China's far West : four decades of change

Author / Creator

Barnett, A. Doak

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Summary

"China's Far West is a rich portrait of China's least-known provinces by one of America's leading China scholars. Based on A. Doak Barnett's unrivaled travels in and study of some of the most remot...

"China's Far West is a rich portrait of China's least-known provinces by one of America's leading China scholars. Based on A. Doak Barnett's unrivaled travels in and study of some of the most remote areas of the country in both the late 1940s and the late 1980s, this sweeping work vividly portrays a China few outsiders have seen." "Barnett's work builds on decades of experiences in China. He began writing about the country in 1947 and chronicled the Communist takeover in 1949. More than any other Western observer of the time, he followed the fortunes of China's distant provinces in the far west, most of which were then ruled by old-style warlords. His observations were distilled in China on the Eve of Communist Takeover (available from Westview Press), which was the inspiration for this book." "When the doors to interior areas opened more widely as a result of Deng Xiaoping's economic reform, Barnett decided to retrace journeys that were now four decades in the past in 1988, he revisited Inner Mongolia, the arc of Hui Muslim areas in the northwest, the Uighur and Kazakh regions in Xinjiang, the Tibetan enclaves in Qinghai and western Sichuan, and Yunnan's multiethnic regions. Everywhere he went, he probed for answers to two basic questions: How much had these distant areas changed over four decades? And what had been the impact of the economic reforms and accelerating processes of growth and modernization spurred by Deng in the 1980s?" "Containing remarkably comprehensive profiles of each area the author visited, the book is full of detailed information about government and politics, economic development, social changes, and relations between ethnic groups. Barnett comments on continuities, but he is clearly most impressed by the extent of the changes he saw. The spread of industrialization, a remarkable communications revolution, rising living standards, and increasing contacts with the rest of China and the world had catapulted the region into the modern world. Although many western areas were still among the poorest in China, the economic reforms of the 1980s were taking hold." "No other contemporary study of these little-known areas of China begins to match the scope and detail of China's Far West, and no other author has the experience to analyze the book's themes with Barnett's breadth and depth of historical perspective. Although this volume concentrates on China's far west, the author discusses in both the Prologue and the final chapter the broad processes of modernization and reform that have been transforming every part of China during the past four decades."--BOOK JACKET.

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