SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE The extraordinary
and essential story of how China became the powerful country it is
today. Even at the high noon of Europe's empires China managed to
be one of the handful of countries not to succumb. Invaded,
humiliated and looted, China nonetheless kept its sovereignty.
Robert Bickers' major new book is the first to describe fully what
has proved to be one of the modern era's most important stories:
the long, often agonising process by which the Chinese had by the
end of the 20th century regained control of their own country. Out
of China uses a brilliant array of unusual, strange and vivid
sources to recreate a now fantastically remote world: the corrupt,
lurid modernity of pre-War Shanghai, the often tiny patches of
'extra-territorial' land controlled by European powers (one of
which, unnoticed, had mostly toppled into a river), the entrepots
of Hong Kong and Macao, and the myriad means, through armed
threats, technology and legal chicanery, by which China was kept
subservient. Today Chinese nationalism stays firmly rooted in
memories of its degraded past - the quest for self-sufficiency, a
determination both to assert China's standing in the world and its
outstanding territorial claims, and never to be vulnerable to
renewed attack. History matters deeply to Beijing's current rulers
- and Out of China explains why.
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