East Africa into dialogue with one another. In highlighting the interactions, exchanges, and influences that linked these regions, he makes a distinctive contribution to understanding of the global past. He blends the histories of production, distribution, and consumption with the histories of technology, trade, and art, as well as social history, commodity history, cultural history, political history, and literary history. The result is a rich stew of historical analysis combining close attention to detail with graceful writing and a clear focus on global themes. The Pilgrim Art ranks as an example of contemporary world history at its finest." --Jerry H. Bentley, Editor of the Journal of World History and author of Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times
"Finlay traces the rise and fall of Chinese porcelain across global flows of desire, artistic symbols and styles, innovation, espionage, competition and colonial power. This is commodity history as it should be written--exciting, engaging, with a masterful attention to regional context, be it France, Japan, India, or the Swahili Coast."--Stewart Gordon, author of When Asia was the World

From the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century to the Chinese Communist movement in the twentieth, no province in China gave rise to as many reformers, military officers, and revolutionaries as did Hunan. Stephen Platt offers the first comprehensive study of why Hunan wielded such disproportionate influence.
Covering a span of eight decades, this book portrays three generations of Hunanese scholar-activists who held their provincial loyalties above their allegiances to a questionable Chinese empire. The renaissance of Hunan centered around the revival of Wang Fuzhi, a local hermit scholar from the seventeenth century whose iconoclastic writings were deemed a remarkable match for "Western" ideas of progress, humanism, and nationalism. Advocates of reform and revolution thus framed their projects as the continuance of a local tradition--the natural destiny of the Hunanese people--creating a tradition of reform and nationalism that culminated in the 1920s with a Hunanese independence movement led by the young Mao Zedong.
By putting provincial Hunan at the center of this narrative, Platt uncovers an unexpected and surprising story of modern China that sheds light on the current resurgence of regionalism in the country.

一个现代国家的形成，离不开四个基本要素，即领土、人口、政府和主权。所以，我们要认识现代中国，至少须回答：中国作为一个以汉人为主体的内地各省和以少数民族为主体的各边疆所组成的多民族国家，在19世纪之前是如何成形并得以维系的？ 它在19世纪被卷入世界范围的主权国家体系之后，是如何维持自身的生存尤其是既有疆域，并在国际上获得对其主权的确认的？20世纪以来不同形态的国家体制，又是在怎样的历史背景下以及通过何种路径而形成的? 归根到底，我们需要回答，今天的中国究竟从何而来? 其疆域构成、族群组合和政权形态是否具有历史的合理性? 她到底是一个具有生命力的现代民族国家，抑或一个在疆域整合和政治认同方面依然面临重重危机的非常态国家? 这些问题不解释清楚，中国作为一个现代国家的历史正当性，及其在西方历史经验基础上所建构的国际政治话语中的合法性，便会受到质疑。
欲重新认识现代中国，有必要从过去宏大历史叙事的窠臼以及“碎片化” 的泥潭里解放出来，站在新千年的全球地缘政治的高度，重新探究对今日中国的历史认识最具挑战性的问题。如果我们对当代中国不是仅仅从政权性质的角度加以界定，而是从更宽广的角度，把它定义为一个现代主权国家，那么，整个中国近现代史的宏大叙事和概念架构，均有待重构。在前述组成现代国家的四个基本要素中，除政权外，还必须考虑到疆域、族群构成和主权形成问题。最为重要的是，政权本身也必须放在国家形成的宏观历史视野里加以理解。中国的近现代史，换句话说，是中国朝向一个现代主权国家转型的历史。这一历史的时间跨度和涵盖范围，远远超出了过去以革命或现代化为主叙事的历史书写。