The Shortest History of China: From the Ancient Dynasties to a Modern Superpower

"It’s about 250 pages, which for several thousand years of history is not bad. Jaivin’s a very talented writer, who knows China well, and from a variety of vantage points. She’s written on rock music there, on protest. She’s got a passionate interest in women’s roles both in Chinese history and in contemporary China. Women figure in the book throughout, in more than token ways for every period, which is refreshing. She brings to the book this special energy and interest in intriguing and unexpected stories, while also covering the historical milestones. The most challenging thing for a book like this is to do justice to both continuities and ruptures. She doesn’t fall into the trap of an ‘unchanging China’ idea. One nice visual touch is that most chapters have a map. It’s a map of what now comes into our mind when we hear the word China, and she shows how much or how little—and it’s often very little—of that physical space was actually controlled by the dynasty in power at the time. That’s a very effective way to keep reminding us to forget the Chinese Communist Party’s effort to get one to think of there being a single geographical space that always was and always will be China, except when bad things happened, and parts got carved away. It’s all in there. I used it as a textbook, and it seemed to work quite well. It’s sort of an anti-textbook, but those are the textbooks that I like to use. It’s not in the grade school textbook genre, in which it’s all names and dates. It gives you lots of information, but it’s carried forward by gripping tales and nicely crafted profiles. Yes, and particularly Chinese culture. If you had to classify it, I think its strength is as cultural history."