Modern China

The peril of misunderstanding China was brought home to Westerners in 1949 when they suddenly realized that a Communist regime had come to power in this land of 600 million people. Little had been done to provide us with knowledge of the revolutionary century that followed the "opening" of China by British gunboats in 1842.

In the 12 articles here assembled some of the West's foremost China experts treat with clarity and realism such frequently misunderstood facets of China's twentieth-century revolution as population and birth control, the Chinese peasant, the family unit, economic stagnation, the defeat of the Kuomintang, the"Great Leap Forward," and recent Chinese literature.

This book is an urgently needed antidote to the vague and biased thinking that has bred many Western misconceptions about modern China