[
    {
        "id": 212417,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1990",
        "page_number": 359,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "336\n\nJonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China, W.W Norton and Company: $29.95; cloth; 876 pages.\n\nJonathan D. Spence in \"The Search for Modern China” endeavours to facilitate an understanding of China. He says, quite rightly, that \"in trying to understand China today we need to know about China in the past\" (pp. xix-xx). That is why Spence begins his narrative in the late 16th century, when China was ruled by its last native dynasty on the eve of the Manchu conquest.\n\nInterestingly, the Yale historian explains that his book is not about modern China. Rather, it is about a centuries-long effort to create such a country, one which is both integrated and receptive, fairly sure of its own identity yet able to join others on equal terms in the quest for new markets, new technologies, new ideas\" (p.xx).\n\nBy this definition, Spence says, China is not today and never has been a modern country.\n\nCertainly, China in the Qing dynasty was far from being **fairly sure of its own identity yet able to join others on equal terms**. As Spence points out, China did not even have a national flag in its 4,000 years of existence, until one was created in the nineteenth century, when it consciously began to acquire what it thought were the attributes of a modern nation.\n\nAs is to be expected, Spence finds numerous parallels in Chinese history. Thus, he likens General Claire Chennault's World War II \"Flying Tigers\" to the foreign mercenary Ever-Victorious Army formed to fight the Taiping rebels; he sees similarities between Great Leap Forward rhetoric and the vision of Hong Xiuquan, the Taiping Heavenly King, and he compares the Shanghai Communique of 1972 with the Treaty of Nerchinsk of 1689.\n\nThis does not mean, of course, that China is unchanging. During the Qing dynasty, for example, China spurned British requests for developing trade. Spence quotes the Qianlong emperor's message to George III of England:\n\n\"We have never valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the slightest need of your country's manufactures. Therefore, O king,",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
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    },
    {
        "id": 212672,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1991",
        "page_number": 226,
        "title": "RAS-1991",
        "content_text": "207\n\nan original commission with the final decision on the book's coverage and titling.\n\nA further sign of inadequate editing is the absence of any indication of the sources of these images of the past. Beyond stating on the inside rear of the cover that the photographs were \"carefully culled from press archives of the time” (my italics), a rather inexact and fairly unhelpful statement, the book itself is totally without any list or acknowledgement of sources. For a work which is sub-titled “A History in Documentary Photographs\" and is part of an interesting series which up to the time of this book's publication had issued volumes dealing with Russia, Africa, and the Ottoman Empire around the same period.\n\nand one clearly intended to be a historical record this major omission is surprising as well as disappointing. It is to be hoped that the other books in the series are more useful in this regard.\n\n―\n\nChina, A Photohistory 1937-1987 Introduction by Jonathan D. Spence, Edited with Commentaries by W.J.F. Jenner (London, Thames and Hudson, 1988).\n\nIt is a relief to turn to this very elegant and thoroughly scholarly book so carefully compiled and edited by William Jenner and so compassionately and accurately introduced by Jonathan Spence. No need to worry about sources, or to find fault with the introduction, summaries and captions to the photographs. It is altogether a more thoughtful production which makes one realize what a great opportunity was missed with the other, whose images are equally striking and evocative but are not properly supported by the accompanying text.\n\nThe 153 photographs reproduced here are by persons from or connected with the well-known Magnum international photographers' cooperative. Jonathan Spence's fine Introduction sets the scene for them and explains how \"surprisingly large portions of the Chinese story are still not available in any visual form' in the West, through not having been covered by Western photographers. For instance, little is available from 1949 to 1956, when from that year until mid 1958 Hiroshi Hamaya took pictures and Marc Riboud \"produced a stream of photographs during his travels in China at this time\".\n\nThere is not space to do justice to all the facets of this collection, nor to the quality of Spence's commentary. However, his comments on",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 213402,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1994",
        "page_number": 224,
        "title": "RAS-1994",
        "content_text": "212\n\nStockholm Statens Etnografiska Museum, 1866\n\nSkrine, CP, Chinese Central Asia, London. Methuen, 1926 (Hong Kong Reprint Oxford University Press)\n\nSladen, Douglas Brooke Wheelton, The Japanese at Home, 5th edition, with Bits of China, London and New York Waid, Lock and Bowden, 1895\n\nSmedley, Agnes, Chinese Destinies - Sketches, New York Vanguard, 1933\n\n- China Correspondent, London Routledge and Kegan. 1934\n\n- Battle Hymn of China, New York Knopf, 1943\n\n+\n\nSmith, Carl T, Chinese Christians Elites, Middlemen, and the Church in Hong Kong, Hong Kong Oxford University Press, 1985\n\nSmith, Richard J, Mercenaries and Mandarins: the Ever-Victorious Army in Nineteenth Century China, New York KTO Press, 1978\n\nSmith, Ronald Bishop, A Projected Portuguese Voyage to China in 1512 and New Notices Relative to Tome Pires in Canton, Bethesda (Maryland) L Decatur Press, 1972\n\nSpence, Jonathan, To Change China: Western Advisers in China 1620-1960, Boston Little Brown, 1969\n\nThe Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, New York Viking Penguin, 1984\n\nStaunton, Sir George Leonard, An Authentic Account of An Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China, London G Nicol, 1798\n\nStein, Sir Mark Aurel, Detailed Report of Explorations in Central Asia and Westernmost China. Oxford Clarendon Press, 1921\n\nStern, Simon Adler, Jettings of Travel in China and Japan, Philadelphia Porter and Coates, 1888 (WB11894)\n\nSzczesniak, Boleslaw, The Writings of Michael Boym, Monumenta Serica XIV (1949-55), 481-538\n\nTaylor, Francis, mss (Bodleian Library Ms Rawl D391/95-98) Letters of Francis Taylor to Dr Edward Browne April 25, 1703 off Ancuago on coast of China,\n\nTeignmouth, Henry Noel Shore, (b 1847), The Flight of Lapwing, a Naval Officer's Jottings in China, London Longmans, 1881\n\nThomas, James A, A Pioneer Tobacco Merchant in the Orient, Durham NC Duke University Press, 1928.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1994.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 215996,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-2002",
        "page_number": 295,
        "title": "RAS-2002",
        "content_text": "229\n\nrecollections, Jonathan Spence's depiction of Hong Xiùquan's madness in God's Chinese Son, and the argument of Robert P. Weller where he suggests the Taiping king's responses did maintain an appearance of sensibility to those in 19th century Guangxi and Guangdong (Resistance, Chaos, and Control in China: Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts and Tiananmen (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994)).\n\n38. No recognition of this kind of cultural logic is explained or addressed in any direct manner within any of the materials published about Ch'ea. Wherever Legge hints at this kind of problem in his 1861 \"Journal of a Missionary Tour,\" the new editors of the EMMC/MM in London (Legge's father-in-law having died in 1858) consistently deleted it from his original text.\n\n39. This rarely mentioned factor in late Qing political movements is hardly given the attention it rightly deserves, but has been recently readdressed in Frank Dikkötter's study, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1992), especially the section on \"Race As Type (1793-1895)\", pp. 31-60.\n\n40. Advocated in Paul A. Cohen's evaluation of historical writing about China as the appropriate new direction for academic studies. See his Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).\n\n41. Illustrations from the text are explained with translations and notes below each image, appearing in Paul A. Cohen, China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Antiforeignism, 1860-1870 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1963, third printing, 1977), consisting of nine plates (seven with scenarios) between pages 140 and 141.\n\n42. The book title was also translated by Christian missionaries who exposed the content of the volume in a tamer manner as Death Blow to Corrupt Doctrines. See Paul Cohen, China and Christianity, pp. 277-281.\n\n43. Whether or not these exact images were being employed in the ideological opposition to Ch'ea's conversion is not certain. In fact, Legge himself possessed one copy of Bixie shilu only later in his life, possessing it only after 1884 when he received an \"LLD\" from Edinburgh University. The copy he received in Oxford originally was owned by Alexander Wylie, if the signatures on the cover portray the story. This same copy was later donated to the Bodleian Library by \"H. Corbett\", and is a text without pictures (Ms. chin. d. 23).\n\n44. This is the argument of An Pingqiu and Zhang Péihéng, editors of Zhōngguó jinshu dàguān (A Complete Introduction to [the History of] Chinese Censored Books) (Shanghai: Cultural Pub. Co., 1990), esp. pp. 102-144, and also illustrated with extensive detail in Okamoto Sae's new publication, Shindai kinsho no kenkyu (The Prohibited Books in the Qing Dynasty) (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1996), where she discusses the kinds of books censored, the contents of these volumes, the authors and their fates.\n\n45. And so the Taiping in their own demonology cast the Manchurians into the role of demon devils in response to these intergenerational racist oppressions. Spence notes the presence of the demonology, but does not point out the connection with the previous imperial tactics oppressing intellectuals (God's",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278",
        "rank": 0
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]