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China: A Concise Cultural History
A cultural history of China from the pre-imperial era through to the student's revolt of the late 1980s.
- GenresHistoryChinaNonfiction
Paperback
First published May 26, 1988
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About the author
Arthur Cotterell
96 books37 followersArthur Cotterell, former Principal of Kingston College in London, has spent many years combining senior educational management with historical research. He is the respected author of more than thirty books, and is now writing on the Chinese empire, from the history of which he considers one can learn as much about leadership as from Ashridge or Harvard.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 28, 2020
This book was about as thorough and well-written for a book about the complete history of China can be in less than 500 pages. I'm in the middle of the road regarding this book. While it was informative and got the job done, that being to teach me about the history of China, I felt it was lacking pieces throughout, so not great but not bad either. 3/5
November 1, 2016
Compressing a few thousand years of history into a few hundred pages isn't an easy task, and Cotterell does a respectable job. There are moments in the book when I was reminded of the quip that history 'is just one damn thing after another', and I was left wanting more depth, detail and colour. But an attempt to tell China's whole story in less than 400 pages will never realistically be able to deliver that.
The author's main success is that he creates a meaningful narrative out of China's history by selecting particular threads of the tapestry and following them through. One of these is Confucianism: a set of ideas that has fallen out of fashion at many times during China's history, most recently under Chairman Mao, but has always reasserted itself - though leaders have always used it for their own ends. Another running theme is the difficulty China's rulers have faced in holding together such a vast and diverse country (empire), which we discover is by no means unique to the present day, but a problem that runs right back into its ancient history. Some dynasties resorted to harsh, repressive regimes: the doctrine of Legalism that flourished in the Qin dynasty, for example, held that obedience to the letter of the law was of paramount importance, requiring severe punishments for trivial transgressions. Other emperors and their advisers took a more pragmatic approach, which was generally more successful. The Chinese people may be remarkably malleable, but every time they have been pushed too hard, Cotterell argues, they have pushed back with fatal consequences for those in power. (China's current leaders must be acutely aware of this.)
China's examination system, copied all over the world, is another interesting strand of its civilisation. Originally, it was a cornerstone of China's meritocracy, allowing the talented to flourish and contribute to the nation's prosperity - a defence against nepotism and the stagnation of thought that comes with a lack of social mobility. But under the later dynasties, it became ossified, a relic of the past that served to entrench outdated ways of thinking. Competition for a job in China's bureaucracy became so intense that there were thousands of candidates for each place, with scholars driven half-mad with studying. We can recognise in this both the good and the bad aspects of China's current education system.
China, or parts of China, have been invaded many times - it is painful to remember the foreign 'concessions' in cities such as Shanghai, and the naked exploitation of the Opium Wars that Gladstone correctly suggested would 'cover [Britain] with permanent disgrace'. The Manchus, Mongols and Tartars all got there before the Europeans, of course, and the enormities of the Japanese leave the rawest scars. But as Cotterell clearly illustrates, none of these incursions managed to alter the fundamental 'Chinese-ness' of China. The Mongols perhaps came closest to imposing an alien culture on the Chinese during the Yuan dynasty, but despite going on nearly a century, it had surprisingly little lasting influence. (This was the time when Marco Polo visited China; the fact that he served as governor of Yangzhou was due in part to the Mongols' preference for non-Chinese in powerful positions.)
The enduring nature of Chinese culture and civilisation is one of the things that makes the country fascinating, especially as it reinvents itself in the twenty-first century, reclaiming the dominant position it enjoyed for so much of its history, and so disastrously lost in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cotterell's book is probably as good a starting place as any for those who want to understand China better by gaining an appreciation of its rich and eventful past.
The author's main success is that he creates a meaningful narrative out of China's history by selecting particular threads of the tapestry and following them through. One of these is Confucianism: a set of ideas that has fallen out of fashion at many times during China's history, most recently under Chairman Mao, but has always reasserted itself - though leaders have always used it for their own ends. Another running theme is the difficulty China's rulers have faced in holding together such a vast and diverse country (empire), which we discover is by no means unique to the present day, but a problem that runs right back into its ancient history. Some dynasties resorted to harsh, repressive regimes: the doctrine of Legalism that flourished in the Qin dynasty, for example, held that obedience to the letter of the law was of paramount importance, requiring severe punishments for trivial transgressions. Other emperors and their advisers took a more pragmatic approach, which was generally more successful. The Chinese people may be remarkably malleable, but every time they have been pushed too hard, Cotterell argues, they have pushed back with fatal consequences for those in power. (China's current leaders must be acutely aware of this.)
China's examination system, copied all over the world, is another interesting strand of its civilisation. Originally, it was a cornerstone of China's meritocracy, allowing the talented to flourish and contribute to the nation's prosperity - a defence against nepotism and the stagnation of thought that comes with a lack of social mobility. But under the later dynasties, it became ossified, a relic of the past that served to entrench outdated ways of thinking. Competition for a job in China's bureaucracy became so intense that there were thousands of candidates for each place, with scholars driven half-mad with studying. We can recognise in this both the good and the bad aspects of China's current education system.
China, or parts of China, have been invaded many times - it is painful to remember the foreign 'concessions' in cities such as Shanghai, and the naked exploitation of the Opium Wars that Gladstone correctly suggested would 'cover [Britain] with permanent disgrace'. The Manchus, Mongols and Tartars all got there before the Europeans, of course, and the enormities of the Japanese leave the rawest scars. But as Cotterell clearly illustrates, none of these incursions managed to alter the fundamental 'Chinese-ness' of China. The Mongols perhaps came closest to imposing an alien culture on the Chinese during the Yuan dynasty, but despite going on nearly a century, it had surprisingly little lasting influence. (This was the time when Marco Polo visited China; the fact that he served as governor of Yangzhou was due in part to the Mongols' preference for non-Chinese in powerful positions.)
The enduring nature of Chinese culture and civilisation is one of the things that makes the country fascinating, especially as it reinvents itself in the twenty-first century, reclaiming the dominant position it enjoyed for so much of its history, and so disastrously lost in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cotterell's book is probably as good a starting place as any for those who want to understand China better by gaining an appreciation of its rich and eventful past.
September 8, 2024
Writing a history of China from the Neolithic era of the Yangshao culture to contemporary China in the 1990s is always a major challenge and should be taken with caution, especially when dealing with authors who have dabbled in the history of different cultures, given that the complexity and extent of Chinese culture, coupled with the fact that it is the only ancient civilization in existence, requires exclusive dedication.
However, Cotterell's book achieves a balance that takes it a little beyond the merely illustrative text and his analysis of certain dynastic periods (what he calls the classical era, or the role of the Qin and Song dynasties), as well as some modern periods, especially the republican era, the civil war and the early years of the People's Republic, is very objective and in some aspects innovative. I especially highlight his account of the events of the civil war between 1945 and 1949 and the accumulation of mistakes that the Americans and the Guomindang made in not understanding the basic fundamentals of the communist policy that brought the CCP to power and the early stage of the People's Republic up to the Great Leap Forward.
It is a fairly objective, dispassionate text, yet it does not lose sight of the importance of China's resurgence on the current world stage. Something that the author frames in a profound Chinese historical consciousness as an expression of a historical ethos of a great non-hegemonic empire, not formed from the invasion of other kingdoms or countries. Mao's role in laying the foundations of this resurgence is something that Cotterell does not hesitate to affirm, because it is clear that the historian prevails in the narration of the facts and their analysis.
However, Cotterell's book achieves a balance that takes it a little beyond the merely illustrative text and his analysis of certain dynastic periods (what he calls the classical era, or the role of the Qin and Song dynasties), as well as some modern periods, especially the republican era, the civil war and the early years of the People's Republic, is very objective and in some aspects innovative. I especially highlight his account of the events of the civil war between 1945 and 1949 and the accumulation of mistakes that the Americans and the Guomindang made in not understanding the basic fundamentals of the communist policy that brought the CCP to power and the early stage of the People's Republic up to the Great Leap Forward.
It is a fairly objective, dispassionate text, yet it does not lose sight of the importance of China's resurgence on the current world stage. Something that the author frames in a profound Chinese historical consciousness as an expression of a historical ethos of a great non-hegemonic empire, not formed from the invasion of other kingdoms or countries. Mao's role in laying the foundations of this resurgence is something that Cotterell does not hesitate to affirm, because it is clear that the historian prevails in the narration of the facts and their analysis.
October 13, 2019
Spelling errors and plagued by jumps in time that I'm sure made sense to him, but as someone unfamiliar didn't make sense.
February 16, 2011
A snappy, well written little history that manages to squeeze the past three thousand years of Chinese history into a little over three hundred pages. The author has a rather quaint style of writing that never becomes so textbook-esque that you want to stop reading, but without sounding like he's saying "History can be fun, kids!" and smiling creepily either.
October 6, 2015
Learn to understand China - Read the history!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews