Download or read book Encountering the Chinese written by Hu Wenzhong and published by Nicholas Brealey. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A classic must-read for everyone coming to work or live in China." - Shelley Warner and Tony Voutas, cross-cultural trainers and founders of Asia Pacific Access Ltd, China China is in the midst of unprecedented economic and cultural growth. In the last decade alone, China joined the World Trade Organization, hosted the 2008 Olympics and experienced a remarkable, record-high increase in its foreign currency reserves. As these changes unfold, frequency of contact between the Chinese and Westerners is dramatically increasing in the office, the classroom and the home. With thought-provoking glimpses into history and tradition, Encountering the Chinese provides fundamental information on Chinese cultural norms and values, giving clear context for contemporary social standards. Readers will learn the etiquette necessary to build successful personal and professional relationships with the Chinese both inside and outside the People's Republic of China. This revised edition of Encountering the Chinese also explains how Chinese values are changing rapidly-and why it is more important than ever to keep up. For instance, compliments, once declined out of modesty, are now widely accepted in coastal cities; and some terms of address that were proper to use only a decade ago have grown offensive. Encountering the Chinese provides invaluable insight into the diverse and changing Chinese culture.

Download or read book Encountering China written by Michael J. Sandel and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-08 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the West, Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel is a thinker of unusual prominence. In China, he’s a phenomenon, greeted by vast crowds. China Daily reports that he has acquired a popularity “usually reserved for Hollywood movie stars.” China Newsweek declared him the “most influential foreign figure” of the year. In Sandel the Chinese have found a guide through the ethical dilemmas created by the nation’s swift embrace of a market economy—a guide whose communitarian ideas resonate with aspects of China’s own rich and ancient philosophical traditions. Chinese citizens often describe a sense that, in sprinting ahead, they have bounded past whatever barriers once held back the forces of corruption and moral disregard. The market economy has lifted millions from poverty but done little to define ultimate goals for individuals or the nation. Is the market all there is? In this context, Sandel’s charismatic, interactive lecturing style, which roots moral philosophy in real-world scenarios, has found an audience struggling with questions of their responsibility to one another. Encountering China brings together leading experts in Confucian and Daoist thought to explore the connections and tensions revealed in this unlikely episode of Chinese engagement with the West. The result is a profound examination of diverse ideas about the self, justice, community, gender, and public good. With a foreword by Evan Osnos that considers Sandel’s fame and the state of moral dialogue in China, the book will itself be a major contribution to the debates that Sandel sparks in East and West alike.

Download or read book Encounters with Ancient Beijing written by Virginia S. Anami and published by 五洲传播出版社. This book was released on 2004 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully-produced book in 330 pages of color, which examines Beijing through its trees, stone and water as a way of unlocking the city's past and appreciating its heritage in the relationship of man to nature. Author Virginia Stibbs Anami has been exploring Beijing for over 20 years, and has researched, written about and photographed the city for numerous publications and exhibitions.

Download or read book Qing Encounters written by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West examines how the contact between China and Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries transformed the arts on both sides of the East-West divide. The essays in the volume reveal the extent to which images, artifacts, and natural specimens were traded and copied, and how these materials inflected both cultures’ visions of novelty and pleasure, battle and power, and ways of seeing and representing. Artists and craftspeople on both continents borrowed and adapted forms, techniques, and modes of representation, producing deliberate, meaningful, and complex new creations. By considering this reciprocity from both Eastern and Western perspectives, Qing Encounters offers a new and nuanced understanding of this critical period.

Download or read book The Great Encounter of China and the West 1500 1800 written by D. E. Mungello and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-09-17 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the Chinese, the drive toward growing political and economic power is part of an ongoing effort to restore China's past greatness and remove the lingering memories of history's humiliations. This widely praised book explores the 1500–1800 period before China's decline, when the country was viewed as a leading world culture and power. Europe, by contrast, was in the early stages of emerging from provincial to international status while the United States was still an uncharted wilderness. D. E. Mungello argues that this earlier era, ironically, may contain more relevance for today than the more recent past. Building on the author's decades of research and teaching, this compelling book illustrates the vital importance of history to readers trying to understand China’s renewed rise.

Download or read book Distant Shores written by Melissa Macauley and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering history that transforms our understanding of the colonial era and China's place in it China has conventionally been considered a land empire whose lack of maritime and colonial reach contributed to its economic decline after the mid-eighteenth century. Distant Shores challenges this view, showing that the economic expansion of southeastern Chinese rivaled the colonial ambitions of Europeans overseas. In a story that dawns with the Industrial Revolution and culminates in the Great Depression, Melissa Macauley explains how sojourners from an ungovernable corner of China emerged among the commercial masters of the South China Sea. She focuses on Chaozhou, a region in the great maritime province of Guangdong, whose people shared a repertoire of ritual, cultural, and economic practices. Macauley traces how Chaozhouese at home and abroad reaped many of the benefits of an overseas colonial system without establishing formal governing authority. Their power was sustained instead through a mosaic of familial, fraternal, and commercial relationships spread across the ports of Bangkok, Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Swatow. The picture that emerges is not one of Chinese divergence from European modernity but rather of a convergence in colonial sites that were critical to modern development and accelerating levels of capital accumulation. A magisterial work of scholarship, Distant Shores reveals how the transoceanic migration of Chaozhouese laborers and merchants across a far-flung maritime world linked the Chinese homeland to an ever-expanding frontier of settlement and economic extraction.

Download or read book China and Ashkenazic Jewry Transcultural Encounters written by Kathryn Hellerstein and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-04-04 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past thirty years, the Sino-Jewish encounter in modern China has increasingly garnered scholarly and popular attention. This volume will be the first to focus on the transcultural exchange between Ashkenazic Jewry and China. The essays here investigate how this exchange of texts and translations, images and ideas, has enriched both Jewish and Chinese cultures and prepared for a global, inclusive world literature. The book breaks new ground in the field, covering such new topics as the images of China in Yiddish and German Jewish letters, the intersectionality of the Jewish and Chinese literature in illuminating the implications for a truly global and inclusive world literature, the biographies of prominent figures in Chinese-Jewish connections, the Chabad engagement in contemporary China. Some of the fundamental debates in the current scholarship will also be addressed, with a special emphasis on how many Jewish refugees arrived in Shanghai and how much interaction occurred between the Jewish refugees and the resident Chinese population during the wartime and its aftermath.

Download or read book Ten Thousand Things written by Judith Farquhar and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-04-17 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the myriad ways contemporary residents of Beijing understand and nurture the good life, practice the embodied arts of everyday well-being, and in doing so draw on cultural resources ranging from ancient metaphysics to modern media.

Download or read book Road to Heaven written by Red Pine and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2009-08-10 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1989, Bill Porter, having spent much of his life studying and translating Chinese religious and philosophical texts, began to wonder if the Buddhist hermit tradition still existed in China. At the time, it was believed that the Cultural Revolution had dealt a lethal blow to all religions in China, destroying countless temples and shrines, and forcibly returning thousands of monks and nuns to a lay life. But when Porter travels to the Chungnan mountains — the historical refuge of ancient hermits — he discovers that the hermit tradition is very much alive, as dozens of monks and nuns continue to lead solitary lives in quiet contemplation of their faith deep in the mountains. Part travelogue, part history, part sociology, and part religious study, this record of extraordinary journeys to an unknown China sheds light on a phenomenon unparalleled in the West. Porter's discovery is more than a revelation, and uncovers the glimmer of hope for the future of religion in China.

Download or read book The Last Embassy written by Tonio Andrade and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author of The Gunpowder Age, a book that casts new light on the history of China and the West at the turn of the nineteenth century George Macartney's disastrous 1793 mission to China plays a central role in the prevailing narrative of modern Sino-European relations. Summarily dismissed by the Qing court, Macartney failed in nearly all of his objectives, perhaps setting the stage for the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century and the mistrust that still marks the relationship today. But not all European encounters with China were disastrous. The Last Embassy tells the story of the Dutch mission of 1795, bringing to light a dramatic but little-known episode that transforms our understanding of the history of China and the West. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, Tonio Andrade paints a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of an age marked by intrigues and war. China was on the brink of rebellion. In Europe, French armies were invading Holland. Enduring a harrowing voyage, the Dutch mission was to be the last European diplomatic delegation ever received in the traditional Chinese court. Andrade shows how, in contrast to the British emissaries, the Dutch were men with deep knowledge of Asia who respected regional diplomatic norms and were committed to understanding China on its own terms. Beautifully illustrated with sketches and paintings by Chinese and European artists, The Last Embassy suggests that the Qing court, often mischaracterized as arrogant and narrow-minded, was in fact open, flexible, curious, and cosmopolitan.

Download or read book The Cambridge History of Ancient China written by Michael Loewe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-03-13 with total page 1192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge History of Ancient China provides a survey of the institutional and cultural history of pre-imperial China.

Download or read book The Last Days of Old Beijing written by Michael Meyer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-07-23 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Journalist Michael Meyer has spent his adult life in China, first in a small village as a Peace Corps volunteer, the last decade in Beijing--where he has witnessed the extraordinary transformation the country has experienced in that time. For the past two years he has been completely immersed in the ancient city, living on one of its famed hutong in a century-old courtyard home he shares with several families, teaching English at a local elementary school--while all around him "progress" closes in as the neighborhood is methodically destroyed to make way for high-rise buildings, shopping malls, and other symbols of modern, urban life. The city, he shows, has been demolished many times before; however, he writes, "the epitaph for Beijing will read: born 1280, died 2008...what emperors, warlords, Japanese invaders, and Communist planners couldn't eradicate, the market economy can." The Last Days of Old Beijing tells the story of this historic city from the inside out-through the eyes of those whose lives are in the balance: the Widow who takes care of Meyer; his students and fellow teachers, the first-ever description of what goes on in a Chinese public school; the local historian who rallies against the government. The tension of preservation vs. modernization--the question of what, in an ancient civilization, counts as heritage, and what happens when a billion people want to live the way Americans do--suffuse Meyer's story.

Download or read book A Comrade Lost and Found written by Jan Wong and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2009 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hoping to make amends, Wong returns to Beijing to find the classmate she betrayed during the Cultural Revolution. As she traces her way from one former comrade to the next, Wong unearths not only the fate of the woman she is searching for but a web of fates that mirrors the dramatic journey of contemporary China.

Download or read book Early Medieval China written by Wendy Swartz and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 745 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative sourcebook builds a dynamic understanding of China's early medieval period (220–589) through an original selection and arrangement of literary, historical, religious, and critical texts. A tumultuous and formative era, these centuries saw the longest stretch of political fragmentation in China's imperial history, resulting in new ethnic configurations, the rise of powerful clans, and a pervasive divide between north and south. Deploying thematic categories, the editors sketch the period in a novel way for students and, by featuring many texts translated into English for the first time, recast the era for specialists. Thematic topics include regional definitions and tensions, governing mechanisms and social reality, ideas of self and other, relations with the unseen world, everyday life, and cultural concepts. Within each section, the editors and translators introduce the selected texts and provide critical commentary on their historical significance, along with suggestions for further reading and research.

Download or read book The Tragedy of Liberation written by Frank Dikötter and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-08-29 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second installment in 'The People's Trilogy', the groundbreaking series from Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author Frank Dikötter 'For anyone who wants to understand the current Beijing regime, this is essential background reading' Anne Applebaum 'Essential reading for all who want to understand the darkness that lies at the heart of one of the world's most important revolutions' Guardian 'Dikötter performs here a tremendous service by making legible the hugely controversial origins of the present Chinese political order' Timothy Snyder In 1949 Mao Zedong hoisted the red flag over Beijing's Forbidden City. Instead of liberating the country, the communists destroyed the old order and replaced it with a repressive system that would dominate every aspect of Chinese life. In an epic of revolution and violence which draws on newly opened party archives, interviews and memoirs, Frank Dikötter interweaves the stories of millions of ordinary people with the brutal politics of Mao's court. A gripping account of how people from all walks of life were caught up in a tragedy that sent at least five million civilians to their deaths.

Download or read book Beijing Welcomes You written by Tom Scocca and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2012-07-03 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries, Beijing was closed off to the world, turned inward and literally built around the imperial Forbidden City, the emblem of all that was unknowable about China. But now the capital is reinventing itself to reflect China’s global influence, progress, and prosperity. When Tom Scocca arrived—an American eager to see another culture—Beijing was looking toward welcoming the world to its Olympics, and preparations were in full swing to renew itself. Scocca discovered a city of contradictions—modern and ancient, friendly yet wary, bold and insecure. He talked to scientists tasked with changing the weather, and interviewed architects; checked out the campaign to stop public spitting; documented the planting of trees, the rerouting of traffic, the demolition of the old city, and the designs of a new metropolis, all the while finding the city more daunting, and more intimate. Beijing Welcomes You is a glimpse into the future and an encounter with an urban place we do not yet fully comprehend, and a superpower it is essential we get to know better.

Download or read book China A to Z written by May-lee Chai and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-11-25 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A practical and accessible guide to an ancient but rapidly changing culture—now revised and updated Perfect for business, pleasure, or armchair travelers, China A to Z explains the customs, culture, and etiquette essential for any trip or for anyone wanting to understand this complex country. In one hundred brief, reader-friendly essays alphabetized by subject, this fully revised and updated edition provides a crash course in the etiquette and politics of contemporary China as well as the nation’s geography and venerable history. In it, readers will discover: · How the recently selected President and his advisors approach global relations · Why China is considered the fastest growing market for fashion and luxury goods · What you should bring when visiting a Chinese household · What’s hot in Chinese art · How recent scandals impact Chinese society From architecture and body language to Confucianism and feng shui, China A to Z offers accessible and authoritative information about China.