Contemporary China

by John Sexton, Alan Hunter, Jay Sexton

Contemporary China is a lively account of China today which focuses on the late 1990s. The Maoist era and the early 1980s were certainly formative, but China now faces a range of new issues like... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312221479
• ISBN13: 9780312221478
• Release Date: June 1999
• Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
• Length: 226 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

An excellent textbook

This is an excellent book, information and points presented with great clarty. Two suggestions to the author: 1)update the book as soon as possible; 2)increase the numbers of topics to thirteen for the convenience of college use (one topic for one week)

A Concise and Accurate Account that is Surprisingly Current

This is the best introductory book on contemporary China that I've seen so far. The greatest strength of the book is its combination of conciseness and accuracy. The book packs an amazing amount of information in about 200 pages and is full of insightful analyses. The authors were very careful in including only those facts that help the reader gain insights into the politics, economics and socio-cultural characteristics of the country. They not only present the key historical events in the country's (particularly recent) evolution but also explain carefully why these events occurred and what their influences on the country's subsequent evolution are. Some of those explanations inevitably involve speculations, but the authors consistently offer insights from the best sources and give a balanced assessment of the differing views on most of the issues that are still unsettled in the academic community. Given the lightning speed of China's recent development, one may justifiably question whether the book, published in 1999, is to a significant extent outdated. I myself made the mistake of dismissing it initially when I was trying to choose a book for a university class that I was asked to teach. I later found out, however, that the recentness of a book's publication does not affect its relevancy as much as it may seem to. Two factors work in the book's favor in this regard. First, the research for the book was done in the late 1990s when China was already on a path of rapid economic reform and development. The fact that the country has been following that trajectory since then keeps the descriptions and predictions of book highly relevant. Second, even though the authors present both optimistic and pessimistic predictions on the prospects for the country's evolution, their discussions clearly make the relative optimistic predictions look highly plausible. The fact China has evolved along the path predicted by the optimists since the late 1990s further helps the book to retain its relevance. Finally, I'd like to compare this book with a couple of other books that I've also examined. I'll do this, however, after I tell you how I eventually chose this book for my class. I was asked to teach an undergraduate course on doing business in China in 2004. Even though this book came to my attention at the time, I simply dismissed it as "too old" without even giving it a careful evaluation. My rash decision was partly due to the time pressure I faced. I instead chose two other books that were published more recently. The book that I used to give my students (most of whom had very limited knowledge about China) some background information is Understanding China by John Bryan Starr (Hill and Wang, 2001). This book provides an accurate account of the country's historical evolution and contains many good insights, but my students found its coverage to be lengthy and too detailed. I also believe that the author is a little too pessimistic about the China's futur