Sinicization and the Rise of China

Reviews / Votes

If we are to understand the importance of a rising China we will have to answer complex questions about China's evolving civilizational and national identity and of the processes that link China to the world. The learned scholars in this volume address these questions in a series of intelligent, provocative, and sometimes controversial essays.

Thomas J. Christensen, Princeton University.

This comprehensive collection brings together an outstanding set of scholars to provide new perspectives on both China's own cultural, political, and economic issues as well as its relations with the world. Students of international relations, Asia, and civilizational debates will find this thought-provoking book to be essential for its theoretically informed and sophisticated scholarship.

David Kang, University of Southern California.

These studies on China's rise provide a comprehensive examination of the Sinicization process. The seven authors link past and present civilizing influences, they connect those acting within the Sinic world with those outside, and some reach further out to wherever similar processes may occur. They demonstrate that an ancient and distinctive mode of cultural change survived many crises and is alive today. The case the essays make for Sinicization as a recombination effect makes compelling reading. It is an important corrective to recent efforts to display China's rise in dramatic and overwrought terms.

Wang Gungwu, East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore.

Katzenstein and the other authors in this text attempt to complicate popular conceptions of civilizational interaction by focusing instead upon hybridity and plurality. The result is a cohesive series of chapters which each contribute, more or less, to producing a nuanced dialogue centered on the perceived "rise" of China. The arguments presented are theoretically and historiographically sound and are produced from a prodigious body of both primary and secondary source materials. The authors collectively consulted the works of a diverse group of theorists and scholars ranging from Antonio Gramsci, Rey Chow, and Pierre Bourdieu to Evelyn Rawski, Maya Jasanoff, Philip C.C. Huang, John Fairbank, and Samuel Huntington. This book will undoubtedly help to further complicate debates surrounding both the "rise" of China, and the role that Sinicization plays globally. It will be well received by scholars of China, as well as those who focus upon international relations, and economic and social history.

Christa Adams, The University of Akron



Comprehensive in scope and illuminating in many aspects, it is indispensable reading not just for experts of Chinese politics and international relations but for scholars and students of modern China in general.

Lin Hang