With growing interest in China in the run up to the Beijing Olympics, this is an indispensable starting point to understanding the themes and controversies that have shaped modern China.
Rana Mitter is University Lecturer in the History and Politics of Modern China at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St Cross College. He is the author of The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance and Collaboration in Modern China (California, 2000), and A Bitter Revolution: China's Struggle with the Modern World (OUP, 2004), for which he won the title Times Higher Young Academic Author of the Year 2005. The book was also runner-up for the Longman/History Today Book of the Year prize, a finalist for the British Academy Book Prize, and named by Foreign Affairs as one of five <"must-read>" Notable Books on China. He presents and comments regularly on radio and television, and his reviews and essays have appeared in the Financial Times, History Today, and London Review of Books.