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Stephen R. Platt, Mao Haijian. The Qing Empire and the Opium War: The Collapse of the Heavenly Dynasty., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 5, December 2018, Pages 1650–1651, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy299
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Mao Haijian’s 1995 study of the Opium War, Tianchao de bengkui, translated here as The Collapse of the Heavenly Dynasty, is a contemporary classic in modern Chinese history that, despite its enormous influence in the more than twenty years since its publication, has been previously unavailable to English-language readers. The volume at hand represents a welcome effort to bring this work into the Western scholarly mainstream.
Tianchao de bengkui was a bombshell in its time. By convention in China, the first Opium War (1839–1842) marks the opening of the “modern” era of the country’s history, and the beginning of the so-called “Century of Humiliation,” which ended in 1949 with the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The war has long been a staple of nationalist education and holds a foundational place in the Chinese Communist Party’s vision of history.
What made (and continues to make) Mao Haijian’s interpretation of this war so influential, and so surprising, was how sharply he cut against the grain of PRC orthodoxy in his analysis. His book was, as British scholar Julia Lovell writes in the introduction to this translation, “a daringly alternative historical assessment of the Opium War” (xv).
