China Revolutionized

Thomson, John Stuart, 1869-1950Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

3.0

Word count: 1M words
Chapters: 104

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.China Revolutionized by John Stuart ThomsonAuthor: Thomson, John Stuart, 1869-1950,Language: English, Class: DS: History: General and Eastern Hemisphere: Asia, Release Date: Jun 1, 2018

Editor's review

Written by the British author John Stuart Thomson under the English title China Revolutionized, this book is classified under Asian history; Project Gutenberg released an electronic edition in 2018. Its core value is an outside perspective: how a Western observer in the first half of the twentieth century narrated China's process of change. Readers can see the period's Western framing of China, its topics of concern, and its habits of expression. Read it as historical material and opinion, not as a general history in today's sense: its judgments carry the limitations of their time and should be read against Chinese sources and later scholarship. For those studying modern Sino-Western cognitive differences or journalistic China narratives, it offers directly quotable English primary text; general readers can use it as an introduction to how others told the story of China's transformation, best with annotations and background reading.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Historians studying modern Sino-Western cognitive differences and Western China narratives
Modern-history students who need English primary texts for source citation
General readers interested in China's modern transformation who can read English
Collectors and researchers of public-domain texts and early sinological writing

Not a good fit for

Beginners seeking a systematic, accurate general history of modern China
Ordinary readers who struggle with English and need fluent Chinese prose
Readers prone to treating a century-old Western view as today's settled conclusion without critical awareness

Reading tips

Read the table of contents and preface first, mark the topics the author focuses on, then enter specific chapters with questions in mind.
Read it alongside a Chinese general history of modern China, checking chapter by chapter for differences in facts and judgments.
Note as you read what sources the author uses and what tendencies of expression appear, forming critical notes.
In the English original, use electronic search to gather passages by theme, then read them together.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Can this book's views still be taken at face value today?

They should not be taken at face value. It is the observation and judgment of a Western author in the first half of the twentieth century, carrying that era's perspective and limits. Better use is as historical material for studying Western China narratives, read against Chinese sources and later research, distinguishing factual description from value judgment.

How should "Revolutionized" in the title be understood?

Judging from the title and classification, the author focuses on China's process of drastic change, using the kind of "China in transformation" phrasing common among Western observers of the time. The exact scope should be determined from the table of contents and main text; note how the author defines "change" and its time span.

Can someone with basic English read this book?

It is an English original in a historical narrative style, with somewhat difficult sentence structures and vocabulary. Readers with basic English may struggle with long sentences and period expressions; try one or two chapters first, or choose an edition with background notes and read alongside Chinese modern-history works.

Comments

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About the author

Thomson, John Stuart, 1869-1950 Author

John Stuart Thomson (1869-1950) is an author about whom relatively little is publicly known: his nationality, education and personal career are not clearly documented, and only two of his works are currently held in the collection. Judging by their titles, his interests spanned two quite different fields. China Revolutionized is a documentary account of the transformations in modern China, an early twentieth-century Western observer's record of Chinese social change; Fil and Filippa: Story of Child Life in the Philippines focuses on children's life in the Philippines and is written in a more everyday, story-like manner. Taken together, the two books suggest an author who presented foreign societies and daily life in a documentary style, choosing subjects close to the changes of the age and the circumstances of ordinary people, in plain language aimed at general readers. Given the limited public information, biographical details and the full range of his writing remain to be verified, and readers may chiefly come to know him through the subjects and narrative style of his surviving works.