This book is the only comprehensive book on modern China's intellectual history.

Unlike the majority of contemporary scholarly works that examine Sino-Japanese relations between 1925 and 1945, this study de-emphasizes the story of conflict and war in favor of one that revolves around the way in which the Chinese intellectually encountered the "enemy", the Japanese.

International scholars and sinologists discuss culture, economic growth, social change, political processes, and foreign influences in China since the earliest pre-dynastic period.