China : a new history
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
China : a new history
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, c1992
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 435-490) and indexes
Description and Table of Contents
- Volume
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ISBN 9780674116702
Description
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 backbreaking attempt to tame their temperamental 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 in the style thst is quintessentially Fairbank.
Table of Contents
- Introduction - approaches to understanding China's history: the variety of historical perspectives, geography - the contrast of North and South, humankind in nature, the village - family and lineage, inner Asia and China - the Steppe and the Sown. Part 1 Rise and decline of the imperial autocracy: origins - the discoveries of archaeology - paleolithic China, neolithic China, excavation of Shang and Xia, the rise of central authority, Western Zhou, implications of the new archaeological record
- the first unification - imperial confucianism - the utility of dynasties, princes and philosophers, the Confucian code, Daoism, unification by Qin, consolidation and expansion under the Han, imperial Confucianism, correlative cosmology, emperor and scholars
- reunification in the Buddhist age - disunion, the Buddhist teaching, Sui-Tang reunification, Buddhism and the state, decline of the Tang dynasty, social change - the Tang-Song transition
- China's greatest age - Northern and Southern Song - efflorescence of material growth, education and the examination system, the creation of neo-Confucianism, formation of gentry society
- the paradox of Song China and Inner Asia - the sybiosis of Wen and Wu, the rise of non-Chinese rule over China, China in the Mongol Empire, interpreting the Song era
- government in the Ming dynasty - legacies of the Hongwu emperor, fiscal problems, China turns inward, factional politics
- the Qing success story - the Manchu conquest, institutional adaptation, the Jesuit interlude, growth of Qing control in Inner Asia, the attempted integration of policy and culture. Part 2 Late Imperial China, 1600-1911: the paradox of growth without development - the rise in population, diminishing returns of farm labour, the subjection of women, domestic trade and commercial organization, merchant-official symbiosis, limitations of the law
- frontier unrest and the opening of China - the weakness of state leadership, the White Lotus Rebellion 1796-1804, maritime China - origins of the overseas Chinese, European trading companies and the Canton trade, rebellion on the Turkestan frontier 1826-1835, opium and the struggle for a new order at Guangzhou 1834-1842, inauguration of the treaty century after 1842
- rebellion and restoration - the great Taiping rebellion 1851-1864, Civil War, the Qing restoration of the 1860s, suppression of other rebellions
- early modernization and the decline of Qing power - self-strengthening and its failure, the Christian-Confucian struggle, the reform movement, the Boxer rising 1898-1901, demoralization. (Part contents)
- Volume
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: pbk ISBN 9780674116719
Description
Written by a well-known scholar on China, this text offers an expression of his lifelong engagement with this vast and ancient civilization. Fairbank's work provides a concise, comprehensive and authoritative account of China and its people over four millennia, from the emergence of Beijing man in the Paleolithic culture to the Tiananmen massacre of 1989.
by "Nielsen BookData"
