First published in 1992, The Discourse of Race in Modern China rapidly became a classic, showing for the first time on the basis of detailed evidence how and why racial categorisation became so widespread in China. After the country's devastating defeat against Japan in 1895, leading reformers like Yan Fu, Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei turned away from the Confucian classics to seek enlightenment abroad, hoping to find the keys to wealth and power on the distant shores of Europe. Instead, they discovered the notion of 'race', and used new evolutionary theories from Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer to present a universe red in tooth and claw in which 'yellows' competed with 'whites' in a deadly struggle for survival. After the fall of the empire in 1911, prominent politicians and writers in republican China continued to measure, classify and rank people from around the world according to their supposed biological features, all in the name of science. Racial thinking remains popular in the People's Republic of China, as serologists, geneticists and anthropometrists continue to interpret human variation in terms of 'race'. This new edition has been revised and expanded to include a new chapter taking the reader up to the twenty-first century.

Frank Dikötter is Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. Before moving to Asia in 2006, he was Professor of the Modern History of China at SOAS. He has published nine books about the history of China, including Mao's Great Famine, which won the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction in 2011.

Preface to the Revised and Expanded Edition
Preface and Acknowledgements
Chapters
1. Race as Culture: Historical Background
SECTION ONE
The barbarian in the classics
The barbarian in mythology
Environmental determinism
'Raw' and 'cooked' barbarians
Skin colour
White ash
Black coal
SECTION TWO
Anti-Buddhism
Song loyalism
Anti-Manchuism
Conclusion
2. Race as Type (1793-1895)
Demonology
Teratology
Anatomy
Geography
Typology
Intermarri age
3. Race as Lineage (1895-1903)
Racial war
Racial origins
Racial extinction
Racial classification
Racial hierarchy
Racial frontiers
Racial assimilation
'Western influence'
Alternatives
4. Race as Nation (1903-1915)
Racial evolution
Racial preservation
Racial ancestry
Racial origins
Racial nationalism
5. Race as Species (1915-1949)
Introduction
Origins
Colour
Hair
Odour
Intelligence
Stereo types
Hierarchy
Armageddon

6. Race as Seed (1915-1949)
Background
Expansion
Apogee

7. Race as Nationality (1949-2012)

Race and class under Mao
Race and nation since 1978
Eugenics
Popular racism