Mao Haijian

Mao Haijian, born in Shanghai in 1954, is a Chinese scholar of modern Chinese history. He received his master's degree from the Department of History at East China Normal University in 1982, studying under Chen Xulu. He has served as a researcher at the Institute of Modern History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and as a professor in the Department of History at Peking University, and is currently a professor in the Department of History at East China Normal University and dean of the Simian Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. His research focuses on the political and diplomatic history of modern China, and his representative works include The Collapse of the Celestial Empire and A Study of the Historical Events of the Hundred Days' Reform. Grounded in archival sources, his writing emphasizes textual verification and the reconstruction of detail, combining scholarly rigor with readability. Ten of his works are included in this collection, covering the Opium War, the Hundred Days' Reform, the Xianfeng Emperor, and modern military and diplomatic history; among them are Another Side of the Hundred Days' Reform, From the Sino-Japanese War to the Hundred Days' Reform, and The Measure of Modernity, which span historical reading, biography, and essays, and have exerted a broad influence on readers of modern Chinese history.