In Making China Modern, Klaus Mühlhahn provides an institutional explanation of what happened in China during the past 270 years. Mühlhahn seeks to maintain a consistent and systematic account of China's modern history from the fall of imperial China, the Chinese revolutions, and the new People's Republic of China (PRC) and its transformations to the ongoing rise of China on the world stage. For any China specialist, it is a daunting task to cover such an extended period. It is equally challenging to describe each section of this long period with a judicial temperament and to provide an adequate amount of information in each part of the book. It is an intimidating task for historians to cover the recent decades of PRC history because political scientists, sociologists, policy wonks, and journalists have claimed them extensively. On top of the social scientific expertise, historians are unsure whether the current unfolding...

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