Doyen of China Historians

 Many Australian readers can list several great historians of the Second World War. Besides Winston Churchill himself, names in lights include A.J.P. Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Alan Bullock, Ian Kershaw and Antony Beevor. Their focus was or remains the war in Europe, with Hitler as the marketing key, the magnetically evil drawcard. A few books about that same war in our part of the world, such as Peter FitzSimons’s big-selling Kokoda, and Peter Ryan’s Fear Drive My Feet—both set in Papua New Guinea—have also captured many Australians’ imaginations.

These are all fascinating, not least in the latter case for what we learn about ourselves. But those encounters were with a Germany and a Japan that have since changed ineradicably.

Australians are mostly reasonably informed about the wars of the last century, even those fought in a remote continent. In comparison, what do we know about the framing of the most significant development of our day—the unremitting rise of China, on which it…