[1] In the book, Dikötter challenged conventional historical narratives on China during the Republican period, an era that has traditionally been represented as a catastrophic time marred by famine, invasions, civil war, and instability, the backwardness of which was only corrected with the triumph of the Communists in 1949.

[2] As Bradley Winterton of the Taipei Times wrote, Dikötter presents evidence that China during this era was "for a time at least, more democratic than many comparable countries in Europe (and almost everywhere else in Asia), less militarized per head of the population than might be supposed, with considerable stability and continuity in local government even if the central government was weak, and with a remarkably international perspective.

[2] Historian Jonathan Spence wrote that The Age of Openness "presents a cornucopia of graphic examples to show that China in the first half of the twentieth century, far from being in a state of decay that called for revolutionary action, was in fact a vibrant and cosmopolitan society.

In such a reading, the current Chinese leaders should not be seen as striving to do something bold and new; they are merely struggling to rebuild a network of global connections that Mao and others had systematically helped to destroy.

"[1] Andrew J. Nathan, professor of political science at Columbia University, wrote that Dikötter's book "infuses new life into an historical period left by most historians for dead—China's republican era from 1912 to 1949.