I'm currently reading John King Fairbank's "China: A New History" and I can't help feel that its a bit outdated scholarshipwise, in addition to shoehorning Chinese concepts into Western definitions. Are there any other works on Chinese history that I can look into to supplement Fairbanks' work?

by Khysamgathys
EnclavedMicrostate

I'd go a step further. Ditch Fairbank entirely. While Fairbank cast a long shadow over China studies, that shadow was already quite blurred by the 1980s, and many of his original theories about Chinese history (including a general belief in China as an 'ancient', highly continuous civilisation) are just not up to scratch anymore, though Fairbank did certainly come to accept quite a lot of change in his later years. For a general overview, the best modern option is the six-volume History of Imperial China series edited by Timothy Brook which came out about ten years ago. Don't be too daunted by that 'six-volume' figure, as each book is only between 200-250 pages of core text, making a total of 1200-1500 pages which is, I feel, pretty fair if you're going to cover 220 BCE up to 1912.* While I have no particular preference for the post-Qing period, Jonathan Spence's The Search for Modern China is still quite reasonable. Spence's view was always more that China is unchangeable by any one individual, not that China is unchanging in and of itself, and moreover he was always reasonably ahead of his time in recognising the Han-Manchu duality under the Qing even without himself being a Manjurist. If there's one issue with Search for Modern China it's that in practical terms, Spence was always an Early Modernist who wrote forward into the twentieth century, so you may find he's just a little too interested in this idea of continuities and China's having still been in an early modern state long past other regions.

* The six volumes are, in order:

  • The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han by Mark Edward Lewis
  • China between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties by Mark Edward Lewis
  • China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty by Mark Edward Lewis
  • The Age of Confucian Rule: The Song Transformation of China by Dieter Kuhn
  • The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties by Timothy Brook
  • China's Last Empire: The Great Qing by William T. Rowe
KippyPowers

I haven’t read this book, but I do tend to think that there is always going to be a problem with writing a single history of an entire civilization, even if the scholarship is excellent. Not just China but applicable to any of the flairs you see here including mine.

Could you specify some particular areas of interest of yours in Chinese history? That would help us give the best quality suggestions.

hellcatfighter

If you're interested in a historiographical perspective of the Sinology debates in the 1970s and 1980s, one can do little wrong with Paul A. Cohen's Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (1984), which gives a detailed explanation and critique of the Western-centric approaches adopted by Fairbank and his students (note: Cohen was also a student of Fairbank). Also see Cohen's article 'Revisiting Discovering History in China' in China Unbound: Evolving Perspectives on the Chinese Past (2003), which draws upon new scholarship and offers a response to criticism from other Sinologists.

For Chinese perspectives on the debate, see Lu Han-chao's 'A Double-Sided Mirror: On Paul Cohen's Discovering History in China,' The Chinese Historical Review, 14:2 (2007), 189-191, and Xia Ming-fang's 'Modern Chinese history without “modernity”: Paul A. Cohen's three dogmas and the logical contradictions of the “China‐centred approach”,' Journal of Modern Chinese History, 1:1 (2007), 53-68.