This book is an appealing candidate for the “one” book on China that specialists are often asked to recommend to readers with little or no knowledge of the place. It is engaging, in some places downright chatty, and never condescends. Its chronological framing—ostensibly the period from 1750 to the present, but in substance the 1890s to the present—is practical, its coverage is wide-ranging, and it has some outstanding maps (perhaps the best being of contested territories in South Asia). Its organization is thematic, and the chapter headings are broad (“Imperialisms,” “Japan,” “War,” and “Communism” among them), which would appear to present handy landmarks for grazing by general readers.
The book's structure and the casual flow within the chapters do not obscure a basic plot arc: After centuries of prominent participation in international trade and cultural exchange, China had sunk to the bottom of an isolationist, politically radical trough in the 1960s. The mutually reinforcing factors driving China inward were gradual alienation from the Soviet Union and the catastrophic failure of the Great Leap Forward. But in the depths of isolation in 1969, Mao had the idea that connection with the United States was the answer to China's domestic and international problems, and at the same time it occurred to Nixon that China was the answer to the domestic and international problems of the United States. From that point on, China and the United States were entwined in a complex dance of trust and suspicion, cooperation and rivalry, reserved friendship and shaded hostility. As China assumes its role as the world's largest economy and enters the top tier of military powers, the world's fate will be determined by China's new international role—and that will be determined by its domestic political stability and economic development.
The author warns that “China”—past, present, and future—is a dynamic proposition. Partly for this reason, adhering to the dichotomy of “native” and “foreign” will produce mirages, since the two are porous and mutually transformative. Attempting to predict China's future, too, is hazardous, especially for those who think the best guide to the future is the past. Whether attempting to define China, to find the boundary between China and non-China, or to mark the threshold between the past and the present, the author's advice is to avoid absolutes and “essential terms.” That is good advice.
The secondary scholarship behind the text is respectable but not exhaustive, and the interpretations are in line with the main currents in the past quarter-century of scholarly work on China. Inside the text, claims to revisionism are modest. A shadowy group usually called Some Historians is active on about a dozen pages, making claims such as that China in Qing times was insular, that an absence of a scientific tradition promoted rapid Chinese adaptation of twentieth-century science and technology, that Maoist eradication of a generation of political leadership cleared the way for fresh faces and ideas, that the changes of the 1980s were profoundly discontinuous with the 1970s, and other theories that the author makes bold attempts to refute (not always in very specific ways). Readers should be assured that Most Historians think on these and other subjects just the way author Westad thinks. In a rare moment of dyspepsia, the author comments, “There is a lot of nonsense about the role of concessions that has been written both by Chinese and foreigners” (p. 60). There follows vague discussion of the small foreign residency of the concessions as well as the production of an invigorating “hybridity” in concession cities, but exactly how this reduces other discussions to “a lot of nonsense” remains notional. For the most part, the treatment here is reiterative, not revisionist—including unexamined essential terms, such as “empire,” “Confucianism,” Communism,” “imperialism,” “Han” and “non-Han,” and, yes, even “foreign” and “foreigners.”
The book's strongest passages place China in the international context since 1970. Discussions of Japan, the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia (including Soviet architectural and city-planning influence), India (but not Pakistan), Vietnam, Burma (but not Thailand, Cambodia, or Laos), and Indonesia (but not the Philippines) have body, texture, and sustained interpretation. Coverage of Africa is surprisingly vague, contributing to an impression that China's isolation in the early 1960s might be overstated and the complex intertwining of industrial, strategic, and cultural initiatives in the twenty-first century may not be adequately explored. Environmental issues, whether in China, at its peripheries, or in Africa and Southeast Asia, are evidently not considered important—one of the few instances in which the book diverges from the conventions of current China study.
