Zhang Haipeng

Zhang Haipeng, born in May 1939 in Hanchuan, Hubei, is a historian and a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, as well as a researcher at the Institute of Modern History. He previously served as director of the institute and president of the Chinese Historical Society. He has long been engaged in the study of modern Chinese history and Marxist historiography, with scholarly work that combines careful source analysis with attention to broad historical context. His representative achievement is the ten-volume General History of Modern China, which he edited; its volumes cover key phases from the late Qing to the Republican era, including the New Policies and constitutional movements around the 1898 reforms, the 1911 Revolution, the early Republic, and the civil war and crisis of 1927–1937. He also edited A Draft History of Taiwan and Forty Years of Chinese Historiography, and has written a biography of Qiu Jin. His plain, rigorous style has given him considerable influence in the field of modern Chinese history.