The Penguin History Of Modern China: The Fall And Rise Of A Great Power (1850-2008)

摘要

China's extraordinary transformation during the past 30 years has broken the near monopoly that Sinologists once had over the generation of insight and understanding of the country. Beijing's global engagement in just about every sphere of life and the coincident revolution in communications have produced a torrent of public information, personal experience, analysis and commentary about the country. Much of this comes from those outside the traditional world of Chinese studies. It is the work instead of gifted writers, sharp observers and intelligent laypersons for whom the great drama of China's development provides rich material for journalism, novels, travelogues, works of popular history of the kind under review here, and much else.rnIn his Penguin History of Modern China Jonathan Fenby, a senior British journalist, has taken a long look at the plentiful English language scholarship on the last 150 years of Chinese history, combined it with a degree of personal experience, and drawn upon both to produce an engaging narrative of the "fall and rise of a great power." A former editor of Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, he adopted a similar approach in his biography of Chiang Kai-shek, Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the China He Lost (Free Press, 2003), exploiting to good effect the lack of any recent study of the former Chinese leader in English.