Book Review

Asia

Thanks to the pioneering efforts of a number of scholars, the Sinocentric version of Chinese history has now yielded to a multidimensional vision that weaves centuries of "alien rule" into the fabric of Chinese political order and institutions. Whereas the older perception of China's relations with Inner Asian nomads was cast in terms of "Sinification" or "Sinicization," recent scholarship deprecates these terms because such expressions imply that acculturation and assimilation in China were unidirectional. It has become more common to view "China" as a historical construction. Thus, more and more East and Central Asian specialists have come to rebuke the meaning of various alien regimes that dominated China from ca. 960–1368 and 1644–1911 within the notion of China's political and geographical inevitability. F. W. Mote reminds readers in this fascinating volume that the origins of the Sinocentric view lay in centuries of nationalistic prejudice deeply ingrained in Chinese historiography. Even today, as Mote clearly demonstrates, modern scholars from both Taiwan and mainland China find problematic the explanation of non-Chinese rule over parts or all of what was China. Although these writers may replace the older epithet "barbarians" for non-Han peoples living around, near, or even in China, "modern Chinese in China . . . now class [these groups] as their "non-Han but Chinese" junior partners in the growth of a multiethnic Chinese nation" (p. 28). Thus, the historical relations between non-Han and Chinese are subsumed under rhetoric, and the integrity of these peoples' own contribution to Chinese civilization is too often disregarded.

. . .