The rise of modern China

This title is derived from the scholarly historical publication, ‘The Rise of Modern China’, first published by Oxford University Press in the United States in 1970. Originally written in English, the book was translated into Traditional Chinese and published in Hong Kong in 2001. It was published in Simplified Chinese in China in 2008. In the Simplified Chinese edition, eleven chapters, or over 200 pages, are erased. ‘The Rise of Modern China (2018)’ now republishes the removed pages from the original edition. Most of the content on these pages was eliminated, leaving only year dates, in the system of the Gregorian calendar. This work not only addresses the (well- known) censorship regime of contemporary China, but is also an attempt to address historiography, and the way national histories are written. In the First Edition, all of the 50 copies were hand-binded, with glue and blackened binding gauze. Intentionally, the book does not include any publishing information, neither on its cover, back-cover or spine. All the imageries on it are unidentified, except the year dates. The book was designed to become an incomplete book, as if one fragment torn out from an intact book, echoing its concept: a book of erasure.