"The Great History of China" Author: Huang Renyu Publisher: Life·Reading·New Knowledge Sanlian Bookstore

The Great History of China is one of the representative works of Chinese-American historian Huang Renyu. This book, with a short length of more than 200,000 words, outlines the whole picture of China's history for thousands of years. Chinese historical books are so vast that beginners often cannot get started. The author has changed the writing style of previous historians. He does not aim to pile up historical materials, nor does he focus on a single historical event. The author advocates big history and advocates using induction to highly compress existing historical materials, first forming a concise and coherent outline, which has a comparable scope and level with European and American history, and then conducting further research. This "big" historical writing method focuses on the outline of the macro lines of history and the structural framework of history itself. The Great History of China analyzes the process of Chinese history from a technical perspective, focusing on how the modern economic system is not tolerated by traditional society and what opportunity it has taken to settle on Chinese soil. Since the simplified Chinese version of The Great History of China was published in 1997, it has been published more than 20 times in the past ten years. As a successful historical work, its readers are not limited to the historical community. As a prominent representative of the French Annales School among Chinese scholars, Huang Renyu is very good at starting from the details of history, while breaking away from the constraints of specific historical events and finding more accurate characteristics of the historical era. This is the big history view. He emphasizes combining characters with the historical background and not letting go of the characters' individual characteristics, so that those characters who have been deeply studied by the historical community can reappear in front of readers with new faces.

Huang Renyu was born in Changsha, Hunan. In 1936, he entered the Department of Electrical Engineering of Nankai University in Tianjin. After the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, he first worked at the Anti-Japanese War Report in Changsha, and later entered the Kuomintang Central Military Academy in Chengdu. He retired in 1950. He then went to the United States to study history and obtained bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees. He was a visiting associate professor at Columbia University and a researcher at the East Asian Institute of Harvard University. He participated in the collective research work of "Biographies of Ming Dynasty Celebrities" and "Cambridge History of China".