America s top China watcher, the renowned "pandit" of modern Chinese history, here provides an unrivaled overview of revolutionary China and Chinese American relations. His reviews and critical commentary scrutinize our always fascinated, often puzzled attitude toward this newly emergent superpower.

John Fairbank distinguishes two major motifs in recent Chinese American connections: the American expectation of highly profitable trade and investment, which so far have not materialized, and the deep rooted missionary impulse to give the Chinese the best of our culture, which includes our efforts to promote human rights. The possibility of grafting our ideas of individual endeavor and God given prerogatives onto two thousand years of Confucianism with its emphasis on duty and collective harmony seems remote. In contrast, the outlook for mutually enriching economic dealings is much brighter. Yet Fairbank cautions that we are dealing with a huge and disoriented nation struggling to enter the modern world with its own cultural identity intact, and (at least in the current period) with its Communist Party in power. Confucian tenets still prevail: theory and practice are a unity policies are a form of conduct manifesting one s character, and attacks on policy equal attacks on the ruling party.

These writings concern China in the mind s eye of America as it is interpreted though the works of American merchants, diplomats, missionaries, and reporters observing China s travail of revolution. For generalist, scholar, and sage alike, "China Watch" offers many insights.

For more than a century missionaries were the main contact points between the Chinese and American peoples. Often frustrated in saving Chinese souls, they nevertheless founded hospitals and colleges, and meanwhile on the American scene they helped form the image of China.

This volume offers views of missionary roles in the United States and in China. Early American Protestant missions moved on from the Near East to the Far East. The second great surge of American missionary expansion in the 1880s was signaled by the formation of more business-like mission boards, by the Student Volunteer Movement to recruit liberal arts college graduates for evangelism abroad, and by the Layman's Movement to back them up. During the same period in China, missionary journalism was reaching a new Chinese-Christian community, and missionary educational and medical work was building modern institutions of social value for Chinese communities. A few "Christian reformers" emerged in China's treaty ports, and by the end of the century there was a missionary contribution to the reform movement in general.

By the 1920s missionary and Chinese Christian educators were collaborating in Christian colleges like Yenching University, only to meet eventual disaster as the Nationalist revolution and Japan's invasion precipitated the great Chinese Communist-led revolution of the 1940s and after. American missions contributed fundamentally both to the revolutionary changes in China and to the American public response to them, although their impact on American policy s less clear.

Fourteen contributors studying both sides of the missionary effort, in China and in America, present case studies that suggest conclusions and themes for research.

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John King Fairbank was the West's doyen on China, and this book is the full and final expression of his lifelong engagement with this vast ancient civilization. It remains a masterwork without parallel. The distinguished historian Merle Goldman brings the book up to date, covering reforms in the post-Mao period through the early years of the twenty-first century, including the leadership of Hu Jintao. She also provides an epilogue discussing the changes in contemporary China that will shape the nation in the years to come.

As the Ch'ing government's Inspector General of the Maritime Customs Service, Robert Hart was the most influential Westerner in China for half a century. These journal entries continue the sequence begun in Entering China's Service and cover the years when Hart was setting up Customs procedures, establishing a modus operandi with the Ch'ing bureaucracy, and inspecting the treaty ports. They culminate in Hart's return visit to Europe with the Pin-ch'un Mission and his marriage in Northern Ireland. Richard Smith, John King Fairbank, and Katherine Bruner interleave the segments of Hart's journals with lively narratives describing the contemporary Chinese scene and recounting Hart's responses to the many challenges of establishing a Western-style organization within a Chinese milieu.

The present confrontation of Communist China and the United States, on which the future of peace in Asia hinges, is merely the latest phase in a continuing historical process--the remaking of China's ancient society under the stimulus of Western contact. How does it happen that a century of foreign trade and missionary evangelism, of modern education and the training of Chinese students in Western ways, has now resulted in a seeming rejection of the West? What has been the real nature of "China's response to the West" during the past century of our contact?

This volume gives the first inside account, on so broad a scale, of how China's leaders reacted to the invasion of Western arms and goods, persons and ideas, during the three generations from the Opium War to the rise of the Kuomintang. In 28 chapters, with translations of 65 key documents, the authors trace the stages by which the scholar-officials of the Middle Kingdom were brought to recognize successively the need for Western arms to defend their country, Western technology for making arms, modern science to support technology, its application in modern industry to strengthen the nation, and all the attendant new ideas which led them eventually into great movements for institutional reform, political revolution, and ideological reconstruction.

From the famous Commissioner un's first study of Western geography during his anti-opium crusade, through the efforts of Li Hungchang and others at "self-strengthening" by industrialization, down to the critical thought of Dr. Hu Shih and the eclecticism of Sun Yat-sen in the early 20th century, the writings of China's leaders ring the changes on a central theme how to remaketheir heritage and create a modern nation capable of meeting the West on equal terms. The provincial viceroys, the Reformers of 1898, the Boxers in 1900, the old Empress Dowager, and the eager students studying abroad, each in their own way, all grapple with this absorbing problem. The varied Chinese responses to the West in the formative century here analyzed give us a new insight into the springs of social action among one-fifth of mankind.

The companion volume, for the research specialist, provides Notes and Sources, Bibliography, and a Glossary of Chinese names and terms, essential bases for further exploration of this new field.

Hosea Ballou Morse (1855-1934) sailed to China in 1874, and for the next thirty-five years he labored loyally in the Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs Service, becoming one of its most able commissioners and acquiring a deep knowledge of China's economy and foreign relations. After his retirement in 1909, Morse devoted himself to scholarship. He pioneered in the Western study of China's foreign relations, weaving from the tangled threads of the Ch'ing dynasty's foreign affairs several seminal interpretive histories, most notably his three-volume magnum opus, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire (1910-18). At the time of his death, Morse was considered the major historian of modern China in the English-speaking world, and his works played a profound role in shaping the contours of Western scholarship on China. Begun as a labor of love by his protege, John King Fairbank, this lively biography based primarily on Morse's vast collection of personal papers sheds light on many crucial events in modern Chinese history, as well as on the multifaceted Western role in late imperial China, and provides new insights into the beginnings of modern China studies in this country. Half-finished when Fairbank died, the project was completed by his colleagues, Martha Henderson Coolidge and Richard J. Smith.