Response to a Critic

Extract

At the invitation of the current Editor of Early China I have accepted to write a response to Sophia-Karin Psarras's review of my book, published in 2002, Ancient China and Its Enemies, The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (Early China 31, 2007: 227–259, published in June 2010).

As a frequent book reviewer myself and former book review editor, I do believe that reviews have an important role in academia, but it is a role sometime abused, and something needs to be said when the credibility of a book and its author is treated in a manner that, by any standard, can only be regarded as prosecutorial. A point-by-point rebuttal would be a tedious and unnecessary exercise, and therefore I shall address only a few illustrative issues.

On p. 231 I am accused of appropriating Lin Yun's language and of having taken terms from him without proper attribution (implying some kind of plagiarism). But in the passage that immediately precedes the incriminating excerpts, I say: “The standard typology of the Northern Zone's complex metal inventory, provided by Lin Yun [my emphasis] includes daggers, axes with short sockets, axes with tubular sockets, mirrors, and ‘bow shaped’ objects.” Did the reviewer miss this?