Why another book on China? Four reasons: This book places a special emphasis on China’s culture, warfare, and immediate neighbors, while its organization provides structural convenience not found in other surveys of modern Chinese history. First, this book uses a comparative approach to bridge the cultural divide separating Chinese history from Western readers trying to understand it. It compares the embedded assumptions, patterns of analysis, and primary values that distinguish these two great civilizations, not to suggest the superiority of either; but rather, to reach a Western audience, who may be unaware that many of their core assumptions and values are not shared by others. This is not an attempt to understand China in its own terms, but in comparison to the West so as to bridge the cultural divide. Second, this book emphasizes the tragic role of warfare in Chinese history. Far more so than in most other countries, warfare has wracked Chinese society for the last two centuries: A cascade of internal rebellions, secession movements, and civil and foreign wars continued with only short interruptions from 1800 until the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. On a human level, it is incumbent on this and succeeding generations not to forget the holocaust that has been a hallmark of modern Chinese history. Third, all too often the study of China has been done in semi-isolation from its neighbors. The authors of this book have spent years living not only in China and Taiwan, but also in Russia and Japan, and have visited South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. Modern Chinese history cannot be understood without a deep appreciation of the foreign influence that has bombarded China from all sides. Western texts generally give due attention to the Western European powers and to the United States. Some devote time to discussing the Japanese influence. None gives adequate attention to the activities of Russia. Most Western Sinologists do not read Russian, nor do most Chinese secondary sources emphasize Russia’s extensive influence because Russian diplomats from the 19th century onward consistently succeeded in promoting their country’s national interests at Chinese expense. On a human level, this is not a story many Chinese want to tell. On a national level, Sino-Russian relations are so central to China’s national security that the topic is generally classified. The authors learned about Russo-Chinese relations from years of research in the archives of Russia, China, Taiwan, Japan, and the United States reading materials covering Russo-Chinese diplomatic relations from the 18th through the 20th centuries.

Modern China: Continuity and Change, 1644 to the Present

History

Elleman, Bruce

Paine, S.C.M.

Americas

Pearson

The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895: Perceptions, Power, and Primacy

The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 is a seminal event in world history, yet it has been virtually ignored in Western literature. In the East, the focus of Chinese foreign policy has been to undo its results whereas the focus of Japanese foreign policy has been to confirm them. Japan supplanted China as the dominant regional power, disrupting the traditional power balance and fracturing the previous international harmony within the Confucian world, leaving enduring territorial and political fault lines that have embroiled China, Japan, Korea, Russia, and Taiwan ever since. The book examines the war through the eyes of the journalists who filed reports from China, Japan, Russia, Europe, and the United States showing how the war changed outside perceptions of the relative power of China and Japan and the consequences of these changed perceptions, namely, the scramble for concessions in China and Japan's emergence as a great power.

Europe

Cambridge University Press

This book examines the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5, a significant event in world history virtually ignored in Western literature. Japan so rapidly defeated China that citizens of Europe suddenly perceived Japan, not only as the dominant power of Asia, but also as a key international player. Western disgust with Chinese military performance led to their rapidly growing intrusions on Chinese sovereignty while Japan soon became an ally of the ruling superpower, Great Britain. To the present day, China is still struggling to reverse the judgment of this war and restore its regional dominance.

Arts & Photography

The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895: Perceptions, Power, and Primacy

The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War

The Japanese experience of war from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century presents a stunning example of the meteoric rise and shattering fall of a great power. As Japan modernized and became the one non-European great power, its leaders concluded that an empire on the Asian mainland required the containment of Russia. Japan won the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-5) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) but became overextended in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1931-45), which escalated, with profound consequences, into World War II. A combination of incomplete institution building, an increasingly lethal international environment, a skewed balance between civil and military authority, and a misunderstanding of geopolitics explains these divergent outcomes. This analytical survey examines themes including the development of Japanese institutions, diversity of opinion within the government, domestic politics, Japanese foreign policy and China's anti-Japanese responses. It is an essential guide for those interested in history, politics and international relations.

Asia

The Wars for Asia, 1911-1949 shows that the Western treatment of World War II, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the Chinese Civil War as separate events misrepresents their overlapping connections and causes. The long Chinese Civil War precipitated a long regional war between China and Japan that went global in 1941 when the Chinese found themselves fighting a civil war within a regional war within an overarching global war. The global war that consumed Western attentions resulted from Japan's peripheral strategy to cut foreign aid to China by attacking Pearl Harbor and Western interests throughout the Pacific on December 7-8, 1941. S. C. M. Paine emphasizes the fears and ambitions of Japan, China, and Russia, and the pivotal decisions that set them on a collision course in the 1920s and 1930s. The resulting wars - the Chinese Civil War (1911-1949), the Second Sino-Japanese War (1931-1945), and World War II (1939-1945) - together yielded a viscerally anti-Japanese and unified Communist China, the still-angry rising power of the early twenty-first century. While these events are history in the West, they live on in Japan and especially China.

The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949

Military

Naval Power and Expeditionary Wars

Elleman, Bruce A.

Taylor&Francis

Now in a fully updated edition, this accessible text provides a balanced history of modern China in a global context. Through years of living and research in China, Taiwan, Japan, and Russia, the authors are deeply qualified to understand China’s internal dynamics as well as its foreign relations over centuries. Arguing that modern Chinese history cannot be understood without a deep appreciation of the outside factors that have influenced the country, the authors focus on China’s near neighbors, especially Japan and Russia. They also emphasize the tragic role of almost endless warfare throughout Chinese history. Providing a unique comparative approach, the authors bridge the cultural divide separating Chinese history from Western readers trying to understand it. Specifically geared to the teaching requirements of the semester system, the book is divided into four parts and a total of twenty-eight chapters, corresponding either to two chapters per week in a fourteen-week semester or one chapter per week in a two-semester course.

Elleman US Naval War College, Bruce A.

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

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Books by Paine, S.C.M.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Paine, S.C.M.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Modern China: Continuity and Change, 1644 to the Present

The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895: Perceptions, Power, and Primacy

The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895: Perceptions, Power, and Primacy

The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895: Perceptions, Power, and Primacy

The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War

The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949

The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War

The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949

Naval Power and Expeditionary Wars

Modern China: Continuity and Change, 1644 to the Present