CHINA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 499, 14 January 1949, Page 12

CHINA

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE CHINESE PEOPLE. By L. Carrington Goodrich, Allen and Unwin. "THE history of the Chinese people," writes Professor Goodrich in his preface, "cannot often enough be told. Old as it is, new light is being shed on it every year." This English edition of what has already become a standard short work by a China-born American scholar is doubly welcome at a time when something like a new deal seems to be preparing in China; for with no

country is it more necessary to remember the past in judging the present. And anyone who wants precedent for what is happening now north and south of the Yangtse will find it more than once in these 232 pages that re-

cord, with admirable conciseness, nearly 4,000 years of continuous history, Most of the new light concerns the boundaries of Chinese pre-history, which are being steadily pushed back by the archaeologist and the economic historian. In an excellent series of charts, Professor Goodrich illustrates the chief findings of modern scholarship in regard to the earliest periods; and he writes illuminatingly of the long "dark age" of political disunion that followed the establishment of the first empires. The great advantage of such a work as this over, for example, the gossipy but fascinating account of Mr. Tsui Chi, is its clarity: and even when the scheme of his work forces him to make generalisations, Professor Goodrich is sober, unsensational, and conservative without being stuffy. He has produced a firstrate introduction to a subject whose importance is still insufficiently appreciated in the schools and universities

of this country.

J.

B.