{"id":14466,"date":"2024-08-27T06:30:00","date_gmt":"2024-08-27T06:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/focus.cbbc.org\/?p=14466"},"modified":"2024-08-21T13:22:56","modified_gmt":"2024-08-21T13:22:56","slug":"kerry-browns-new-book-on-the-great-reversal-of-anglo-chinese-relations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/focus.cbbc.org\/kerry-browns-new-book-on-the-great-reversal-of-anglo-chinese-relations\/","title":{"rendered":"Kerry Brown on the “Great Reversal” of Anglo-Chinese Relations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Former diplomat and prolific author Kerry Brown, currently Professor of Chinese Studies at Kings College London\u2019s Lau Institute, has just published The Great Reversal<\/em> (Yale University Press). The book takes as its starting point that while modern China has a narrative of its relationship with Britain, Britons don’t have a similar understanding of our relationship with China. If they are taught any history at all, children at schools in the United Kingdom today are more likely to learn about European or American history. China is regarded as a subsidiary issue, a part of the vast, complex narrative of the British empire, despite the fact that it has profoundly influenced the culture of Britain through tea, porcelain, silk and ideas of garden design, and has impacted our politics through the role of British imperialism in China\u2019s 19th and 20th century history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In The Great Reversal<\/em>, Brown\u2019s intention is to provide British readers with our own China story and an understanding of how and why the West, through Britain, impacted and shaped the east in the form of China. Paul French caught up with Kerry Brown to talk Anglo-Chinese relations, the issue of our collective China knowledge (or lack of it) and what we can do about it.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Why do you think China and Chinese history have been so historically absent from our school curriculums, and why should we try and boost the study of China at the secondary school level?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

British imperial history is extremely contentious, but the one impact it did have that no one could dispute is that Britain became involved, directly or indirectly, in a vast number of other countries and territories. That means that China has largely been seen as a subset of this broader history and tended to get subsumed into it. Things are complicated by the fact that the Chinese story was not straightforward. Apart from Hong Kong, ceded in different stages from 1842, China was part of what some historians have called an \u2018informal\u2019 empire and never directly governed. So that makes British involvement a more complex story to tell. Those are two of the more obvious reasons why even the relatively well-defined area of Britain\u2019s relations with China and Chinese history are not easy to teach today and, therefore, largely neglected. On top of that is the obvious unfamiliarity with Chinese dynastic history, which is vast and largely unknown by the British.<\/p>\n\n\n\n