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The Dragon and the Foreign Devils

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The Dragon and the Foreign Devils

by Harry G. Gelber

Bloomsbury, HK$400

In her new book, Nixon and Mao, Margaret MacMillan reminds us that Richard Nixon's 1972 trip to China was once considered the diplomatic equivalent of the moon landing, a risky rapprochement with a remote, forbidding enigma. How did China become so isolated?

The course of Chinese history has rarely run smooth. The nation's symbol is the Great Wall, after all - hardly a propitious welcome to outsiders. Yet, as Harry Gelber argues in The Dragon and the Foreign Devils, China's resistance to foreign influence has also shaped its character.

Gelber, a former visiting scholar at Harvard and the London School of Economics, has set himself an impossible task - surveying Chinese interaction with the wider world from prehistory to the present - and his account necessarily sacrifices depth for breadth. Although it includes mini-chapters on pivotal figures and events, The Dragon and the Foreign Devils is broad, even for a general history, glossing three millennia in a mere 400 pages. A profusion of dates and dynasties lends the book an unfortunate Gradgrindian tone.

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