This book is the only comprehensive book on modern China's intellectual history.

Unlike the majority of contemporary scholarly works that examine Sino-Japanese relations between 1925 and 1945, this study de-emphasizes the story of conflict and war in favor of one that revolves around the way in which the Chinese intellectually encountered the "enemy", the Japanese.

International scholars and sinologists discuss culture, economic growth, social change, political processes, and foreign influences in China since the earliest pre-dynastic period.

The 3,053 entries in this work, first published in 1986, comprise the compliers' attempt at a comprehensive annotated bibliography of the most useful locatable books, monographs, pamphlets, regularly and occasionally issued serials, scholarly papers, and selected newspaper accounts dealing in a significant way with formal and informal, public and private education in the People's Republic of China before and since 1949.