The Fall and Rise of China: Healing the Trauma of History traces the countrys development in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries up to the present day and offers an explanation of the collective mentality that enabled China, confronted by the superiority of Western science and technology, to commit to the unsparing self-diagnosis that enabled its impressive rise and radical transformation. The country identified the aspects of Western civilization it must adopt in order to remove the obstacles to its own rebirth, taking a path of reason and renewal.