The search for modern China
This book is the second edition of the author's history of modern China. The new discussions in this revision include the extension of imperial power into central Asia by the eighteenth century emperors, women's literacy and education in the Qing, the early development of Chinese nationalism, the roots of Chinese communism and alternatives to Mao, the early stages of the Great Leap Forward and of the Cultural Revolution. Also, there is a new chapter at the end of the book on economic, cultural, and political developments since 1989.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
5mentions
5people
2015–2026years
80% recommend20% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- <Red Star Over China> -> for the Communism side of china, why china choose this path.
<River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze> -> one of my fav all the time. a forigner teach in this small chinese city, and he write what he observes.
for more ancient chinese history:
<1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline> -> one of the most popular china's history book for these years. highly recommnded.
i read a lot but i doubt many of them has a non-chinese version. the above ones are the ones i can think of now.
also <The Search for Modern China> is highly recommmend, but i foget if i have read it or not.
oh also another book on how chinese characters are made, 《China: Empire of Living Symbols》。 writen by a Sweden author Cecilia Lindqvist. i love it very much
- On Chinese history: The Search for Modern China by Spence (1990)
On China's history told through several biographies: The Search for Modern China by Schell and Delury
On modern China and it's ambitions, from Xi himself (these are speeches so there will be propaganda): Xi Jinping: The Governance of China Volume 1
On tech in China: AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World by Kai-Fu Lee
- China is an interesting case of thousands of years of relatively modern social order with high coercion in many ways.
However, it's also a society that maintained high levels of family and clan based organization which counterbalance the atomization and individuality that you see in modern "Washington Consensus" societies.
I highly recommend "The Search for Modern China" if you are truly interested in thinking about these things in context. It's very pleasing and readable.
Modern China isn't as straightforwardly authoritarian as you might want to compare against.
North Korea might be a better choice.
- Jonathan Spence's The Search for Modern China is fairly decent, although it is not light-weight.
http://www.amazon.com/Search-Modern-China-Jonathan-Spence/dp...
- "The very fact that you can't have any political party of the CCP makes it undemocratic."
This claim is not accurate. I'm currently reading The Search for Modern China, and I was surprised to learn that there are, in fact, eight officially recognized political parties in China — all operating under the leadership of the CCP. One of them is even called the 'Taiwan Democratic Self-Government League.'
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