Modern Chinese History

History of Modern China, written by the historian Jiang Tingfu, ranges from the Opium War to the Xinhai Revolution, from the Self-Strengthening Movement to the Hundred Days’ Reform, and from Zeng Guofan to Kang Youwei, from Li Hongzhang to Sun Yat-sen. It vividly recounts nearly a century of change and the people who shaped it, without dry textual scholarship or piles of historical documents, while bringing into focus the country’s future, the nation’s fate, and the direction of social development. The book follows the course of China’s modernization, arguing that “whether the Chinese people can modernize will determine the nation’s survival or decline.” It chiefly examines the efforts people made to strengthen the country in the face of “a transformation unseen in thousands of years,” and why those efforts failed. It goes on to argue that “modern national defense requires not only modern transportation, education, and economics, but also modern politics and a modern citizenry. A halfway mixture of the old and the new is no good.” The framework of historical study and periodization established in this book once set the course for research into modern history. It has earned the admiration of later scholars and is regarded as a pioneering work in the study of modern Chinese history.