"China is one of the great question marks on the world stage as we approach the third millennium. No longer a sleeping giant, neither is China a stable ally of the West. Economically it is an emerging powerhouse, and politically it is precariously balanced between the free market and military dictatorship. There could be no better time to try to understand China's history - the distance it has traveled, and where it may be going from herethan today."...

Jonathan Spence, our foremost historian of Chinese politics and culture, tells us in his new book how the West has understood China over seven centuries. Ranging from Marco Polo's own depiction of China and the mighty Khan, Kublai, in the 1270s to the China sightings of three twentieth-century writers of acknowledged genius - Kafka, Borges, and Calvino - Spence explores Western thought on China through a remarkable array of expression. Peopling Spence's...

Chronicles the life of seventeenth-century historian and essayist Zhang Dai, whose life spanned the Manchus' conquest of China and the fall of the Ming dynasty, and explores his influence on seventeenth-century Chinese culture and literature.