GRADUATE education, MING dynasty, China, 1368-1644, QING dynasty, China, 1644-1912, INTERNATIONAL relations
Abstract
I began my graduate studies at Harvard in September 1958. In the summer and fall of 1959, I started groping for ways to think about China in the seventeenth century, discovered that there had been some very interesting European eyewitnesses of the Ming-Qing wars, and wrote my first seminar paper for John King Fairbank on the first Dutch embassy, 1655.1657. The rest, shall we say, is history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
INTERNATIONAL relations, ESSAYS, LEGISLATORS, INTERNATIONAL conflict, QING dynasty, China, 1644-1912, HISTORY
Abstract
The history of China's foreign relations is an interesting and controversial topic in its own right, as the essays in this special issue so amply demonstrate. But it is also central to an understanding of China's contemporary international relations. The history of China's foreign relations is not just a chronicle of the past, but also a set of facts and ideas and images that are alive in the minds of policy-makers and the public today, thereby shaping the present and future of China's relationship with the rest of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]