Sources in Chinese History: Diverse Perspectives from 1644 to the Present ed. by David G. Atwill and Yurong Y. Atwill (review)

There are few better ways to engage the minds and imaginations of a new generation of undergraduates studying modern Chinese history than a good collection of primary documents. For the period ranging from the late Ming to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the second edition of Sources of Chinese Tradition, vol. 2 (2000), and The Search for Modern China: A Documentary Collection (1999) (hereafter, Search) have set the standard.¹ The husband-and-wife team of David G. and Yurong Y. Atwill have contributed another sourcebook, one that “goes beyond the narrow boundaries of political and intellectual thought” as they explore “broad cultural, social, and ethnic trends” (p. xix). In this undertaking, the Atwills retrace the steps Pei-kai Cheng, Michael Lestz, and Jonathan Spence took in Search to illustrate “aspects of social life, political and military problems, ethical conceptions and practice, and the inner dynamics of everyday life” (Search, p. xv). In their attempt to draw on a “broad spectrum of perspectives and ideas” (p. xix) the Atwills were especially interested in exploring women’s topics, sampling Chinese literature, and highlighting popular culture. These efforts are easily seen in the very useful thematic table of contents that arranges their 170 documents in ten categories, including “Women’s Roles, Education, and Rights” (19 documents) and “Literature, Song, Television, and Cinema” (25 documents). In the former category, the selections begin with a Yuan Mei ghost story (c. 1788) and ends with Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby (1999). Other themes include education (10 documents); religious, social, and political movements (13 documents); ethnicity, nationalities, and borderlands (8 documents); and rebels, revolutionaries, and resistors (24 documents). The remaining state-oriented topics (law, rulers, foreign relations, and war) include an almost equal number (96) of documents.

The attention paid by the Atwills to social and cultural history is noteworthy. Still, students can easily situate this compelling and evocative material within the broader political histories of the Qing, Republican, and Communist periods. Interspersed with chapters keyed to political histories are other chapters such as “Qing Society, Culture, and Peoples” and chapter sections such as “Literary Currents in 1920s China,” “Music, Opera, and Plays” (dealing with the Cultural Revolution), or contemporary issues in post-2000 China. The Atwills wrote introductory essays to each chapter (as well as shorter section introductions); this material is sometimes cross-referenced to individual documents, all of which have headnotes and question sets for students. Overall control of chronology is aided by timelines for each of the three historical periods covered. Framing the timelines are annotated listings of additional readings and useful websites. The final study aid provided by the Atwills is a glossary that includes all the glossed terms first presented as footnotes throughout the sourcebook. Taken together, all of these features, when combined with classroom lectures and discussions and a standalone textbook, should provide students with a firm grounding in the primary and secondary literature and the important historiographical issues of modern Chinese history.

There is one other feature of the sourcebook that is a boon to students: the “Visual Source” that opens each of the fifteen chapters. These visual sources, which are all unpacked with a series of helpful annotations, enliven the documentary sources significantly. Examples include a reproduction of a memorial to the Kangxi emperor; the physical layout of the Canton system of Sino-Western trade; a Taiping government seal; sequential maps of the increasing number of treaty ports as the nineteenth century unfolded; 1920s advertising; political cartoons; Great Leap Forward propaganda from the 1950s; Mao images; and photos from the 1989 student demonstrations at Tiananmen.

The value-added items just described do much to distinguish Sources in Chinese History from its predecessors. While this volume does not replace Search, which also includes numerous documents of...