Читать книгу China - Kerry Brown - Страница 11

Chinese history is long and complex. It is a story that splits into many different themes and plots. Trying to understand China without having at least some knowledge of this historical background is, nevertheless, impossible. This is particularly true today, when current Chinese leaders daily appeal to the glorious, unique past of their country as a source of their authority and power in the present. The complexity of this history, however, means that there are many different interpretations and meanings that can be harvested from it. This book aims to present at least some of these, and show why they are important.

Despite China’s global prominence in the twenty-first century, these Chinese histories are not well known by people in Europe or the United States (broadly what we can call ‘the West’). This lack of knowledge is compounded by the politicized way that China’s history is told within the current People’s Republic of China (PRC). This book aims at helping to rectify this situation, giving those with no specialist engagement with China a workable outline by which to make sense of this vast story.

One aim of this book is to demonstrate that, however marginal China may have seemed in much of the period since the mid-nineteenth century, for a country and a culture accounting for a fifth of humanity, its story is a global one. It was an aberration that so little of this story was known outside of China. What we are witnessing now is a long-overdue correction to this imbalance – something that should have been done earlier.