Best of
China

2004

Gweilo: Memories of a Hong Kong Childhood


Martin Booth - 2004
    Unrestricted by parental control and blessed with bright blond hair that signified good luck to the Chinese, he had free access to hidden corners of the colony normally closed to a Gweilo, a 'pale fellow' like him. Befriending rickshaw coolies and local stallholders, he learnt Cantonese, sampled delicacies such as boiled water beetles and one-hundred-year-old eggs, and participated in colourful festivals. He even entered the forbidden Kowloon Walled City, wandered into the secret lair of the Triads and visited an opium den. Along the way he encountered a colourful array of people, from the plink plonk man with his dancing monkey to Nagasaki Jim, a drunken child molester, and the Queen of Kowloon, the crazed tramp who may have been a member of the Romanov family.Shadowed by the unhappiness of his warring parents, a broad-minded mother who, like her son, was keen to embrace all things Chinese, and a bigoted father who was enraged by his family's interest in 'going native', Martin Booth's compelling memoir is a journey into Chinese culture and an extinct colonial way of life that glows with infectious curiosity and humour.

Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet


Xinran - 2004
    Xinran made the trip and met the woman, called Shu Wen, who recounted the story of her thirty-year odyssey in the vast landscape of Tibet.Shu Wen and her husband had been married for only a few months in the 1950s when he joined the Chinese army and was sent to Tibet for the purpose of unification of the two countries. Shortly after he left she was notified that he had been killed, although no details were given. Determined to find the truth, Shu Wen joined a militia unit going to the Tibetan north, where she soon was separated from the regiment. Without supplies and knowledge of the language, she wandered, trying to find her way until, on the brink of death, she was rescued by a family of nomads under whose protection she moved from place to place with the seasons and eventually came to discover the details of her husband's death.In the haunting Sky Burial, Xinran has recreated Shu Wen's journey, writing beautifully and simply of the silence and the emptiness in which Shu Wen was enveloped. The book is an extraordinary portrait of a woman and a land, each at the mercy of fate and politics. It is an unforgettable, ultimately uplifting tale of love, loss, loyalty, and survival.

Wolf Totem


Jiang Rong - 2004
    There has been much international excitement too-to date, rights have been sold in thirteen countries. Wolf Totem is set in 1960s China-the time of the Great Leap Forward, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Searching for spirituality, Beijing intellectual Chen Zhen travels to the pristine grasslands of Inner Mongolia to live among the nomadic Mongols-a proud, brave, and ancient race of people who coexist in perfect harmony with their unspeakably beautiful but cruel natural surroundings. Their philosophy of maintaining a balance with nature is the ground stone of their religion, a kind of cult of the wolf. The fierce wolves that haunt the steppes of the unforgiving grassland searching for food are locked with the nomads in a profoundly spiritual battle for survival-a life-and-death dance that has gone on between them for thousands of years. The Mongols believe that the wolf is a great and worthy foe that they are divinely instructed to contend with, but also to worship and to learn from. Chen's own encounters with the otherworldly wolves awake a latent primitive instinct in him, and his fascination with them blossoms into obsession, then reverence. After many years, the peace is shattered with the arrival of Chen's kinfolk, Han Chinese, sent from the cities to bring modernity to the grasslands. They immediately launch a campaign to exterminate the wolves, sending the balance that has been maintained with religious dedication for thousands of years into a spiral leading to extinction-first the wolves, then the Mongol culture, finally the land. As a result of the eradication of the wolves, rats become a plague and wild sheep graze until the meadows turn to dust. Mongolian dust storms glide over Beijing, sometimes blocking out the moon. Part period epic, part fable for modern days, Wolf Totem is a stinging social commentary on the dangers of China's overaccelerated economic growth as well as a fascinating immersion into the heart of Chinese culture.

Gang of One: Memoirs of a Red Guard


Fan Shen - 2004
    Disillusion soon followed, then turned to disgust and fear when Shen discovered that his compatriots had tortured and murdered a doctor whose house he’d helped raid and whose beautiful daughter he secretly adored. A story of coming of age in the midst of monumental historical upheaval, Shen’s Gang of One is more than a memoir of one young man’s harrowing experience during a time of terror. It is also, in spite of circumstances of remarkable grimness and injustice, an unlikely picaresque tale of adventure full of courage, cunning, wit, tenacity, resourcefulness, and sheer luck—the story of how Shen managed to scheme his way through a hugely oppressive system and emerge triumphant. Gang of One recounts how Shen escaped, again and again, from his appointed fate, as when he somehow found himself a doctor at sixteen and even, miraculously, saved a few lives. In such volatile times, however, good luck could quickly turn to misfortune: a transfer to the East Wind Aircraft Factory got him out of the countryside and into another terrible trap, where many people were driven to suicide; his secret self-education took him from the factory to college, where friendship with an American teacher earned him the wrath of the secret police. Following a path strewn with perils and pitfalls, twists and surprises worthy of Dickens, Shen’s story is ultimately an exuberant human comedy unlike any other.Purchase the audio edition.

Buddha's Warriors


Mikel Dunham - 2004
    Tibet in the last sixty years has been so much mystified and politicized that the world at large is confused about what really happened to the "Rooftop of the World" when Mao Tse-tung invaded its borders in 1950. There are dramatically conflicting accounts from Beijing and Dharamsala (home of the Dalai Lama's government-in-exile). Adding to the confusion is the romanticized spin that Western writers and filmmakers have adopted in an effort to appease the popular myth of Shangri-La.Buddha's Warriors is no fairy tale. Set in a narrative framework but relying heavily on the oral transcripts of the Tibetan men who actually fought the Chinese, Buddha's Warriors tells, for the first time, the inside story of these historic developments, while drawing a vivid picture of Tibetan life before, during, and after Mao's takeover. The firsthand accounts, gathered by the author over a period of seven years, bring faces and deeply personal emotions to the forefront of this ongoing tragedy. It is a saga of brave soldiers and cowardly traitors. It's about hope against desolation, courage against repression, atheism against Buddhism. Above all, it's about what happens to an ancient civilization when it is thrust overnight into the modern horrors of twentieth-century warfare.

Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son: Abandonment, Adoption, and Orphanage Care in China


Kay Ann Johnson - 2004
    In Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son, Johnson untangles the complex interactions between these social practices and the government's population policies. She also documents the many unintended consequences, including the overcrowding of orphanages that led China to begin international adoptions. Those touched by adoption from China want to know why so many healthy infant girls are in Chinese orphanages. This book provides the most thorough answer to date. Johnson's research overturns stereotypes and challenges the conventional wisdom on abandonment and adoption in modern China. Certainly, as Johnson shows, many Chinese parents feel a great need for a son to carry on the family name and to care for them in their old age. At the same time, the government's strict population policy puts great pressure on parents to limit births. As a result, some parents are able to obtain a son only by resorting to illegal behavior, such as "overquota" births and female infant abandonment. Yet the Chinese today value daughters more highly than ever before. As many of Johnson's respondents put it, "A son and a daughter make a family complete." How can these seemingly contradictory trends--the widespread desire for a daughter as well as a son, and the revival of female infant abandonment--be happening in the same place at the same time? Johnson looks at abandonment together with two other practices: population planning and adoption. In doing so, she reveals all three in a new light. Johnson shows us that a rapidly changing culture in late twentieth-century China hastened a positive revaluation of daughters, while new policies limiting births undercut girls' improving status in the family. Those policies also revived and exacerbated one of the worst aspects of traditional patriarchal practices: the abandonment of female infants. Yet Chinese parents are not literally forced to abandon female infants in order to have a son. While birth-planning enforcement can be coercive, parents who abandon are rarely prosecuted. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Chinese parents informally adopt female foundlings and raise them as their own. Ironically, as Johnson shows, in some places adoptive parents are more likely than abandoning parents to incur fines and discrimination. In addressing all these issues, Johnson brings the skills of a China specialist who has spent over a decade researching her subject. She also brings the concerns of an adoptive parent who hopes that this book might help others find answers to the question, What can we tell our children about why they were abandoned and why they were available for international adoption?

The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry: From Ancient to Contemporary, The Full 3000-Year Tradition


Tony Barnstone - 2004
    Encompassing the spiritual, philosophical, political, mystical, and erotic strains that have emerged over millennia, this broadly representative selection also includes a preface on the art of translation, a general introduction to Chinese poetic form, biographical headnotes for each of the poets, and concise essays on the dynasties that structure the book. A landmark anthology, The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry captures with impressive range and depth the essence of China’s illustrious poetic tradition.

Chu Ju's House


Gloria Whelan - 2004
    . .When a girl is born to Chu Ju's family, it is quickly determined that the baby must be sent away. After all, the law states that a family may have only two children, and tradition dictates that every family should have a boy. To make room for one, this girl will have to go.Fourteen-year-old Chu Ju knows she cannot allow this to happen to her sister. Understanding that one girl must leave, she sets out in the middle of the night, vowing not to return.With luminescent detail, National Book Award-winning author Gloria Whelan transports readers to China, where law conspires with tradition, tearing a young woman from her family, sending her on a remarkable journey to find a home of her own.

A Tibetan Revolutionary: The Political Life and Times of Bapa Phüntso Wangye


Melvyn C. Goldstein - 2004
    Phünwang began his activism in school, where he founded a secret Tibetan Communist Party. He was expelled in 1940, and for the next nine years he worked to organize a guerrilla uprising against the Chinese who controlled his homeland. In 1949, he merged his Tibetan Communist Party with Mao's Chinese Communist Party. He played an important role in the party's administrative organization in Lhasa and was the translator for the young Dalai Lama during his famous 1954-55 meetings with Mao Zedong. In the 1950s, Phünwang was the highest-ranking Tibetan official within the Communist Party in Tibet. Though he was fluent in Chinese, comfortable with Chinese culture, and devoted to socialism and the Communist Party, Phünwang's deep commitment to the welfare of Tibetans made him suspect to powerful Han colleagues. In 1958 he was secretly detained; three years later, he was imprisoned in solitary confinement in Beijing's equivalent of the Bastille for the next eighteen years.Informed by vivid firsthand accounts of the relations between the Dalai Lama, the Nationalist Chinese government, and the People's Republic of China, this absorbing chronicle illuminates one of the world's most tragic and dangerous ethnic conflicts at the same time that it relates the fascinating details of a stormy life spent in the quest for a new Tibet.

Peach Blossom Paradise


Ge Fei - 2004
    The Hundred Days’ Reform that followed was a moment of unprecedented change and extraordinary hope—brought to an abrupt end by a bloody military coup. Dashed expectations would contribute to the revolutionary turn that Chinese history would soon take, leading in time to the deaths of millions.Peach Blossom Paradise, set at the time of the reform, is the story of Xiumi, the daughter of a wealthy landowner and former government official who falls prey to insanity and disappears. Days later, a man with a gold cicada in his pocket turns up at his estate and is inexplicably welcomed as a relative. This mysterious man has a great vision of reforging China as an egalitarian utopia, and he will stop at nothing to make it real. It is his own plans, however, which come to nothing, and his “little sister” Xiumi is left to take up arms against a Confucian world in which women are chattel. Her campaign for change and her struggle to seize control over her own body are continually threatened by the violent whims of men who claim to be building paradise.

Chinese Children's Favorite Stories


Mingmei Yip - 2004
    Inspired by her father's nightly story-telling adventures when she was a child, Yip hopes that by "retelling some of these thousand-year-old Chinese stories," she can pass along Chinese folklore and fables to many readers. They make perfect new additions for story time or bedtime reading. Retold for an international audience, the beautifully illustrated stories will give children aged five to ten in other countries a glimpse into traditional Chinese culture. The Children's Favorite Stories series was created to share the folktales and legends most beloved by children in the East with young readers of all backgrounds in the West. In Chinese Children's Favorite Stories, discover the many delightful characters—from a monkey and fairy to ghosts and frogs—in stories such as:The Mouse BrideDream of the ButterflyThe Ghost CatcherThe Frog Who Lived in a WellHow the Fox Tricked the TigerThe Monkey King Turns the Heavenly Palace Upside DownThe Children's Favorite Stories series was created to share the folktales and legends most beloved by children in the East with young readers of all backgrounds in the West. Other multicultural children's books in this series include: Asian Children's Favorite Stories, Indian Children's Favorite Stories, Indonesian Children's Favorite Stories, Japanese Children's Favorite Stories, Singapore Children's Favorite Stories, Favorite Children's Stories from China & Tibet, Korean Children's Favorite Stories, Balinese Children's Favorite Stories, and Vietnamese Children's Favorite Stories.

From Yao to Mao: 5000 Years of Chinese History


Kenneth J. Hammond - 2004
    Yet behind that veil lies one of the most amazing civilizations the world has ever known. For most of its 5,000-year existence, China has been the largest, most populous, wealthiest, and mightiest nation on Earth. And for us as Westerners, it is essential to understand where China has been in order to anticipate its future. This course answers this need by delivering a comprehensive political and historical overview of one of the most fascinating and complex countries in world history.

Only Hope: Coming of Age Under China’s One-Child Policy


Vanessa L. Fong - 2004
    What are these children like? What are their values, goals, and interests? What kinds of relationships do they have with their families? This is the first in-depth study to analyze what it is like to grow up as the state-appointed vanguard of modernization. Based on surveys and ethnographic research in China, where the author lived with teenage only children and observed their homes and classrooms for 27 months between 1997 and 2002, the book explores the social, economic, and psychological consequences of the government's decision to accelerate the fertility transition.Only Hope shows how the one-child policy has largely succeeded in its goals, but with unintended consequences. Only children are expected to be the primary providers of support and care for their retired parents, grandparents, and parents-in-law, and only a very lucrative position will allow them to provide for so many dependents. Many only children aspire to elite status even though few can attain it, and such aspirations lead to increased stress and competition, as well as intense parental involvement.

Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China


Ruth Rogaski - 2004
    Rogaski focuses on multiple manifestations across time of a single Chinese concept, weisheng—which has been rendered into English as "hygiene," "sanitary," "health," or "public health"—as it emerged in the complex treaty-port environment of Tianjin. Before the late nineteenth century, weisheng was associated with diverse regimens of diet, meditation, and self-medication. Hygienic Modernity reveals how meanings of weisheng, with the arrival of violent imperialism, shifted from Chinese cosmology to encompass such ideas as national sovereignty, laboratory knowledge, the cleanliness of bodies, and the fitness of races: categories in which the Chinese were often deemed lacking by foreign observers and Chinese elites alike.

Nine Commentaries On The Communist Party


The Epoch Group - 2004
    It is a final verdict on the CCP, and has been spreading very rapidly in China. During the 80-year history of the CCP, its lies, dictatorship, various political movements and crackdowns have wreaked unprecedented havoc in the land of China and caused irrevocable destruction to the traditional values and morality of the Chinese nation. In today¡¯s China, under the CCP¡¯s violent and despotic rule, social tension is extremely high, and crises have been emerging one after another. The Chinese communist regime is seated on a live volcano that may evaporate at any moment. Since its publication, The Nine Commentaries have posed the most serious challenge ever to the CCP¡¯s ideology. It has profoundly touched the hearts of many Chinese people in China and around the world. It is bound to bring about the rebirth of the nation¡¯s soul. Commentary 1: On What the Communist Party Is Commentary 2: On the Beginnings of the Chinese Communist Party Commentary 3: On the Tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party Commentary 4: On How the Communist Party Is an Anti-Universe Force Commentary 5: On the Collusion of Jiang Zemin and the Communist Party to Persecute Falun-Gong Commentary 6: On How the Chinese Communist Party Destroyed Traditional Culture Commentary 7: On How the Chinese Communist Party 's History of Killing Commentary 8: On How the Chinese Communist Party is an Evil Cult Commentary 9: On the Unscrupulous Nature of the Chinese Communist Party

Trust in Mind: The Rebellion of Chinese Zen


Mu Soeng - 2004
    / When love and hate are both absent / everything becomes clear and undisguised. / Make the smallest distinction, however / and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart." So begins "Trust in Mind," the beloved poem that has again and again welcomed generations to their practice of Zen Buddhism. Traditionally attributed to the third Chinese ancestor of Zen (Sengcan, d. 606), it is often considered the first historical "Zen" document and remains an anchor of Zen Buddhist practice to this day. Here, scholar and commentator Mu Soeng explores the poem's importance and impact in three sections: The Dharma of Trust in Mind, The Tao of Trust in Mind, and The Chan of Trust in Mind. Finally, a brilliant line-by-line commentary brings the elements of this ancient work completely to life for the modern reader. Trust in Mind is the first book of its kind, looking at this very important Zen text from historical and cultural contexts, as well as from the practitioner's point of view. It is sure to interest readers of Mu Soeng and his fellow Buddhist contemporaries, as well as those with an interest in meditation and Eastern religions--most especially Zen practitioners, academics, philosophers, and scholars of Mind.

Taiwan's Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683-1895


Emma Jinhua Teng - 2004
    The incorporation of this island into the Qing empire in the seventeenth century and its evolution into a province by the late nineteenth century involved not only a reconsideration of imperial geography but also a reconceptualisation of the Chinese domain. The annexation of Taiwan was only one incident in the much larger phenomenon of Qing expansionism into frontier areas that resulted in a doubling of the area controlled from Beijing and the creation of a multi-ethnic polity. The author argues that travellers' accounts and pictures of frontiers such as Taiwan led to a change in the imagined geography of the empire. In representing distant Iands and ethnically diverse peoples of the frontiers to audiences in China proper, these works transformed places once considered non-Chinese into familiar parts of the empire and thereby helped to naturalise Qing expansionism. By viewing Taiwan-China relations as a product of the history of Qing expansionism, the author contributes to our understanding of current political events in the region.

Transcending Boundaries: Zhejiangcun: The Story of a Migrant Village in Beijing


Biao Xiang - 2004
    Based on long years of fieldwork, the book takes us to a highly unlikely site in Beijing Zhejiangcun (literally Zhejiang village ), the biggest migrant community in China, located only five kilometres south of Tian anmen Square -- where 100,000 migrants, mostly from Wenzhou, have organised a vibrant garment industry despite regular state crackdowns. It documents the spontaneous evolution of Zhejiangcun into a hub of nationwide migrant business networks transcending officially imposed boundaries. The book also makes use of Chinese folk insights and philosophical traditions as analytical tools for tackling fluid social relationships unconfined to physical space."

Mr. China


Tim Clissold - 2004
    China tells the rollicking story of a young man who goes to China with the misguided notion that he will help bring the Chinese into the modern world, only to be schooled by the most resourceful and creative operators he would ever meet. Part memoir, part parable, Mr. China is one man's coming-of-age story where he learns to respect and admire the nation he sought to conquer.

Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China


Ian Johnson - 2004
    Representing the first cracks in the otherwise seamless façade of Communist Party control, these small acts of resistance demonstrate the unconquerable power of the human conscience and prophesy an increasingly open political future for China.

Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864-1877


Kim Hodong - 2004
    But conflict in the region has deep roots. Now available in paperback, Holy War in China remains the first comprehensive and balanced history of a late nineteenth-century Muslim rebellion in Xinjiang, which led to the establishment of an independent Islamic state under Ya'qub Beg. That independence was lost in 1877, when the Qing army recaptured the region and incorporated it into the Chinese state, known today as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.Hodong Kim offers readers the first English-language history of the rebellion since 1878 to be based on primary sources in Islamic languages as well as Chinese, complemented by British and Ottoman archival documents and secondary sources in Russian, English, Japanese, Chinese, French, German, and Turkish. His pioneering account of past events offers much insight into current relations.

The Sinister Way: The Divine and the Demonic in Chinese Religious Culture


Glahn Richard von - 2004
    Wutong was perceived not as a heroic figure or paragon of noble qualities but rather as an embodiment of humanity's basest vices, greed and lust, a maleficent demon who preyed on the weak and vulnerable. In The Sinister Way, Richard von Glahn examines the emergence and evolution of the Wutong cult within the larger framework of the historical development of Chinese popular or vernacular religion—as opposed to institutional religions such as Buddhism or Daoism. Von Glahn's study, spanning three millennia, gives due recognition to the morally ambivalent and demonic aspects of divine power within the common Chinese religious culture.

China Along the Yellow River: Reflections on Rural Society


Cao Jinqing - 2004
    Reviewed in the Far East Economic Review as 'one of the richest portraits of the Chinese countryside published in the reform era', it charts a long journey through the hinterland region of the Yellow River undertaken by the author between 1994 and 1996. It examines in exhaustive detail the lives and work of peasants, Party and local government officials, providing a wealth of data on the nature of life in post-reform rural China. The author argues that global integration is but the latest 'great leap forward' in a succession of reforms over a hundred years.

Chinese Calligraphy Made Easy: A Structured Course in Creating Beautiful Brush Lettering


Rebecca Yue - 2004
    A series of lessons and projects, organized to build the reader's knowledge and make the art of calligraphy as enjoyable as it is graceful. The method is innovative, the learning solid: the five major styles of Chinese calligraphy (Kai Shu, Hsing Shu, Chuan Shu, Li Shu, and Tsao) are covered in depth. Now anyone can learn this 4,000-year-old art in just a few weeks!

Chinese Propaganda Posters


Taschen - 2004
    THE COMMUNIST SUPERHERO--MAO'S STARRING ROLE IN CHINESE PROPAGANDA ART.Over 300 posters produced during the rule Chairman Mao to promote Communist values and to portray the bright future of the People's Republic of China.With essays examining the history of Chinese propaganda and the experience of living in Mao's China.

Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 7: Science and Chinese society, Part 2: General Conclusions and Reflections


Joseph Needham - 2004
    His Science and Civilisation in China series caused a seismic shift in western perceptions of China, revealed as perhaps the world's most scientifically and technically productive country in pre-modern times. But why did the scientific and industrial revolutions not happen in China? Joseph Needham reflects on possible answers to this question in the concluding volume of this series and provides fascinating insights into his great intellectual quest.

Calligraphy and Power in Contemporary Chinese Society


Yuehping Yen - 2004
    It examines Chinese space and the political and social use of writing as propaganda, a publicity booster and as a ladder for social climbing.

America's Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945


Colleen Lye - 2004
    Colleen Lye traces the American stereotype of Asians as a model minority or a yellow peril--two aspects of what she calls Asiatic racial form-- to emergent responses to globalization beginning in California in the late nineteenth century, when industrialization proceeded in tandem with the nation's neocolonial expansion beyond its continental frontier.From Progressive efforts to regulate corporate monopoly to New Deal contentions with the crisis of the Great Depression, a particular racial mode of social redress explains why turn-of-the-century radicals and reformers united around Asian exclusion and why Japanese American internment during World War II was a liberal initiative.In Lye's reconstructed archive of Asian American racialization, literary naturalism and its conventions of representing capitalist abstraction provide key historiographical evidence. Arguing for the profound influence of literature on policymaking, America's Asia examines the relationship between Jack London and leading Progressive George Kennan on U.S.-Japan relations, Frank Norris and AFL leader Samuel Gompers on cheap immigrant labor, Pearl S. Buck and journalist Edgar Snow on the Popular Front in China, and John Steinbeck and left intellectual Carey McWilliams on Japanese American internment. Lye's materialist approach to the construction of race succeeds in locating racialization as part of a wider ideological pattern and in distinguishing between its different, and sometimes opposing, historical effects.

Paper Swordsmen: Jin Yong and the Modern Chinese Martial Arts Novel


John Christopher Hamm - 2004
    It is popular not only within Chinese-language communities but in translation throughout East Asia and in cinematic and other adaptations throughout the world. In Paper Swordsmen, John Christopher Hamm offers the first in-depth English-language study of this fascinating and influential genre, focusing on the work of its undisputed twentieth-century master, Jin Yong.

Awakening the Dragon: The Dragon Boat Festival


Arlene Chan - 2004
    To honor this powerful creature, people created long narrow boats that they raced in an annual rainmaking festival.From the wearing of fragrant pouches, to the consumption of rice dumplings, to thrilling boat races, the dragon boat festival of today is a celebration of Chinese traditions all over the world.Arlene Chan, a respected librarian and an experienced dragon boat racer, explores the origins of the festival, it’s customs, and the races themselves. Beautifully detailed illustrations by Song Nan Zhang let you experience the beauty and energy of this ancient festival.From the Hardcover edition.

Heaven My Blanket, Earth My Pillow: Poems from Sung Dynasty China by Yang Wan-Li


Yang Wan-Li - 2004
    But they created at Hangchow a refuge of elegant solitude from which they gazed longingly toward the north, and in this quiet setting, they were able to enjoy the beauties of nature. Many of the poems are perfect verbalizations of the magnificent landscape paintings of the Sung painters: misty, ethereal and luminous. The poetry, however, also holds the annoyances of overwork, aching feet, creaking bones and the pleasures of wine, filling it with humanity and a zest for living.

Tu Fu: Selected Poems


Du Fu - 2004
    Tu Fu was a contemporary and equal of Li Po, widely known in the West. In the minds of many Chinese people he is even greater. Both glorified their days, the golden age of classical Chinese poetry, with writings of unmatched brilliance. It was a lime of great turmoil, a time when the Tang rule was declining and wars of aggression swept the country. Tu Fu, born of an intelligentsia family, sank to the lowest rung of the social ladder. He shared the lot of the common folk and therefore had a deep insight into the calamities and sufferings in which they were involved. He hated wars of aggression and longed for peace. He made his poetry a vehicle for the expression of his sympathy for the people, as well as a faithful account of his own tragedy. His poems have been cherished with ever-growing admiration. In 1962, Tu Fu was commemorated as one of the World's Cultural Giants. Feng Chih, the compiler of this book, is a professor of Peking University and the outstanding specialist on Tu Fu's works. His other collection of Tu Fu's works, containing 264 poems, is popular reading among Chinese lovers of poetry. The translator Rewi Alley, himself a poet from New Zealand, has been in China for more than thirty years. He has travelled widely in northwestern and southwestern China and has personally seen the mountains, rivers, cities and countryside mentioned by Tu Fu. He is most qualified for the translation of Tu Fu's poems. The present volume contains 140 of Tu Fu's poems written at various periods of his life, some of them already widely read. Additional features include the reproductions of the rubbing of a stone carving of Tu Fu's portrait, facsimiles of Tu Fu's works printed in the Sung and Yuan Dynasties, and paintings inspired by the poems.

World Astrology: The Astrologer's Quest to Understand the Human Character


Peter H. Marshall - 2004
    Initially skeptical, Marshall was eventually persuaded by his research and travels that astrology not only contains the psychology of antiquity, but also offers profoundly modern insights into the workings of the mind. Astrology conveys important truths about the human character and the course of history, he argues, and can help us find our true place and purpose in the universe.

Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China


Andrew D. Morris - 2004
    A landmark work on the history of sport in China, Marrow of the Nation tells the dramatic story of how Olympic-style competitions and ball games, as well as militarized forms of training associated with the West and Japan, were adapted to become an integral part of the modern Chinese experience.

Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative


Rania Huntington - 2004
    Ming and Qing China were well populated with foxes, shape-changing creatures who transgressed the boundaries of species, gender, and the metaphysical realm. In human form, foxes were both immoral succubi and good wives/good mothers, both tricksters and Confucian paragons. They were the most alien yet the most common of the strange creatures a human might encounter.Rania Huntington investigates a conception of one kind of alien and attempts to establish the boundaries of the human. As the most ambiguous alien in the late imperial Chinese imagination, the fox reveals which boundaries around the human and the ordinary were most frequently violated and, therefore, most jealously guarded.Each section of this book traces a particular boundary violated by the fox and examines how maneuvers across that boundary change over time: the narrative boundaries of genre and texts; domesticity and the outside world; chaos and order; the human and the non-human; class; gender; sexual relations; and the progression from animal to monster to transcendent. As middle creatures, foxes were morally ambivalent, endowed with superhuman but not quite divine powers; like humans, they occupied a middle space between the infernal and the celestial.

Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City, 1550-1850


Antonia Finnane - 2004
    Even today Yangzhou continues to evoke images of artists, men of letters, great merchant families, scenic waterways, an urban environment of considerable grace and charm, and a history imbued with colour and romance. This book is in some ways a biography of a city that acquired a personality, even a gender, and became an actor in its own history. Yangzhou invites attention because its place in China's cultural iconography tells us not only of one city's vicissitudes and fortunes but also of changes in the geography of the Chinese imagination. The author examines the city's place in the history of the late imperial era and of the meanings that accrued to Yangzhou over time. She argues that the actual construction of the city - its academies of learning, its philanthropic institutions, its gardens, its teahouses, and its brothels - underpinned the const

John Dewey, Confucius, and Global Philosophy


Joseph Grange - 2004
    Grange concentrates on the major themes of experience, felt intelligence, and culture to make the connections between these two giants of Western and Eastern thought. He explains why the Chinese called Dewey "A Second Confucius," and deepens our understanding of Confucius's concepts of the way (dao) of human excellence (ren). The important dimensions of American and Chinese cultural philosophy are welded into an argument that calls for the liberation of what is finest in both traditions. The work gives a new appreciation of fundamental issues facing Chinese and American relations and brings the opportunities and dangers of globalization into focus.

The Ten Thousand Year Calendar: The Definitive Reference for Feng Shui & Chinese Astrology


Joey Yap - 2004
    It also includes a comprehensive set of key Feng Shui and Chinese Astrology charts and references, including Xuan Kong Nine Palace Flying Star charts, monthly and even daily flying stars, Water Dragon formulas reference charts, Zi Wei Dou Shu (Purple Star) Astrology reference charts, BaZi (Four Pillars of Destiny) tables and charts and all other related reference tables for Chinese Metaphysical studies. Essential for Students and Practitioners of Feng Shui and Chinese Astrology A complete reference for plotting your BaZi (Four Pillars of Destiny) and Zi Wei Dou Shu (Purple Star)Astrology charts. Quick Reference Sections for: Feng Shui (San Yuan, San He, Xuan Kong Flying Stars, Ba Zhai (Eight Mansions), BaZi (Four Pillars of Destiny), Zi Wei Dou Shu (Purple Star Astrology), Yi Jing (I-Ching).

Lottie Moon: A Generous Offering


Renee Taft Meloche - 2004
    In dire circumstances, Lottie's first priority was helping others learn about God's love. She courageously fought fires, invented clever disguises, and fended off angry mobs to protect others.Children, parents, and teachers love the adventurous Christian Heroes Then & Now biographies and unit study curriculum guides. Now Heroes for Young Readers introduces younger children to the lives of Christian heroes! Whether reading for themselves or being read to, children love the captivating rhyming poems and unforgettable color illustrations of the Heroes for Young Readers series.

Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China


Timothy Brook - 2004
    This work talks about the sensitive topic of wartime collaboration between the Chinese and their Japanese occupiers.

Yangzi: The Yangtze River and the Three Gorges from Source to Sea


Judy Bonavia - 2004
    They refer to it simply as Changjiang, or Long River. Stretching for nearly 4,000 miles, the Yangzi is China?s main artery, supporting a third of its people; it also serves as the country's primary commercial waterway. This detailed guide to the river and its scenery and environs includes practical information about sights and accommodation. Illustrated by exceptional color photography and informative maps and plans, it is an essential companion for anyone with an interest in China's Long River.

The Class of 1761: Examinations, State, and Elites in Eighteenth-Century China


Iona D. Man-Cheong - 2004
    The author follows the students' struggles in negotiating the examination system along with bureaucratic intrigue and intellectual conflict, as well as their careers across the Empire—to the battlefields of imperial expansion in Annam and Tibet, the archives where the glories of the empire were compiled, and back to the chambers where they in turn became examiners for the next generation of aspirants.The book explores the rigors and flexibilities of the examination system as it disciplined men for political life and shows how the system legitimated both the Manchu throne and the majority non-Manchu elite. In the system's intricately articulated networks, we discern the stability of the Qing empire and the fault lines that would grow to destabilize it.

Becoming Chinese American: A History of Communities and Institutions


Him Mark Lai - 2004
    Representing a singular breadth of knowledge about the Chinese American past, the volume begins with an historical overview of Chinese migration to the United States, followed by critical discussion of the development of key community institutions, Chinese-language schools, newspapers, and politics in early Chinese American life. Rather than emphasize experiences of discrimination, the collection focuses on Chinese American community formation that tested the racially-imposed boundaries on their new lives in the United States. Written by noted Chinese American scholar Him Mark Lai, the essays in this volume will be of interest to scholars of Asian and Asian American studies, as well as American history, ethnicity, and immigration.

In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai Under Japanese Occupation


Christian Henriot - 2004
    Instead of presenting their stories in terms of heroic resistance versus shameful collaboration with the enemy, the volume reveals how the city's dwellers mobilized a variety of social networks to circumvent enemy strictures. They employed strategies that kept alive a culture and an economy that were vital to the survival of the brutalized population.

Interpreting China's Military Power


Ka Po Ng - 2004
    As China, operating the world's largest army, grows stronger, there are ongoing debates over the implications for Asia's regional security. This book argues that it is imperative to look beyond the empirical observations and conventional materialist reading of Chinese military development to understand its dynamics and directions in doctrinal terms and put it in a readiness context for evaluation. Military doctrine has long been under-studied and is often treated as a subject separate from force development. But, as this study contends, this factor is necessary for interpreting the making and purposes of China's military power because it forms the intellectual foundation of military structural and hardware development. When loaded with political rhetoric, it also communicates to us the intended uses of the military power. The role of doctrine is reinforced in the context of military readiness, which defines what for and how the army is getting ready. Force development is evaluated in structural, operational and directional terms.The importance of this analytical framework based on military doctrine and readiness is demonstrated in a survey of the evolutionof Chinese military doctrine and force development. As the Chinese People's Liberation Army has continued to adjust its military structure and operation to follow the doctrinal lead, its switches between the doctines of local war and total war have seen corresponding changes to the emphasis between operational and structural readiness.

Tang China And The Collapse Of The Uighur Empire: A Documentary History


Michael R. Drompp - 2004
    the collapse of the Uighur steppe empire in 840 C.E., and the subsequent fleeing of large numbers of Uighur refugees to China s northern frontier. Through a translation of seventy relevant documents the author analyzes the rhetoric of the crisis, as well as its aftermath. The extant writings of Li Deyu uniquely allow an in-depth look into Chinese-Inner Asian relations, very unusual for such an early period. This volume permits us a close look at the workings of the late Tang government, particularly in terms of policy formation and implementation, as well as the rhetoric surrounding such activities."

The Asian Insider: Unconventional Wisdom for Asian Business


Michael Backman - 2004
    In this revised and updated edition of The Asian Insider, bestselling author, Michael Backman, has researched beneath the surface to reveal the things that you need to know about Asian business. This paperback edition has an important new chapter on the massive, booming Chinese consumer market and updated chapters on China's fast paced economy, India's emerging economy, outsourcing in India, corruption and many other key essentials for Asian Insiders.

The Chinese State in Ming Society


Timothy Brook - 2004
    This unique collection of reworked and heavily illustrated essays, by one of the leading scholars of Chinese history, re-examines this relationship. It argues that, contrary to previous scholarship, it was radical responses within society that led to a 'constitution', not periods of fluctuation within the dynasty itself. Brook's outstanding scholarship demonstrates that it was changes in commercial relations and social networks that were actually responsible for the development of a stable society. This imaginative reconsidering of existing scholarship on the history of China will be fascinating reading for scholars and students interested in China's development.

An Embassy To China; Being The Journal Kept By Lord Macartney During His Embassy To The Emperor Ch`Ien Lung, 1793 1794


Lord MacArtney - 2004
    

Winning in Asia: Strategies for Competing in the New Millennium


Peter J. Williamson - 2004
    The make-up of competition locally is shifting from national fiefdoms to cross-border competition. And China's rapid development is changing how competition is played altogether. Winning in Asia explores these new business realities in Asia, and explains why there will be no going back to the Asian norm of the 80s and 90s. Most importantly, it tackles head-on the critical issue of what companies - both local Asian businesses and multinational corporations operating in Asia - must do and how they must change in order to compete successfully in the next round of Asian competition. The book identifies the five key challenges that the winners in tomorrow's Asia must meet, outlines what the Asian company of the future will need to look like and how it can be built, and provides a practical framework for formulating successful post-Asian crisis strategies.

Pioneer In Tibet: The Life And Perils Of Dr. Albert Shelton


Douglas Wissing - 2004
    Albert Shelton was a medical missionary who spent nearly twenty years in the Tibetan borderlands at the start of the last century. Raising his family in a land of banditry and civil war, caught between a weak Chinese government and the British Raj, Shelton proved to be a resourceful frontiersman. During the course of his work in Tibet, he was praised by the Western press as a family man, revered doctor, respected diplomat and fearless adventurer. Driven by his goal of setting up a medical mission within Lhasa, the seat of the Dalai Lama and a city off limits to Westerners for hundreds of years, Shelton acted as a valued go between for the Tibetans and Chinese. Tragically, while finalizing his entry into Lhasa, Shelton was shot to death on a remote mountain trail in the Himalayas. Set against the exciting history of early twentieth century Tibet and China, Pioneer in Tibet offers a window into the life of a dying breed of adventurer. MARKET 1: Asian History; Biographical History

Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China, 1945-1963: A Medicine of Revolution


Kim Taylor - 2004
    The political, economic and social motives which drove this promotion are analyzed and the extraordinary role that Chinese medicine was meant to play in Mao Zedong's revolution is fully explored for the first time, making a major contribution to the history of Chinese medicine.

State and Religion in China: Historical and Textual Perspectives


Anthony C. Yu - 2004
    He argues, against those who claim that Chinese politics has been traditionally secular, or even that the Chinese traditionally had no religion that religion has deep roots in the Chinese past, and that the Chinese state has from its creation always interfered in relgious matters.

The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World


Thomas J. Campanella - 2004
    Over the past 25 years, surging economic growth has propelled a construction boom unlike anything the world has ever seen, radically transforming both city and countryside in its wake. The speed and scale of China's urban revolution challenges nearly all our expectations about architecture, urbanism and city planning. China's ambition to be a major player on the global stage is written on the skylines of every major city. This is a nation on the rise, and it is building for the record books.China is now home to some of the world's tallest skyscrapers and biggest shopping malls; the longest bridges and largest airport; the most expansive theme parks and gated communities and even the world's largest skateboard park. And by 2020 China's national network of expressways will exceed in length even the American interstate highway system. China's construction industry, employing a workforce equal to the population of California, has been erecting billions of square feet of housing and office space every year. But such extensive development has also meant demolition on a scale unprecedented in the peacetime history of the world. Nearly all of Beijing's centuries-old cityscape has been bulldozed in recent years, and redevelopment in Shanghai has displaced more families than 30 years of urban renewal in the United States. China's cities are also rapidly sprawling across the landscape, churning precious farmland into a landscape of superblock housing estates and single-family subdivisions laced with highways and big-box malls. In a mere generation, China's cities have undergone a metamorphosis that took 150 years to complete in the United States.The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World sheds light on this extraordinary chapter in world urban history. The book surveys the driving forces behind the great Chinese building boom, traces the historical precedents and global flows of ideas and information that are fusing to create a bold new Chinese cityscape, and considers the social and environmental impacts of China's urban future. The Concrete Dragon provides a critical overview of contemporary Chinese urbanization in light of both China's past as well as earlier episodes of rapid urban development elsewhere in the worldespecially that of the United States, a nation that itself once set global records for the speed and scale of its urban ambitions.

Aborigines of Taiwan: The Puyuma: From Headhunting to the Modern World


Josiane Cauquelin - 2004
    The Puyuma belong to the Austronesian peoples, which today number less than 370,000. In Taiwan, they are the least known of the aboriginal groups, numbering only 6000, and inhabiting the Southeastern province of Taitung. The study looks at the historical changes in the status and definition of these people in relation to the central state, the criteria by which people determine their own ethnic identity, and the evolution of that identity through history. The increasing awareness in the West of the importance of ethnic relations makes this an especially timely book.

Corrupt Histories


Emmanuel Kreike - 2004
    This study offers three different perspectives on corruption. The first chapters highlight corrupt practices, taking as a point of departure a technocratic definition of corruption. The second part of the book views corruption through the lens of discourses of corruption, revealing that accusations of corruption have been employed as tools, often in the context of contestations of power. The essays in the third part of the book treat corruption as a process, taking into account its causes and effects and their impact on society, economics, and politics. Contributors: Jeremy Adelman, Virginie Coulloudon, William Doyle, Diego Gambetta, Norman J. W. Goda, Robert Gregg, Michael Johnston, William Chester Jordan, Emmanuel Kreike, Vinod Pavarala, Dilip Simeon, Pierre-Etienne Will, David Witwer, Philip Woodfine William Chester Jordan is Professor of History at Princeton University; Emmanuel Kreike is Assistant Professor of African History and Director of the African Studies Program at Princeton University

Rites of Belonging: Memory, Modernity, and Identity in a Malaysian Chinese Community


Jean Debernardi - 2004
    In the multicultural urban settlement that developed, the Chinese immigrants organized their social life through community temples like the Guanyin Temple (Kong Hok Palace) and their secret sworn brotherhoods. These community associations assumed exceptional importance precisely because they were a means to establish a social presence for the Chinese immigrants, to organize their social life, and to display their economic prowess. The Confucian "cult of memory" also took on new meanings in the early twentieth century as a form of racial pride. In twentieth-century Penang, religious practices and events continued to draw the boundaries of belonging in the idiom of the sacred.Part I of Rites of Belonging focuses on the conjuncture between Chinese and British in colonial Penang. The author closely analyzes the 1857 Guanyin Temple Riots and conflicts leading to the suppression of the Chinese sworn brotherhoods. Part II investigates the conjuncture between Chinese and Malays in contemporary Malaysia, and the revitalization in the 1970s and 1980s of Chinese popular religious culture.