Chinese Characteristics - Softcover

Smith, Arthur H

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1910736872 ISBN 13: 9781910736876

Publisher: Eastbridge Books, 2018

Synopsis

Chinese Characteristics (1894) was the most widely read American work on China until Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth (1931). It was the first to take up the task of analyzing Chinese society in the light of “scientific” social and racial theory. 

Written as a series of pungent and sometimes comic essays for a Shanghai newspaper in the late 1880s, Chinese Characteristics was among the five most read books on China among foreigners living in China as late as World War I and it was read by Americans at home as a wise and authentic handbook. The book was quickly translated into Japanese and just as quickly into Chinese. It was accepted by the Chinese — and has maintained its authoritative status for over a century — as the quintessential portrait of the Chinese race drawn by a Westerner. 

Lu Xun, the most prominent Chinese cultural critic of the early twentieth century, urged his students to study and ponder Smith’s message, which was very widely debated in Chinese student circles. Within the 1990s two different, new translations of Smith’s book were published in China and both editions have enjoyed wide distribution and readership. In the West, particularly since World War II, Chinese Characteristics has been widely quoted (though seldom read) as a purported example of "Sino-myopia" and "Orientalism". Despite such Western pseudo-intellectual bias, Smith’s arguments retain the power to provoke critical introspection among Chinese and, for the honest, among Westerners as well. 

About this title

About the Author:

Arthur H. Smith, D.D., was born in Vernon, Connecticut and graduated from Beloit College before serving with the Wisconsin infantry for a few months during the Civil War. A college friend called Smith an accomplished storyteller and "the funniest man I ever knew." After he attended Andover Theological Seminary, in 1872 the American Board of the Commissioners for Foreign Missions sent him and his wife, Emma Jane Dickenson, to China. They lived in the north China village of Panjiazhuang for several decades, aspiring to fit in as "natives." Arthur Smith steeped himself in Chinese classical literature and folklore, leading to a stream of articles and books, including Proverbs and Common Sayings from the Chinese (1886; 1916); Village Life in China: A Study in Sociology (1899); and China in Convulsion (1901), a two-volume study of the Boxer Uprising.

About this edition

• Publisher: Eastbridge Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1910736872
• ISBN 13: 9781910736876
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 362