Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750

Description

A prizewinning historian and expert on Chinese foreign relations examines China's relationship with the outside world over the last 250 years, showing how the past will set the course for China's future. Over the past 250 years of momentous change and dramatic upheaval, China has proved itself to be a Restless Empire. Tracing China's course from the eighteenth-century Qing Dynasty to today's People's Republic, Restless Empire shows how the country's worldview has evolved. It explains how Chinese attitudes have been determined by both receptiveness and resistance to outside influence and presents the preoccupations that have set its foreign-relations agenda. Within two decades China is likely to depose the United States as the world's largest economy. By then the country expects to have eradicated poverty among its population of more than one and a half billion, and established itself as the world's technological powerhouse. Meanwhile, some - especially its neighbours - are afraid that China will strengthen its military might in order to bend others to its will. A new form of Chinese nationalism is rising. Many Chinese are angry about perceived past injustices and fear a loss of identity to commercial forces and foreign influences. So, will China's attraction to world society dwindle, or will China continue to engage? Will it attempt to recreate a Sino-centric international order in Eastern Asia, or pursue a more harmonious diplomatic route? And can it overcome its lack of democracy and transparency, or are these characteristics hard-wired into the Chinese system? Whatever the case, we ignore China's international history at our peril. Restless Empire is a magisterial and indispensible history of the most important state in world affairs today. WINNER OF THE 2013 ASIA SOCIETY BERNARD SCHWARTZ BOOK AWARD

Odd Arne Westad is one of the world's foremost experts on both the Cold War and contemporary East Asian history, having won the Bancroft Prize, the Michael Harrington Award and the Akira Iriye International History Book Award for his seminal book The Global Cold War. A Professor of International History at the London School of Economics, he is also co-director of LSE IDEAS, a centre for the study of international affairs, diplomacy and grand strategy. Odd Arne Westad, FBA, is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics. He has published fifteen books on modern and contemporary international history, among themThe Global Cold War, which won the Bancroft Prize, andDecisive Encounters, a standard history of the Chinese civil war. He also served as general co-editor of theCambridge History of the Cold War.

Written by one of the most distinguished scholars on China, this book brings clarity and insight into complex historical issues -- Jung Chang Thorough, fast-moving, and consistently clear. Restless Empire gives an excellent introduction to the vagaries of China's foreign relations over the last 250 years -- Jonathan Spence, author of The Search for Modern China An authoritative and lucid history of China's foreign relations from the peak of the Qing dynasty in the eighteenth century to the present day. Anyone seeking to understand the role China may play in our future world should start with this book -- Stephen R. Platt, author of Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom An essential guide to modern China's often violent encounter with the rest of the world -- Frank Dikotter, author of 'Mao's Great Famine'