The Chinese Connection: Getting Plugged in to Pacific Rim Real Estate, Trade, and Capital Markets

worlds he has elaborated so well in the nature of language itself, Indo-European vs. Chinese. Many of Gernet's assertions will be disputed and probably should be. Some of his characterizations seem overdrawn; at times it is hard to tell where the paraphrased Chinese critic ends and the author begins. He also has a tendency to use terms like "Christianity," "missionaries," and "Chinese thought" as if they were more homogeneous than they probably were. And the bibliography is not up to date on other scholars' work (Daniel Overmyer's several works are not cited, for example), although to be fair he calls it only a "select" bibliography. An excellent comprehensive bibliography is in the edition of Tianzbu shiyi edited by Malatesta. Some scholars will take exception to Gernet's implied portrayal of Xu Guangqi as an inauthentic Christian or to his picture of the missionaries as duplicitous at times. There should be good debates on some of these points in coming years. There remains the question of how relevant this seventeenth-century scene is for more recent and contemporary Sino-Western Christian and cultural interaction. In the modern period, Christianity's role in China has been terribly cluttered by political overlays of diplomacy, war, extraterritoriality, and Chinese nationalism. Gernet's study reminds us of the purely intellectual issues, which also remain an underlying part of this mix. As to the question of the ultimate receptivity of Chinese people or Chinese society to Christianity, this superb study of the seventeenth century may not be so much help. As Christianity in the late twentieth century becomes less "Western," and authentic indigenous forms of it become more well rooted in the Third World, it is perhaps easier to envisage accommodation or assimilation occurring between these two entities ("Christianity" and "Chinese thought"), which collided on an almost cosmic scale of intellectual encounter over three hundred years ago. Both entities, of course, have become sufficiently diversified so that this can occur. The only mechanical defect of this book is the lack of a glossary for Chinese terms. This is a grievous lack, but some of the key terms and names can be found in the glossary of John D. Young's book.