This is not a comprehensive review: merely a few things I thought were particularly interesting. Fairbank has Opinions, and he’s not trying to go for a tone of boring objectivity. He’s not the first person I would recommend reading if you’re not familiar at all with Chinese history, unless you’re fine regularly googling phrases like the Chinese Rites controversy. If you are fine with regular googling, and you don’t mind getting one person’s opinion, he comes strongly recommended as an enjoyable historian: just don’t let him be the only person you read. I read him as part of an elephant book club, where every member reads a different book on the same topic, and he was an excellent fit for that environment.
- Vatican II authorized ancestor worship.
I’m going to reiterate that one, actually. Syncretic forms of Christianity pop up everywhere I look, but my own rabbit hole into the intersection of a hierarchical church and the resulting conflict was fascinating.
- Christianity really struggled in China.
Missionaries were often politically influential, as they were educated and had foreign backing, but these numbers are good for context: 400 million Chinese citizens, 40 million opium users, 3 million Chinese converts to Christianity.
- The Boxer Rebellion was a war that the victors agreed to call a rebellion.
When the imperial court deploys the imperial military to stop foreign forces from invading, that would, in ordinary circumstances, be called a war. But there was actual resistance to the dowager empress of the time that didn’t get involved, and the imperial powers didn’t want to deal with overthrowing the reigning monarch.
- It doesn’t help you understand modern China as well as you might like.
Renan: “The essential characteristic of a nation is that its individuals must have many things in common, and must have forgotten many things as well.” There’s a lot of Chinese history, and I don’t know what is remembered and what is forgotten. Even a naive observer could figure out that the nationalists must be evil, and the Japanese the same. Memories of Western humiliation are still prominent, and anti-Japanese sentiment is still strong enough that the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 probably isn’t forgotten entirely. But is it remembered as “China was weak because the old government was corrupt”? Was China weak because the old ideas were wrong? How are the Boxers taught and viewed? I was struck by the extent to which I don’t know, and no book of history was likely to tell me.
Mere knowledge of facts, even facts well assembled to tell a narrative, do not tell you how common the narrative you are reading is to others. Understanding the raw facts can be useful, but understanding that decently educated Americans see the Seven Years War/French and Indian War as a British action that should not have resulted in taxation on the colonists is crucial: that George Washington started it is an afterthought. To pick the top google search result for me:
“The French and Indian War, which took place between 1754-1763, began due to a conflict between England and France over control of the Ohio River Valley. Both sides wanted the valley so they could expand their settlements into the area.” –Link.
Keller Scholl's Internet Front Door 