I have just finished reading Klaus Mühlhan's Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping. If you have an appetite for learning more about modern Chinese History, I would highly recommend this book as a foundational survey text. Mühlhan favors using institutional theory over other frequent theoretical models such as Marxist theory to explain the features and trends that made China into a prominent modern nation. This unique theoretical model is refreshing because avoids the reductionist pitfalls that Marxist theory often brings when explaining the historical evolution of a region by emphasizing the political, economic, social, and cultural institutions and edifices that transformed China, not just between the Qing, Republican period, and CCP period, but also within those periods.  Mühlhan, in my view, phenomenally demonstrates how the Qing, for example, was almost unrecognizable compared with the early years of the dynasty. An important way that the author demonstrates the perennially metamorphosing institutions that defined life in China since the early Qing is by dividing the chapters not by dynasty/ party reign period, but by time frames within those periods that are underlined by important themes which were expressed through China's institutions irreversibly changing it. This book has brought back to mind an argument I have mused over for some time now about whether or not it is more useful to teach Chinese History in terms of "turning points" in China's history as opposed to teaching Chinese History as a sequence of dynasties/ party reign periods, since teaching Chinese History through the lens of dynasties/ party reign periods carries the danger of painting generalizing images of those historical periods.

I wish I had the time to write a full review of this book. However, with online Chinese classes starting up again, my attention has been turned singularly toward studying Chinese. In short, I wholeheartedly recommend Isabella Jackson's Shaping Modern Shanghai: Colonialism in China's Global City. Especially for anyone interested in the colonial period in China, this is an important book for understanding the influence of the Shanghai Municipal Council not only on the whole of the International Settlement's institutions, but on the lives of individuals who lived in and around the Settlement.