Western English Language Scholarship on China since 1945: Trends and Evaluation

Abstract

This article analyses post-World War II Western English language scholarship about China's history and present. It focuses on the ways this scholarship has changed over the period, including discussion of how the balance between comparative and area studies has changed towards the latter, but also gives some space to works by two great sinologists, Joseph Needham and John K. Fairbank. It offers a periodization of the scholarhip, with three periods separated by boundaries in the late 1960s and late 1980s and early 1990s. It argues that factors affecting scholarly images of China's present and very recent past have included not only the realities of China but also changing power relations between the west and China. Contemporary China appears to have advanced more than English language scholarship about it would suggest.