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Review of The Birth of Modern China: The Middle Kingdom in Globalization by Quynh Delaunay

Under the title Naissance de la Chine moderne (The Birth of Modern China), Quynh Delaunay gives French readers a hearty book (about 400 pages). To be honest, the subject is worth writing up! The subtitle L’Empire du Milieu dans la mondialisation (The Middle Kingdom in Globalization) underlines the aim of the author, who deals not only with the present and the recent past (after 1978), but also the most ancient past. We do not, along the lines of Marcel Granet (1884–1940) (1994), sometimes go as far back as the fifth or fourth century BC, to encounter the roots of tao, yin, yang, “fundamental notions on which Chinese thought has settled” (Delaunay 2014, 84), or the origins of handwriting. Let us say at once: the proposed work is very consistent. It rests on a set of different authors whose common point is to have written about China or, more generally, about the Far East. These authors issued from Western thought and in return influenced either the “classical authors” in philosophy, sociology, and history, such as Marx and Engels, Max Weber, Marcel Granet, Karl Jaspers, Karl Polanyi, etc., or some contemporary authors more oriented to the “general public,” such as Frédéric Lenoir, a prolific author and great popularizer of the history of religions. Chinese writers today, especially sociologists, are not forgotten. With their observations and investigations, they participate in filling page after page with studies of the present mutations in their country. It is a good thing that the French reader can come to know their works. Quynh Delaunay’s book is clearly ordered and presented. According to the author, it includes two subsets. From Chapter I to Chapter III, after an introduction outlining the problems (nearly 150 pages: a book in the book!), we face the emergence of the Chinese world (human groupings, thought, religion, techniques) and the presentation of classical texts (Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism[s]) from established “sinological studies” and other disciplines in social sciences (history, anthropology, psychology). In counterpoint, the development of the Western world is revealed, from ancient Greece particularly, with its transformation into modernity in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. From Chapter IV to Chapter VIII, we are then gradually led by the author into the world of contemporary China from various angles, including two chapters summarizing her own rich field surveys in 2010 in the region of Shanghai (Delaunay 2014, 252–54).