China's Response To The West: A Documentary Survey, 1839-1923 is a volume of historical documents translated from the Chinese, edited and with an introduction by Teng Ssu-yu and John King Fairbank, with E-tu Zen Sun, Chaoying Fang, and others.
The documents are primarily essays and official writings on policy issues, starting with a memorial to the throne by Lin Zexu, a Qing dynasty official at the time of the Opium Wars, and finishing with selections from the writings of Liang Qichao and Sun Yat-sen in 1923, just after the New Culture Movement and the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.
The Introduction explains that the book is "a survey of one of the most interesting, but neglected aspects of modern history -- the way in which the scholar-official class of China, faced with the aggressive expansion of the modern West, tried to understand an alien civilization and take action to preserve their own culture and their political and social institutions"; its over-running by the West was "bound to create a continuing and violent intellectual revolution...." [1] An accompanying Research Guide gave bibliographic references and research comments.
The book traces the stages of the reaction and a "natural chronology" through an "excellent selection" of the "most important documents of each period and each point of view", providing a "kaleidoscopic picture" of these developments.
They call for caution in applying the "impact and response framework," but Cohen writes that later historians, including Fairbank himself, did not heed this warning.