China

A New History

Enlarged Edition

John King Fairbank

Merle Goldman

    China sets out to cover, in 432 pages of text, the entire span of China's history from the Paleolithic cultures...to the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, and it does so with a brisk and sprightly air but also with an awesomely thorough overview of the current scholarly work of scores of historians. The book is indeed a kind of reprise...of Fairbank's life as a reader and teacher...An admirable achievement.
       --Jonathan Spence, New York Times Book Review

    One has to admire the smooth self-assurance with which Fairbank lopes through the centuries, effortlessly incorporating the latest and best in English-language scholarship, and he is, of course, hard to beat on the Republican period, to which he himself was a witness.
       --T. H. Barrett, Times Literary Supplement

    History, Fairbank says, is what we historians think happened, and this volume is Fairbank's distillation of what he thinks happened in China from the time of Beijing man some 400,000 years ago to the Beijing massacre of June 4, 1989. It is an ambitious, audacious undertaking, befitting the man who was the progenitor of modern China studies in the United States.
       --Anne F. Thurston, Boston Globe

    [This book] elegantly synthesizes a prodigious range of recent scholarship and is equally ambitious in chronological sweep...The result is a multilayered, multicausal extravaganza, dealing with cosmology, economics, state institutions, social forces, even daily life--a kind of `All under Heaven under one cover"...Anything but pedantic, it bubbles with relaxed wit.
       --Paul M. Evans, Globe and Mail

    Manages to tell its sprawling, turbulent, 4,000-year story in a single volume without either losing clarity or oversimplifying its subject...Rich and fascinating.
       --Arnold R. Isaacs, San Francisco Chronicle

    Will serve for decades to come as a standard reference and textbook.
       --Robert L. Worden, Washington Post Book World

    This remarkable New History from the hand of the doyen of historians of China, John King Fairbank...bears eloquent witness to the depth and breadth of his knowledge and understanding. This is no mere reworking of generally accepted ideas of developments in China under successive dynasties. Here is a fertile enquiring mind at work, keeping pace with a flood of new research...He writes here with an easy authority, with zip and zing, and sometimes the use of the first person, challenging and stimulating.
       --Victor Funnell, Asian Affairs

    A scholarly but readable introduction to the broad sweep of Chinese history.
       --David Mattin, The Times

    Succinct, highly readable and "down to earth," this updated version of Fairbank's last work combines the erudition born of a half-century of scholarship with the educator's sense of relevancy and organization...China: A New History provides the general reader and students with a highly accessible and readable introduction to the vast history of one of the world's oldest surviving civilizations...Overall, this text is a fitting culmination to an exemplary life devoted to both teaching and research.
       --Jeffrey Dippmann, Education about Asia

    This new edition is superb. The interpretative themes structuring Goldman's concluding chapter are strong and convincing. Illuminating comparisons are drawn between the Deng Xiaoping and earlier eras. Although not soft-pedaling the insistently authoritarian character of China's leadership in the political realm, Goldman takes due note of the impressive gains in personal freedom that marked the Deng years. A compelling history. Authoritative, cogent, and skillful.
       --Paul A. Cohen, Wellesley College

  • Cover: China
  • A photo of the author

John King Fairbank was Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and Director of the East Asian Research Center at Harvard University.

Merle Goldman is Professor of History, Emerita, at Boston University and Associate of the John K. Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University.