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Origins of the Modern Chinese State. By PHILIP A. KUHN. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002. viii, 162 pp. $18.95 (paper).
Philip Kuhn has steadily kept his eye trained on a horizon that few scholars in modern Chinese studies gaze upon for long: the continuities from the very late Qing empire to contemporary China. Mostly in his shorter studies, he has produced a master literature built upon the twin pillars of the nineteenth-century intellectual and institutional foundations of modern China. He has gone far beyond commonplace assertions that the People's Republic of China is, in some vague way, still an empire (a general idea with which Kuhn does not disagree) to look at specifics of where this imperial essence resides and what it means. He is still one of a surprisingly few in the field who look respectfully at the ostensible failures of the late Qing, and he suggests that the roots of the problem may lie buried under a debris of confused and halfhearted reform efforts, combined with the ongoing search for inspiration to solve the basic issues of the governance of China. More specifically, in this small collection of essays, as in related work on the period, Kuhn seeks to solve the puzzle of...