I suggest that the Western impact, at least in nineteenth-century....

“ I suggest that the Western impact, at least in nineteenth-century China, was overstated (and misstated) by an earlier generation of American historians. An especially egregious example of this, I argue, was American treatment of the Opium War, the objective importance of which was not nearly so great as we—and an almost unanimous corps of Chinese historians—have imagined. ”

Paul A. Cohen

From : Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past