This useful volume brings together a number of articles showing recent shifts in the English-language historiography of 20th-century China. Historians tend to talk in terms of centuries, and a book about historical approaches to the century just finished is timely. Wasserstrom's introduction establishes the grounds for thinking about China's 20th century as a discrete period of historical time, at the same time explaining the logic of the book and integrating its disparate elements.

The chapters show considerable diversity. Joseph Esherick's “Ten theses on the Chinese revolution,” already well known in the field, rebuts some received wisdom about the (Communist) revolution and offers a series of alternative conclusions. Among these is “the need to break the 1949 barrier,” (p. 41) a point discussed at greater length in Paul Cohen's essay on “The 1949 divide in Chinese history.” The diminished significance of 1949 in recent studies is a natural product, as Cohen notes, of political and social change in China since the death of Mao, and he poses the problem of how to “probe the ways in which 1949 did indeed signal abrupt and important change, as well as the ways it did not” (p. 35).