China: A New History - Tapa dura

Will serve for decades to come as a standard reference and textbook. -- Robert L. Worden "Washington Post Book World" Manages to tell its sprawling, turbulent, 4,000-year story in a single volume without either losing clarity or oversimplifying its subject...Rich and fascinating. -- Arnold R. Isaacs "San Francisco Chronicle" One has to admire the smooth self-assurance with which Fairbank lopes through the centuries, effortlessly incorporating the latest and best in English-language scholarship, and he is, of course, hard to beat on the Republican period, to which he himself was a witness. -- T. H. Barrett "Times Literary Supplement" History, Fairbank says, is what we historians think happened, and this volume is Fairbank's distillation of what he thinks happened in China from the time of Beijing man some 400,000 years ago to the Beijing massacre of June 4, 1989. It is an ambitious, audacious undertaking, befitting the man who was the progenitor of modern China studies in the United States. -- Anne F. Thurston "Boston Globe" This book elegantly synthesizes a prodigious range of recent scholarship and is equally ambitious in chronological sweep...The result is a multilayered, multicausal extravaganza, dealing with cosmology, economics, state institutions, social forces, even daily life--a kind of All under Heaven under one cover..."Anything but pedantic, it bubbles with relaxed wit. -- Paul M. Evans "Globe and Mail" "China" sets out to cover, in 432 pages of text, the entire span of China's history from the Paleolithic cultures...to the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, and it does so with a brisk and sprightly air but also with an awesomely thorough overview of the current scholarly work of scores of historians. The book is indeed a kind of reprise...of Fairbank's life as a reader and teacher...An admirable achievement. -- Jonathan Spence "New York Times Book Review" This remarkable "New History" from the hand of the doyen of historians of China, John King Fairbank...bears eloquent witness to the depth and breadth of his knowledge and understanding. This is no mere reworking of generally accepted ideas of developments in China under successive dynasties. Here is a fertile enquiring mind at work, keeping pace with a flood of new research...He writes here with an easy authority, with zip and zing, and sometimes the use of the first person, challenging and stimulating. -- Victor Funnell "Asian Affairs"

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.