Cohen presents a sympathetic critique of the dominant paradigms associated with John K. Fairbank and the historians he trained which shaped the field of Area Studies after World War II: "China's response to the West" (or "impact-response") and "Tradition and Modernity," which were popular in the 1950s, and Imperialism, which became fashionable in the 1960s in response to American involvement in Vietnam.

Cohen, himself trained by Fairbank, sees these paradigms as placing China in a passive role and not being capable of change without a Western impact.

Historians are supposed to know otherwise.... As times change, concerns shift... each generation of historians must rewrite the history written by the preceding generation.”[1] Up through World War II, he continues, “American writing tended to stress those aspects which the West itself had been most immediately concerned," an intellectual bias which “equated modern with Western with important; for many Americans of this era, even educated ones, Westernized China and modern China were indistinguishable.”[2] Chapter 1, "The Problem with 'China's Response to the West,'" focuses on the "impact and response" framework made popular by Teng Ssu-yu and Fairbank's 1954 volume of annotated translations, China's Response to the West.

Likewise Mary Wright, in The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism concluded that for China after the Taiping Rebellion, “the obstacles to successful adaptation to the modern world were not imperialist aggression, Manchu rule, mandarin stupidity, or the accidents of history, but nothing less than the constituent elements of the Confucian system itself.”[4] Chapter 3.

"[7] Dennis Duncanson was skeptical: "there is regrettably little novelty to stimulate reflection in this less than comprehensive survey," and did not agree with "finding fault with other people's 'perceptions'.