Don't expect to read one book and get the whole picture.

books:


	• China: A Macro History (East Gate Books) Ray Huang East Gate Book, 1996 - 335 pages average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Macro, it is.

I'm a male, Chinese-American. 26 y.o. I hardly knew/know much of my own ancestral history. This was a required text, but I'm glad I went thru it. It's a short (relatively speaking), concise text that's pretty absorbable.

It gave me a good "introduction".

Don't expect to read one book and get the whole picture.

Please don't expect to read this book and get the whole picture of China's three or four thousand years' history.

I am a Chinese/Taiwanese. And I thank Dr. Huang for his great insight.

His book helped me to understand why the communists would take over mainland China so easily around 1949.

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Refreshing and enlightening

This is one of the most enlightening books I've read. Maybe only a person with Ray Huang's life experience, his mastery of both the eastern and western languages and culture can write a book so refreshing and so uncolored by party politics or ideological beliefs. Growing up in China, Huang spent 12 years serving in Chiang Kai-Shek's army; then trading guns for books, he earned his PhD in history in the US at the mature age of 46. He lived the rest of his life in the US, marrying a stunning Caucasian woman and teaching history in a university. His fame came when he was 61 with the publication of "1578, a year of no significance", whose Chinese edition later became a best seller in China.

Compared to "1578", this book is more ambitious but equally scholarly and insightful. This is not your typical history book. Instead of focusing on who what and when, it asks and answers the question of why. Huang found intrinsic laws in the seemingly random events of Chinese dynastic and modern history. Suddenly, all the things that happened become inevitable, history progresses in its own trajectory regardless of any individual's wishes. He convincingly explored the reasons why Confucius and Mencious philosophy dominated the Chinese society for two thousand years, the impetus to the rise and fall of the three Chinese empires and why capitalism never developed in China till the late 20's century. He urged us not to judge an event or figure by rigid moral standards, but by their effect on the overall (macro) progress of history. For example, instead of tossing labels of "good", "bad", "tyrannical" or "corrupt", he maintained Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong both re-shaped the structure of Chinese society and laid foundation for the amazing transition of China from a three-thousand-year-old agrarian society to a "numerically manageable" modern society in the last 20 years. Huang's book also makes me seriously consider for the first time the possibility that democracy is not a system that works anywhere and anytime. You don't have to agree with everything Huang wrote, but he definitely makes you think.

On a side note, you will get the most out of this book if you already have a good knowledge of Chinese history, and have a chronological table of all the Chinese dynasties and emperors handy.

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Decent Description; Arguable Analysis

This is an ambitious effort to provide an overview of Chinese history. Huang divides Chinese history into 7 periods. The first is the period of state formation. The second is what Huang terms the First Empire, essentially the Qin and Han empires. This is followed by a chaotic interregnum, the Second Empire of the Sui, Tang, and Song, the Mongolian interlude, and the Third Empire of the Ming and the Qing. The final period is the one we're presently in, the destruction of traditional China and its replacement by a modern state. Huang covers the major dynastic changes, expansion of Chinese culture into the South of what is now modern China, and major intellectual trends. A good deal of the narrative, drawn from traditional chronicles, is 'top down' histories of the Imperial Courts. This is all solid.
Huang's efforts to provide an overview of the major structural features of Chinese history is surprisingly traditional. Huang presents the early formation of centralized Chinese states as driven to a large extent by geographic factors,including the very long border with the nomadic peoples of central Asia. Huang then presents the Chinese state as having most of the same structural features from its Qin foundation to the end of the Qing. This is very much a traditional description of a centralized bureacracy resting on a mass of peasants and supported by an ideology stressing social stability and resistant to intellectual innovation. Huang doesn't quite project the Marxist cliche of the 'Asiatic mode of production' or other cliches of 'oriental despotism' but his analysis isn't far away from such approaches. At the same time, Huang shows that the Chinese state never developed the efficient bureaucracy and systems of taxation needed to run such a huge state, often the seed of dynastic failure. Huang presents also a rather traditional analysis of China's failure to break out of the mold of its traditional society. This is presented as a failure to develop the type of bourgeois institutions that emerged in early modern Europe. This is again a traditional, semi-Marxist analysis. In this context, Huang sees the enormous upheavals of the last 2 centuries as needed to destroy traditional society and reconstruct it on a modern basis.
This type of traditional analysis has been attacked in recent years. Some economic historians, like Kenneth Pomeranz in his book The Great Divergence, present 18th century Qing China as much more similar to Europe than previously thought. Some of Huang's language, notably his consistent use of the idea of the rationality of history, has a teleological flavor.

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