The United States and China

Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged

ISBN 9780674924383

Publication date: 01/01/1983

For two generations scholars and general readers have looked to John King Fairbank’s The United States and China for knowledge and insights about China. In this fourth edition, enlarged, he includes a new preface and an epilogue that brings the book up to date through the events of 1982. He has also updated the vast bibliography and both indexes. This book stands almost alone as a history of China, an analysis of Chinese society, and an account of Sino–American relations, all in brief compass.

The older portions of the book still sparkle, and they have been refined by the latest scholarship and the author’s own observations in the People’s Republic of China. And many photographs, especially chosen by John and Wilma Fairbank, show a changing land and its inhabitants.

Praise

An indispensable book for thoughtful people.

—New York Times Book Review
Fairbank provides a miraculously concise account of Chinese civilization from its foundations to the present day… Maps, photographs, and an 80-page bibliography make this an invaluable reference work.

—New Republic
[Fairbank’s] ability to transcend the academic to write a highly readable, authoritative, information-packed, perceptive and analytical account of the Chinese is unsurpassed. This is must reading for all Asiaphiles.

—Asia Mail
Still flashes with brilliance in its latest (fourth) incarnation… With this latest edition of what is arguably the best guide to China in any language, American and other non-Chinese readers may finally catch a glimpse of the ‘very complex’ Chinese way of life.

—Asiaweek Literary Review
As useful and timely as when it first appeared in 1948. Written by America’s foremost China scholar, John Fairbank, the book addresses a popular, not the academic, audience. It offers a sweeping view of the Chinese polity from ancient times up to the recent, convoluted period of Western contact, spiced by the wit and insight into detail of a geographer who drew the maps himself… Yet the book offers much to the specialist as well as the layman. To the historian, a state-of-the-art review of the latest historical analysis of modern China… To the student, a cogent guide to the field… For the diplomat and businessman, the work explores that most intangible but also most influential area of human feeling between the two countries that has launched ventures and derailed them.

—China Business Review
The best general introduction to the Chinese political system… A book of love and great learning.

—Kirkus Reviews