China: A History By Arthur Cotterell
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Arthur 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 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. Epub chinese books 
Learn to understand China Read the history History 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 History 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 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 pragmatic approach which was generally 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 History 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 History
| China: A History By Arthur Cotterell |
| 0712662510 |
| 9780712662512 |
| English |
| 355 |
| Paperback |
| ebook chinese |
| ebook chinh sach tien te the ky 21 |
| ebook chicago citation |
| ebook chicago |
| ebook chicago style |
| chia anime |
| chandlers |
| chinedu |
| chinese |
| chiang mai |
| cinahl |