What ended in one atrocity began with another: the savage military takeover of China's capital city, which quickly became known as the Rape of Nanking. The Japanese Army's conduct from December 1937 to February 1938 constitutes one of the most barbarous events not just of the war but of the century. The violence was documented at the time and then redocumented during the war crimes trial in Tokyo after the war. This book brings together materials from both moments to provide the first comprehensive dossier of primary sources on the Rape.Part 1, "The Records," includes two sources written as the Rape was underway. The first is a long set of documents produced by the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, a group of foreigners who strove to protect the Chinese residents. The second is a series of letters that American surgeon Dr. Robert Wilson wrote for his family during the same period. These letters are published here for the first time.The evidence compiled by the International Committee and its members would be decisive for the indictments against Japanese leaders at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo. Part 2, "The Judgments," reprints portions of the tribunal's 1948 judgment dealing with the Rape of Nanking, its judicial consequences, and sections of the dissenting judgment of Justice Radhabinod Pal.These contemporary records and judgments create an intimate firsthand account of the Rape of Nanking. Together they are intended to stimulate deeper reflection than previously possible on how and why we assess and assign the burden of war guilt.Timothy Brook is Professor of Chinese History and Associate Director of the Joint Centre for Asia Pacific Studies, University of Toronto, and is coeditor of Nation Work: Asian Elites and National Identities and Cultureand Economy: The Shaping of Capitalism in Eastern Asia, both published by the University of Michigan Press.

    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.

    In each of his books, James Bradley has exposed the hidden truths behind America's engagement in Asia. Now comes his most engrossing work yet. Beginning in the 1850s, Bradley introduces us to the prominent Americans who made their fortunes in the China opium trade. As they -- -good Christians all -- -profitably addicted millions, American missionaries arrived, promising salvation for those who adopted Western ways. And that was just the beginning. From drug dealer Warren Delano to his grandson Franklin Delano Roosevelt, from the port of Hong Kong to the towers of Princeton University, from the era of Appomattox to the age of the A-Bomb, The China Mirage explores a difficult century that defines U.S.-Chinese relations to this day.

    Bill Hayton tells the story of how ‘China’ came to think of itself as China—​and what it means for our world today In this compelling and highly-readable account, Hayton shows how China’s present-day geopolitical problems—the fates of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and the South China Sea—were born in the struggle to create a modern nation-state. He brings alive the fevered debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when reformers and revolutionaries adopted foreign ideas to “invent’ a new vision of China. Ranging across history, nationhood, language, and territory, Hayton shows how a few radicals, often living in exile, adopted European beliefs about race and nation to rethink China’s past and create a new future. He weaves together political and personal stories to show how Chinese nationalism emerged from the connections between east and west. These ideas continue to motivate and direct the country’s policies into the twenty first century. By asserting a particular version of the past Chinese governments have bolstered their claims to a vast territory stretching from the Pacific to Central Asia.

    In keeping with his reputation for writing about big ideas in an illuminating and graceful way, he shows how sports respond to deep human needs; describes the ways in which baseball, football and basketball became national institutions and how they reached their present forms; and covers the evolution of rules, the rise and fall of the most successful teams, and the historical significance of the most famous and influential figures such as Babe Ruth, Vince Lombardi, and Michael Jordan. Whether he is writing about baseball as the agrarian game, football as similar to warfare, basketball as the embodiment of post-industrial society, or the moral havoc created by baseball's designated hitter rule, Mandelbaum applies the full force of his learning and wit to subjects about which so many Americans care passionately: the games they played in their youth and continue to follow as adults. By offering a fresh and unconventional perspective on these games, The Meaning of Sports makes for fascinating and rewarding reading both for fans and newcomers.

    What are the cultural implications of this phenomenal success? Does the introduction of American fast food undermine local cuisines, many of them celebrated for centuries? Does it, as some critics fear, presage a homogeneous, global culture? These are but a few of the questions confronted in this engaging study that vividly demonstrates how the theories and techniques of anthropology can be used not only to examine obscure peoples and exotic practices, but to shed light on the motivations and behavior of people conducting their daily lives in some of the major population centers of the world.Earlier studies of the fast food industry have emphasized production, focusing on labor or management. This book takes a fresh approach to the industry by concentrating on the perspective of the consumer. It analyzes consumers' reactions to McDonald's in five East Asian cities: Hong Kong, Beijing, Taipei, Seoul, and Tokyo. What do they have to say about McDonald's? How is fast food perceived by those who pay to eat it? How do their preferences and biases affect the system of production?The book argues that McDonald's has largely become divorced from its American roots and become a "local" institution for an entire generation of affluent consumers in Hong Kong, Taipei, and Tokyo. In Beijing, the process of localization has barely begun, with consumers more interested in the experience of eating at McDonald's than in the food itself. In Seoul, many nationalists treat the Big Mac as a symbol of Yankee imperialism; meanwhile, increasing numbers of Korean children are celebrating their birthdays atMcDonald's.Localization is not, however, a one-way process; the corporation has also had to adapt in order to flourish in new settings. The book demonstrates how consumers, with the cooperation and encouragement of McDonald's management, have transformed their neighborhood restaurants into leisure centers, afterschool clubs, and meeting halls. The contributors pay special attention to the effects of these activities on family organization, education, and socialization, and conclude that it is no accident that the fast food boom corresponds to the rise of a child-centered consumer culture in East Asian cities.

    For more than two centuries, American and Chinese statesmen, merchants, missionaries, and adventurers, men and women, have profoundly influenced the fate of these nations. While we tend to think of America's ties with China as starting in 1972 with the visit of President Richard Nixon to China, the patterns—rapturous enchantment followed by angry disillusionment—were set in motion hundreds of years earlier.Drawing on personal letters, diaries, memoirs, government documents, and contemporary news reports, John Pomfret reconstructs the surprising, tragic, and marvelous ways Americans and Chinese have engaged with one another through the centuries. A fascinating and thrilling account, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom is also an indispensable book for understanding the most important—and often the most perplexing—relationship between any two countries in the world.--us.macmillan.com

    Elaine Mar and her mother emigrated from Hong Kong to Denver to join her father in a community more Chinese than American, more hungry than hopeful.While working with her family in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant and living in the basement of her aunt's house, Mar quickly masters English and begins to excel in school. But as her home and school life--Chinese tradition and American independence--become two increasingly disparate worlds, Mar tries desperately to navigate between them.Adolescence and the awakening of her sexuality leave Elaine isolated and confused. She yearns for storebought clothes and falls for a red-haired boy who leads her away from the fretful eyes of her family. In his presence, Elaine is overcome by the strength of her desire--blocking out her family's visions of an arranged marriage in Hong Kong.From surviving racist harassment in the schooIyard to trying to flip her straight hair like Farrah Fawcett, from hiding her parents' heritage to arriving alone at Harvard University, Mar's story is at once an unforgettable personal journey and an unflinching, brutal look at the realities of the American Dream.

    Now, in China: The Novel, Rutherfurd takes readers into the rich and fascinating milieu of the Middle Kingdom..The story begins in 1839, at the dawn of the First Opium War, and follows Chinese history through Mao's Cultural Revolution and up to the present day. Rutherfurd chronicles the rising and falling fortunes of members of Chinese, British, and American families, as they negotiate the tides of history. Along the way, in his signature style, Rutherfurd provides a deeply researched portrait of Chinese history and society, its ancient traditions and great upheavals, and China's emergence as a rising global power. As always, we are treated to romance and adventure, heroines and scoundrels, grinding struggle and incredible fortunes. China: The Novel brings to life the rich terrain of this vast and constantly evolving country. From Shanghai to Nanking to the Great Wall, Rutherfurd chronicles the turbulent rise and fall of empires as the colonial West meets the opulent and complex East in a dramatic struggle between cultures and people.Extraordinarily researched and majestically told, Edward Rutherfurd paints a thrilling portrait of one of the most singular and remarkable countries in the world.

    A fresh, bold interpretative survey, it focuses on the dynamic social forces underlying the Chinese Communists' rise in three short decades from obscurity to power.The author seeks above all to relate the events of this tumultuous period to certain tentative generalizations about the nature and course of the revolution. He is concerned less with the May Fourth Movement as such, for example, than with the revolution's intellectual origins, less with the Communist party's early political history than with the place of Marxist ideology in that history, less with the military aspects of the war of 1937-45 than with the influence of nationalism in the growing success of the Communists.An important part of the book deals with the various governmental and non-governmental attempt at reform during the Kuomintang era, which the author shows were too little too late to dam the swelling flood of revolution. The conclusion evaluates the crucial role of imperialism, the peasantry, and the army in the Chinese "formula" for revolution and re-examines the relationship between Marxism and the Chinese Revolution.

    Now the authors have returned to Chen Village to bring the village's tumultuous story up to the nineties. Chen Village Under Mao and Deng includes not only the bulk of the original text of Chen Village, but also three new chapters on village life under Deng: gripping descriptions of the village leader's purge, the rapid industrialization of the district, an alienated "lost generation" of young peasants, and the new village officials' legal and illegal efforts at self-enrichment. Readers who enjoyed Chen Village will be doubly fascinated by the ironic twists and turns of recent events among the Chens.

    A plainspoken account of living in Asia."  --San Francisco ChronicleAnyone who has heard his weekly commentary on NPR knows that T. R. Reid is trenchant, funny, and deeply knowledgeable reporter and now he brings this erudition and humor to the five years he spent in Japan--where he served as The Washington Post's Tokyo bureau chief.  He provides unique insights into the country and its 2,500-year-old Confucian tradition, a powerful ethical system that has played an integral role in the continent's "postwar miracle."Whether describing his neighbor calmly asserting that his son's loud bass playing brings disrepute on the neighborhood, or the Japanese custom of having students clean the schools, Reid inspires us to consider the many benefits of the Asian Way--as well as its drawbacks--and to use this to come to a greater understanding of both Japanese culture and America.

    Whether schussing down ski slopes or speaking of politics in coffee houses, she cherished the city of her birth. But in the 1930s an undercurrent of conflict and hate began to seize the former imperial capital. This struggle came to a head when Hitler took possession of neighboring Germany. Anti-Semitism, which Nini and her idealistic friends believed was impossible in the socially advanced world of Vienna, became widespread and virulent.The Karpel's Jewish identity suddenly made them foreigners in their own homeland. Tormented, disenfranchised, and with a broken heart, Nini and her family sought refuge in a land seven thousand miles across the world.Shanghai, China, one of the few countries accepting Jewish immigrants, became their new home and refuge. Stepping off the boat, the Karpel family found themselves in a land they could never have imagined. Shanghai presented an incongruent world of immense wealth and privilege for some and poverty for the masses, with opium dens and decadent clubs as well as rampant disease and a raging war between nations.Ten Green Bottles is the story of Nini Karpel's struggles as she told it to her daughter Vivian so many years ago. This true story depicts the fierce perseverance of one family, victims of the forces of evil, who overcame suffering of biblical proportion to survive. It was a time when ordinary people became heroes.

    After introducing the reader to the region's history from the origins of Islam in the seventh century, Cleveland focuses on the past two centuries of profound and often dramatic change. While built around a framework of political history, the book also carefully integrates social, cultural, and economic developments into a single, carefully crafted account. The revised and updated third edition of this benchmark text places the developments of the 1990s in a new historical perspective and includes an examination of key events of the early twenty-first century. An epilogue offers a critical evaluation, from a historian's perspective, of the al-Qa'ida attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the early phases of the US occupation of Iraq.

    Shelley Rigger explains how Taiwan became such a key global player, highlighting economic and political breakthroughs so impressive they have been called "miracles." She links these accomplishments to Taiwan's determined society, vibrant culture, and unique history. Drawing on arts, economics, politics, and international relations, Rigger explores Taiwan's importance to China, the United States, and the world. Considering where Taiwan may be headed in its wary standoff with China, she traces how the focus of Taiwan's domestic politics has shifted to a Taiwan-centered strategy. All readers interested in Asia and international affairs, as well as travelers to the region, will find this an accessible and entertaining overview, replete with human interest stories and colorful examples of daily life in Taiwan.