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The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History. By JOANNA WALEY-COHEN. New York and London: W W Norton & Company, 1999. PP. 322. $24.95 (cloth); $14.95 (paper).
Joanna Waley-Cohen's The Sextants of Beijing offers a powerful reevaluation of traditional characterizations of China as isolationist and xenophobic. In the popular imagination of the West, China remains an enigmatic entity resolutely resistant to external ideas and innovations. While the past decades have witnessed a flurry of attacks on Eurocentric and Orientalist perspectives, studies on China aimed at a more popular audience have remained surprisingly immune and persist in offering an outmoded depiction of China as an "immobile empire." It is in this light that Waley-Cohen's book clearly offers a new introduction to the "general reader wishing to learn more about China's engagement with the world in a historical perspective. . ." (p. 9).
The strength of The Sextants of Beijing lies in Waley-Cohen's dual conviction that China's historical experience included both extensive interaction with the outside world and that China, far from desiring isolation, actively sought out ideas, goods, and technology from nonChinese sources. Challenging the notion of China as monolithic and unchanging, the author begins by altering the standard chronological framework, beginning not with the Opium Wars (1842-47)-traditionally portrayed as the first efforts of the West to open China-but with "early Chinese Cosmopolitanism" of the Han, Tang, and Song dynasties (200 B.C.E.-1200 C.E.). In...