CHINA by John King Fairbank ( 9780674116702 ) - Books & Audio Books at Pickabook.co.uk

Item Details

Title:

CHINA
A NEW HISTORY

By:

Format:

Hardback

List price:	£19.50
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ISBN 10:

0674116704

ISBN 13:

9780674116702

Publisher:

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Pub. date:

1 June, 1992

Edition:

2nd

Pages:

540

Description:

Bringing to bear 60 years of research, travel and teaching, Fairbank's history 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.

Synopsis:

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.

Illustrations:

60 b&w illustrations, 30 maps, 8 tables, suggested reading, author index,

Publication:

Imprint:

Harvard University Press

Returns:

Non-returnable

Some other items by this author:

A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF CHINESE COMMUNISM