There are over 320 million in their teens and twenties, more than the population of the USA. Born after Mao, natives of a nation on the rise, they are destined to have an unprecedented influence on global affairs.These millennials, offspring of the only child policy, face fierce competition and pressure to succeed. Dislocated from their country's tumultuous past, they are caught between tradition and modernity. Their struggles are also the same as those of young people all over the world: moving out of home, starting a career, falling in love.Wish Lanterns tells the stories of six young Chinese. Dahai is a military child and a rebel; 'Fred' is a daughter of the Party. Lucifer is an aspiring superstar; Snail a country migrant addicted to online gaming. Xiaoxiao is a hipster from the freezing north; and Mia a skinhead fashionista from Xinjiang in the far west.Alec Ash, a writer in Beijing of the same generation, has given us a vivid, gripping account of young China as it comes of age. Through individual lives, Wish Lanterns shows with empathy and insight the conflicts and challenges, dreams and wishes of China's - and the world's - future. It is a vibrant and intimate book, for readers of Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy.

    This sharply drawn and insightful account brings to life this modern-day emperor and the tumultuous era that he did so much to shape.   Jonathan Spence captures Mao in all his paradoxical grandeur and sheds light on the radical transformation he unleashed that still reverberates in China today.

    In this book, the authors explain Mao's Machiavellian role in masterminding it, documenting the Hobbesian state which ensued.

    This book paints an interesting picture of the lifestyle behind the grandeur of the Tang culture. Various aspects of day-to-day life are presented, including crime, entertainment, fashion, marriage, food, hygiene, dwellings, and transportation

    After twenty-two years of antagonism, China and the United States suddenly moved toward a détente—achieved not by politicians but by Ping-Pong players. The Western press delighted in the absurdity of the moment and branded it “Ping-Pong Diplomacy.” But for the Chinese, Ping-Pong was always political, a strategic cog in Mao Zedong’s foreign policy. Nicholas Griffin proves that the organized game, from its first breath, was tied to Communism thanks to its founder, Ivor Montagu, son of a wealthy English baron and spy for the Soviet Union. Ping-Pong Diplomacy traces a crucial inter­section of sports and society. Griffin tells the strange and tragic story of how the game was manipulated at the highest levels; how the Chinese government helped cover up the death of 36 million peasants by holding the World Table Tennis Championships during the Great Famine; how championship players were driven to their deaths during the Cultural Revolution; and, finally, how the survivors were reconvened in 1971 and ordered to reach out to their American counterparts. Through a cast of eccentric characters, from spies to hippies and Ping-Pong-obsessed generals to atom-bomb survivors, Griffin explores how a neglected sport was used to help realign the balance of worldwide power.

    Out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran and into Kurdish Turkey, Colin Thubron covers some seven thousand miles in eight months. Making his way by local bus, truck, car, donkey cart and camel, he travels from the tomb of the Yellow Emperor, the mythic progenitor of the Chinese people, to the ancient port of Antioch—in perhaps the most difficult and ambitious journey he has undertaken in forty years of travel.The Silk Road is a huge network of arteries splitting and converging across the breadth of Asia. To travel it is to trace the passage not only of trade and armies but also of ideas, religions and inventions. But alongside this rich and astonishing past, Shadow of the Silk Road is also about Asia today: a continent of upheaval.One of the trademarks of Colin Thubron's travel writing is the beauty of his prose; another is his gift for talking to people and getting them to talk to him. Shadow of the Silk Road encounters Islamic countries in many forms. It is about changes in China, transformed since the Cultural Revolution. It is about false nationalisms and the world's discontented margins, where the true boundaries are not political borders but the frontiers of tribe, ethnicity, language and religion. It is a magnificent and important account of an ancient world in modern ferment.

    It is a prescient fable for our time, one that surprisingly continues to shed light on our modern relationship with China. Indeed, the furious trade in furs, opium, and b che-de-mer a rare sea cucumber delicacy might have catalyzed America 's emerging economy, but it also sparked an ecological and human rights catastrophe of such epic proportions that the reverberations can still be felt today. Peopled with fascinating characters from the Financier of the Revolution Robert Morris to the Chinese emperor Qianlong, who considered foreigners inferior beings this page-turning saga of pirates and politicians, coolies and concubines.

    Traditional morals and behavior are being turned on their head as the country’s climb towards economic prosperity brings sex into the open. But it is a revolution distinctly different from the one experienced in the West and has taken unexpected twists and turns.Written in a highly engaging and readable style, Behind the Red Door: Sex in China takes the reader on a journey from ancient days, when China’s rulers relied on shockingly vivid Daoist sex manuals, to the present, where China is torn between sexual orthodoxy and Western-style openness.

    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.

    Through the story of his family, the author illustrates the decline of the countryside in relation to the cities as a result of modernization and the transformation of Confucian ideology as a result of these changes. Based on nearly 400 volumes of Liu's diary and other writings, the book illustrates what it was like to study in an academy and to be a schoolteacher, the pressures of changing family relationships, the daily grind of work in industry and agriculture, people's experience with government, and life under the Japanese occupation.

    Feeding Desire analyses this beauty ideal in the context of Islam, conceptions of health, and notions of desire Full description

    Following on from Our Story, Ron Kray fills in the gaps and gives his version of the murders of Jack The Hat McVitie and George Cornell, describing his bisexuality and his marriage in Broadmoor and clarifying many of the misconceptions about the years when he and Reg ruled the London underworld, shot enemies at will and simultaneously socialized with some of the most glittering politicians, celebrities and hostesses of the time.

    Author Mark Wilkerson interviewed Townshend himself and several of Townshend's friends and associates for this biography.

    Author and historian Albert Buchanan recreates the engagements of the Pacific and Atlantic combat theaters with near clinical detail, from the Pearl Harbor Attack to the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri. Interwoven within these aerial combat narratives is background information on technological innovations, production methods, training programs, and the important players involved. This new edition of The Navy's Air War: A Mission Completed includes annotations and photographs from World War 2. *Annotations. *Images.

    an imaginative and dispassionate re-examination of the significance of the Mongol Conquest and its aftermath for Russia's historical development." --Slavic Review"On all counts Russia and the Golden Horde infuses the subject with fresh insights and interpretations." --History"Combining rigorous analysis of the major scholarly findings with his own research, Halperin has produced both a much-needed synthesis and an important original work." --Library Journal"Halperin's new book combines sound scholarship and a flair for storytelling that should help publicize this all too unfamiliar tale in the West." --Virginia Quarterly Review"It is a seminal work that will be repeatedly cited in the future... " --The Historian..". ingenious and highly articulate... " --Russian Review