Modernization and Revolution in China

📖 The Scoop

In this important text, now revised and updated, the drama of China's struggle to modernize unfolds against the backdrop of a proud and enduring history. Spanning the Opium War to China in the late 1990s, the book narrates the great episodes that highlight that journey: the breakdown of imperial China in the face of relentless Western and Japanese encroachments; the rise of the new Chinese republic; the early struggles between the ideologies and armies of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong; China's bitter and costly war with Japan; the final shootout that sent Chiang to Taiwan and Mao to Beijing; and the long years of the People's Republic -- culminating in the reforms of Deng Xiaoping and tragically punctuated by the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and Tiananmen. As China emerges from the abyss she was in during the teenth century to become a world-class economic superpower of the post-Cold War Asia-Pacific region, this book is essential for understanding how China reached these new heights.

"This is a good undergraduate textbook. ... Controversial and lively and ends up being quite a pleasaure to read. Strongly recommended to all university students in the field". -- Journal of Contemporary Asia (on the previous edition)

Genre: History / Asia / General (fancy, right?)