Review | Book review: Out of China – from Shanghai to Hong Kong’s handover, an incisive analysis of West’s meddling
Once a schoolboy in Hong Kong, historian Robert Bickers sheds light on Chinese nationalism and the roots of its ‘rage’ in a work that ranges across politics, classical art and popular culture in a conversational tone
Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination
by Robert Bickers
Allen Lane
This story is hardly unknown, of course, and it’s worth asking why it bears repeating. One reason, perhaps, is just because out of sight leads to out of mind. Another reason might be that when accounts of foreign interference are limited, as they can be, to the opium wars and some bad behaviour in the concessions in Shanghai, it is easier to hold that these relatively isolated incidents are so far in the past that they should not have any bearing on relations today.
“The era when China was subject to foreign invasion … has been over for seventy years. Is it not simply history, done and dusted with now?” asks Bickers, entirely rhetorically, in his introduction.
