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The co-op bookstore for avid readers
The Discourse of Race in Modern China
First published in 1992, The Discourse of Race in Modern China rapidly became a classic, showing for the first time on the basis of detailed evidence how and why racial categorisation became so widespread in China. After the country's devastating defeat against Japan in 1895, leading reformers like Yan Fu, Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei turned away from the Confucian classics to seek enlightenment abroad, hoping to find the keys to wealth and power on the distant shores of Europe. Instead, they discovered the notion of 'race', and used new evolutionary theories from Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer to present a universe red in tooth and claw in which 'yellows' competed with 'whites' in a deadly struggle for survival. After the fall of the empire in 1911, prominent politicians and writers in republican China continued to measure, classify and rank people from around the world according to their supposed biological features, all in the name of science. Racial thinking remains popular in the People's Republic of China, as serologists, geneticists and anthropometrists continue to interpret human variation in terms of 'race'. This new edition has been revised and expanded to include a new chapter taking the reader up to the twenty-first century.
Book Details
- Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
- Publish Date: Aug 1st, 2015
- Pages: 256
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.40in - 5.40in - 0.70in - 0.65lb
- EAN: 9780190231132
- Categories: • Asia - China• Anthropology - Cultural & Social• Cultural & Ethnic Studies - General
About the Author
Frank Dikötter is Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. Before moving to Asia in 2006, he was Professor of the Modern History of China at SOAS. He has published nine books about the history of China, including Mao's Great Famine, which won the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction in 2011.
Praise for this book
"Dikötter (Univ. of Hong Kong) has updated his classic 1994 work to address ongoing and new obsessions with race in the People's Republic of China since the 1980s. His original argumentâ"that race is a modern concept in Chinaâ"is still the core of the book, but this revision is an important contribution to wider scholarship on race, since the concept continues to inform China's domestic and foreign policy and is alive and well in other parts of the world." -- M. C. Brose, University of Wyoming, CHOICE"In his brilliant book Dikötter explains how traditional notions about culturally inferior "barbarians" intermingled with Western forms of scientific racism to form a distinctively Chinese racial consciousness in the 20th century." -- Forbes Magazine