Why history is so galling for the world’s newest superpower / by Simon Scott Plummer

Out of China: How the Chinese Ended
the Era of Western Domination
Robert Bickers
(Allen Lane, 576 PP, £30)
tablet bookshop price £27 • tel 01420 592974

In 1949, Mao Zedong declared that China had “stood up” after more than a century of humiliation at the hands of foreign powers. Such is his colossal presence that the nationalist struggles of the first part of the twentieth ­century, and the dependence of Chinese Communism on the Soviet Union after the revolution, tend to be overlooked. As a groundbreaker, Mao ranks with Lenin, but there is more continuity in China’s recent history than his famous declaration of 1949 would suggest.