Twentieth Century China ─ A History in Documents

The twentieth century was a time of great change in China's government, economy, culture, and everyday life. Twentieth Century China, Second Edition, chronicles this period of revolutions and uprisings with the words and images of the participants. This is the story of the people---leaders and followers---whose decisions propelled modern Chinese history in erratic directions. Using a wide variety of primary sources, including official reports and public statements, articles, political posters, cartoons, poetry, songs, and advertisements, R. Keith Schoppa paints a picture of a society undergoing drastic changes, both social and political. Mao Zedong's personal physician recalls the phenomenon of backyard steel furnaces and the changes they brought to the Chinese landscape during Mao's Great Leap Forward; a poem written in 1979 expresses anger toward a general who destroyed a kindergarten to build a mansion on its site; and the box from the Chinese version of Monopoly, introduced in 1987, playfully illustrates the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin.

Expanded to cover the 2008 Beijing Olympies, this second edition of Twentieth Century China also includes an updated introduction with a note on sources and interpretation, thirty-seven new sidebars, twelve new photographs, and updated further reading and websites.

Textbooks may interpret history, but the books in the Pages from History series are history. Each title, compiled and edited by a prominent historian, is a collection of primary sources relating to a particular topic of historical significance. Documentary evidence including news articles, government documents, memoirs, letters, diaries, fiction, photographs, and facsimiles allows history to speak for itself and turns every reader into a historian. Headnotes, extended captions, sidebars, and introductory essays provide the essential context that frames the documents. All the books are amply illustrated and each includes a documentary picture essay, chronology, further reading, source notes, and index.

R. Keith Schoppa is Edward and Catherine Doehler Chair in Asian History at Loyola University, Maryland. He is the author of several monographs and textbooks on Chinese history, including Blood Road (1998), which won the Association for Asian Studies 1997 Levenson Prize for the best book on twentieth-century China.