Ernest P. Young
The Presidency of Yuan Shih-K'ai: Liberalism and Dictatorship in Early Republican China.
The University of Michigan Press, 1977. Michigan Studies on China. 0472089951 viii/347 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6.25" x 9.25", is bound in dark brown cloth, with stamped gilt lettering to spine and pictorial design depicting galloping horse on front cover. Book is like new. Dust jacket shows light shelfwear and preserved in mylar cover.
"The years following the overthrow of China's last dynasty by the 1911 Revolution were punctuated by vigorous elections and outspoken press battles, by campaigns of repression and terror, and by catastrophic foreign crises. The central figure of the new age was Yuan Shih-K'ai, mandarin reformer and now republican president. This book is a pioneering and authoritative study of his presidency.
Professor Young finds the key to China's political history during this period in the interaction between public policy and the Chinse social order. Comparing this interaction with later developments in China and in Third World countries after World War II, he questions the assumption that centralized state power is necessarily the path of progress for developing nations. At the same time he notes the socially biased character of modernizing reforms and analyzes the contradictions arising from the attempted adoption of Western liberal institutions. Throughout, a central theme is the imperialist presence in early twentieth-century China -- both it pervasive influence and its natural limits."