Even at the high noon of Europe's empires China managed to be one of the handful of countries not to succumb. Invaded, humiliated and looted, China nonetheless kept its sovereignty. Robert Bickers' major new book is the first to describe fully what has proved to be one of the twentieth-century's most important stories: the long, often agonising process by which the Chinese regained control of their own country. The range of threats was close to overwhelming, with the Soviets, Japanese, British, Americans and many other European powers all hypnotized by visions of conquest or exploitation. Out of China uses a brilliant array of unusual, strange and vivid sources to recreate a now fantastically remote world: the corrupt, lurid modernity of pre-War Shanghai, the often tiny patches of 'extra-territorial' land controlled by European powers (one of which, unnoticed, had mostly toppled into a river), the entrepots of Hong Kong and Macao, and the myriad means, through armed threats, technology and legal chicanery, by which China was kept subservient. Yet China and its peoples embraced the West as they rejected it; loved it as they hated it, and embraced its ideas, goods, practices and styles as they successfully contested is power. This was a conflict fought across the century in conference chambers, and in museums and exhibitions, on battlefields and in the pages of books and magazines, on screen and through radio. Even in the darkest days of the Second World War, the Chinese government battled to expel all outsiders, whether Allied or not, and many of the most brutal policies of Mao's policies shared the same motives.

Today Chinese nationalism stays firmly rooted in memories of its degraded past- the quest for self-sufficiency, a determination both to assert China's standing in the world and its outstanding territorial claims, and never to be vulnerable to renewed attack. History matters deeply to Beijing's current rulers - and Out of China explains why.".