![]() ![]() Although the word “globalization” has been around since the 1930s, for China, the pivotal year was 2001, when Beijing entered the World Trade Organization, after which its exports increased fivefold in a decade. The economy of the Middle Kingdom is not only fully integrated into the international system, but China’s appetites (for oil, ore, fish and soybeans), its tastes (for Ferraris, Louis Vuitton bags and fine Bourdeaux), and its exports and imports are shaking the world. ![]() Since 1996, however, China has changed and mightily so. ![]() ![]() Possessing many great yarns, mind you, but fundamentally unchangeable. China, then and now, he seemed to say, was unchangeable. The Taiping Rebellion was significant, Spence seemed to argue in “God’s Chinese Son,” more for the fact that it was a good story than for the effect it had on the world. So, perhaps fittingly, the writer, the storied Chinese historian Jonathan Spence, chose to emphasize the profound weirdness of the rebellion’s leader, the eccentricity of his ideology and the faraway nature of the events. China, at the time, was slowly emerging from its defensive crouch following the Tiananmen Square crackdown. The last great English-language history of the 19th-century Taiping Rebellion - one of the bloodiest uprisings the world has ever seen - was published in 1996. ![]()
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