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China: A History
Eminently accessible, yet rigorous, this engaging introduction to the political, social, and cultural development of Chinese civilization tells the story of China--from its beginnings to the present day--in a way that goes beyond simple, misleading accounts of a glorious civilization falling victim to Western and Japanese imperialism or of a supposedly isolated country only recently and reluctantly opening to the outside world. Woven into the narrative are the striking stories of heroes and villains, of women and men, of tragedy and comedy, of high culture and coarse humor, of extremes of wealth and poverty, of feast and famine, and of exquisite art and terrible suffering.
Characteristic of Harold Tanner's presentation is the development and carefully balanced recounting of important themes--such as the ethnic diversity of the early empires, interaction with other civilizations, and the challenge of transforming a multi-ethnic empire into a modern nation-state--that other histories of China omit entirely or discuss only minimally.
Includes a chronology, suggested further readings, illustrations, maps, and an index.
Characteristic of Harold Tanner's presentation is the development and carefully balanced recounting of important themes--such as the ethnic diversity of the early empires, interaction with other civilizations, and the challenge of transforming a multi-ethnic empire into a modern nation-state--that other histories of China omit entirely or discuss only minimally.
Includes a chronology, suggested further readings, illustrations, maps, and an index.
624 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 3, 2022
An outstanding one-volume history. Topics and eras are covered with an excellent blend of depth, conciseness, analysis, and clarity. I learned so much, especially how themes that go back centuries or even millennia influence the China we see today. I just wish the book extended into the Xi regime!
November 27, 2020
This basic history of China lays out the political and cultural history of this huge nation that I know little about. It's strange in a way, how much more I've read about Japan and how much more I feel I know its culture (even before I did a Japanese reading list, I had read many works by Japanese writers, whereas I've read virtually no Chinese literature). That isn't to say that I know Japan well. As with China's history, the history of Japan is one I've read on multiple occassions and have quickly forgotten outside of the twentieth century. I don't know why that is exactly, but I suspect that there are various reasons: (1) Western history is drummed into us in school growing up, while the history of the East is only touched on; and (2) the history that most touches on us and our world directly is the one that we remember best--hence, why I can remember twentieth-century history in addition to that of the West but not so much the East.
One thing Tanner does a good job of in terms of setting up his account is denoting how multicultural China really is. We tend to think of the nation as a single people, but in fact, while the Han dominate the country, there are many other ethnic groups who have been integrated into the nation--and that over centuries: Monguls, Manchus, Tibetans, Urghars, Turks, and so on. Tanner does a good job of showing how many of these ethnic groups have dominated the nation at one time or another--and how they are different from one another.
In a sense, Chinese history until the twentieth century is fairly repetitive. It is a tale of the rise and fall of various monarchies, usually with periods of destablization and disunity between said monarchies. An epigraph about one-third of the way into the book sums up the first third of the work (and arguably sets up the pattern for the next third of the work):
"They say the momentum of history was ever thus: The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus the House of Zhou reached its end and the empire as partitioned into save warring kingdoms. Thus these seven were absorbed into the House of Qui. Then Han and Cho destroyed Qin and waged war on each other until the empire was reunited under the House of Han, reinvigorated by Guangwudi and passed down the generations to Xiandi, the last of the Han, after whose generation the land was partitioned into three kingdoms."
After these would come the Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, with a similar pattern as noted. The Mongols would rule China under the Yuan dynasty, the Mings under the Ming dynasty, the Manchus under the Qing. Each conquering peoples would, in fact, often take on various Chinese customs in order to better fit in with the peoples and the former noble classes, including most especially Confucianism and to a lesser extent Taoism. The Mongols included a number of Nestorian Christians. Indeed, while religion was very much a background item in this book, I would be curious to know more about some of the religions that less associated with China in the present day, like Eastern Christianity and Islam, because they clearly had their adherents at one time in the land.
Things change quite a bit in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The weakness of the later Qing dynasty meant that the country was in large part ruled over by local warlords whose in-fighting left the door open for manipulation by colonial Western powers, who established areas of control over commerce and the subjugation, in many ways, of the Chinese nation. China moved during this stage toward the establishment of a republic, but the inability of political leaders to bring the nation into true unity and to throw off Western powers left open the door for a growing Communist movement (which itself had been part of the movement toward the Republic). Consigned to the rural areas, Mao Zedong and others built a loyal following that eventually established political dominance and the eventual of exile of the republic to the island of Taiwan. Most of the political moves during this time were to a large extent motivated by a desire to reestablish Chinese hegemony over its own territory, and the Communist movement essentially succeeded.
After pushing landlords out of much of their property, the Communists forged various programs to encourage economic growth of the country. Communal farms were given quotas of various sorts and people rewarded for them. Excess production was allowed to be sold on the market by individuals, which led to further growth. But there were also various problems that centralization created. Rosy but inaccurate reports from locals regarding production eventually led famine.
The Communist Party largely dissuaded people from dissenting with the powers that be, except again for brief periods when moderate criticism and openness was encouraged. Those who participated in such, however, usually rued the day for expressing such opinions, for when the dissent grew too intense, the Communist Party would change tactics, closing off free expression and cracking down on those who had previously expressed dissatisfaction (even though they were doing so with government approval and support, as a means to improve the system). A particular intense period of such crackdown was the Cultural Revolution, wherein various young peoples forged the Red Guard who in turn accused many of turning on the State. Like our own "Red Scare" of the 1960s, but with consequences that were even more deadly, the crackdown got out of hand, as people began to turn one another in so as to avoid being turned in themselves even as no one had in fact engaged in nefarious activity or thought.
Economic liberalization, which had kept moderately under wraps under Mao Zedong, took on a fiercer pace after his passing. China encouraged foreign investment and reaped the rewards with larger, more modern cities (Shanghai went from having one building over twenty stories tall to having over one hundred in a span of something like twenty years)--but also with growing economic disparity.
I read this book in part as a precursor to a Chinese reading list I am finally starting on. The sections on culture, in that sense, will be very useful. Writers and works I will want to consider for the list (if I can find them) are as follows:
I Ching [already read]
Dao De Jing
Sun Tzu, Art of War [already read]
Confucious, Analects
Daniel K. Gardner, The Four Books (Analects, Mencius, Doctrine of the Mean, and Great Learning)
Wu-chi Liu and Iring Yucheng Lo, Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry
Victor H. Mair, The Columbia History of Chinese Literature
Mengzi (Menchius), Mengzi
John Minford and Joseph D. S. Lau, Classical Chinese Literature
Wai-lim Yip, Chinese Poetry
Book of Songs/Classics of Poetry
Li Bo (poet)
Tu Fu (poet)
Shi Nalan, Water Margin
Luo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms
Wu Cheng'en, Journey to the West
Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber
Xiaoxiao Sheng, Jin Ping Mei
Bai Hua, Bitter Love
Wang Shuo (contemporary novelist)
On Chinese literary history, I might try Herbert Giles's 1901 History of Chinese Literature.
One thing Tanner does a good job of in terms of setting up his account is denoting how multicultural China really is. We tend to think of the nation as a single people, but in fact, while the Han dominate the country, there are many other ethnic groups who have been integrated into the nation--and that over centuries: Monguls, Manchus, Tibetans, Urghars, Turks, and so on. Tanner does a good job of showing how many of these ethnic groups have dominated the nation at one time or another--and how they are different from one another.
In a sense, Chinese history until the twentieth century is fairly repetitive. It is a tale of the rise and fall of various monarchies, usually with periods of destablization and disunity between said monarchies. An epigraph about one-third of the way into the book sums up the first third of the work (and arguably sets up the pattern for the next third of the work):
"They say the momentum of history was ever thus: The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus the House of Zhou reached its end and the empire as partitioned into save warring kingdoms. Thus these seven were absorbed into the House of Qui. Then Han and Cho destroyed Qin and waged war on each other until the empire was reunited under the House of Han, reinvigorated by Guangwudi and passed down the generations to Xiandi, the last of the Han, after whose generation the land was partitioned into three kingdoms."
After these would come the Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, with a similar pattern as noted. The Mongols would rule China under the Yuan dynasty, the Mings under the Ming dynasty, the Manchus under the Qing. Each conquering peoples would, in fact, often take on various Chinese customs in order to better fit in with the peoples and the former noble classes, including most especially Confucianism and to a lesser extent Taoism. The Mongols included a number of Nestorian Christians. Indeed, while religion was very much a background item in this book, I would be curious to know more about some of the religions that less associated with China in the present day, like Eastern Christianity and Islam, because they clearly had their adherents at one time in the land.
Things change quite a bit in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The weakness of the later Qing dynasty meant that the country was in large part ruled over by local warlords whose in-fighting left the door open for manipulation by colonial Western powers, who established areas of control over commerce and the subjugation, in many ways, of the Chinese nation. China moved during this stage toward the establishment of a republic, but the inability of political leaders to bring the nation into true unity and to throw off Western powers left open the door for a growing Communist movement (which itself had been part of the movement toward the Republic). Consigned to the rural areas, Mao Zedong and others built a loyal following that eventually established political dominance and the eventual of exile of the republic to the island of Taiwan. Most of the political moves during this time were to a large extent motivated by a desire to reestablish Chinese hegemony over its own territory, and the Communist movement essentially succeeded.
After pushing landlords out of much of their property, the Communists forged various programs to encourage economic growth of the country. Communal farms were given quotas of various sorts and people rewarded for them. Excess production was allowed to be sold on the market by individuals, which led to further growth. But there were also various problems that centralization created. Rosy but inaccurate reports from locals regarding production eventually led famine.
The Communist Party largely dissuaded people from dissenting with the powers that be, except again for brief periods when moderate criticism and openness was encouraged. Those who participated in such, however, usually rued the day for expressing such opinions, for when the dissent grew too intense, the Communist Party would change tactics, closing off free expression and cracking down on those who had previously expressed dissatisfaction (even though they were doing so with government approval and support, as a means to improve the system). A particular intense period of such crackdown was the Cultural Revolution, wherein various young peoples forged the Red Guard who in turn accused many of turning on the State. Like our own "Red Scare" of the 1960s, but with consequences that were even more deadly, the crackdown got out of hand, as people began to turn one another in so as to avoid being turned in themselves even as no one had in fact engaged in nefarious activity or thought.
Economic liberalization, which had kept moderately under wraps under Mao Zedong, took on a fiercer pace after his passing. China encouraged foreign investment and reaped the rewards with larger, more modern cities (Shanghai went from having one building over twenty stories tall to having over one hundred in a span of something like twenty years)--but also with growing economic disparity.
I read this book in part as a precursor to a Chinese reading list I am finally starting on. The sections on culture, in that sense, will be very useful. Writers and works I will want to consider for the list (if I can find them) are as follows:
I Ching [already read]
Dao De Jing
Sun Tzu, Art of War [already read]
Confucious, Analects
Daniel K. Gardner, The Four Books (Analects, Mencius, Doctrine of the Mean, and Great Learning)
Wu-chi Liu and Iring Yucheng Lo, Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry
Victor H. Mair, The Columbia History of Chinese Literature
Mengzi (Menchius), Mengzi
John Minford and Joseph D. S. Lau, Classical Chinese Literature
Wai-lim Yip, Chinese Poetry
Book of Songs/Classics of Poetry
Li Bo (poet)
Tu Fu (poet)
Shi Nalan, Water Margin
Luo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms
Wu Cheng'en, Journey to the West
Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber
Xiaoxiao Sheng, Jin Ping Mei
Bai Hua, Bitter Love
Wang Shuo (contemporary novelist)
On Chinese literary history, I might try Herbert Giles's 1901 History of Chinese Literature.
December 28, 2023
This introduction to Chinese history starts around 2070 BCE and ends in 2008 CE. Although it spans almost 600 pages, this truly is an overview, barely scratching the surface of China's history. It moves swiftly, covering the various peoples, dynasties, political figures, and movements in broad strokes. That macro-level take isn't a criticism -- it's the only avenue when trying to summarize such a massive amount of history in a single installment. I'm simply trying to emphasize the introductory nature of this book so people can manage their expectations. It's a bone-dry read, but given how much information covered, there's no room for any flourishes, so that's to be expected. Also, I'm not sure if it was intentional, but the book paints China as a stubborn nation that has never managed to keep pace with other developing countries (sometimes due to pride, other times because of technological, political, social, and economic disadvantages). The conclusion was also pretty trite, but with how tense relations were (and continue to be) between the U.S. and China, it would be pretty difficult to write a diplomatic ending that people on either side didn't tear apart.
For what it is, it's very well written and researched, and I'm highly impressed by this undertaking. It provides a good foundation for people wanting to dip their toes in Chinese history and can help them decide whether to pursue it in greater depth, hone in on specific eras, or simply walk away from it altogether. I'd like to point out that Harold M. Tanner has an entire series of volumes that cover China's history in greater depth, so that would be a better option for people who want to learn more or those interested in furthering their knowledge.
For what it is, it's very well written and researched, and I'm highly impressed by this undertaking. It provides a good foundation for people wanting to dip their toes in Chinese history and can help them decide whether to pursue it in greater depth, hone in on specific eras, or simply walk away from it altogether. I'd like to point out that Harold M. Tanner has an entire series of volumes that cover China's history in greater depth, so that would be a better option for people who want to learn more or those interested in furthering their knowledge.
January 8, 2025
Read this while living in China. As a classical archaeologist, I was more interested in the earlier eras, and I was already visiting ancient sites at the same time. It's very readable and explains events clearly, in an interesting way. I learned a great deal, which I was then able to discuss with my local friends.
November 30, 2021
Quite a good little summary of a couple thousand years of Chinese history with plenty of options for further reading. Highly recommend if you're looking for a broad overview in one book.
July 2, 2022
more complete review to follow... great and informative food
December 11, 2022
Decent textbook for an undergrad survey.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews