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| Additional Physical Format: | Online version: Fairbank, John King, 1907-1991. China. Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992 (OCoLC)555551137 |
|---|---|
| Document Type: | Book |
| All Authors / Contributors: |
John King Fairbank |
| ISBN: | 0674116704 9780674116702 |
| OCLC Number: | 25008188 |
| Description: | xvii, 519 p. : ill., maps ; 25 cm. |
| Contents: | Pt. 1. Rise and decline of the Imperial Autocracy -- Origins: the discoveries of archaeology -- First unification: imperial Confuncianism -- Reunification in the Buddhist age -- China's greatest age: northern and southern song -- Paradox of song China and inner Asia -- Government in the Ming dynasty -- Qing success story -- Pt. 2. Late Imperial China, 1600-1911 -- Paradox of growth without development -- Frontier unrest and the opening of China -- Rebellion and restoration -- Early modernization and the decline of Qing power -- Republican revolution, 1901-1916 -- Pt. 3. The Republic of China, 1912-1949 -- Quest for a Chinese civil society -- Nationalist revolution and the Nanjing government -- Second coming of the Chinese Communist Party -- China's war of resistance -- Civil war and the Nationalists on Taiwan -- The People's Republic of China, 1949-1991 -- Establishing control of state and countryside -- Great Leap Forward -- Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976 -- Deng Xiaoping's reforms, 1978-1988. |
| Responsibility: | John King Fairbank. |
| More information: |
Abstract:
Bringing to bear sixty years of research, travel, and teaching, Fairbank weaves a richly detailed history that reaches from China's neolithic days to its troubled present. With a deft hand, 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, 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 richly illustrated history unfolds in the wise yet often unconventional style that is quintessentially Fairbank: informal, witty, magisterial, and clear. Informed by the most recent scholarly research, this delicately nuanced and broadly interpretive introduction to the Chinese people and their past will enlighten both the novice and the seasoned China-watcher.
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