ABSTRACT

This volume contains a number of articles on modern Chinese history and historiography written by one of the leading academic experts on the subject. The author provides a critique of older approaches to nineteenth-century history and offers powerful reinterpretations of such key events in the recent history of China as the boxer rebellion, Mao's ascension to power in 1949, and the process of political and economic reform in the post-Mao era. This is a strong collection which will be of enormous interest to scholars of East Asian history.

chapter |22 pages

Introduction

China unbound

chapter 1|25 pages

Wang Tao in a changing world

chapter 3|20 pages

New perspectives on the Boxers

The view from anthropology

chapter 4|26 pages

as a religious war

The Boxer conflict of 1900 as a religious war

chapter 5|17 pages

Ambiguities of a watershed date

The 1949 divide in Chinese history

chapter 7|15 pages

Revisiting Discovering History in China

chapter 8|21 pages

Three ways of knowing the past