These writings representing over a generation of work by one of our most acutecommentators on Chinese history are collected here for the first time andintroduce... » 

These writings representing over a generation of work by one of our most acutecommentators on Chinese history are collected here for the first time andintroduced with a masterly prologue. They cut across the boundaries ofdifferent fields of knowledge to better understand modern China and traditionalChinese culture.Schwartzs writings are deeply concerned with the conceptual frameworks andpresumptions which we as twentiethcentury Westerners bring to bear in ourstudy of foreign cultures. He brings the entire complexity concerning modernityto his analysis of the millennial political social and cultural history ofChina.This is also an excavation of the conscious life of the Chinese past aninterpretation of the persistent dominant cultural and sociopoliticalorientations of Chinese culture. The constancies of behavior and attitudes aremade plain in the contingencies and complexities of shortdurational andgenerational history. «