The reviews and essays collected here were written by Ph.D. students in the East Asian history program at the University of California, San Diego from 2000 to 2006. Their writings seek not only to shed light on the books from the point of view of present day standards, but, perhaps more importantly, to appreciate the extraordinary contributions made by earlier generations of scholars who labored under a variety of difficult circumstances, some of which were political (Cold War imperatives), and some of which were professional (no research access to the People’s Republic). For this reason, the first fifty books reviewed were selected from among the “classics” published between 1951 and 1974.
http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/chinesehistory/pgp/index.html#essays