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Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science

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ArticleOpen Access http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2023.05.024

The Essence of History and the Difficulty of Explaining History

Qiyu Yang

Institute of Chinese Marxism, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, Shanghai, China.

*Corresponding author: Qiyu Yang

Published: July 3,2023

Abstract

Since the middle of the 19th century, China has started the process of modernization under the impact of the western world. This process has been accompanied by drastic changes in economy and society. Today China’s modernization has become a unique path that is different from those of the Western countries. Many Chinese and foreign scholars have examined China's modernization process from different perspectives and compared it with that of the West. Based on the "Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy" written by the American scholar: Kenneth Pomeranz, this paper intends to compare and comments on the views of Chinese and Western scholars such as Kenneth Pomeranz, Philip C. C. Huang, R. Bin Wong, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Wang Jiafan, Liu Chang, so as to understand the historical process of China's modernization since the middle of the 19th century as well as the similarities and differences of the Chinese and the Western modernization more objectively.

Keywords

China, modernization, Large diversion, Historical process

References

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Kenneth Pomeranz. (2000). “The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy”. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2000.

Philip C C Huang. (1990). “The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988”. Standford, CA, Standford University Press, 1990.

R Bin Wong, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal. (2021). “Before and after Divergence – The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe”. Jiangsu People's Publishing House, 2021.

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Wang Jiafan. (2007). “Historians and Historiography, Revaluation of Chinese History: Kenneth Pomeranz <Great Divergence>”. Guangxi Normal University Press, 2007.

Copyright

© 2023 by the author(s).
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not modified or adapted.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

How to cite this paper

The Essence of History and the Difficulty of Explaining History

How to cite this paper: Qiyu Yang. (2023) The Essence of History and the Difficulty of Explaining History. Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science7(5), 1002-1008.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2023.05.024