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Madeleine Zelin shatters the image of China as a backward empire wracked by corruption and economic stagnation, thrust into the modern world when the western gunboats arrived in the 1840s, by providing an account of the indigenous evolution of the Chinese state. The Magistrate's Tael makes it possible to judge the impact of the West on modern China's development.
Huang et al. (Sun,) studied this question.