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motivating factor, intimate to Schwartz's soul, for dismantling other political assessments gone askew. In addition, the appeal Schwartz has continued to make to the universality of certain profound questions, rendering China a case in point rather than a quixotic exception, may have something to do with the modern Jew's need to be reconciled with the nations. Although one can exhume no overwhelming evidence for or against this statement, Schwartz's penchant for locating polarities may have as much to do with the dipolar dialectics of the Book of Changes as it does with a Buberian-like discourse of I-Thou and I-It. Certainly, his support of the personal dimension of a preternatural Heaven in the Zhou dynasty texts, a claim which is currently very controversial but which has textual support, is not antagonistic to Schwartz's personal background.
Readers will benefit greatly from the erudition and articulate argumentation of these essays. Still all should bear in mind, as Nathan emphasizes, that especially in cross-cultural studies evaluation is an undeniably complicated task which 'is a way of respectfully sharpening and focusing discussion, not ending it', (p. 301).
LAUREN PFISTER, Hong Kong Baptist College
David Faure, The Rural Economy of Pre-Liberation China; Trade Increase and Peasant Livelihood in Jiangsu and Guangdong, 1870 to 1937, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1989. xiv + 283 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Glossary. Index.
The topic of late Qing and Republican China's rural economy and the role played by foreign trade in its transformation has been a subject of heated debate among scholars. On the one hand, there are the 'pessimists' who emphasize long-term rural decline and the negative effects of foreign trade in accelerating the process; on the other, there are the 'optimists' who stress the positive effects of foreign trade and, related to it, continuous rural prosperity until the time of the world depression in the early 1930s. A useful summary of this debate can be found in the present volume under review, (pp. 2-10).
The task that is set for this book is, in Faure's own words, ‘to explain how the increase in trade, particularly international trade, might have affected rural livelihood in China', (p. 21). His conclusion is clearly