To Change China: Western Advisers In China 1620-1960
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
For three and a half centuries, a parade of Western missionaries, soldiers, doctors, and engineers arrived in China convinced they held the keys to its transformation — and To Change China is the masterful chronicle of their triumphs, failures, and profound self-deceptions. Jonathan Spence presents sixteen vivid biographical portraits of Western advisers — from the Jesuit Adam Schall in the seventeenth century to the American General Joseph Stilwell in the mid-twentieth — each of whom sought to reshape the Middle Kingdom in their own image, only to find themselves reshaped, diminished, or expelled by a civilization of staggering resilience and complexity. Spence, one of the foremost Western historians of China, writes with a rare combination of scholarly precision and narrative elegance, illuminating the persistent arrogance that underlay even the most well-intentioned Western interventions. This edition includes a new introduction and conclusion that deepen the work's already considerable analytical power. What emerges is not merely a history of individuals, but a searching meditation on the nature of cultural contact, imperial ambition, and the West's enduring — and endlessly frustrated — desire to remake the world in its own likeness. Who, in the end, was changed?
Author: Jonathan Spence
Format: Paperback
Genre: Asian history
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
For three and a half centuries, a parade of Western missionaries, soldiers, doctors, and engineers arrived in China convinced they held the keys to its transformation — and To Change China is the masterful chronicle of their triumphs, failures, and profound self-deceptions. Jonathan Spence presents sixteen vivid biographical portraits of Western advisers — from the Jesuit Adam Schall in the seventeenth century to the American General Joseph Stilwell in the mid-twentieth — each of whom sought to reshape the Middle Kingdom in their own image, only to find themselves reshaped, diminished, or expelled by a civilization of staggering resilience and complexity. Spence, one of the foremost Western historians of China, writes with a rare combination of scholarly precision and narrative elegance, illuminating the persistent arrogance that underlay even the most well-intentioned Western interventions. This edition includes a new introduction and conclusion that deepen the work's already considerable analytical power. What emerges is not merely a history of individuals, but a searching meditation on the nature of cultural contact, imperial ambition, and the West's enduring — and endlessly frustrated — desire to remake the world in its own likeness. Who, in the end, was changed?