Best of
China

1999

The Mummies of Ürümchi


Elizabeth Wayland Barber - 1999
    Surprisingly, these prehistoric people are not Asian but Caucasoid—tall, large-nosed and blond with thick beards and round eyes. What were these blond Caucasians doing in the heart of Asia? What language did they speak? Might they be related to a "lost tribe" known from later inscriptions? Few clues are offered by their pottery or tools, but their clothes—woolens that rarely survive more than a few centuries—have been preserved as brightly hued as the day they were woven. Elizabeth Wayland Barber describes these remarkable mummies and their clothing, and deduces their path to this remote, forbidding place. The result is a book like no other—a fascinating unveiling of an ancient, exotic, nearly forgotten world. A finalist for the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize.

Colors of the Mountain


Da Chen - 1999
    Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution engulfed millions of Chinese citizens, and the Red Guard enforced Mao's brutal communist regime. Chen's family belonged to the despised landlord class, and his father and grandfather were routinely beaten and sent to labor camps, the family of eight left without a breadwinner. Despite this background of poverty and danger, and Da Chen grows up to be resilient, tough, and funny, learning how to defend himself and how to work toward his future. By the final pages, when his says his last goodbyes to his father and boards the bus to Beijing to attend college, Da Chen has become a hopeful man astonishing in his resilience and cheerful strength.

The Thirty Six Strategies Of Ancient China = [San Shih Liu Chi]


Stefan H. Verstappen - 1999
    

White Snake and Other Stories


Geling Yan - 1999
    First collection published in English by major, multiple award-winning Chinese writer Yan Geling.

Blue House


Bei Dao - 1999
    This is Bei Dao’s first collection of essays in English translation. Those familiar with Bei Dao will notice the same lucid eye and strength that mark his poetry.Bei Dao has been in exile since the 1989 Tiananmen incident, has lectured around the globe, and currently teaches at the University of California Davis. He is the author of four books of poetry in English translation and one fiction collection.Professor Ted Huters teaches in the department of East Asian Languages and Literature at UCLA and Feng-ying Ming at Whittier College.

Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century


Hanchao Lu - 1999
    In this carefully researched study, Hanchao Lu weaves rich documentary data with ethnographic surveys and interviews to reconstruct the fabric of everyday life in China's largest and most complex city in the first half of this century.

Grace: An American Woman in China, 1934-1974


Eleanor McCallie Cooper - 1999
    . . A unique perspective on a period of -critical transformations in China."—Kirkus Reviews "Reads like a riveting and complex novel. Set against the fascinating backdrop of China during the Cultural Revolution, it is the story of a strong woman who followed her heart against the odds."—Lee Smith, The Last Girls Eleanor McCallie Cooper lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee. William Liu, Grace’s only surviving child, teaches at Simon Frasier University in Vancouver.

The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the Peoples Republic of China


Xiaoneng Yang - 1999
    Catalogue for exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Asian Art Museum San Francisco. More than 175 objects from four historical periods and in numerous media represent important early sites and a diversity of cultures located outside the central Yellow River area are included. Lavishly illustrated.

Children of the hills


Isobel Kuhn - 1999
    She delighted in them and the simplicity of their lives. She says, "Lisuland is a place of physical hardness and spiritual luxury, but if you have ever tasted that luxury all else will be tame for ever after." Isobel had the privilege of seeing the Spirit of God moving among an unreached people group.

Origins of the Modern Chinese State


Philip A. Kuhn - 1999
    Well before the Opium War, Chinese confronted such constitutional questions as: How does the scope of political participation affect state power? How is the state to secure a share of society’s wealth? In response to the changing demands of the age, this agenda has been expressed in changing language. Yet, because the underlying pattern remains recognizable, the modernization of the state in response to foreign aggression can be studied in longer perspective.The author offers three concrete studies to illustrate the constitutional agenda in action: how the early nineteenth-century scholar-activist Wei Yuan confronted the relation between broadened political participation and authoritarian state power; how the reformist proposals of the influential scholar Feng Guifen were received by mainstream bureaucrats during the 1898 reform movement; and how fiscal problems of the late empire formed a backdrop to agricultural collectivization in the 1950s. In each case, the author presents the “modern” constitutional solution as only the most recent answer to old Chinese questions. The book concludes by describing the transformation of the constitutional agenda over the course of the modern period.

An Introduction to Literary Chinese


Michael A. Fuller - 1999
    The lessons are structured to encourage students to do more work with dictionaries.

China's Old Dwellings


Ronald G. Knapp - 1999
    It and its companion volume, China's Living Houses: Folk Beliefs, Symbols, and Household Ornamentation, together form a landmark study of the environmental, historical, and social factors that influence housing forms for nearly a quarter of the world's population. Both books draw on the author's thirty years of field-work and extensive travel in China as well as published and unpublished material in many languages.

Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution


John Israel - 1999
    These were China's leading institutions of higher learning, run by men educated in the West and committed to modern liberal education. The three universities first moved to Changsha, 900 miles southwest of Beijing, where they joined forces. But with the fall of Nanjing in mid-December, many students left to fight the Japanese, who soon began bombing Changsha.In February 1938, the 800 remaining students and faculty made the thousand-mile trek to Kunming, in China’s remote, mountainous southwest, where they formed the National Southwest Associated University (Lianda). In makeshift quarters, subject to sporadic bombing by the Japanese and shortages of food, books, and clothing, students and professors did their best to conduct a modern university. In the next eight years, many of China’s most prominent intellectuals taught or studied at Lianda. This book is the story of their lives and work under extraordinary conditions.Lianda’s wartime saga crystallized the experience of a generation of Chinese intellectuals, beginning with epic journeys, followed by years of privation and endurance, and concluding with politicization, polarization, and radicalization, as China moved from a war of resistance against a foreign foe to a civil war pitting brother against brother. The Lianda community, which had entered the war fiercely loyal to the government of Chiang Kai-shek, emerged in 1946 as a bastion of criticism of China’s ruling Guomindang party. Within three years, the majority of the Lianda community, now returned to its north China campuses in Beijing and Tianjin, was prepared to accept Communist rule.In addition to struggling for physical survival, Lianda’s faculty and students spent the war years striving to uphold a model of higher education in which modern universities, based in large part on the American model, sought to preserve liberal education, political autonomy, and academic freedom. Successful in the face of wartime privations, enemy air raids, and Guomindang pressure, Lianda’s constituent universities eventually succumbed to Communist control. By 1952, the Lianda ideal had been replaced with a politicized and technocratic model borrowed from the Soviet Union.

Which is the New China - Distinguishing between Right and Wrong in Modern Chinese History


Xin Haonian - 1999
    

The Great Wall: From Beginning to End


Michael Yamashita - 1999
    At the dawn of the Beijing Olympics, the eyes of all the world are upon it.Two men who navigated every inch of the Wall have collaborated on a lavishly-illustrated tribute to this amazing structure. Michael Yamashita, an award-winning National Geographic photographer, spent a year shooting the Wall, its environs, and the people who live in its shadow, for the magazine. One hundred and sixty of his magnificent photos grace this volume, which features text by William Lindesay, who not only conducts tours of the Wall and spearheads the movement to preserve it, but has actually run its entire length. Broken into three sections, The Great Wall provides an overview that debunks myths and dishes up rare facts and figures, a comprehensive history that proceeds dynasty by dynasty through its construction, and an account of Lindesay’s personal experiences of the Wall.

The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 BC


Michael Loewe - 1999
    The four subperiods of Shang, Western Zhou, Spring and Autumn and Warring States, are described on the basis of literary and material sources and the evidence of recently found manuscripts. Chapters on the prehistoric background, the growth of language, and relations with the peoples of Central Asia provide the major context of China's achievements in the 1,500 years under review. The teachings of China's early masters are set alongside what is known of the methods of astonomers, physicians and diviners. A final chapter leads the reader forward to imperial times, as described in the volumes of The Cambridge History of China.

Notable Women of China: Shang Dynasty to the Early Twentieth Century: Shang Dynasty to the Early Twentieth Century


Barbara Bennett Peterson - 1999
    The collaborative effort of nearly 100 China scholars from around the world, this unique one-volume reference provides 89 in-depth biographies of important Chinese women from the fifth century B.C.E to the early twentieth century.

A Macao Narrative


Austin Coates - 1999
    In this short, lively and affectionate book, Austin Coates explains how and why the Portuguese came to the Far East, and how they peacefully settled in Macao with tacit Chinese goodwill. Macao’s golden age, from 1557 to the disastrous collapse of 1641, is vividly reconstructed. There follows the cuckoo-in-the-nest situation of the late eighteenth century when the British in Macao were a law unto themselves, until the foundation of Hong Kong and the opening of Shanghai gave wider scope for their energies. Portugal’s subsequent struggle to obtain full sovereignty in Macao, and the extraordinary outcome in 1975, brings this account to a close. Special tribute is paid to the risks Macao gallantly undertook in harbouring Hong Kong’s starving and destitute during World War II.

Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade 1750-1950


Carl A. Trocki - 1999
    In an age when we are increasingly aware of large scale drug use, this book takes a long look at the history of our relationship with mind-altering substances. Engagingly written, with lay readers as much as specialists in mind, this book will be fascinating reading for historians, social scientists, as well as those involved in Asian studies, or economic history.

Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism, 1900-49


Robert Bickers - 1999
    Using archival materials from China and records in Britain and the United States, the author paints a portrait of the traders, missionaries, businessmen, diplomats and settlers who constituted Britain-in-China, challenging our understanding of British imperialism there.

Tsai Ming-Liang


Jean-Pierre Rehm - 1999
    His films include Rebels of the Neon God (1992); Vive l'amour (1994); The River (1997); and his 1998 Cannes golden palme-nominee, The Hole, His films often use water in its multiple capacities -- cleansing, raining, nourishing, flooding -- to sumbolize his character's emotions. Depicting the human body as a mysterious, malleable machine consuming and excreting on its own volition, bodily functions become metaphors for loneliness, desire, decay, and escape. His obsessive and isolated characters give his films a bleak outlook, but they also embody a wry sense of absurdist humor. This is the first book devoted to Ming-liang's work, and is an important addition to contemporary film studies.

Where the Sea Stands Still: New Poems


Lian Yang - 1999
    Unlike his contemporaries from the heady days of the Beijing Spring in the late 1970s - most of whom have either retreated into a very private poetry or stopped writing altogether - Yang Lian has gone on to forge a complex poetry whose themes are the search for a Yeatsian mature wisdom, the accommodation of modernity within the ancient and book-haunted Chinese tradition, and a rapprochement between the literatures of East and West.

Chinese Archery


Stephen Selby - 1999
    The book is written around parallel text translations of classical chinese sources some famous and some little known in which Chinese writers give vivid and detailed explanations of the techniques of bow-building, archery and crossbow technique over the centuries. The author is both a sinologist and practising archer; his translations make the original Chinese texts accessible to the non-specialist. Written for readers who may never have picked up a book about China, but still containing a wealth of detail for Chinese scholars, the book brings the fascinating history of Chinese archery back to life through the voices of its most renowned practitioners.

Taxation Without Representation in Contemporary Rural China


Thomas P. Bernstein - 1999
    Thomas P. Bernstein and Xiabo LU examine the heavy, informal taxation, revealing how peasants defend their interests by adopting peaceful and violent strategies of collective resistance. Bernstein and LU explain why the central government, often siding with the peasants, has been unable to resolve the tax burden issue by instituting a sound, reliable financial system.

史记选 / Selections from Records of the Historian


Sima Qian - 1999
    Bilingual, Chinese-English edition

Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories


Wang Zheng - 1999
    Together, the parts form a fascinating historical portrait of how educated Chinese men and women actively deployed and appropriated ideologies from the West in their pursuit of national salvation and self-emancipation. As Wang demonstrates, feminism was embraced by men as instrumental to China's modernity and by women as pointing to a new way of life.

Sacred Symbols Of Buddhism


José Roleo Santiago - 1999
    This reference guide illustrates the many and varied symbols which appear throughout the Buddhist world.

Experiences Of China


Percy Cradock - 1999
    In this expanded edition, the author updates the story to cover the last five years, including the end of British rule in Hong Kong, the continuing rise of China, and the problems raised by the economic crisis in East Asia. He also looks at the future of China and Hong Kong and examines the issues facing the Western powers as they seek to integrate modern China into the current international order. Drawing on unique personal experience, this book is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand recent events and future prospects in this vital region of the world. Percy Cradock is a former Cambridge don; following his career as British Ambassador to Peking, he served as the Prime Minister's Foreign Policy Advisor from 1984 to 1992.

The Tao Encounters the West: Explorations in Comparative Philosophy


Chenyang Li - 1999
    This relationship is shown through a comparative study of Chinese and Western ideas and philosophies of being, truth, language, ethics, religion, and values. The book covers a wide range of philosophers and philosophies, including Aristotle, Zhuang Zi, Heidegger, Confucius, Kripke, and feminist care ethics. Li shows how a comparative approach to different patterns of thinking in Chinese and Western traditions sheds light on the intelligibility of Chinese multiple ethico-religious practice, which in turn supports the claim that democracy and Confucianism can coexist as independent value systems. In addition, Li's comparative study of different patterns of thinking in Chinese and Western traditions sheds light on the harmony model of Chinese philosophy and culture.

The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet Since 1947


Tsering Shakya - 1999
    Shakya gives a balanced, blow-by-blow account of Tibet's ongoing struggle to maintain its independence and safeguard its cultural identity while being sandwiched between the heavyweights of Asian geopolitics: Britain, India, China, and the United States. With thorough documentation, Shakya details the Chinese depredations of Tibet, and reveals the failures of the Tibetan leadership's divided strategies. Rising above the simplistic dualism so often found in accounts of Tibet's contested recent history, The Dragon in the Land of Snows lucidly depicts the tragedy that has befallen Tibet and identifies the conflicting forces that continue to shape the aspirations of the Tibetan people today.

An Introduction to Hand Reflexology


Denise Whichello-Brown - 1999
    With volumes dedicated to a variety of massage, touch, and exercise-related treatments and preventative measures, the Alternative Health series explores the ancient Eastern approaches to health that have recently gained in popularity in the West.

Civil Law in Qing and Republican China


Kathryn Bernhardt - 1999
    Drawing on records of hundreds of cases from local archives in several parts of China, it considers such questions as the relation between codified law and legal practice, the role of legal and paralegal personnel, and the continuity in civil law between Qing and Republican China.

Longman Chinese-English Visual Dictionary


Pearson-Longman - 1999
    About 10000 illustrations are provided.

The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow


William Burr - 1999
    Here are the transcripts, formerly classified "Top/Secret/Sensitive/Exclusive Eyes Only," of Kissinger's talks with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, Leonid Brezhnev, Andrei Gromyko, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George Bush, and others. When Henry Kissinger left the State Department in January 1977, he took with him "personal papers" as well as copies of government papers that he had worked on and reviewed, and attempted to close off all access to them until five years after his death. However, transcripts of some of his most important conversations found their way into other files, where National Security Archive staffers tracked them down. The Kissinger Transcripts offers an unparalleled view of American diplomacy as conducted by one of the most controversial Secretaries of State in modern U.S. history. With the record unmediated by Kissinger's spin, readers can begin to make up their own minds about the merits or flaws of a major effort to transform U.S. Cold War strategy.

Chinese Painting Techniques


Alison Stilwell Cameron - 1999
    But until the publication of this volume, there was no single source that bridged the gap between the philosophical and imitative methods of instruction. Alison Stilwell Cameron, daughter of famed World War II General Joseph Stilwell, spent her early childhood and teenage years in China where she studied under two renowned Chinese artists — Yu Fei-am and Prince P'u Ju of the imperial family. Having achieved wide recognition for her mastery of Chinese painting, she distilled her knowledge in this book, providing step-by-step instruction for those with no art training at all.Starting with an explanation of the physical tools of the art, she describes the basic strokes and the creation of Chinese characters before moving on to demonstrate the use of these strokes to represent trees, flowers, rocks, boats, insects, birds, and other subjects. These elements are then combined to produce finished Chinese paintings, "the kind of pleasing and satisfying pictures that thousands of amateurs have been producing in China for centuries."Enhanced with hundreds of illustrations, including 36 in full color, this handsome volume also contains a chapter on the mounting process, a valuable bibliography, and an index. It is an invaluable guide to an art, which — once mastered — will not only delight viewing audiences but will bring satisfaction throughout the artist's lifetime.

Mao: A Life


Philip Short - 1999
    Eight years after his military success, Mao Tse-tung had won out over more sophisticated rivals to become party chairman, his title for life. Isolated by his eminence, he lived like a feudal emperor for much of his reign after blood purge and agricultural failures took more lives than those killed by either Stalin or Hitler. His virtual quarantine resulted in an ideological/political divide and a devastating reign of terror that became known as the Cultural Revolution. One cannot understand today's China without first understanding Mao, and Philip Short's masterly assessment -- informed by a wealth of new sources -- allows the reader to understand this colossal figure whose shadow will dominate the twenty-first century.

China's Muslim Hui Community: Migration, Settlement and Sects


Michael Dillon - 1999
    It traces their history from the earliest period of Islam in China up to the present day, but with particular emphasis on the effects of the Mongol conquest on the transfer of central Asians to China, the establishment of stable immigrant communities in the Ming dynasty and the devastating insurrections against the Qing state during the nineteenth century. Sufi and other Islamic orders such as the Ikhwani have played a key role in establishing the identity of the Hui, especially in north-western China, and these are examined in detail as is the growth of religious education and organisation and the use of the Arabic and Persian languages. The relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and the Hui as an officially designated nationality and the social and religious life of Hui people in contemporary China are also discussed.

Defining Chu: Image and Reality in Ancient China


Constance A. Cook - 1999
    is of great importance in the subsequent development of Chinese culture. This book, the first in a Western language to attempt such a broad and in-depth analysis of a single Chinese state, traces the evolution of the Chu from a vassal state of Zhou in the Spring and Autumn period to its rise and fall as a great hegemonic kingdom in the Warring States period and its eventual resurgence in the early Hah dynasty.Defining Chu begins with an overview of the historical geography, an outline of archaeological evidence for Chu history, and an appreciation of Chu art. Following chapters examine issues of state and society: the ideology of the ruling class, legal procedures, popular culture, and daily life. The final section surveys Chu religion and literature and includes an analysis of the Chuci, the great anthology of Chu poetry, and its impact on mainstream Chinese literature. A translation of the "Chu Silk Manuscript, " a document that has intrigued scholars since its discovery in Changsha some sixty years ago, is appended.

Threads of Light: Chinese Embroidery from Suzhou and the Photography of Robert Glenn Ketchum


Patrick Dowdey - 1999
    This volume describes the history of SERI with illustrations of its traditional embroidery and then proceeds to pair Ketchum's photographic images with their exquisite embroidered counterparts. Essays locate the achievement of the Suzhou Embroidery Research Institute within the context of traditional Chinese embroidery and trace the willingness to innovate that has long characterized this remarkable institution.

Imagining Boundaries: Changing Confucian Doctrines, Texts, and Hermeneutics


Kai-Wing Chow - 1999
    The authors show that the Confucian tradition is not a neatly packaged organic whole in which the constitutive parts fall naturally into place, but rather that it displays the ruptures of all cultural constructions. Accordingly, Confucianism has been configured and reconfigured in time in response to changing intellectual and historical circumstances.This anthology addresses the constant negotiation of the boundaries of Confucianism within itself and in relation to other intellectual traditions, the fluidity of the Confucian canon, the dialogical relations between text and discourse in establishing boundaries for the Confucian tradition, and the textual and discursive strategies employed in the imagining of boundaries, which expanded or restricted the intellectual space of Confucianism.Rejecting an interpretation of Confucianism as a homogenous master-narrative and worldview, the book uses the variegated histories of Confucianism to interrogate the tradition itself, unpacking and highlighting its complexity and diversity.Imagining Boundaries is an excellent anthology. The time is long overdue to read Confucian texts as historical artifacts, yet still appreciate the philosophical complexity of them. -- Matthew Levey, Birmingham-Southern CollegeThis work is more than sound...it is on the leading edge of the best work being done in the field. -- John Berthrong, author of All Under Heaven: Transforming Paradigms in Confucian-Christian Dialogues[Contributors include Kai-wing Chow; Kandice Hauf; John B. Henderson; Tze-ki Hon; Hsiung Ping-chen; Yuet Keung Lo; On-cho Ng; Michael Nylan; and Lauren Pfister]

Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China, 1842-1907


Susan Schoenbauer Thurin - 1999
    Their range of perspectives, their acquaintance with one another and their similar scope of travel to Hong Kong, the treaty ports, and Sichuan lend intensity to their picture of China and the Western presence there.What the travelers record reveals is a continuity in the response of the West and China to each other. Susan Schoenbauer Thurin's study of these writings presents a rich tapestry of impressions, biases, and cultural perspectives that inform our own understanding of the Victorians and their views of the world outside their own.The strange mix of opium and missionaries, the aura of fabled “Cathay” and its valuable trade items, the attraction and repulsion of the exotic otherness the travelers experience, reflect the political, religious, and racial views of their era, and explain the allure of the Orient that, in part, characterized their age. Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China, 1842-1907 , is a remarkable look into the cultural past.