Richard Louis Edmonds

Reappraising Republican China

This book testifies to the accomplishments of Republican studies during the 1980s and early 1990s. Reviewing many aspects of contemporary research, it covers the transition from the late Qing dynasty to the Republic; agricultural development from the mid-1890s to 1937; the political aspects of twentieth century Chinese urban history; the problems of capacity building for Republican era governments; political party organization, finance, and military matters; Shanghais modernization process; the politics of the Kuomintang during the Nanjing decade and its relationship with fascism; and Republican-era diplomacy.

The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China . By M ark E lvin . [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004. xxviii+564 pp. ISBN 0-300-10111-2.]

Mark Elvins books often deal with big ideas over large swathes of Chinese history and this book is no exception. The Retreat of the Elephants attempts to describe three millennia of environmental change and environmental ideas in China and to produce conclusions about the nature of Chinese environmental thought as well as experience. It is a masterful tour de force. As such, there is something of interest for everybody. The book is divided into three sections: the first sets the scene and looks at some general cases of degradation over time; the second section concentrates on case studies; and the final section provides textual analysis to elucidate changes in the Chinese view of their environment. The book begins with a simple geography and history lesson. This is helpful for the non-specialist but provides an overly simple and unusual regionalization. Then again, this approach, accompanied with a style that often translates lesser place names into literal translations, does help to open access to the book for a wider audience. Later in the book, however, there is a tendency to digress about Latin names of plants and stories of the supernatural, with wonderful esoteric translations of Chinese poetry and texts. Elvins translations use words that would require most of us to thumb through a very thick English dictionary although Elvin kindly introduces these Scottish, Welsh and old English terms to us and provides good explanations on the stories behind many of the Chinese textual allusions. These are delightful and help to clarify the points being made. Still, with such almost overwhelming detail of textual analysis later in the book, it is not completely clear for whom the book is written.

Taiwan in the Twentieth Century: An Introduction

For much of the past half-century, Taiwans development has been inextricably tied to the drama of the Chinese civil war and the Cold War in Asia. Both the government on Taiwan and many of its supporters abroad have sought to link the islands history with that of the mainland. The result has been partially to obscure the distinctive history of Taiwan and, with this, to ignore factors which have decisively shaped the development of the island. The bulk of the papers in this volume seek to contribute to the ongoing efforts of scholars in Taiwan and abroad to illuminate the early 20th-century portion of this history and to join it to discussions of the post-war evolution of the island.