Restless Empire
by Odd Westad
In Restless Empire, award-winning historian Odd Arne Westad presents a history of China's relationship with the rest of the world for the last 250 years. Westad shows that, for most of its recent past, China has been an open society with an unrivalled capacity to reinvent itself. China's permeability has enabled it to compete and engage with other powers, but it has also contributed to the instability that has marked the country for much of its recent history—and which will pose a serious challenge in the future.Westad traces China's history from the Qing Empire in the 18th century to the People's Republic in the 21st, showing how the nation's worldview and foreign relations have been determined by both its receptiveness and its resistance to outside influence. Encroachment by foreign, often imperial powers—specifically Western nations and Japan—have only reinforced many of China's traditional mores: inherited notions of justice, hierarchy, cultural...