By CARL HARTMAN, Associated Press Writer Fri Jun 27, 2:04 PM ET
“Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850 to the Present” (Ecco. 763 pages. $34.95), by Jonathan Fenby: In 1776, the 13 American colonies began their two-century march to making the United States the world’s only remaining superpower.
Coincidentally, that was the year when Edward Gibbon began publishing his six-volume “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” detailing the millennium-long collapse of a superpower into a welter of European, Asian and African states.
Things move faster now. The first American edition of “Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power” expounds both processes in one hefty but highly colorful tome, covering a shorter period than it took the American epic to unfold.
The new book is by Jonathan Fenby, veteran editor of The Observer in London and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. (lagi…)















