Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past / Edition 2

by Paul Cohen

Overview

Serious study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Chinese history did not really get under way in the United States until after World War II. Since then, scholarly publication has proliferated and a genuine professional field—by far the largest and most active in the West—has taken shape. Now, for the first time, we have a critical, book-length analysis of this development, written by an insider and structured around the leading conceptual approaches that have informed American scholarship in the postwar decades.

In Paul A. Cohen's view, the supreme problem for American students of Chinese history, particularly in its post-Western impact phase, has been one of ethnocentric distortion. The first two chapters of the book explore this problem in connection with the two approaches that were most influential in American scholarship of the 1950s and 1960s—the impact-response and modernization (tradition-modernity) approaches. In chapter three, Dr. Cohen argues that a third major approach, the "imperialism" approach, although emerging in the late 1960s as a critique of the two earlier approaches, has been no less Western-centric in its basic presuppositions. The final chapter traces the increasing efforts of American historians to move beyond the Western-centric paradigms of the past toward a more China-centered approach to recent Chinese history—an approach that strives empathetically to reconstruct the Chinese past as the Chinese themselves experienced it rather than in terms of an imported sense of historical problem. Dr. Cohen concludes with a discussion of some of the implications of this new approach for our understanding of recent Chinese history.

Students of Chinese history, Sino-American relations, and the evolution of American historical scholarship on non-Western societies will welcome this perceptive and thought-provoking book.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231058117
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	12/06/1985
Series:	Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Edition description:	second edition
Pages:	243
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Paul A. Cohen is Edith Stix Wasserman Professor of Asian Studies and History at Wellesley College and an associate at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Second Paperback Edition
Preface
Introduction to the 2010 Issue
Introduction
1. The Problem with "China's Response to the West"
2. Moving Beyond "Tradition and Modernity"
3. Imperialism: Reality or Myth?
4. Toward a China-Centered History of China
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Every historian of China should read this book. For what Paul A. Cohen has done here is lay bare the hidden assumptions that have informed and skewed much American research on 19th- and 20th-century China. He shows that the questions most American historians have asked about the China past, and consequently the kind of histories they have written, have been determined as much by their own cultural biases as by the historical realities of China itself.... A consciousness-raising experience.

American Historical Review