Paul Cohen's Discovering History on China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past, which critically analysed a number of common approaches to the history of modern China, was a very welcome contribution to critical methodology when it appeared in 1984, although the book has aged rather rapidly with the rise of cultural studies over the last 20 years. Readers who benefited from Cohen's arguments in favour of a more ‘China-centered approach’ will be forgiven for thinking that this might be a much needed revision of Discovering History in China. Despite a promising title, however, we are offered instead a sampling of the author's writings to date. The volume reprints excerpts from several of his previous books, starting as far back as his study of Wang Tao published in 1974 and also including a chapter from his 1984 study on American writings on modern China, and presents several talks based on his important study of the Boxer rebellion which were originally delivered in China. The collection also contains a discussion of 1949 as a watershed date, originally given at a workshop held at Harvard University in 1994, and an article on ‘national humiliation’ published as recently as 2002.While collections of articles previously published in hard-to-find journals can be a welcome addition to the field, this compendium no doubt targets the student who wishes to have a handy introduction to the career of Paul Cohen, and a helpful introductory essay in which the author reflects on how his thinking has changed over half a century of active scholarship, as well as a brief chapter in which his earlier work is revisited, no doubt facilitate this goal. Whether or not a compendium which includes work published several decades ago can still offer “fresh ways of approaching the Chinese past,” as the book description promises, is no doubt a matter of perspective, although readers in Europe may find the constant use of terms like ‘the West,’ on occasion 12 times a page, a tad tiring, all the more as this often appears to mean ‘America’–a world on its own. America-bound as China Unbound may be, the volume will nonetheless be read with profit by students from a variety of backgrounds, in particular if they are interested in the craft of historical inquiry as practiced by an important historian of modern China.
THE SILENT HALF SPEAKS