Words are blunt and slippery tools for carving up and dissecting the past. The history of modern China cannot be characterized in a few words, however well chosen. The much used term ‘modern transformation’ signifies little more than ‘change through recent time’ and leaves us still ignorant of what ‘time’ is. At a less simplistic level, however, each of the twenty-eight authors writing in volumes 10 to 13 of this series has offered generalization about events and trends in China within the century and a half from 1800 to 1949. Making more inclusive generalizations about less inclusive ones is no doubt the historian’s chief activity, yet most of the writers in these four volumes would accept the notion that broader a generalization is, the farther it is likely to be removed from the concrete reality of events. In this view the postulating of all-inclusive process (such as progress or modernization) or of inevitable stages (such as feudalism, capitalism,and socialism) generally belongs to metahistory, the realm of faith. While we need not deny such terms to those who enjoy them, we can still identify them as matters of beliefs, beyond reason.
下午在图书馆大厅等Hailing的时候拿了本《剑桥中国史》翻看。序言部分是费正清写的，我很喜欢这一段，就记下来了。暑假要把近代史的课好好补一下。（这本书应该是不错的启蒙读物）