Jonathan D. Spence (1936–2021)

Neste livro essencial para quem quer
conhecer e entender a China, Jonathan D. Spence narra quatro séculos da impressionante história de um país que se julgava o centro do mundo, foi humilhado por potências estrangeiras e atravessou o século XX em constante revolução, buscando o caminho da unidade, do progresso e da modernização.
No posfácio especial para a edição brasileira, o autor analisa os últimos desdobramentos
econômicos e sociais da China,
a possível grande potência do século XXI.… (más)

This book shows how China's efforts to respond to her encounter with the imperial industrial powers from the 1840s to the 1970s were an unmitigated disaster. The Qing state made efforts to modernise the economy and military, sending students abroad, recruiting Western armaments experts, building railways, and so on. But the circumstances were impossible. Rapacious predations by foreign forces and devastating internal civil wars denied China time and space to carry out the needed development. In one pathetic incident, a new Chinese fleet was entirely and ignominiously sunk by French ships within minutes. Resistance to westernisation from inside the regime, which as a foreign conquest state was anxious about its own legitimacy, made a stark contrast with the unified determination of Japan's Meiji state-led industrialisation and military reforms. Japan went on to abuse China for decades herself. In a further disastrous outcome, China was taken over by a Stalinist psychopath whose catastrophic policies turned the mid-20th century into a waking nightmare, a man who even today is held in official honour by a regime too frightened by its own failures to permit honest discussion of the past. Only after Mao's death has China combined an era of peace with competent leadership and successful state-guided industrialisation policies. But her traumatic encounter with the imperial powers between the Opium Wars and the Japanese occupation still defines her approach to the world today: a determination to overcome the "Century of Humiliation" and maximise her power to address the world on her own terms.

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