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Making China Modern by Klaus Mühlhahn - Book Launch
It is tempting to attribute China’s recent ascendance to changes in political leadership and economic policy. Making China Modern teaches otherwise. Moving beyond the standard framework of Cold War competition and national resurgence, Klaus Mühlhahn situates twenty-first-century China in the nation’s long history of creative adaptation.
In the mid-eighteenth century, when the Qing Empire reached the height of its power, China dominated a third of the world’s population and managed its largest economy. But as the Opium Wars threatened the nation’s sovereignty from without and the Taiping Rebellion ripped apart its social fabric from within, China found itself verging on free fall. A network of family relations, economic interdependence, institutional innovation, and structures of governance allowed citizens to regain their footing in a convulsing world. In China’s drive to reclaim regional centrality, its leaders looked outward as well as inward, at industrial developments and international markets offering new ways to thrive.
This dynamic legacy of overcoming adversity and weakness is apparent today in China’s triumphs—but also in its most worrisome trends. Telling a story of crisis and recovery, Making China Modern explores the versatility and resourcefulness that matters most to China’s survival, and to its future possibilities.
About the Author
Prof. Dr. Klaus Mühlhahn
President, Zeppelin University
Klaus Mühlhahn studied Chinese Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and National Taiwan Normal University and graduated in 1993 with a Master degree. He obtained a PhD in 1998 at the Institute of Chinese Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. His German dissertation “Rule and Resistance in Kiaochow” received the annual Joachim Tiburtius Award of the Berlin Senate. From 2002 to 2004 he was a visiting fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, Berkeley. In 2004, he accepted a position at the University of Turku in Finland, where he taught as a professor of Contemporary Chinese and Asian History at the Institute of History and at the Center for East Asian Studies. In 2007 he was appointed professor of modern Chinese history at Indiana University, Bloomington. In 2020 he returned to Berlin, teaching as professor of history and culture of modern China at Freie Universität Berlin. He also served as Vice-President of Freie Universität Berlin from 2014 to 2020. In 2020 he was appointed as president of Zeppelin University.
Klaus Mühlhahn has published widely on modern Chinese history in English, German, and Chinese and is a frequent commentator on China for the German media. His book "Criminal Justice in China", published 2009 in the Harvard University Press was awarded the John K. Fairbank-price for East Asian History by the American Historical Association. His most recent book “Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping”, again published by the Harvard University Press in January 2019, rewriteas China’s history, telling a story of crisis and recovery, exploring the versatility and resourcefulness essential for China’s current development as well as its future possibilities.
At this event
Director, Lau China Institute