Download or read book Recharging China in War and Revolution 1882 1955 written by Ying Jia Tan and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-15 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Recharging China in War and Revolution, 1882–1955, Ying Jia Tan explores the fascinating politics of Chinese power consumption as electrical industries developed during seven decades of revolution and warfare. Tan traces this history from the textile-factory power shortages of the late Qing, through the struggle over China's electrical industries during its civil war, to the 1937 Japanese invasion that robbed China of 97 percent of its generative capacity. Along the way, he demonstrates that power industries became an integral part of the nation's military-industrial complex, showing how competing regimes asserted economic sovereignty through the nationalization of electricity. Based on a wide range of published records, engineering reports, and archival collections in China, Taiwan, Japan, and the United States, Recharging China in War and Revolution, 1882–1955 argues that, even in times of peace, the Chinese economy operated as though still at war, constructing power systems that met immediate demands but sacrificed efficiency and longevity. Thanks to generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through The Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.
Download or read book Revolution and Its Past written by R. Keith Schoppa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike other texts on modern Chinese history, which tend to be either encyclopedic or too pedantic, Revolution and Its Past is comprehensive but concise, focused on the most recent scholarship, and written in a style that engages students from beginning to end. The Third Edition uses the theme of identities--of the nation itself and of the Chinese people--to probe the vast changes that have swept over China from late imperial times to the early twenty-first century. In so doing, it explores the range of identities that China has chosen over time and those that outsiders have attributed to China and its people, showing how, as China rapidly modernizes, the issue of Chinese identity in the modern world looms large.
Download or read book China s Design Revolution written by Lorraine Justice and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The evolution of Chinese design and the major shift in the culture of creativity in a post-Mao China. China is on the verge of a design revolution. A "third generation" of the People's Republic of China that came of age during China's "opening up" period of the 1980s now strives for fame, fortune, and self expression. This generation, workers in their thirties and forties, has more freedom to create--and to consume--than their parents or grandparents. In China's Design Revolution, Lorraine Justice maps the evolution of Chinese design and innovation. Justice explains that just as this "third generation" (post-Revolution, post-Cultural Revolution) reaches for self-expression, China's government is making massive investments in design and innovation, supporting design and creative activities (including design education programs, innovation parks, and privatized companies) at the local and national levels. The goal is to stimulate economic growth--and to establish China as a global creative power. Influenced by Mao and Confucius, communism and capitalism, patriotism and cosmopolitanism, China's third generation will drive the culture of design and innovation in China--and maybe the rest of the world. Justice describes and documents examples of Chinese design and innovation that range from ancient ceramics to communist propaganda posters. She then explores current award-winning projects in media, fashion, graphic, interior, and product design; and examines the lifestyle and purchasing trends of the "fourth generation," now in their teens and twenties. China's Design Revolution offers an essential guide to the inextricably entwined stories of design, culture, and politics in China.
Download or read book Evolution Revolution written by Claire Roberts and published by Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences. This book was released on 1997 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By using the medium of dress, Evolution & Revolution explores the dramatic cultural, social, economic and political changes which have occurred in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan over th past three centuries. This history is revealed through the luxury court robes of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911); the tight-fitting, side-slitted East-West cheungsam; the ubiquitous Mao suit, symbol of Communist ideology; and the bold new directions of contemporary designers. Written by authors from Australia, mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan and rich with visual material, this unique book offers an accessible, informative and inspiring treatment of Chinese history, culture and dress.
Download or read book Red China s Green Revolution written by Joshua Eisenman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China’s dismantling of the Mao-era rural commune system and return to individual household farming under Deng Xiaoping has been seen as a successful turn away from a misguided social experiment and a rejection of the disastrous policies that produced widespread famine. In this revisionist study, Joshua Eisenman marshals previously inaccessible data to overturn this narrative, showing that the commune modernized agriculture, increased productivity, and spurred an agricultural green revolution that laid the foundation for China’s future rapid growth. Red China’s Green Revolution tells the story of the commune’s origins, evolution, and downfall, demonstrating its role in China’s economic ascendance. After 1970, the commune emerged as a hybrid institution, including both collective and private elements, with a high degree of local control over economic decision but almost no say over political ones. It had an integrated agricultural research and extension system that promoted agricultural modernization and collectively owned local enterprises and small factories that spread rural industrialization. The commune transmitted Mao’s collectivist ideology and enforced collective isolation so it could overwork and underpay its households. Eisenman argues that the commune was eliminated not because it was unproductive, but because it was politically undesirable: it was the post-Mao leadership led by Deng Xiaoping—not rural residents—who chose to abandon the commune in order to consolidate their control over China. Based on detailed and systematic national, provincial, and county-level data, as well as interviews with agricultural experts and former commune members, Red China’s Green Revolution is a comprehensive historical and social scientific analysis that fundamentally challenges our understanding of recent Chinese economic history.
Download or read book Art and China s Revolution written by Melissa Chiu and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Takes an in-depth look at the period between the 1950s and 1970s, focusing on the formation of a new visual culture and how it was given priority over artistic traditions such as ink painting. This was part of a broader national program to modernize China, and it had a great impact on artists and their work.
Download or read book A Bitter Revolution written by Rana Mitter and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China is now poised to take a key role on the world stage, but in the early twentieth century the situation could not have been more different. Rana Mitter goes back to this pivotal moment in Chinese history to uncover the origins of the painful transition from a premodern past into a modern world. By the 1920s the seemingly civilized world shaped over the last two thousand years by the legacy of the great philosopher Confucius was falling apart in the face of western imperialism and internal warfare. Chinese cities still bore the imprints of its ancient past with narrow, lanes and temples to long-worshipped gods, but these were starting to change with the influx of foreign traders, teachers, and missionaries, all eager to shape China's ancient past into a modern present. Mitter takes us through the resulting social turmoil and political promise, the devastating war against Japan in the 1940s, Communism and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and the new era of hope in the 1980s ended by the Tian'anmen uprising. He reveals the impetus behind the dramatic changes in Chinese culture and politics as being China's "New Culture" - a strain of thought which celebrated youth, individualism, and the heady mixture of strange and seductive new cultures from places as far apart as America, India, and Japan.
Download or read book The Cultural Revolution written by Frank Dikötter and published by Bloomsbury Press. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concluding volume--following Mao's Great Famine and The Tragedy of Liberation--in Frank Dikötter's award-winning trilogy chronicling the Communist revolution in China. After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives from 1958–1962, an aging Mao Zedong launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The Cultural Revolution's goal was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalistic elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. Young students formed the Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semiautomatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people. The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976 draws for the first time on hundreds of previously classified party documents, from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches. After the army itself fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, ordinary people used the political chaos to resurrect the market and hollow out the party's ideology. By showing how economic reform from below was an unintended consequence of a decade of violent purges and entrenched fear, The Cultural Revolution casts China's most tumultuous era in a wholly new light.
Download or read book The Third Revolution written by Elizabeth Economy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Third Revolution, Elizabeth Economy, one of America's leading China scholars, provides an authoritative overview of contemporary China that makes sense of all of the seeming inconsistencies and ambiguities in its policies and actions.
Download or read book China from the 1911 Revolution to Liberation written by Jean Chesneaux and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 1977 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Cultural Revolution in the Foreign Ministry of China written by Ma Jisen and published by The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. This book was released on 2020-06-15 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cultural Revolution, which occurred between 1966 and 1976, was a major unforgettable event in modern Chinese history. For more than thirty years, the prevalent view of the Cultural Revolution in the Chinese Foreign Ministry has been that the rebels controlled the Foreign Ministry in August 1967 and caused the many excesses in foreign affairs such as the burning of the British mission in Beijing which isolated China from the rest of the world. The author of this book challenges this point of view. The book gives a factual account of the course of the ten-year Cultural Revolution in the Foreign Ministry, based on documents issued during the Cultural Revolution, talks by Zhou Enlai and Chen Yi, and the manuscripts of the people concerned, as well as interviews with Foreign Ministry staff members who personally took part in the events.
Download or read book Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China written by Ezra F. Vogel and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-14 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist An Economist Best Book of the Year | A Financial Times Book of the Year | A Wall Street Journal Book of the Year | A Washington Post Book of the Year | A Bloomberg News Book of the Year | An Esquire China Book of the Year | A Gates Notes Top Read of the Year Perhaps no one in the twentieth century had a greater long-term impact on world history than Deng Xiaoping. And no scholar of contemporary East Asian history and culture is better qualified than Ezra Vogel to disentangle the many contradictions embodied in the life and legacy of China’s boldest strategist. Once described by Mao Zedong as a “needle inside a ball of cotton,” Deng was the pragmatic yet disciplined driving force behind China’s radical transformation in the late twentieth century. He confronted the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution, dissolved Mao’s cult of personality, and loosened the economic and social policies that had stunted China’s growth. Obsessed with modernization and technology, Deng opened trade relations with the West, which lifted hundreds of millions of his countrymen out of poverty. Yet at the same time he answered to his authoritarian roots, most notably when he ordered the crackdown in June 1989 at Tiananmen Square. Deng’s youthful commitment to the Communist Party was cemented in Paris in the early 1920s, among a group of Chinese student-workers that also included Zhou Enlai. Deng returned home in 1927 to join the Chinese Revolution on the ground floor. In the fifty years of his tumultuous rise to power, he endured accusations, purges, and even exile before becoming China’s preeminent leader from 1978 to 1989 and again in 1992. When he reached the top, Deng saw an opportunity to creatively destroy much of the economic system he had helped build for five decades as a loyal follower of Mao—and he did not hesitate.
Download or read book Red Revolution Green Revolution written by Sigrid Schmalzer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-01-20 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1968, the director of USAID coined the term “green revolution” to celebrate the new technological solutions that promised to ease hunger around the world—and forestall the spread of more “red,” or socialist, revolutions. Yet in China, where modernization and scientific progress could not be divorced from politics, green and red revolutions proceeded side by side. In Red Revolution, Green Revolution, Sigrid Schmalzer explores the intersection of politics and agriculture in socialist China through the diverse experiences of scientists, peasants, state agents, and “educated youth.” The environmental costs of chemical-intensive agriculture and the human costs of emphasizing increasing production over equitable distribution of food and labor have been felt as strongly in China as anywhere—and yet, as Schmalzer shows, Mao-era challenges to technocracy laid important groundwork for today’s sustainability and food justice movements. This history of “scientific farming” in China offers us a unique opportunity not only to explore the consequences of modern agricultural technologies but also to engage in a necessary rethinking of fundamental assumptions about science and society.
Download or read book China and Charles Darwin written by James Reeve Pusey and published by Harvard Univ Asia Center. This book was released on 1983 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study evaluates Darwin's theory of evolution as a stimulus to Chinese political changes and philosophic challenge to traditional Chinese beliefs. Pusey bases his analysis on a survey of journals issued from 1896 to 1910 and, after a break for revolutionary action, from 1915 to 1926, with emphasis on the era between the Sino-Japanese War and the Republician Revolution.
Download or read book Mao s Last Revolution written by Roderick MACFARQUHAR and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 742 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains why Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, and shows his Machiavellian role in masterminding it. This book documents the Hobbesian state that ensued. Power struggles raged among Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Qing - Mao's wife and leader of the Gang of Four - while Mao often played one against the other.
Download or read book The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China written by Guobin Yang and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-17 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Raised to be "flowers of the nation," the first generation born after the founding of the People's Republic of China was united in its political outlook and at first embraced the Cultural Revolution of 1966, but then split into warring factions. Investigating the causes of this fracture, Guobin Yang argues that Chinese youth engaged in an imaginary revolution from 1966 to 1968, enacting a political mythology that encouraged violence as a way to prove one's revolutionary credentials. This same competitive dynamic would later turn the Red Guard against the communist government. Throughout the 1970s, the majority of Red Guard youth were sent to work in rural villages, where they developed an appreciation for the values of ordinary life. From this experience, an underground cultural movement was born. Rejecting idolatry, these relocated revolutionaries developed a new form of resistance that signaled a new era of enlightenment, culminating in the Democracy Wall movement of the late 1970s and the Tiananmen protest of 1989. Yang's final chapter on the politics of history and memory argues that contemporary memories of the Cultural Revolution are factionalized along these lines of political division, formed fifty years before.
Download or read book Kingdom of Characters Pulitzer Prize Finalist written by Jing Tsu and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded.
