The reason is Thucydides’s Trap, a deadly pattern of structural stress that results when a rising power challenges a ruling one. This phenomenon is as old as history itself. About the Peloponnesian War that devastated ancient Greece, the historian Thucydides explained: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” Over the past 500 years, these conditions have occurred sixteen times. War broke out in twelve of them. Today, as an unstoppable China approaches an immovable America and both Xi Jinping and Donald Trump promise to make their countries “great again,” the seventeenth case looks grim. Unless China is willing to scale back its ambitions or Washington can accept becoming number two in the Pacific, a trade conflict, cyberattack, or accident at sea could soon escalate into all-out war. In Destined for War, the eminent Harvard scholar Graham Allison explains why Thucydides’s Trap is the best lens for understanding U.S.-China relations in the twenty-first century. Through uncanny historical parallels and war scenarios, he shows how close we are to the unthinkable. Yet, stressing that war is not inevitable, Allison also reveals how clashing powers have kept the peace in the past — and what painful steps the United States and China must take to avoid disaster today.

    After their deaths, each year on the anniversary of the broadcast, their souls would return to the Chinese village of their younger days. It’s where they had fought—and survived—a war that shook the world and changed their own lives in unimaginable ways. Now, seventy years later, the pledge is being fulfilled by American missionary Pastor Billy, brash gunner’s mate Ian Ferguson, and local soldier Liu Zhaohu.All that’s missing is Ah Yan—also known as Swallow—the girl each man loved, each in his own profound way.As they unravel their personal stories of the war, and of the woman who touched them so deeply during that unforgiving time, the story of Ah Yan’s life begins to take shape, woven into view by their memories. A woman who had suffered unspeakable atrocities, and yet found the grace and dignity to survive, she’d been the one to bring them together. And it is her spark of humanity, still burning brightly, that gives these ghosts of the past the courage to look back on everything they endured and remember the woman they lost.

    China produced some of the world’s top academic achievers, and just down the street from her home in Shanghai was THE school, as far as elite Chinese were concerned. Should Lenora entrust her rambunctious young son to the system?So began Rainey’s immersion in one of the most extreme school systems on the planet. Almost immediately, the three-year-old began to develop surprising powers of concentration, became proficient in early math, and learned to obey his teachers’ every command. Yet Lenora also noticed disturbing new behaviors: Where he used to scribble and explore, Rainey grew obsessed with staying inside the lines. He became fearful of authority figures, and also developed a habit of obeisance outside of school. “If you want me to do it, I’ll do it,” he told a stranger who’d asked whether he liked to sing. What was happening behind closed classroom doors? Driven by parental anxiety, Lenora embarked on a journalistic mission to discover: What price do the Chinese pay to produce their “smart” kids? How hard should the rest of us work to stay ahead of the global curve? And, ultimately, is China’s school system one the West should emulate? She pulls the curtain back on a military-like education system, in which even the youngest kids submit to high-stakes tests, and parents are crippled by the pressure to compete (and sometimes to pay bribes). Yet, as mother-and-son reach new milestones, Lenora uncovers surprising nuggets of wisdom, such as the upside of student shame, how competition can motivate achievement, and why a cultural belief in hard work over innate talent gives the Chinese an advantage.Lively and intimate, beautifully written and reported, Little Soldiers challenges our assumptions and asks us to reconsider the true value and purpose of education.

    Easternization is the defining trend of our age the growing wealth of Asian nations is transforming the international balance of power. This shift to the East is shaping the lives of people all over the world, the fate of nations, and the great questions of war and peace. A troubled but rising China is now challenging America s supremacy, and the ambitions of other Asian powers including Japan, North Korea, India, and Pakistan have the potential to shake the whole world. Meanwhile the West is struggling with economic malaise and political populism, the Arab world is in turmoil, and Russia longs to reclaim its status as a great power. As it becomes clear that the West s historic power and influence is receding, Gideon Rachman offers a road map to the turbulent process that will define the international politics of the twenty-first century."

    They are strangers to her. When Xiaolu is born her parents hand her over to a childless peasant couple in the mountains. Aged two, and suffering from malnutrition on a diet of yam leaves, they leave Xiaolu with her illiterate grandparents in a fishing village on the East China Sea. It’s a strange beginning.Like a Wild Swans for a new generation, Once Upon a Time in the East takes Xiaolu from a run-down shack to film school in a rapidly changing Beijing, navigating the everyday peculiarity of modern China: censorship, underground art, Western boyfriends. In 2002 she leaves Beijing on a scholarship to study in a picturesque British village. Now, after a decade in Europe, her tale of East to West resonates with the insight that can only come from someone who is both an outsider and at home.Xiaolu Guo’s extraordinary memoir is a handbook of life lessons. How to be an artist when censorship kills creativity and the only job you can get is writing bad telenovela scripts. How to be a woman when female babies are regularly drowned at birth and sexual abuse is commonplace. Most poignantly of all: how to love when you’ve never been shown how.

    “If leaving me in the mental institution will further the gospel, then leave me there!” The first time Doris, an orthodox Buddhist, heard about Jesus, she whispered to Grace, “Don’t tell anyone that Jesus died for us. This will be our secret!” The police were interrogating 19-year-old Hope every few days—pressuring her to disclose Grace and Justin’s ministry to university students. With tears in her eyes, she told Grace and Justin, “I’ll never betray you two, no matter what they do to me!” Leah, an idol-worshipper, longed to become a Christian, but she was afraid. “If I believe in Jesus, the gods I worship are going to retaliate. They’ll hurt me really bad. Is Jesus powerful enough to protect me from them?” In the kick-off meeting of a discussion group Grace was leading for atheist university students, Carol burst out laughing. “Grace, you can’t be serious! You actually believe God exists?” In Dragon Ride, the beauty of the Lord is seen through the eyes of Buddhists, atheists, idol-worshippers, Muslims, and an animist as they encounter Jesus. Dragon Ride records the actual conversations Grace had with her friends, and many of them embraced Christ as the answer to their deepest longings. Grace writes about persecution, evading the police, saving lives, helping the homeless and disabled, and she even writes about the murder of a friend. But more importantly, she writes of a God who acts on behalf of His children, of a faith that grew in the crucible of China, and of learning how to effectively share the gospel. Grace’s stories are raw, personal, and humorous, and she openly shares about her own spiritual struggles and growth.

     "Song of Praise for a Flower" traces a century of Chinese history through the experiences of one woman and her family, from the dark years of World War II and China’s civil war to the tragic Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, and beyond. It is a window into a faraway world, a sweeping epic about China’s tumultuous transformation and a harrowing yet ultimately uplifting story of a remarkable woman who survives it all and finally finds peace and tranquility. Chu’s story begins in the 1920s in an idyllic home in the heart of China’s rice country. Her life is a struggle from the start. At a young age, she defies foot-binding and an arranged marriage and sneaks away from home to attend school. Her young adulthood is thrown into turmoil when the Japanese invade and ransack her village. Later her family is driven to starvation when Mao Zedong’s Communist Party seizes power and her husband is branded a ‘bad element.’ After Mao’s death in the 1970s, as China picks up the pieces and moves in a new direction, Chu eventually finds herself in a glittering city on the sea adjacent to Hong Kong, worlds away in both culture and time from the place she came from. “Fengxian Chu’s first-person account of growing up female in feudal rural China is ultimately as uplifting as it is heart wrenching. Beautiful and bravely written. Bravo.” – Michael J. Totten, author of Where the West Ends

    A confidential tale literally kept in the closet for more than twenty years. This narrative, set from the 1970s through the late 90s in the Pacific Northwest, exposes how the personal issues of adoptive parents can take precedence over the truth of origin and fundamental human rights of transracial and intercountry adoptees--even into adulthood. In this particular case, hoarding, a traumatic brain injury, recovery, a divorce battle, a life-altering family secret, and cancer consume the adoptive parents time, and leave absolutely no room to deal with the true legal status of their two adopted daughters. Instead, the twins persevere by using teamwork to overcome the adoptive family struggles. Kept private for more than two decades, this narrative provides understanding on the twins' innate nature to protect and uplift the innocent and those they love. (Sometimes the box of limitations can be found within the adoptive home.) This confidential book reveals the personal young lives of individuals who now as adults inform government officials, attorneys, university professors and the public on the crisis of adoption trafficking. But back in the 1980s and in the perspective found in this book, the twins were just trying to honor and obey their American parents-like everyone else in junior high and high school.Janine is now the founder of a confidential and worldwide resource to prevent adoption trafficking; however, she merely considers herself to be just another proud product of the X Generation. Her twin, Jenette, has worked in the health care field for more than 20 years and coauthoring books on energy therapy and meditation. Vance's second book The Search For Mother Missing: A Peek Inside International Adoption reveals why she acknowledges parents and siblings of adoption-loss. An absolute must-read to caution and protect uninformed parents, families, indigenous communities, and nation-states on the crisis of adoption trafficking.

    The toxic rivalry between China and Japan, two Asian giants consumed with endless history wars and ruled by entrenched political dynasties, is threatening to upend the peace underwritten by Pax Americana since World War II. Combined with Donald Trump's disdain for America's old alliances and China's own regional ambitions, east Asia is entering a new era of instability and conflict. If the United States laid the postwar foundations for modern Asia, now the anchor of the global economy, Asia's Reckoning reveals how that structure is falling apart.With unrivaled access to archives in the United States and Asia, as well as to many of the major players in all three countries, Richard McGregor has written a tale that blends the tectonic shifts in diplomacy with bitter domestic politics and the personalities driving them. It is a story not only of an overstretched America, but also of the rise and fall and rise of the great powers of Asia. The about-turn of Japan--from a colossus seemingly poised for world domination to a nation in inexorable decline in the space of two decades--has few parallels in modern history, as does the rapid rise of China--a country whose military is now larger than those of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and southeast Asia's combined.The confrontational course on which China and Japan are set is no simple spat between neighbors: the United States would be involved on the side of Japan in any military conflict between the two countries. The fallout would be an economic tsunami, affecting manufacturing centers, trade routes, and political capitals on every continent. Richard McGregor's book takes us behind the headlines of his years reporting as the Financial Times's Beijing and Washington bureau chief to show how American power will stand or fall on its ability to hold its ground in Asia.

     The Souls of China tells the story of one of the world's great spiritual revivals. Following a century of violent anti-religious campaigns, China is now filled with new temples, churches, and mosques--as well as cults, sects, and politicians trying to harness religion for their own ends. Driving this explosion of faith is uncertainty--over what it means to be Chinese and how to live an ethical life in a country that discarded traditional morality a century ago and is searching for new guideposts.Ian Johnson first visited China in 1984; in the 1990s he helped run a charity to rebuild Daoist temples, and in 2001 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the suppression of the Falun Gong spiritual movement. While researching this book, he lived for extended periods with underground church members, rural Daoists, and Buddhist pilgrims. Along the way, he learned esoteric meditation techniques, visited a nonagenarian Confucian sage, and befriended government propagandists as they fashioned a remarkable embrace of traditional values. He has distilled these experiences into a cycle of festivals, births, deaths, detentions, and struggle--a great awakening of faith that is shaping the soul of the world's newest superpower.

    Her multigenerational saga is also a microcosm of China's turbulent, transformative history from imperialism, nationalism, and communism, through to its present role as an economic superpower, captured from the unique perspective of a Chinese Christian family. When, in 1979, Jennifer Lin accompanied her father back to China for the first time in thirty years, it was like stepping into the last page of a mystery without having read any of the book. Her relatives were thrilled to be reunited with their long-lost family, but too stoic and often too frightened to stir up stories from a painful, politically dangerous past. Jennifer, however, was determined to find out what had gone before and in the course of a career that afforded her a deep engagement with China and equipped her with the skills and doggedness to unearth even the most carefully buried truths, she has pieced together an extraordinary tale. Moreover, she discovered that the saga of her family is, as she writes, "the very story of China, one that captures the collision of religion and politics that began more than a century ago and continues to this day."

    But for Tong the move became much more—it offered the opportunity to reconnect with members of his extended family who had remained in China after his parents fled the communists six decades prior. By uncovering the stories of his family’s history, Tong discovered a new way to understand the defining moments of modern China and its long, interrupted quest to go global.  A Village with My Name offers a unique perspective on the transitions in China through the eyes of regular people who have witnessed such epochal events as the toppling of the Qing monarchy, Japan’s occupation during World War II, exile of political prisoners to forced labor camps, mass death and famine during the Great Leap Forward, market reforms under Deng Xiaoping, and the dawn of the One Child Policy. Tong’s story focuses on five members of his family, who each offer a specific window on a changing country: a rare American-educated girl born in the closing days of the Qing Dynasty, a pioneer exchange student, an abandoned toddler from World War II who later rides the wave of China’s global export boom, a young professional climbing the ladder at a multinational company, and an orphan (the author’s daughter) adopted in the middle of a baby-selling scandal fueled by foreign money. Through their stories, Tong shows us China anew, visiting former prison labor camps on the Tibetan plateau and rural outposts along the Yangtze, exploring the Shanghai of the 1930s, and touring factories across the mainland.   With curiosity and sensitivity, Tong explores the moments that have shaped China and its people, offering a compelling and deeply personal take on how China became what it is today.

    That enemy is China, a country that invented totalitarianism thousands of years ago whose economic power rivals our own that believes its superior race and culture give it the right to universal deference that teaches its people to hate America for standing in the way of achieving its narcissistic "dream" of world domination that believes in its manifest destiny to usher in the World of Great Harmony which publishes maps showing the exact extent of the nuclear destruction it could rain down on the United States  Steven Mosher exposes the resurgent aspirations of the would-be hegemon–and the roots of China's will to domination in its five-thousand-year history of ruthless conquest and assimilation of other nations, brutal repression of its own people, and belligerence toward any civilization that challenges its claim to superiority.The naïve idealism of our "China hands" has lulled America into a fool's dream of "engagement" with the People's Republic of China and its "peaceful evolution" toward democracy and freedom. Wishful thinking, says Mosher, has blinded us to the danger we face and left the owlrd vulnerable to China's overweening ambitions.Mosher knows China as few Westerners do. Having exposed as a visiting graduate student the monstrous practice of forced abortions, he became the target of the regime's crushing retaliation. His encyclopedic grasp of China's history and its present-day politics, his astute insights, and his bracing realism are the perfect antidote for our dangerous confusion about the Bully of Asia.

    Let her sleep, for when she wakes she will shake the world.” In 2014, President Xi Jinping triumphantly declared that the lion had awoken. Under Xi, China is pursuing an increasingly ambitious foreign policy with the aim of restoring its historical status as the dominant power in Asia. From the Mekong Basin to the Central Asian steppe, the country is wooing its neighbors with promises of new roads, railways, dams, and power grids.  Chinese trade and investment presents huge opportunities for China’s neighbors, and its ability to build much-needed infrastructure could assist in the development of some of the world’s poorest countries. Yet Chinas rise also threatens to reduce its neighbours to the status of exploited vassals. In Vietnam and Myanmar, resentment of Chinese encroachment has already incited anti-Chinese protests, and many countries in the region are seeking to counterbalance its influence by turning to the US and Japan. Combining a concise overview of the situation with on-the-ground reportage from over seven countries, China’s Asian Dream offers a fresh perspective on one of the most important questions of our time: what does China’s rise mean for the future of Asia and of the world?

    Through the years, the Chinese written language encountered presumed alphabetic universalism in the form of Morse Code, Braille, stenography, Linotype, punch cards, word processing, and other systems developed with the Latin alphabet in mind. This book is about those encounters -- in particular thousands of Chinese characters versus the typewriter and its QWERTY keyboard. Thomas Mullaney describes a fascinating series of experiments, prototypes, failures, and successes in the century-long quest for a workable Chinese typewriter.The earliest Chinese typewriters, Mullaney tells us, were figments of popular imagination, sensational accounts of twelve-foot keyboards with 5,000 keys. One of the first Chinese typewriters actually constructed was invented by a Christian missionary, who organized characters by common usage (but promoted the less-common characters for "Jesus" to the common usage level). Later came typewriters manufactured for use in Chinese offices, and typewriting schools that turned out trained "typewriter girls" and "typewriter boys." Still later was the "Double Pigeon" typewriter produced by the Shanghai Calculator and Typewriter Factory, the typewriter of choice under Mao. Clerks and secretaries in this era experimented with alternative ways of organizing characters on their tray beds, inventing an input method that was the first instance of "predictive text."Today, after more than a century of resistance against the alphabetic, not only have Chinese characters prevailed, they form the linguistic substrate of the vibrant world of Chinese information technology. The Chinese Typewriter, not just an "object history" but grappling with broad questions of technological change and global communication, shows how this happened.

    The city of his birth was totally unrecognizable. “My city that once was had vanished,” he writes: “I was a foreigner in my hometown.” The shock of this experience released a flood of memories and emotions that sparked Open Up, City Gate. In this lyrical autobiography of growing up—from the birth of the People’s Republic, through the chaotic years of the Great Leap Forward, and on into the Cultural Revolution—Bei Dao uses his extraordinary gifts as a poet and storyteller to create another Beijing, a beautiful memory palace of endless alleyways and corridors, where personal narrative mixes with the momentous history he lived through. At the center of the book are his parents and siblings, and their everyday life together through famine and festival. Open Up, City Gate is told in an episodic, fluid style that moves back and forth through the poet’s childhood, recreating the smells and sounds, the laughter and the danger, of a boy’s coming of age during a time of enormous change and upheaval.

    . . In 1908, Jialing is only seven years old when she is abandoned in the courtyard of a once-lavish estate outside Shanghai. Jialing is zazhong—Eurasian—and faces a lifetime of contempt from both Chinese and Europeans. Until now she’s led a secluded life behind courtyard walls, but without her mother’s protection, she can survive only if the estate’s new owners, the Yang family, agree to take her in.Jialing finds allies in Anjuin, the eldest Yang daughter, and Fox, an animal spirit who has lived in the courtyard for centuries. But Jialing’s life as the Yangs’ bondservant changes unexpectedly when she befriends a young English girl who then mysteriously vanishes.Murder, political intrigue, jealousy, forbidden love … Jialing confronts them all as she grows into womanhood during the tumultuous early years of the Chinese republic, always hopeful of finding her long-lost mother. Through every turn she is guided, both by Fox and by her own strength of spirit, away from the shadows of her past toward a very different fate, if she has the courage to accept it.

    The "Ruta de la Plata" or "Silver Way" connected Asia and especially China with Spanish America. Gordon and Morales del Pino show how it furthered economic and cultural exchange, and built the foundations for the first global currency and the first "world city," Mexico City, long before the U.S. dollar or London and New York rose to international importance.

    Antony Dapiran explores the historical and social stimuli and implications of public dissident movements from the turbulent 1960s until the most recent wave of protests, which became apparent in the 2014 Occupy Central movement. What emerges from these grassroots movements is a unique Hong Kong identity, one shaped neither by Britain nor China. City of Protest is a compelling look at the often-fraught relationship between politics and belonging, and a city’s struggle to assert itself.

    It's one over 30 million Americans pursue. But being the significant other of an entrepreneur is not so glamorous. Boundaries between work and home disappear. Personal savings and business funds become intertwined. You can feel like a single parent as your spouse travels, works late hours, and answers calls and e-mails 24-7.You may even sacrifice a career or move your home for the sake of the business.But there are strategies you can use to combat all this stress and uncertainty. Whether you're new to the start-up world, or a long-term entrepreneurial partner, Start, Love, Repeat will help you understand exactly how a start-up affects your lives-and what you can do to build a happy and healthy relationship in the midst of the madness. Dorcas Cheng-Tozun has not only done extensive research, she has lived through the perils and pitfalls of being with an entrepreneur as the wife of the CEO and cofounder of successful start-up d.light. She offers clear-sighted, first-hand advice for any couple considering making the same leap. She further draws on interviews with other successful entrepreneurs and their significant others, executive coaches, marriage-family therapists, venture capitalists, and start-up authorities to provide practical insights and steps any couple can take to build a strong relationship while launching that dream business.

    It redraws the boundaries of working-class poetry for the new millennium by incorporating at its center issues like migration, globalization, and rank-and-file resistance. We hear in these poems what Zheng Xiaoqiong calls “a language of callouses.”  This isn’t a book about the lost industrial past; it’s a fervent testimony to the horrific, hidden histories of the 21st century’s working-class and a clarion call for a more cooperative and humane future.”—Mark Nowak, author of Coal Mountain ElementaryEleanor Goodman is a writer and translator. Her translation of work by Wang Xiaoni, Something Crosses My Mind, won the Lucien Stryk Translation Prize. Her first poetry collection is Nine Dragon Island.

    Success must be eked out in the face of life’s unnegotiable realities: sandstorms, locusts and death.While this small tribe is held at the mercy of these headwinds, they discover the cheer and dignity hidden in each other. But will their ceaseless labours deliver blooming fields of green and yellow? Or will their dreams prove as distant as they are fragile?

    Continued success requires re-invention of its economy and politics. The old economic strategy based on exports and infrastructure now piles up debt without producing sustainable economic growth, and Chinese society now resists the disruptive change that enabled earlier reforms. While China's leadership has produced a strategy for successful economic transition, it is struggling to manage the politics of implementing that strategy. After analysing the economics of growth, William H. Overholt explores critical social issues of the transition, notably inequality, corruption, environmental degradation, and globalisation. He argues that Xi Jinping is pursuing the riskiest political strategy of any important national leader. Alternative outcomes include continued impressive growth and political stability, Japanese-style stagnation, and a major political-economic crisis.

    He argues that the Chinese ideation and tradition of political governance and world order--the China Order--is based on an imperial state of Confucian-Legalism as historically exemplified by the Qin-Han polity. Claiming a Mandate of Heaven to unify and govern the whole known world or tianxia (all under heaven), the China Order dominated Eastern Eurasia as a world empire for more than two millennia, until the late nineteenth century. Since 1949, the People's Republic of China has been a reincarnated Qin-Han polity without the traditional China Order, finding itself stuck in the endless struggle against the current world order and the ever-changing Chinese society for its regime survival and security. Wang also offers new discoveries and assessments about the true golden eras of Chinese civilization, explains the great East-West divergence between China and Europe, and analyzes the China Dream that drives much of current Chinese foreign policy.

    From a historic spy case that saved Taiwan from communist takeover to modern day covert action programs, and from emergency alert procedures to underground coastal defense networks, this is the untold story of the most dangerous flashpoint of our times.""Easton offers a brilliant, thick description of China's invasion plans, Taiwan's plans to repel an invasion, potential invasion scenarios, and how the U.S. might respond. Throughout the incredible level of detail, and the vast number of plans, locations, weapons systems, operations and doctrines it presents, Easton's clarity of order and logical presentation keep everything firmly under control.Where would it arrive? When would it come? How would China attack Taiwan?Easton paints the way the island-nation would be attacked with a fine calligraphy brush, detailing how the landings would go, what would happen if the PRC got a foothold, and what weapons would be deployed where and how."Democratic-ruled Taiwan poses an existential threat to China's communist leaders because the island, located some 90 miles off the southeast coast "serves as a beacon of freedom for ethnically Chinese people everywhere," the book states."What Easton has done is provide a vital warning to America and its allies, China could try to invade Taiwan as early as the first half of the next decade."Easton is a Washington-based think tank Project 2049 Institute research fellow and a former National Chengchi University student.

    Authors Stewart Lee Beck and Sun Zhumin have collaborated in China for over 20 years to produce innovative content for diverse audiences. As experienced storytellers, they capture the essence of five millenniums of Chinese history—the revolutionary ideas of its most celebrated philosophers, the bold visions of its dauntless leaders, and the pivotal events which shaped the modern nation—all in this beautifully illustrated volume of under 200 pages. Their passion is to share these stories with you and perhaps discover along the way that we’re not that different after all. The China Simplified book series explores and demystifies the country and its people for the rest of the world. By shifting our collective attention beyond the 1% (hot-button issues in the mass media) to the other 99% (relevant conversations about history, language, business, and more), the China Simplified team hopes to raise cultural awareness and increase mutual understanding. PRAISE FOR HISTORY FLASHBACK "You'll enjoy yourself so much you might not realize how much you're learning."— Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, University of Oxford "This is the history book for people that didn't know they love history!”— Yue-Sai Kan, Chinese American television host and producer "A delightful romp through 5,000 years of Chinese history." — Andrew Browne, China columnist, The Wall Street Journal "A clean, clear line to the main developments in China's history... entertaining and enlightening.”— James Fallows, The Atlantic "Those who want to understand China can now do it with ease."— Jesse Wu, International Vice President, Johnson & Johnson "An exciting tour through a long, varied and fascinating history."— James Uden, Associate Professor of Classical Studies, Boston University "Both informative and fun; a masterstroke!"— Bruno Lannes, Partner at a well-known consulting company in China READER BENEFITS Connect Eastern history with Western history and visualize key world events on a Chinese history timeline. Access the views of respected China history experts from both East and West without reading 500-page history books. Prepare for China travel with something more satisfying than a superficial China travel guide. Peer into the origins of ancient China and the legends of Chinese culture (the Yellow Emperor, the Chinese dragon, China’s Adam & Eve, and more) dating back through 5,000 years of Chinese civilization. Grasp the Chinese philosophy of Confucius (Kongzi), Lao-Tzu (Laozi), Sun-Tzu (Sunzi, famous for The Art of War), and Mencius (Mengzi) whose lives paralleled those of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and the Buddha. Discover how the Great Wall of China compares to the Star Wars missile defense system. Meet China’s only female emperor, who it’s been said kept a Buddhist monk as a boyfriend (oh my!).

    From freehand sketching and witty stories, the author gives a clear historical structure, from which we see First Emperor of Qin, Emperor Wu of Han dynasty, Emperor Taizong of Tang, Emperor Taizu of Song, Cao Cao and Song Quan were just like you and we, who had both merits and flaws, friends and enemies. They burst amazing power in crucial points in history, building the astonishing Chinese history of three thousand years. While working on your abdominal muscle by laughing, you know the history imperceptibly. 看半小时漫画，通三千年历史，脉络无比清晰，看完就能倒背。仅仅通过手绘和段子，二混子就捋出清晰的历史大脉络，秦皇、汉武、唐宗、宋祖、曹操、孙权，全都和你我一样，有优点和缺陷，有朋友和敌人，他们在历史关键节点迸发出的惊人能量铸就了三千年的疯狂中国史。而你在笑出腹肌的同时，不知不觉已经通晓了历史。

    Your only right is to obey.” With these words, Chinese lawyer Xie Yang was introduced to the brutality of Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL), China’s rapidly expanding system for enforced disappearances. Little is known of RSDL, or what happens inside. The People’s Republic of the Disappeared will change that. RSDL facilities, often secret, custom-built and unmarked prisons, are run by police or State Security officials. Inside, people are placed outside the normal legal system, left in solitary confinement, interrogated repeatedly, and often subjected to torture. There is no oversight of the police, and no protection for those inside. In RSDL, you simply vanish. In RSDL, the police have total control. This book exposes what it is like to be disappeared in China. It is the first anthology written by the victims themselves, from lawyer Wang Yu who was abducted in the middle of the night to engineer Tang Zhishun who was taken from across the border in Burma; from IT worker Jiang Xiaoyu who was beaten and threatened with permanent disappearance to Pan Jinling whose only crime was dating an NGO worker. The People’s Republic of the Disappeared includes a foreword by well-known exiled human rights lawyer Teng Biao. The foreword and introduction provide the reader with an understanding of RSDL. The legal chapter at the end offers an exhaustive, authoritative analysis of the domestic law giving rise to RSDL, and the international legal framework that China brazenly violates. These chapters, along with stories by lawyers Tang Jitian and Liu Shihui trace China’s obsession with disappearing dissidents from the early 2000s, through to the Jasmine Revolution movement in China in 2011, and into the current system of RSDL. This book is essential reading for academics and journalists, governments and nonprofit workers alike working on or interested in China, because these stories illustrate, with narrative clarity, the hollowness of China’s rhetoric of the rule of law. Likewise, it is worthwhile reading for anyone studying authoritarian regimes and the struggle for human rights.

    With its first edition issued in 1960, this book, in a plain, pure and innocent style of writing, describes the protagonist Xiao Yingzi's childhood experiences in southern Beijing in the 1920s, showing us an old Beijing in the eyes of a child, and the life of Beijing people in the beginning of the last century. Meaningful, innocent, and nostalgic, this novel has affected generation after generation of readers.

    That diffidence has now been set aside. China has asserted its place among the global heavyweights, revealing its plans for pan-Asian geopolitical dominance by building up its navy, fabricating new islands to support its territorial claims in areas like the South China Sea, and diplomatically bullying smaller players.Underlying this shift in attitude is a strain of thinking that casts China's present-day actions in historical terms. China is now once more on the path to restoring the glories of its dynastic past. Howard W. French demonstrates that if we can understand how that historical identity informs current actions — in ways ideological, philosophical, and even legal — we can learn to forecast just what kind of global power China intends to become — and to interact wisely with the superpower.

    The complex strategies they developed to manage their responsibilities suggest a new interpretation of an important period in China's history as well as a broader theory of politics.Using previously untapped sources, including lineage genealogies and internal family documents, Szonyi examines how soldiers and their families living on China's southeast coast minimized the costs and maximized the benefits of meeting government demands for manpower. Families that had to provide a soldier for the army set up elaborate rules to ensure their obligation was fulfilled, and to provide incentives for the soldier not to desert his post. People in the system found ways to gain advantages for themselves and their families. For example, naval officers used the military's protection to engage in the very piracy and smuggling they were supposed to suppress. Szonyi demonstrates through firsthand accounts how subjects of the Ming state operated in a space between defiance and compliance, and how paying attention to this middle ground can help us better understand not only Ming China but also other periods and places.Combining traditional scholarship with innovative fieldwork in the villages where descendants of Ming subjects still live, The Art of Being Governed illustrates the ways that arrangements between communities and the state hundreds of years ago have consequences and relevance for how we look at diverse cultures and societies, even today.

    Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio show how this Daoist classic, contrary to contemporary philosophical readings, distances itself from the pursuit of authenticity and subverts the dominant Confucianism of its time through satirical allegories and ironical reflections.With humor and parody, the Zhuangzi exposes the Confucian demand to commit to socially constructed norms as pretense and hypocrisy. The Confucian pursuit of sincerity establishes exemplary models that one is supposed to emulate. In contrast, the Zhuangzi parodies such venerated representations of wisdom and deconstructs the very notion of sagehood. Instead, it urges a playful, skillful, and unattached engagement with socially mandated duties and obligations. The Zhuangzi expounds the Daoist art of what Moeller and D’Ambrosio call “genuine pretending”: the paradoxical skill of not only surviving but thriving by enacting social roles without being tricked into submitting to them or letting them define one’s identity. A provocative rereading of a Chinese philosophical classic, Genuine Pretending also suggests the value of a Daoist outlook today as a way of seeking existential sanity in an age of mass media’s paradoxical quest for originality.

    It is a “warm war,” a shoving match between the United States, since WWII the uncontested ruler of the seas, and China, which now possesses the world’s largest navy. The Chinese regard the Pacific, and especially the South China Sea, as their ocean, and they’re ready to defend it. Each day the heat between the two countries increases as the Chinese try to claim the South China Sea for their own, and the United States insists on asserting freedom of navigation. Throughout Southern Asia, countries such as Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and South Korea respond with outrage and growing fear as China turns coral reefs into manmade islands capable of supporting airstrips and then attempts to enforce twelve-mile-radius, shoot-down zones. The immediate danger is that the five trillion dollars in international trade that passes through the area will grind to a standstill. The ultimate danger is that the US and China will be drawn into all-out war. Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Michael Fabey has had unprecedented access to the Navy’s most exotic aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, aircraft, and submarines, as well as those who command them. He was among the only journalists allowed to board a Chinese war vessel and observe its operations. In Crashback, Fabey describes how every year the US is “losing sea.” He predicts the next great struggle between military superpowers will play out in the Pacific, and his book, more than any other, is an accurate preview of how that conflict might unfold.

    This book will be hated by the commissars, because it is a triumph of analysis and good sense. --PAUL THEROUXI sure wish I'd read this book before heading to China--or Chinatown, for that matter. China runs on an entirely different operating system--both commercial and personal. Midler's clear, clever analysis and illuminating, often hilarious tales foster not only understanding but respect. --MARY ROACHFrom the Back CoverWhat's Wrong with China is the widely anticipated follow-up to Paul Midler's Poorly Made in China, an exposE of China manufacturing practices. Applying a wider lens in this account, he reveals many of the deep problems affecting Chinese society as a whole. Once again, Midler delivers the goods by rejecting commonly held notions, breaking down old myths, and providing fresh explanations of lesser-understood cultural phenomena.

    But Ming Da has a plan. With the help of his tailors, he comes up with a clever idea to outsmart his devious advisors: He asks his tailors to make “magical” new clothes for him. Anyone who is honest, the young emperor explains, will see the clothes’ true splendor, but anyone who is dishonest will see only burlap sacks. The emperor dons a burlap sack, and the ministers can’t help but fall for his cunning trick.

    Apart from superior military power, close coordination between the political leadership and the military and the ability to take quick decisions, China has potent anti-satellite and cyber warfare capabilities. Even more shockingly, regardless of popular opinion, India today is not even in a position to win a war against Pakistan. This has nothing to do with Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. It is because while India has been focused on building military force (troops and materiel needed to wage war) Pakistan has built military power (learning how to optimally utilize its military force). In this lies the difference between losing and winning. Far from being the strong Asian power of its perception, India could find itself extremely vulnerable to the hostility of its powerful neighbors. In Dragon On Our Doorstep, Pravin Sawhney and Ghazala Wahab analyse the geopolitics of the region and the military strategies of the three Asian countries to tell us exactly why India is in this precarious position and how it can transform itself through deft strategy into a leading power.The most populous countries and fastest growing economies in the world—India and China—have cultural and economic relations that date back to the second century bc. But over the years, despite the many treaties and agreements between the two nations, border clashes (including the disastrous 1962 war) and disagreements over Tibet and Jammu and Kashmir have complicated the relationship. For decades China kept a low profile. However, since 2008, when it was recognized as an economic power, China has become assertive. Today, this Himalayan balancing act of power is clearly tilted towards China, in whose view there is room for only one power in Asia. In this rise, Pakistan has emerged as China’s most trusted and crucial partner. The partnership between China and Pakistan, whether in terms of military interoperability (ability to operate as one in combat), or geostrategic design (which is unfolding through the wide-sweeping One Belt One Road project), has serious implications for India. The best that India can do is try and manage the relationship so that the dragon’s rise is not at the cost of India.

    Despite extensive media and academic scrutiny, the conventional wisdom about China's economy is often wrong. Cracking the China Conundrum provides a holistic and contrarianview of China's major economic, political, and foreign policy issues.Yukon Huang trenchantly addresses widely accepted yet misguided views in the analysis of China's economy. He examines arguments about the causes and effects of China's possible debt and property market bubbles, trade and investment relations with the Western world, the links between corruption andpolitical liberalization in a growing economy and Beijing's more assertive foreign policies. Huang explains that such misconceptions arise in part because China's economic system is unprecedented in many ways-namely because it's driven by both the market and state- which complicates the task ofdesigning accurate and adaptable analysis and research. Further, China's size, regional diversity, and uniquely decentralized administrative system poses difficulties for making generalizations and comparisons from micro to macro levels when trying to interpret China's economic state accurately.This book not only interprets the ideologies that experts continue building misguided theories upon, but also examines the contributing factors to this puzzle. Cracking the China Conundrum provides an enlightening and corrective viewpoint on several major economic and political foreign policyconcerns currently shaping China's economic environment.

    Passport Not Required.You don't need to travel the world to take your company global. What you do need is an open mind and the desire to become a global generalist. This book will help. Based on 15 years of experience helping companies go global, author John Yunker provides:- A process for creating world-ready products, websites, and software - Cultural insights into China, Russia, Germany, Brazil, India, and more - Tips for localizing text, images, icons, and pictures for the world - New rules of the translation economy In the information economy, information is power. In the translation economy, translation is power. Thanks to translation and localization, companies like Apple, Nike, and General Electric now make more money from outside the US than from within it. This book helps marketers, designers, and executives develop sound strategies for going global--and avoid costly and embarrassing mistakes along the way. In addition, you'll find the ultimate globalization checklist that your web, marketing, and product teams can use to make sure you go global the right way.About the author: John Yunker is the world's leading expert on web and content globalization and is author of Beyond Borders and The Savvy Client's Guide to Translation Agencies.

    It began in China around the eleventh century CE, played a leading role in East Asian cultures over the last millennium, and has had a profound influence on modern Chinese society. Based on the latest scholarship but presented in accessible language, Neo-Confucianism: A Philosophical Introduction is organized around themes that are central in Neo-Confucian philosophy, including the structure of the cosmos, human nature, ways of knowing, personal cultivation, and approaches to governance. The authors thus accomplish two things at once: they present the Neo-Confucians in their own, distinctive terms; and they enable contemporary readers to grasp what is at stake in the great Neo-Confucian debates. This novel structure gives both students and scholars in philosophy, religion, history, and cultural studies a new window into one of the world's most important philosophical traditions.

    Authors Stewart Lee Beck and Katie Lu first connected as struggling student and language professional over ten years ago. They collaborated on this book to share their many entertaining experiences and insights gained along the bumpy road to Mandarin language proficiency. The China Simplified series explores and demystifies the country and its people for the rest of the world. By shifting our collective attention beyond the 1% (hot-button issues in the mass media) to the other 99% (relevant conversations about language, history, business, and more), the China Simplified team hopes to raise cultural awareness and increase mutual understanding. PRAISE FOR LANGUAGE EMPOWERMENT "I suddenly feel as if the scales have been lifted from my eyes."— Carol Potter, Executive Vice Chairman at Edelman "A lively and original approach to navigating the bottomless mysteries of Chinese language and culture."— David Brooks, Chairman, Coca-Cola Greater China & Korea "Ridiculously funny, uncomfortably accurate, and totally memorable!"— Grant Horsfield, Founder, naked Group "I wish a book like this existed when I moved to China."— Dan Washburn, Chief Content Officer, Asia Society "It’s not a textbook; it’s just stuff you should know."— John Pasden, Founder and CEO, AllSet Learning "I learned an enlightening cache of information about the country, its people, and its language from a non-native speaker."— Paul Chin, CEO, Bacardi Greater China, North Asia & Oceania "Totally authentic."— Christine Ng, CEO, BBH China "Reveals insights that many teachers and textbooks overlook."— Olle Linge, Mandarin Language Educator, Founder Hacking Chinese "Weaves together rich cultural and linguistic background information of the Chinese language with practical implications for daily communication."— Michael Volz, Chinese Program Coordinator, University of Missouri "This book should be required reading for every foreigner before getting on the plane to China."— Miao Jun, former HR Director, Asia-Pacific, Milliken Inc. READER BENEFITS This book is intended to assist readers who want to... Understand the Chinese family of languages dating back to ancient China. Decide whether to study Mandarin Chinese part-time or full-time and (either way) to have huge fun doing it! Gain confidence and get more out of your China travel with this (real-life) China travel guide. Pick up an improved understanding of Chinese grammar. Discover a enjoyable substitute to boring Mandarin phrasebooks. Learn how Simplified Chinese characters and Traditional Chinese characters parted paths and the arguments in favor of each. Become familiar with the basics of Chinese dialects such as Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hokkien/Fujianhua and more.

    Julian Gewirtz offers a dramatic tale of competition for influence between reformers and hardline conservatives during the Deng Xiaoping era, bringing to light China's productive exchanges with the West.When Mao Zedong died in 1976, his successors seized the opportunity to reassess the wisdom of China's rigid commitment to Marxist doctrine. With Deng Xiaoping's blessing, China's economic gurus scoured the globe for fresh ideas that would put China on the path to domestic prosperity and ultimately global economic power. Leading foreign economists accepted invitations to visit China to share their expertise, while Chinese delegations traveled to the United States, Hungary, Great Britain, West Germany, Brazil, and other countries to examine new ideas. Chinese economists partnered with an array of brilliant thinkers, including Nobel Prize winners, World Bank officials, battle-scarred veterans of Eastern Europe's economic struggles, and blunt-speaking free-market fundamentalists.Nevertheless, the push from China's senior leadership to implement economic reforms did not go unchallenged, nor has the Chinese government been eager to publicize its engagement with Western-style innovations. Even today, Chinese Communists decry dangerous Western influences and officially maintain that China's economic reinvention was the Party's achievement alone. Unlikely Partners sets forth the truer story, which has continuing relevance for China's complex and far-reaching relationship with the West.

    Even though we live in an increasingly multicultural world, most philosophy departments stubbornly insist that only Western philosophy is real philosophy and denigrate everything outside the European canon. In Taking Back Philosophy, Bryan W. Van Norden lambastes academic philosophy for its Eurocentrism, insularity, and complicity with nationalism and issues a ringing call to make our educational institutions live up to their cosmopolitan ideals. In a cheeky, agenda-setting, and controversial style, Van Norden, an expert in Chinese philosophy, proposes an inclusive, multicultural approach to philosophical inquiry. He showcases several accessible examples of how Western and Asian thinkers can be brought into productive dialogue, demonstrating that philosophy only becomes deeper as it becomes increasingly diverse and pluralistic. Taking Back Philosophy is at once a manifesto for multicultural education, an accessible introduction to Confucian and Buddhist philosophy, a critique of the ethnocentrism and anti-intellectualism characteristic of much contemporary American politics, a defense of the value of philosophy and a liberal arts education, and a call to return to the search for the good life that defined philosophy for Confucius, Socrates, and the Buddha. Building on a popular New York Times opinion piece that suggested any philosophy department that fails to teach non-Western philosophy should be renamed a “Department of European and American Philosophy,” this book will challenge any student or scholar of philosophy to reconsider what constitutes the love of wisdom.

    In that spirit, A New Literary History of Modern China looks beyond state-sanctioned works and official narratives to reveal China as it has seldom been seen before, through a rich spectrum of writings covering Chinese literature from the late-seventeenth century to the present.Featuring over 140 Chinese and non-Chinese contributors from throughout the world, this landmark volume explores unconventional forms as well as traditional genres—pop song lyrics and presidential speeches, political treatises and prison-house jottings, to name just a few. Major figures such as Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, Eileen Chang, and Mo Yan appear in a new light, while lesser-known works illuminate turning points in recent history with unexpected clarity and force. Many essays emphasize Chinese authors' influence on foreign writers as well as China's receptivity to outside literary influences. Contemporary works that engage with ethnic minorities and environmental issues take their place in the critical discussion, alongside writers who embraced Chinese traditions and others who resisted. Writers' assessments of the popularity of translated foreign-language classics and avant-garde subjects refute the notion of China as an insular and inward-looking culture.A vibrant collection of contrasting voices and points of view, A New Literary History of Modern China is essential reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of China's literary and cultural legacy.

    Chinese entrepreneurs are flooding into the continent, investing in long-term assets such as factories and heavy equipment.Considering Africa's difficult history of colonialism, one might suspect that China's activity there is another instance of a foreign power exploiting resources. But as author Irene Yuan Sun vividly shows in this remarkable book, it is really a story about resilient Chinese entrepreneurs building in Africa what they so recently learned to build in China--a global manufacturing powerhouse.The fact that China sees Africa not for its poverty but for its potential wealth is a striking departure from the attitude of the West, particularly that of the United States. Despite fifty years of Western aid programs, Africa still has more people living in extreme poverty than any other region in the world. Those who are serious about raising living standards across the continent know that another strategy is needed.Chinese investment gives rise to a tantalizing possibility: that Africa can industrialize in the coming generation. With a manufacturing-led transformation, Africa would be following in the footsteps of the United States in the nineteenth century, Japan in the early twentieth, and the Asian Tigers in the late twentieth. Many may consider this an old-fashioned way to develop, but as Sun argues, it's the only one that's proven to raise living standards across entire societies in a lasting way. And with every new Chinese factory boss setting up machinery and hiring African workers--and managers--that possibility becomes more real for Africa.With fascinating and moving human stories along with incisive business and economic analysis, The Next Factory of the World will make you rethink both China's role in the world and Africa's future in the globalized economy.

    Concerned that the rise of China will challenge the its hegemony in world affairs, the US has decided to reassert its influence in Asia to counteract any challenge. Examining and challenging the dominant causal explanations for and professed intentions of this shift in US policy, this book uncovers the real dynamics of contemporary Sino-American relations, surveying their complex interactions in the context of their post-war history, offering the reader an accessible and informative survey of the relations between China and the US in Asia, ranging from Russia's turn to the east, the rise of Japanese nationalism, democracy in Myanmar, North Korea's nuclear programme to disputes in the South China Sea. This book is an illuminating introduction to the defining issue shaping global politics for our time.

    In Beating the Odds, two of the world's leading development economists begin with this paradox to explain what is wrong with mainstream development thinking--and to offer a practical blueprint for moving poor countries out of the low-income trap regardless of their circumstances.Justin Yifu Lin, the former chief economist of the World Bank, and C�lestin Monga, the chief economist of the African Development Bank, propose a development strategy that encourages poor countries to leap directly into the global economy by building industrial parks and export-processing zones linked to global markets. Countries can leverage these zones to attract light manufacturing from more advanced economies, as East Asian countries did in the 1960s and China did in the 1980s. By attracting foreign investment and firms, poor countries can improve their trade logistics, increase the knowledge and skills of local entrepreneurs, gain the confidence of international buyers, and gradually make local firms competitive. This strategy is already being used with great success in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Mauritius, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and other countries. And the strategy need not be limited to traditional manufacturing but can also include agriculture, the service sector, and other activities.Beating the Odds shows how poor countries can ignite growth without waiting for global action or the creation of ideal local conditions.

    To assist him he asked for the help of his language teacher, who was born just two years after the communist party came to power in 1949. The changing fortunes of his life have mirrored the ups and downs of his country, which has moved from communist poverty to capitalist wealth in just a single generation. It came as a surprise though, to learn that the teacher was also a cross-dresser. Michael gradually realised that the teacher’s story is the story of modern China.

    Alibaba and their peers Baidu, Tencent, Xiaomi, and LeEco showcase unprecedented growth and success in China and are expanding their impact globally. With a combined market capitalization of close to 600 billion USD, incubating over 1,000 new ventures and an average annual growth of over 50%, they have become a force to reckon with for the likes of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and IBM. ‘Business ecosystem’ is a frequently used concept to describe the unique competitive advantages of the American technology giants. This book explores not only the application of a business ecosystem approach in the Chinese context but also deals with the key strategic question: How did these five Chinese business ecosystems grow so rapidly and successfully? The book takes the growth and transformation of Alibaba’s business ecosystem as a focus case in comparison with Baidu, Tencent, Xiaomi, and LeEco. These business ecosystems developed in less than 20 years and transformed from organic growth to rapid expansion by investment and acquisition, entrepreneurship and incubation of new ventures, continuous innovation, and internationalization. This book brings insights and practical lessons on leading, creating, and disrupting markets for corporate executives and professionals in global business, a comparative case study for researchers and students of management, and food for thought on Chinese ways of doing business.

    For nearly two thousand years, the condensed language of classical Chinese has offered the possibility of writing poems that may be read both forward and backward, producing entirely different creations. The genre was known as the -flight of wild geese, - and the poems were often symbolically or literally sent to a distant lover, in the hope that he or she, like the migrating birds, would return. Its greatest practitioner, and the focus of this critical anthology, is Su Hui, a woman who, in the fourth century, embroidered a silk for her distant husband consisting of a grid of 840 characters. No one has ever fully explored all of its possibilities, but it is estimated that the poem--and the poems within the poem--may be read as many as twelve thousand ways. Su Hui herself said, -As it lingers aimlessly, twisting and turning, it takes on a pattern of its own. No one but my beloved can be sure of comprehending it.- With examples ranging from the third to the nineteenth centuries, Michele Metail brings the scholarship of a Sinologist and the playfulness of an avant-gardist to this unique collection of perhaps the most ancient of experimental poems.

    W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts given at the National Gallery of Art, leading art historian Craig Clunas draws from a wealth of artistic masterpieces and lesser-known pictures, some of them discussed here in English for the first time, to show how Chinese painting has been understood by a range of audiences over five centuries, from the Ming Dynasty to today. Richly illustrated, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences demonstrates that viewers in China and beyond have irrevocably shaped this great artistic tradition.Arguing that audiences within China were crucially important to the evolution of Chinese painting, Clunas considers how Chinese artists have imagined the reception of their own work. By examining paintings that depict people looking at paintings, he introduces readers to ideal types of viewers: the scholar, the gentleman, the merchant, the nation, and the people. In discussing the changing audiences for Chinese art, Clunas emphasizes that the diversity and quantity of images in Chinese culture make it impossible to generalize definitively about what constitutes Chinese painting.Exploring the complex relationships between works of art and those who look at them, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences sheds new light on how the concept of Chinese painting has been formed and reformed over hundreds of years.Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

    When the Cultural Revolution officially began, this uniformity seemed to extend to the mind. From the outside, China had become a monotonous world, a place of endless repetition and imitation, but a closer look reveals a range of cultural experiences, which also provided individuals with an obscure sense of freedom. In The Art of Cloning, Pang Laikwan examines this period in Chinese history when ordinary citizens read widely, traveled extensively through the country, and engaged in a range of cultural and artistic activities. The freedom they experienced, argues Pang, differs from the freedom, under Western capitalism, to express individuality through a range of consumer products. But it was far from boring and was possessed of its own kind of diversity.

    Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.Ginseng and Borderland explores the territorial boundaries and political relations between Qing China and Choson Korea during the period from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries. By examining a unique body of materials written in Chinese, Manchu, and Korean, and building on recent studies in New Qing History, the author contributes new perspectives to current understandings of the remarkable transformation of the Manchu Qing dynasty (1636-1912) from a tribal state to a universal empire. This book discusses the early Manchu history, intermingled as it was with neighboring Koreans in the borderland, and explores the Qing Empire's policy of controlling Manchuria and Choson Korea. Kim also contributes to Korean history of the Choson dynasty (1392-1910) by challenging conventional accounts that embrace a China-centered interpretation of the tributary relationship and, instead, stressing the agency of Choson Korea in the formation of the Qing Empire. This study explains how the Koreans interpreted and employed the tributary relationship in order to preserve the boundary--and peace--with the suzerain power. By focusing on the historical significance of the China-Korean boundary, the book ultimately defines the nature of the Qing Empire through the dynamics of contacts and conflicts under both the cultural and material frameworks of its tributary relationship with Choson Korea.

    It was the largest military clash between China and a Western power ever fought on Chinese soil, involving more that a quarter million combatants. Michael M. Walker’s The 1929 Sino-Soviet War is the first full account of what UPI’s Moscow correspondent called “the war nobody knew”—a “limited modern war” that destabilized the region's balance of power, altered East Asian history, and sent grim reverberations through a global community giving lip service to demilitarizing in the wake of World War I.Walker locates the roots of the conflict in miscalculations by Chiang Kai-shek and Chang Hsueh-liang about the Soviets’ political and military power—flawed assessments that prompted China’s attempt to reassert full authority over the CER. The Soviets, on the other hand, were dominated by a Stalin eager to flex some military muscle and thoroughly convinced that war would win much more than petty negotiations. This was in fact, Walker shows, a watershed moment for Stalin, his regime, and his still young and untested military, disproving the assumption that the Red Army was incapable of fighting a modern war. By contrast, the outcome revealed how unprepared the Chinese military forces were to fight either the Red Army or the Imperial Japanese Army, their other primary regional competitor. And yet, while the Chinese commanders proved weak, Walker sees in the toughness of the overmatched infantry a hint of the rising nationalism that would transform China’s troops from a mercenary army into a formidable professional force, with powerful implications for an overconfident Japanese Imperial Army in 1937.

    Guggenheim Museum, Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World explores recent experimental art from 1989 to 2008, arguably the most transformative period of modern Chinese and recent world history.Featuring over 150 iconic and lesser-known artworks by more than 70 artists and collectives, this catalog offers an interpretative survey of Chinese experimental art framed by the geopolitical dynamics attending the end of the Cold War, the spread of globalization and the rise of China. Critical essays explore how Chinese artists have been both agents and skeptics of China's arrival as a global presence, while an extensive entry section offers detailed analysis on works made in a broad range of experimental mediums, including film and video, ink, installation, land art and performance, as well as painting and photography.Featured artists include Ai Weiwei, Big Tail Elephant Group, Cai Guo-Qiang, Cao Fei, Chen Zhen, Chen Chieh-jen, Ding Yi, Geng Jianyi, Huang Yong Ping, Kan Xuan, Rem Koolhaas/OMA, Libreria Borges, Liu Wei, Liu Xiaodong, New Measurement Group, Ou Ning, Ellen Pau, Qiu Zhijie, Shen Yuan, Song Dong, Wang Guangyi, Wang Jianwei, Yan Lei, Yang Jiechang, Yu Hong, Xijing Men, Xu Bing, Zeng Fanzhi, Zhang Peili, Zhang Hongtu, Zhang Xiaogang and Zhou Tiehai. An appendix includes a selected history of contemporary art exhibitions in China, artist biographies and a bibliography.

    How does China work, what does it want, why does it want it, and what does its rise to global power mean for the rest of the world? As the twenty-first century looks set to be the stage for a battle about competing geopolitical ideals, these are urgent questions for everyone with an interest in what the future might bring.Despite decades of a relatively open door relationship with the rest of the world, China is still a mystery to many outside it. A world of its own, China is both a microcosm and an amplification of questions and events in the wider world. China's story offers us an opportunity to hold a mirror to ourselves: to our own assumptions, to our values, and to our ideas about the most important question of all: what it means to be human in the world of the state.Epic in scope, this is the story of how China became the state it is today and how its worldview is based on what has gone before. Weaving together inspirations, ideas, wars and dreams to reveal the heart of what it means to be Chinese and how the past impacts on the present.

    Whether to acquire servants, slaves, concubines, or children--or dispose of unwanted household members--families at all levels of society addressed various domestic needs by participating in this market. Sold People brings into focus the complicit dynamic of human trafficking, including the social and legal networks that sustained it. Johanna Ransmeier reveals the extent to which the structure of the Chinese family not only influenced but encouraged the buying and selling of men, women, and children.For centuries, human trafficking had an ambiguous status in Chinese society. Prohibited in principle during the Qing period, it was nevertheless widely accepted as part of family life, despite the frequent involvement of criminals. In 1910, Qing reformers, hoping to usher China into the community of modern nations, officially abolished the trade. But police and other judicial officials found the new law extremely difficult to enforce. Industrialization, urbanization, and the development of modern transportation systems created a breeding ground for continued commerce in people. The Republican government that came to power after the 1911 revolution similarly struggled to root out the entrenched practice.Ransmeier draws from untapped archival sources to recreate the lived experience of human trafficking in turn-of-the-century North China. Not always a measure of last resort reserved for times of extreme hardship, the sale of people was a commonplace transaction that built and restructured families as often as it broke them apart.

    The Green Phoenix tells the story of the Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang, born a Mongolian princess who became a consort in the Manchu court and then the Qing Dynasty's first matriarch. She lived through harrowing threats, endless political crises, personal heartaches and painful losses to lead a shaky Empire out of a dead end. The story is set against a turbulent canvas as the Chinese Ming Dynasty is replaced by the Qing. Xiaozhuang guides her husband, her lover, her son and her grandson - all emperors and supreme leaders of the Qing Empire - to success against the odds.

    What has caused this dramatic transformation? In China’s Great Migration: How the Poor Built a Prosperous Nation, author Bradley Gardner looks at one of the most important but least discussed forces pushing China’s economic development: the migration of more than 260 million people from their birthplaces to China’s most economically vibrant cities. By combining an analysis of China’s political economy with current scholarship on the role of migration in economic development, China’s Great Migration shows how the largest economic migration in the history of the world has led to a bottom-up transformation of China. Gardner draws from his experience as a researcher and journalist working in China to investigate why people chose to migrate and the social and political consequences of their decisions. In the aftermath of China's Cultural Revolution, the collapse of totalitarian government control allowed millions of people to skirt migration restrictions and move to China’s growing cities, where they offered a massive pool of labor that propelled industrial development, foreign investment, and urbanization. Struggling to respond to the demands of these migrants, the Chinese government loosened its grip on the economy, strengthening property rights and allowing migrants to employ themselves and each other, spurring the Chinese economic miracle. More than simply a narrative of economic progress, China’s Great Migration tells the human story of China’s transformation, featuring interviews with the men and women whose way of life has been remade.

    Coupled with China's birth-planning policy, this has led to a severe gender imbalance. But a counterpattern is emerging in rural China where a noticeable proportion of young couples have willingly accepted having a single daughter. They are doing so even as birth-planning policies are being relaxed and having a second child, and the opportunity of having a son is a new possibility. Choosing Daughters explores this largely overlooked, pattern emerging in China's landscape. Shi delves into the social, economic, and cultural forces behind the complex decision-making process of these couples to unravel their life goals and childrearing aspirations, the changing family dynamics and gender relations, and the intimate parent–daughter ties that have engendered this drastic transformation of reproductive choice. She reveals a leading-edge social force that fosters China's recent fertility decline, namely pursuit of a modern family and successful childrearing achieved through having a small family. Through this discussion, Shi refutes the conventional understanding of a universal preference for sons and discrimination against daughters in China and counters claims of continuing resistance against China's population control program.

    The first experiment, based on the equal distributionof poverty, suggests the “universal asceticism” and “roughegalitarianism” criticised by the Communist Manifesto. We can nowunderstand the decision to move to Lenin’s New Economic Policy,which was often interpreted as a return to capitalism. Theincreasing threat of war pushed Stalin into sweeping economiccollectivisation. The third experiment produced a very advancedwelfare state but ended in failure: in the last years of the SovietUnion, it was characterised by mass absenteeism anddisengagement in the workplace; this stalled productivity, and itbecame hard to find any application of the principle that Marxsaid should preside over socialism—remuneration according tothe quantity and quality of work delivered. The history of China isdifferent: Mao believed that, unlike “political capital,” theeconomic capital of the bourgeoisie should not be subject to totalexpropriation, at least until it can serve the development of thenational economy. After the tragedy of the Great Leap Forwardand the Cultural Revolution, it took Deng Xiaoping to emphasisethat socialism implies the development of the productive forces.Chinese market socialism has achieved extraordinary success.

    Don’t worry, I’ll do all the hard work (the standing in line for visas and security, the shriek-inducing vaccinations, the twelve hour flights, the shoving of three days’ clothing for two types of weather into the confines of a carry on, the conversion of yuan or reals into dollars and back, the dysentery). You just need to sit back in the comfort of your sofa or bed or subway seat, wherever you happen to be reading this (though in the case of the subway seat, maybe ‘comfort’ isn’t the right word), and travel with me. First stop, Beijing, China, and one of the truly incredible Seven Modern Wonders of the World, the Great Wall. What delights of the Mysterious Orient did I discover there? What shocks lurk beyond public restroom doors? What flavors of potato chips startle the Western palate? How can you find somebody who speaks English? (It's easier than you think.) And, once you’ve hauled yourself up to the heights of the Great Wall, how on earth do you get back down? Read and find out! This is the first in an exciting series of travelogues, Around The World With Jet Lag Jerry. With photos!

    As Australia’s largest trading partner and signatory to a recent Free Trade Agreement, China’s future is undeniably linked with our own. So how will China’s domestic issues affect its relationship with Australia? Will China’s demand for Australian goods and services continue to grow? Can the Communist Party continue its balancing act of expanding its middle class while cracking down on free speech and intensifying censorship? Will it make the leap to a green and high-tech economy? How will it use its growing power, regionally and globally? China Matters is a concise, up-to-date overview of what is happening in China right now, and the implications for Australia. Written by Australia-based, internationally renowned China-watchers Linda Jakobson and Bates Gill, this nuanced account examines the country’s unique tensions and contradictions, and considers what Australia can do to best shape our relationship with the emerging superpower. China Matters is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the consequences of strengthening ties with and doing business in a changing and increasingly powerful China.

    Through careful examination of a wide range of visual and print media--including historical accounts of the institutionalization of science, pictorial representations of technological innovations, and a number of novels and short stories--Isaacson makes a case for understanding Chinese science fiction as a product of colonial modernity. By situating the genre's emergence in the transnational traffic of ideas and material culture engendered by the presence of colonial powers in China's economic and political centers, Celestial Empires explores the relationship between science fiction and Orientalist discourse. In doing so it offers an innovative approach to the study of both vernacular writing in twentieth-century China and science fiction in a global context.Hardcover is un-jacketed.

    Hull In the 1930s, wartime Shanghai is a cosmopolitan metropolis where conmen and dance-hall girls mingle with refugees streaming in from the occupied areas. One of those refugees is Shi Zhaochang. Having read too many gongfu novels, he is convinced that only an elite martial artist with magical powers can save China. He flees to Shanghai on a quixotic search for a gongfu master who can teach him the secret techniques that will make himself that warrior. The fate of China itself hangs in the balance, and everyone has a scheme to save the nation, or at least get rich trying. The Pidgin Warrior is a rollicking satire of nationalism and modernity that is remarkably relevant today.

    Tracking women's life experience across class lines, outside as well as inside the domestic realm, Xu challenges the accepted wisdom about women and gender roles in medieval China. She contextualizes women in a much broader physical space and social network, investigating the gaps between ideals and reality and examining women's own agency in gender construction. She argues that women's autonomy and mobility, conventionally attributed to Ming-Qing women of late imperial China, can be traced to the Song era. This thorough study of Song women's life experience connects women to the great political, economic, and social transitions of the time, and sheds light on the so-called "Song-Yuan-Ming transition" from the perspective of gender studies. By putting women at the center of analysis and by focusing on the local and the quotidian, Crossing the Gate offers a new and nuanced picture of the Song Confucian revival.

    Determined to sweep him off his feet, she accompanies him down the mortal realm as he takes on his three trials to attain greater divinity. However, in those three lifetimes that were given to them, will she be able to make him love her back?

    This book examines these patterns of legal mobilization, showing which workers are likely to avail themselves of these new protections and find them effective. Gallagher finds that workers with high levels of education are far more likely to claim these new rights and be satisfied with the results. However, many others, left disappointed with the large gap between law on the books and law in reality, reject the courtroom for the streets. Using workers' narratives, surveys, and case studies of protests, Gallagher argues that China's half-hearted attempt at rule of law construction undermines the stability of authoritarian rule. New workplace rights fuel workers' rising expectations, but a dysfunctional legal system drives many workers to more extreme options, including strikes, demonstrations and violence.

    Villagers drink obviously tainted water and breathe visibly dirty air, afflicted by a variety of ailments--from arthritis to nosebleeds--that they ascribe to the effects of industrial pollution. "Cancer villages," village-sized clusters of high cancer incidence, have emerged as a political and cultural phenomenon. In Resigned Activism, Anna Lora-Wainwright explores the daily grind of living with pollution in rural China and the varying forms of activism that develop in response. She finds that claims of health or environmental damage are politically sensitive, and that efforts to seek redress are frustrated by limited access to scientific evidence, growing socioeconomic inequalities, and complex local realities. Villagers, feeling powerless, often come to accept pollution as part of the environment; their activism is tempered by their resignation.Lora-Wainwright uses the term "resigned activism" as a lens through which to view villagers' perceptions and the diverse forms of environmental engagement that result. These range from picketing at the factory gate to quieter individual or family-oriented actions. Lora-Wainwright offers three case studies of "resigned activism" in rural China, examining the experiences of villagers who live with the effects of phosphorous mining and fertilizer production, lead and zinc mining, and electronic waste processing. These cases make clear the staggering human costs of development and the deeply uneven distribution of costs and benefits that underlie China's economic power.

    

     Did Britain take over the right place? Why did they really want Kowloon? What did mainland refugees curse when they got there? And where can I get one of those cool Handover t-shirts? Bet you thought you knew! Discover the alternative truth in these action-packed, politically incorrect stories of: PASSION: A sweltering romance between a hot-headed damsel and a goofball sailor, while his shipmates peddle dope and colonize the wrong island. BRUTALITY: He outsmarted Japanese invaders and communist rebels, but a potty-mouthed new immigrant meets his match on the old Star Ferry. T-SHIRTS: The true story of an accidental avatar of the end of an era. And why the artist didn’t get rich from it. Read it now, before it's too politically incorrect to do so!

    Impossible is Nothing explores various facets of Chinese society within the context of Communism that engages in "Capitalism with Chinese characteristics." These photographs examine constructed realities within China relating to luxury and status, with the West serving as a model for Capitalist consumerism. Portraits, still-life images, and urban landscapes are woven together to create a lyrical ode to the optimism and imagination of contemporary China.Priscilla Briggs is a lens-based artist who investigates global representations of capitalism and consumerism. Her work has been exhibited internationally, most recently in the Landskrona Photo Salon in Sweden, the Minneapolis International Film Festival, the DeVos Museum in Michigan, and many more.

    It details the Song’s attempts to reinvigorate a flagging economy and government while defending against the invasion of China by the barbarians and by the Mongols led by Genghis Khan. An informative and accessible middle school history volume with solid details and engaging artwork.Jing Liu is a Beijing-based designer and entrepreneur.

    Historians of China have described this process in stark terms: pristine borderlands became breadbaskets. Yet Manchu and Mongolian archives reveal a different story. Well before homesteaders arrived, wild objects from the far north became part of elite fashion, and unprecedented consumption had exhausted the region's most precious resources.In A World Trimmed with Fur, Jonathan Schlesinger uses these diverse archives to reveal how Qing rule witnessed not the destruction of unspoiled environments, but their invention. Qing frontiers were never pristine in the nineteenth century—pearlers had stripped riverbeds of mussels, mushroom pickers had uprooted the steppe, and fur-bearing animals had disappeared from the forest. In response, the court turned to "purification;" it registered and arrested poachers, reformed territorial rule, and redefined the boundary between the pristine and the corrupted. Schlesinger's resulting analysis provides a framework for rethinking the global invention of nature.

    Today, it is a truly global city, a place where people from around the world go to make new lives, find themselves, or further their careers. A large number of these migrants are small-scale traders from Africa who deal in Chinese goods—often knockoffs or copies of high-end branded items—to send back to their home countries. In The World in Guangzhou, Gordon Mathews explores the question of how the city became a center of “low-end globalization” and shows what we can learn from that experience about similar transformations elsewhere in the world.   Through detailed ethnographic portraits, Mathews reveals a world of globalization based on informality, reputation, and trust rather than on formal contracts. How, he asks, can such informal relationships emerge between two groups—Chinese and sub-Saharan Africans—that don't share a common language, culture, or religion? And what happens when Africans move beyond their status as temporary residents and begin to put down roots and establish families?   Full of unforgettable characters, The World in Guangzhou presents a compelling account of globalization at ground level and offers a look into the future of urban life as transnational connections continue to remake cities around the world.

    Critical of the field of Asian studies and its complicity with the United States' policies in Vietnam, the CCAS mounted a sweeping attack on the field's academic, political, and financial structures. While the CCAS included scholars of Japan, Korea, and South and Southeast Asia, the committee focused on Maoist China, as it offered the possibility of an alternative politics and the transformation of the meaning of labor and the production of knowledge. In The End of Concern Fabio Lanza traces the complete history of the CCAS, outlining how its members worked to merge their politics and activism with their scholarship. Lanza's story exceeds the intellectual history and legacy of the CCAS, however; he narrates a moment of transition in Cold War politics and how Maoist China influenced activists and intellectuals around the world, becoming a central element in the political upheaval of the long 1960s.

    The Chinese words in the book are all common, everyday items, and the rhymes are informative and fun for children.The goal of My First Book of Chinese Words is to familiarize children with the basic sounds and written characters of Chinese, to introduce core concepts of Chinese culture and to illustrate the ways in which Chinese sounds differ from English ones. Teachers and parents will welcome the cultural notes at the back of the book and appreciate how the book is organized using a familiar ABC structure. Each word is presented in Chinese characters (both Simplified and Traditional) as well as Romanized Pinyin for easy pronunciation.With the help of this book, we hope more children (and adults) will soon join the more than one billion people worldwide who speak Chinese!

    This Chinese Cookbook will show you how to prepare your favorite Chinese dishes at home easily and quickly. Genuine Chinese cooking is very healthy, consisting of healthy oils such as sesame seed and peanut oil. Spices such as garlic and ginger have tremendous health benefits. People in China are known for their longevity for a reason. Most recipes consist of fresh vegetables with a small amount of meat cooked in a delectable sauce. It doesn't get any better or healthier. The recipes are very easy to prepare and simply delicious for the entire family. Enjoy the authentic regional recipes in this Chinese Cookbook. From spicy to mild, this cookbook has recipes for everyone. Once you start preparing your own favorite Chinese dishes, you'll never settle for a restaurant meal or take-out again.

    It presents a novel dynamic of civil society contention - mobilizing without the masses - that lowers the risk of activism under duress. Instead of facilitating collective action, activists coach the aggrieved to challenge authorities one by one. In doing so, they lower the risks of organizing while empowering the weak. This dynamic represents a third pathway of contention that challenges conventional understandings of mobilization in an illiberal state. It takes readers inside the world of underground labor organizing and opens the black box of repression inside the world's most powerful authoritarian state.

    In recent decades, Shenzhen has transformed from an experimental site for economic reform into a dominant city at the crossroads of the global economy. The first of China’s special economic zones, Shenzhen is today a UNESCO City of Design and the hub of China’s emerging technology industries. Bringing China studies into dialogue with urban studies, the contributors explore how the post-Mao Chinese appropriation of capitalist logic led to a dramatic remodeling of the Chinese city and collective life in China today. These essays show how urban villages and informal institutions enabled social transformation through cases of public health, labor, architecture, gender, politics, education, and more. Offering scholars and general readers alike an unprecedented look at one of the world’s most dynamic metropolises, this collective history uses the urban case study to explore critical problems and possibilities relevant for modern-day China and beyond.

     In this one hour "speed read", the authors present +30 essays that make four main contrarian points: Point 1: China needs smarter, not faster growth. Point 2: Yes, Chinese consumers are rising. But they are changing even faster. And they are disrupting everything. Point 3: China can innovate big time. Point 4: At home and abroad, Chinese companies can beat you fair and square. Author Jonathan Woetzel is a senior partner of McKinsey & Company. He opened McKinsey's Shanghai location in 1995 and has been resident since then. He currently the global leader of its Cities Special Initiative and the Asia-based Director of the McKinsey Global Institute. He co-chairs the Urban China Initiative along with Tsinghua University to catalyze the next stage of China’s urbanization. Author Jeffrey Towson is a private equity investor / consultant, keynote speaker, Peking University professor and author. His writing and speaking are on how rising Chinese consumers (and companies) are disrupting global markets. (#consumerchina). He was previously Head of Direct Investments for Middle East North Africa and Asia Pacific for Prince Alwaleed, nicknamed by Time magazine the “Arabian Warren Buffett” and arguably the world’s first private global investor.

    Inspired by the marks left behind by a cicada walking across his sketchbook, contemporary artist Zhu Yingchun placed boards and "ink ponds" of dark-colored vegetable juices in his garden for the bugs to crawl through. The resulting marks, were thousands of twisted characters, each with a charm of its own - the language of the bugs. The accompanying booklet explains the artist's concept and QR code links the reader to a video of the process. "The bugs seem insignificant, but their strokes are beautiful," says Zhu Yingchun. "Art is not just those pieces hanging on walls and placed in exhibition halls. Everything in the world, including every life in nature, has the power to create beauty, and art is all around us. Contents: Booklet (24 pages; artists' concept and QR codes, linking to a video) Introduction The Language of Bugs through the Designer's Eyes The Earthworm - Earth Art The Ladybug - Miro The Spider, Mantis, Stinkbug, Ant - Jackson Pollock The Snail - Ancient Elephant's Molars The Spot Clothing Wax Cicada - Rorschch Inkblot Test The Spot Clothing Wax Cicada - Roger Ballen

    How did this happen? In The Contentious Public Sphere, Ya-Wen Lei shows how the Chinese state drew on law, the media, and the Internet to further an authoritarian project of modernization, but in so doing, inadvertently created a nationwide public sphere in China--one the state must now endeavor to control. Lei examines the influence this unruly sphere has had on Chinese politics and the ways that the state has responded.Using interviews, newspaper articles, online texts, official documents, and national surveys, Lei shows that the development of the public sphere in China has provided an unprecedented forum for citizens to influence the public agenda, demand accountability from the government, and organize around the concepts of law and rights. She demonstrates how citizens came to understand themselves as legal subjects, how legal and media professionals began to collaborate in unexpected ways, and how existing conditions of political and economic fragmentation created unintended opportunities for political critique, particularly with the rise of the Internet. The emergence of this public sphere--and its uncertain future--is a pressing issue with important implications for the political prospects of the Chinese people.Investigating how individuals learn to use public discourse to influence politics, The Contentious Public Sphere offers new possibilities for thinking about the transformation of state-society relations.

    But its stories of loyalty, obligation, passion, and duty also attracted diverse patrons into Chinese American communities Drawing on a wealth of new Chinese- and English-language research, Nancy Yunhwa Rao tells the story of iconic theater companies and the networks and migrations that made Chinese opera a part of North American cultures. Rao unmasks a backstage world of performers, performance, and repertoire and sets readers in the spellbound audiences beyond the footlights. But she also braids a captivating and complex history from elements outside the opera house walls: the impact of government immigration policy; how a theater influenced a Chinatown's sense of cultural self; the dissemination of Chinese opera music via recording and print materials; and the role of Chinese American business in sustaining theatrical institutions. The result is a work that strips the veneer of exoticism from Chinese opera, placing it firmly within the bounds of American music and a profoundly American experience.

    Caught in a struggle between the Mob, the US government, Mao’s Communists, China’s KMT, Russia’s Red and White armies and the Japanese Imperial Army, they must balance their internal struggle with the world’s struggle going on all around them. Join them in this harrowing epic novel that spans the globe during great upheaval known as 1936.

    In these six tales from nationally bestselling author Ye Guangqin, tigers, pandas, monkeys and bears live alongside the region’s equally various human residents – some striving to ‘keep apace with the times’, others struggling to save their way of life from the onslaught of nationwide change. Both have much to learn from each other.Beautifully highlighting the absurdity of everyday human interactions, and the potential for tragedy when the lives of animals become entangled with ours, Mountain Stories is a stunning, enthralling collection that will transport international readers to a rarely-seen part of our world; the perfect introduction to a major new voice in world literature.

    Sorace examines the political mechanisms at work in the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and the broader ideological energies that drove them. Sorace takes Communist Party ideas and discourse as central to how that organization formulates policies, defines legitimacy, and exerts its power. Sorace argues that the Communist Party has never abandoned its conviction that discourse can shape the world and the people who inhabit it. Sorace also demonstrates how the Communist Party's planning apparatus continues to play a crucial role in engineering China's economy and market construction, especially in the countryside.Sorace takes a distinctive and original interpretive approach to understanding Chinese politics, and Shaken Authority demonstrates how Communist Party discourse and ideology influenced the official decisions and responses to the Sichuan earthquake. Sorace provides a clear view of the lived outcomes of Communist Party plans, rationalities, and discourses in the earthquake zone. The three case studies he presents each demonstrate a different type of reconstruction and model of development: urban-rural integration, tourism, and ecological civilization. Sorace's work emphasizes the need for a grounded literacy in the political concepts, discourses, and vocabularies of the Communist Party itself. To dismiss China's official discourse as empty propaganda, Sorace argues, makes China and Chinese realities harder to understand, not easier.

    Maybe someone handsome, rich, and powerful. When she finds out her new husband is a eunuch who saved the emperor's life, she is devastated. She fears she will never have a normal life, never know the pleasures of intimacy that come from being a wife. Will Hualing find happiness when her husband shows her that there are many ways a man can pleasure a woman?The Eunuch's Wife is the third stand-alone story in the Lotus and the Phoenix series.

    This sensational fold-out frieze is more than six-feet long and can be removed and displayed. It features stunning illustrated detail on one side and incredible facts on the other.Get ready for an unforgettable journey across China. From the dusty desert of Gansu province to the rolling waves of the Yellow Sea, this amazing journey takes you past flaming mountains and ancient wonders. Watch out for mighty fortresses, giant pandas and the extraordinary Army of Terracotta Warriors. Along the way you'll discover breathtaking wonders of nature, visit modern China, and see how the traditions and landscape of the Great Wall are changing. You'll also encounter fascinating ancient Chinese monuments and amazing creatures living near the Great Wall.Part of our 'Unfolding Journeys' series.Also available: Unfolding Journeys - Rocky Mountain Explorer , Unfolding Journeys - Amazon Adventure, Unfolding Journeys - Secrets of the Nile. Collect them all!About Lonely Planet Kids: Come explore! Let's start an adventure. Lonely Planet Kids excites and educates children about the amazing world around them. Combining astonishing facts, quirky humor and eye-catching imagery, we ignite their curiosity and encourage them to discover more about our planet. Every book draws on our huge team of global experts to help share our continual fascination with what makes the world such a diverse and magnificent place - inspiring children at home and in school.

    Several scholar-teachers incorporated tenets from traditional Chinese education into their promotion of Islamic knowledge. As a result, some Sino-Muslims established an educationalnetwork which utilized an Islamic curriculum made up of Arabic, Persian, and Chinese works. The corpus of Chinese Islamic texts written in this system is collectively labeled the Han Kitab.Interpreting Islam in China explores the Sino-Islamic intellectual tradition through the works of some its brightest luminaries. Three prominent Sino-Muslim authors are used to illustrate transformations within this tradition, Wang Daiyu, Liu Zhi, and Ma Dexin. Kristian Petersen puts these scholarsin dialogue and demonstrates the continuities and departures within this tradition. Through an analysis of their writings, he considers several questions: How malleable are religious categories and why are they variously interpreted across time? How do changing historical circumstances affect theinterpretation of religious beliefs and practices? How do individuals navigate multiple sources of authority? How do practices inform belief? Overall, he shows that these authors presented an increasingly universalistic portrait of Islam through which Sino-Muslims were encouraged to participatewithin the global community of Muslims. The growing emphasis on performing the pilgrimage to Mecca, comprehensive knowledge of the Qur'an, and personal knowledge of Arabic stimulated communal engagement. Petersen demonstrates that the integration of Sino-Muslims within a growing global environment, where international travel and communication was increasingly possible, was accompanied by the rising self-awareness of a universally engaged Muslim community.

    Shadow Banking refers to capital that is distributed outside the formal banking system, including everything from Mom and Pop lending shops to online credit to giant state owned banks called Trusts. They have grown from a fraction of the economy ten years ago to nearly half of all China's annual Rmb 25 trillion ($4.1 trillion) in lending in the economy today.Shadow Banks are a new aspect of capitalism in China - barely regulated, highly risky, yet tolerated by Beijing. They have been permitted to flourish because many companies cannot get access to formal bank loans. It is the Wild West of banking in China. If we define capitalism as economic activity controlled by the private sector, then Shadow Banking is still in a hybrid stage, a halfway house between the state and the private economic. But it is precisely this divide that makes Shadow Banking an important to the rise of capitalism. How Beijing handles this large free market will say a lot about how the country's economy will grow - will free markets be granted greater leeway?

    Polar states are global giants, strong in military, scientific, and economic terms. The concept of a polar great power is relatively unknown in international relations studies; yet China, a rising power globally, is now widely using this term to categorize its aspirations and emphasize the significance of the polar regions to their national interests. China's focus on becoming a polar great power represents a fundamental re-orientation - a completely new way of imagining the world. China's push into these regions encompasses maritime and nuclear security, the frontlines of climate change research, and the possibility of a resources bonanza. As shown in this book, China's growing strength at the poles will be a game-changer for a number of strategic vulnerabilities that could shift the global balance of power in significant and unexpected ways.

    Karl interrogates "the economic" as concept and practice as it was construed historically in China in the 1930s and again in the 1980s and 1990s. Separated by the Chinese Revolution and Mao's socialist experiments, each era witnessed urgent discussions about how to think about economic concepts derived from capitalism in modern China. Both eras were highly cosmopolitan and each faced its own global crisis in economic and historical philosophy: in the 1930s, capitalism's failures suggested that socialism offered a plausible solution, while the abandonment of socialism five decades later provoked a rethinking of the relationship between history and the economic as social practice. Interweaving a critical historiography of modern China with the work of the Marxist-trained economist Wang Yanan, Karl shows how "magical concepts" based on dehistoricized Eurocentric and capitalist conceptions of historical activity that purport to exist outside lived experiences have erased much of the critical import of China's twentieth-century history. In this volume, Karl retrieves the economic to argue for a more nuanced and critical account of twentieth-century Chinese and global historical practice.

    Combining Jack Ma's personal experiences, this book shares his managerial experience from 11 aspects of strategic management, team management, mid-to-high-level management, competition management, brand management, business model management, philosophy management, corporate culture management, innovation management, self-emotion management, and capital management, pinpoints the misconceptions and blind spots in management, and cracks the truth and nature for management.

    It examines how Chinese investors, workers, tourists, bureaucrats, longtime residents, and adventurers interact throughout Southeast Asia. The contributors use case studies to show the scale of Chinese influence in the region and the ways in which various countries mitigate their unequal relationship with China by negotiating asymmetry, circumventing hegemony, and embracing, resisting, or manipulating the terms dictated by Chinese capital. ��

    The present translation not only provides a facing page critical Chinese text, it addresses two problems that have been ignored or not adequately treated in earlier works. First, it traces the history of the current text. The rather serious problems with this text will be, if not soluble, at least visible. Second, translations have been shaped by the anachronistic assumption that Ruan Ji was loyal to the declining Wei dynasty, when actual power had been taken by the Suma family, who founded the Jin dynasty after Ruan Ji's death. The introduction shows how and when that assumption took full shape five centuries after Ruan Ji lived and why it is not tenable. This leads to a different kind of translation, closer to what a contemporary reader might have understood and far less certain than referring it to some political event. The Poetry of Xi Kang presents a complete scholarly translation of his poetic works (including "Rhapsody on the Zither") alongside the original texts. Many of Xi Kang's poems are difficult and most are laden with allusions and quotations, adding another level of challenge to interpretation. Basic explanatory notes are provided. The translations are based on the critical modern edition of Xi Kang's work by Dai Mingyang, generally considered to be the best edition available. Important editions by Lu Xun and Lu Qinli are consulted on matters of variants, arrangement, and interpretation.

    Unfortunately, as a man, he is forbidden from entering the Inner Court. How is he supposed to solve a murder when he cannot visit the scene of the crime or talk to the women in the victim’s life? He won’t be able to solve this crime alone. The widowed Lady Li is devastated when she finds out about the murder of her sister-in-law, who was serving as the Empress’s lady-in-waiting. She is determined to discover who killed her, even if it means assisting the rude and obnoxious Inspector Gong and going undercover in the Forbidden City. Together, will Lady Li and Inspector Gong be able to find the murderer before he – or she – strikes again? Amanda Roberts is the successful author of historical novel Threads of Silk and the fun cookbook series Crazy Dumplings. She has lived in China since 2010. She is a full-time writer and editor and writes about her life at TwoAmericansinChina.com.

    From radically different backgrounds yet with a common legacy, having grown up in post-handover Hong Kong, these young people have little attachment to the era of British colonial rule or today's China. Instead, they see themselves as Hong Kongers, an identity both reinforced and threatened by the rapid expansion of Beijing's influence. Amid great political and social uncertainty, Generation HK is trying to build a brighter future. Theirs is a truly captivating coming-of-age story that reflects the bitter struggles beneath the gleaming facade of modern Hong Kong.

    Dibao serves the dual function of providing a basicsafety net for the poor and maintaining social and political stability. Despite currently being the world's largest welfare program in terms of population coverage, evidence on Dibao's performance has been lacking. This book offers important new empirical evidence and draws policy lessons that aretimely and useful for both China and beyond. Specifically, author Qin Gao addresses the following questions:- How effective has Dibao been in targeting the poor and alleviating poverty? - Have the Dibao recipients been dependent on welfare or able to move from welfare to work? - How has Dibao affected recipients' consumption patterns and subjective well-being? - Do they use the Dibao subsidy to meet survival needs (such as food, clothing, and shelter) or invest in human capital (such as health and education)? - Are they distressed by the stigma associated with receiving Dibao or do they become more optimistic about future and enjoy greater life satisfaction because of the Dibao support? - And finally, what policy lessons can we learn from the existing evidence in order to strengthen and improve Dibao in the future?Answers to these questions not only help us gain an in-depth understanding of Dibao's performance, but also add the Chinese case to the growing international literature on comparative welfare studies. Welfare, Work, and Poverty is essential reading for political scientists, economists, sociologists, public policy researchers, and social workers interested in learning about and understanding contemporary China.

    The killings spread to surrounding counties, resulting in a combined death toll of more than 9,000. Commonly known as theDaoxian massacre, the killings were one of many acts of so-called mass dictatorship and armed factional conflict that rocked China during the Cultural Revolution. However, in spite of the scope and brutality of the killings, there are few detailed accounts of mass killings in China's countrysideduring the Cultural Revolution's most tumultuous years.Years after the massacre, journalist Tan Hecheng was sent to Daoxian to report on an official investigation into the killings. Tan was prevented from publishing his findings in China, but in 2010, he published the Chinese edition of The Killing Wind in Hong Kong. Tan's first-hand investigation ofthe atrocities, accumulated over the course of more than 20 years, blends his research with the recollections of survivors to provide a vivid account exploring how and why the massacre took place and describing its aftermath. Dispelling the heroic aura of class struggle, Tan reveals that most of theDaoxian massacre's victims were hard-working, peaceful members of the rural middle class blacklisted as landlords or rich peasants. Tan also describes how political pressure and brainwashing turned ordinary people into heartless killing machines.More than a catalog of horrors, The Killing Wind is also a poignant meditation on memory, moral culpability, and the failure of the Chinese government to come to terms with the crimes of the Maoist era. By painting a detailed portrait of this massacre, Tan makes a broader argument about thelong-term consequences of the Cultural Revolution, one of the most violent political movements of the twentieth century. A compelling testament to the victims and survivors of the Daoxian massacre, The Killing Wind is a monument to historical truth: one that fills an immense gap in our understandingof the Mao era, the Cultural Revolution, and the status of truth in contemporary China.

    Instead, it argues that the war was started by a group of British merchants in the Chinese port of Canton in the 1830s, known as the ‘Warlike party’. Living in a period when British knowledge of China was growing rapidly, the Warlike party came to understand China’s weakness and its members returned to London to lobby for intervention until war broke out in 1839. However, the Warlike party did not get its way entirely. Another group of British merchants known in Canton as the ‘Pacific party’ opposed the war. In Britain, the anti-war movement gave the conflict its infamous name, the ‘Opium War’, which has stuck ever since. Using materials housed in the National Archives, UK, the First Historical Archives of China, the National Palace Museum, the British Library, SOAS Library, and Cambridge University Library, this meticulously researched and lucid volume is a new history of the cause of the First Opium War.