Huping Ling

Fascinating historical and sociological information collected and laid out in readable form even for the non-academic.

Occasionally the author over-broadly generalizes, particularly regarding China's political history. Sometimes the author will make a generalization also that she contradicts within her own text -- for example in chapter 5 in discussing the power of merchant immigrants, she states that "secure in their wealth and power , the Chinese gentry-scholars had little incentive to emigrate." In that case, when three paragraphs on she says that "the Hip Sing Tong was established in the 1870s by a scholar who had lost his business." After the first statement quoted above, the second begs for explication.

All in all, a good read.


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