Download or read book Mao s Bestiary written by Liz P. Y. Chee and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-29 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Controversy over the medicinal uses of wild animals in China has erupted around the ethics and efficacy of animal-based drugs, the devastating effect of animal farming on wildlife conservation, and the propensity of these practices to foster zoonotic diseases. In Mao's Bestiary, Liz P. Y. Chee traces the history of the use of medicinal animals in modern China. While animal parts and tissue have been used in Chinese medicine for centuries, Chee demonstrates that the early Communist state expanded and systematized their production and use to compensate for drug shortages, generate foreign investment in high-end animal medicines, and facilitate an ideological shift toward legitimating folk medicines. Among other topics, Chee investigates the craze for chicken blood therapy during the Cultural Revolution, the origins of deer antler farming under Mao and bear bile farming under Deng, and the crucial influence of the Soviet Union and North Korea on Chinese zootherapies. In the process, Chee shows Chinese medicine to be a realm of change rather than a timeless tradition, a hopeful conclusion given current efforts to reform its use of animals.
Download or read book People Or Monsters written by Binyan Liu and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The title piece of this collection was an immediate sensation when it was published in China in September 1979. an outstanding example of 'reportage', or fictionalized social analysis, 'People or Monsters?' is a story of the corruption of an entire commune in a small county of the remote Heilongjiang Province of northeastern China. There female candre by the name of Wang Shouxin gained control of the commune and ran it for her personal benefit. While many in China were scandalized by Liu's expose, many more saw in it a microcosm of Chinese society."--Page 4 of cover.
Download or read book The Poems of Mao Zedong written by Zedong Mao and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-06-14 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mao Zedong, leader of the revolution and absolute chairman of the People's Republic of China, was also a calligrapher and a poet of extraordinary grace and eloquent simplicity. The poems in this beautiful edition (from the 1963 Beijing edition), translated and introduced by Willis Barnstone, are expressions of decades of struggle, the painful loss of his first wife, his hope for a new China, and his ultimate victory over the Nationalist forces. Willis Barnstone's introduction, his short biography of Mao and brief history of the revolution, and his notes on Chinese versification all combine to enrich the Western reader's understanding of Mao's poetry.
Download or read book Bestiary written by K-Ming Chang and published by One World. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • Three generations of Taiwanese American women are haunted by the myths of their homeland in this spellbinding, visceral debut about one family’s queer desires, violent impulses, and buried secrets. “Gorgeous and gorgeously grotesque . . . Every line of this sensuous, magical-realist marvel is utterly alive.”—O: The Oprah Magazine FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY O: The Oprah Magazine • NPR • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews One evening, Mother tells Daughter a story about a tiger spirit who lived in a woman’s body. She was called Hu Gu Po, and she hungered to eat children, especially their toes. Soon afterward, Daughter awakes with a tiger tail. And more mysterious events follow: Holes in the backyard spit up letters penned by her grandmother; a visiting aunt arrives with snakes in her belly; a brother tests the possibility of flight. All the while, Daughter is falling for Ben, a neighborhood girl with strange powers of her own. As the two young lovers translate the grandmother’s letters, Daughter begins to understand that each woman in her family embodies a myth—and that she will have to bring her family’s secrets to light in order to change their destiny. With a poetic voice of crackling electricity, K-Ming Chang is an explosive young writer who combines the wit and fabulism of Helen Oyeyemi with the subversive storytelling of Maxine Hong Kingston. Tracing one family’s history from Taiwan to America, from Arkansas to California, Bestiary is a novel of migration, queer lineages, and girlhood. Praise for Bestiary “[A] vivid, fabulist debut . . . the prose is full of imagery. Chang’s wild story of a family’s tenuous grasp on belonging in the U.S. stands out with a deep commitment to exploring discomfort with the body and its transformations.”—Publishers Weekly
Download or read book China s Environmental Challenges written by Judith Shapiro and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2024-01-17 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China’s huge environmental challenges affect not only the health and well-being of China but the very future of the planet. In this fully revised and updated third edition of her acclaimed book, noted scholar of Chinese environmentalism Judith Shapiro explores China’s struggle to achieve the ‘ecological civilization’ championed by Xi Jinping since 2017. Drawing on six core analytical concepts - globalization, governance, national identity, civil society, environmental justice, and extractivism - Shapiro ably demonstrates the multifaceted and complex nature of this struggle. China’s precipitous economic growth has carried a heavy cost in air and water pollution, soil contamination, and loss of habitat for the biodiversity upon which human life depends. But its quest for sustainability has been further hampered by authoritarian governance patterns, soaring middle class consumption, the need to provide employment and safety nets for a population of more than one billion, and a manufacturing sector thirsty to secure global resources and sell to new markets. Transformation to a more sustainable development model is still possible. But, as Shapiro persuasively argues, this will require humility, creativity, and a rejection of business as usual. China – and the planet – are at a pivotal moment.
Download or read book Cultural China 2021 written by Séagh Kehoe and published by University of Westminster Press. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultural China is a unique annual publication for up-to-date, informed and accessible commentary about Chinese and Sinophone languages, cultural practices, politics and production, and their critical analysis. It builds on the University of Westminster’s Contemporary China Centre Blog, providing additional reflective introductory pieces to contextualise each of the seven chapters. The articles in this Review speak to the challenging and eventful year that was 2021 as it unfolded across cultural China. Thematically, they range from health and medicine, environment, food, children and parenting, via film, red culture and calls for action. Many of the articles in this book focus on the People’s Republic of China, but they also draw attention to the multiple Chinese and Sinophone cultural practices that exist within, across, and beyond national borders. The Review is distinctive in its cultural studies-based approach and contributes a much-needed critical perspective from the Humanities to the study of cultural China. It aims to promote interdisciplinary dialogue and debate about the social, cultural, political, and historical dynamics that inform life in cultural China today, offering academics, activists, practitioners, and politicians a key reference with which to situate current events in and relating to cultural China in a wider context.
Download or read book Gathering Medicines written by Judith Farquhar and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-04-19 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 2000s, the central government of China encouraged all of the nation’s registered minorities to “salvage, sort, synthesize, and elevate” folk medical knowledges in an effort to create local health care systems comparable to the nationally supported institutions of traditional Chinese medicine. Gathering Medicines bears witness to this remarkable moment of knowledge development while sympathetically introducing the myriad therapeutic traditions of southern China. Over a period of six years, Judith Farquhar and Lili Lai worked with seven minority nationality groups in China’s southern mountains, observing how medicines were gathered and local healing systems codified. Gathering Medicines shares their intimate view of how people understand ethnicity, locality, the body, and nature. This ethnography of knowledge diversities in multiethnic China is a testament to the rural wisdom of mountain healers, one that theorizes, from the ground up, the dynamic encounters between formal statist knowledge and the popular authority of the wild.
Download or read book Oxford Handbook of Commodities History written by Stubbs and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 753 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Commodities provide a lens through which local and global histories can be understood and written. The study of commodities history follows these goods as they make their way from land and water through processing and trade to eventual consumption. It is a fast-developing field with collaborative, comparative, and interdisciplinary research, with new information technologies becoming increasingly important. Although many individual researchers continue to focus on particular commodities and regions, they often do so in partnership with others working on different areas and employing a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, placing commodities history at the forefront of local and global historical analysis. This Oxford Handbook features contributions from scholars involved in these developments across a range of countries and linguistic regions. They discuss the state of the art in their fields, draw on their own work, and signal lacunae for future research. Each of its 31 chapters focuses on an important thematic area within commodities history: key approaches, global histories, modes of production, people and land, environmental impact, consumption, and new methodologies. Taken together, the Oxford Handbook of Commodities History offers insight into the directions in which commodities history is heading, and the multiple ways in which it can contribute to a better understanding of the world"--
Download or read book Asian Medical Industries written by Stephan Kloos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-02-28 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops the concept of Asian Medical Industries as a novel perspective on traditional Asian medicines. Complementing and updating existing work in this field, the book provides a critical and comparative analytic framework for understanding Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda, Sowa Rigpa, and Japanese Kampo in the 21st century. No longer subaltern health resources or conservative systems of traditional knowledge, these medicines have become an integral part of modern Asia as innovative, lucrative industries. Ten original case studies employ insights from anthropology, history, geography, pharmaceutical sciences, botany, and economics to trace the transformation of Asian medical traditions into rapidly growing and dynamic pharmaceutical industries. Collectively, these contributions identify this as a major phenomenon impacting Asian and global healthcare, economics, cultural politics, and environments. The book suggests that we can learn more about Asian medicines today by approaching them as industries rather than as cultural or epistemic systems. Asian Medical Industries is a highly original resource for students and scholars across a range of academic fields such as anthropology, history, and Asian studies, as well as medical practitioners, health sector actors, and policymakers.
Download or read book A Certain Justice written by Haiyan Lee and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-06-05 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "China has an image as a realm of Oriental despotism where law is at best window-dressing and at worst an instrument of coercion and tyranny. The rule of law seems an elusive ideal in the face of entrenched obstacles baked, as it were, into China's cultural and political DNA. In this highly original contribution to the interdisciplinary field of law and humanities, Haiyan Lee contends that this image arises from an ahistorical understanding of China's political-legal tradition, particularly the failure to distinguish what she calls high justice and low justice. Lee argues that the liberal (and, so to speak, horizontal) conception of justice as fairness is quite different from the Chinese understanding of law. In the Chinese legal imagination, she shows, justice is a vertical concept, with low justice between individuals firmly subordinated to the high justice of the state. China's political-legal culture mistrusts law's ability to deliver justice and privileges moral over procedural justice. Lee shows that Chinese literature and film invariably dramatize the relationship between law and morality in ways that emphasize law's concession to moral sentiments and the triumph of moral justice through the discretion of a sagacious judge or the defiance of a vigilante hero. As China rises to global superpower status, its conception of justice can no longer be treated as a pale, floundering, and negligible sideshow to the legal drama of defending liberty and upholding human rights in the West. Lee's book helps us recognize the fight for justice outside the familiar arenas of liberal democracy and in terms other than those furnished by the rule of law"--
Download or read book On the Edge written by Franck Bill and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering examination of history, current affairs, and daily life along the RussiaÐChina border, one of the worldÕs least understood and most politically charged frontiers. The border between Russia and China winds for 2,600 miles through rivers, swamps, and vast taiga forests. ItÕs a thin line of direct engagement, extraordinary contrasts, frequent tension, and occasional war between two of the worldÕs political giants. Franck Bill and Caroline Humphrey have spent years traveling through and studying this important yet forgotten region. Drawing on pioneering fieldwork, they introduce readers to the lifeways, politics, and history of one of the worldÕs most consequential and enigmatic borderlands. It is telling that, along a border consisting mainly of rivers, there is not a single operating passenger bridge. Two different worlds have emerged. On the Russian side, in territory seized from China in the nineteenth century, defense is prioritized over the economy, leaving dilapidated villages slumbering amid the forests. For its part, the Chinese side is heavily settled and increasingly prosperous and dynamic. Moscow worries about the imbalance, and both governments discourage citizens from interacting. But as Bill and Humphrey show, cross-border connection is a fact of life, whatever distant authorities say. There are marriages, friendships, and sexual encounters. There are joint businesses and underground deals, including no shortage of smuggling. Meanwhile some indigenous peoples, persecuted on both sides, seek to ÒreviveÓ their own alternative social groupings that span the border. And Chinese towns make much of their proximity to ÒEurope,Ó building giant Russian dolls and replicas of St. BasilÕs Cathedral to woo tourists. Surprising and rigorously researched, On the Edge testifies to the rich diversity of an extraordinary world haunted by history and divided by remote political decisions but connected by the ordinary imperatives of daily life.
Download or read book The Viral Politics of Covid 19 written by Vanessa Lemm and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-09-20 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book critically examines the COVID-19 pandemic and its legal and biological governance using a multidisciplinary approach. The perspectives reflected in this volume investigate the imbrications between technosphere and biosphere at social, economic, and political levels. The biolegal dimensions of our evolving understanding of “home” are analysed as the common thread linking the problem of zoonotic diseases and planetary health with that of geopolitics, biosecurity, bioeconomics and biophilosophies of the plant-animal-human interface. In doing so, the contributions collectively highlight the complexities, challenges, and opportunities for humanity, opening new perspectives on how to inhabit our shared planet. This volume will broadly appeal to scholars and students in anthropology, cultural and media studies, history, philosophy, political science and public health, sociology and science and technology studies.
Download or read book Strange Beasts of China written by Yan Ge and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Editors' Choice and Notable Book of 2021 "Best Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror of 2021"—The Washington Post From one of the most exciting voices in contemporary Chinese literature, an uncanny and playful novel that blurs the line between human and beast… In the fictional Chinese city of Yong’an, an amateur cryptozoologist is commissioned to uncover the stories of its fabled beasts. These creatures live alongside humans in near-inconspicuousness—save their greenish skin, serrated earlobes, and strange birthmarks. Aided by her elusive former professor and his enigmatic assistant, our narrator sets off to document each beast, and is slowly drawn deeper into a mystery that threatens her very sense of self. Part detective story, part metaphysical enquiry, Strange Beasts of China engages existential questions of identity, humanity, love and morality with whimsy and stylistic verve.
Download or read book Newborn Socialist Things written by Laurence Coderre and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-28 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary China is seen as a place of widespread commodification and consumerism, while the preceeding Maoist Cultural Revolution is typically understood as a time when goods were scarce and the state criticized what little consumption was possible. Indeed, with the exception of the likeness and words of Mao Zedong, both the media and material culture of the Cultural Revolution are often characterized as a void out of which the postsocialist world of commodity consumption miraculously sprang fully formed. In Newborn Socialist Things, Laurence Coderre explores the material culture of the Cultural Revolution to show how it paved the way for commodification in contemporary China. Examining objects ranging from retail counters and porcelain statuettes to textbooks and vanity mirrors, she shows how the project of building socialism in China has always been intimately bound up with consumption. By focusing on these objects—or “newborn socialist things”—along with the Cultural Revolution’s media environment, discourses of materiality, and political economy, Coderre reconfigures understandings of the origins of present-day China.
Download or read book A Bestiary written by Lily K. Hoang and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compilation of essays on the author's observations of life described by Wayne Koestenbaum as "a work of great subtlety, precision, intelligence, daring, and emotive keenness" -- Page [4] cover.
Download or read book A Chinese Bestiary written by Richard E. Strassberg and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-03 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Chinese Bestiary presents a fascinating pageant of mythical creatures from a unique and enduring cosmography written in ancient China. The Guideways through Mountains and Seas, compiled between the fourth and first centuries b.c.e., contains descriptions of hundreds of fantastic denizens of mountains, rivers, islands, and seas, along with minerals, flora, and medicine. The text also represents a wide range of beliefs held by the ancient Chinese. Richard Strassberg brings the Guideways to life for modern readers by weaving together translations from the work itself with information from other texts and recent archaeological finds to create a lavishly illustrated guide to the imaginative world of early China. Unlike the bestiaries of the late medieval period in Europe, the Guideways was not interpreted allegorically; the strange creatures described in it were regarded as actual entities found throughout the landscape. The work was originally used as a sacred geography, as a guidebook for travelers, and as a book of omens. Today, it is regarded as the richest repository of ancient Chinese mythology and shamanistic wisdom. The Guideways may have been illustrated from the start, but the earliest surviving illustrations are woodblock engravings from a rare 1597 edition. Seventy-six of those plates are reproduced here for the first time, and they provide a fine example of the Chinese engraver's art during the late Ming dynasty. This beautiful volume, compiled by a well-known specialist in the field, provides a fascinating window on the thoughts and beliefs of an ancient people, and will delight specialists and general readers alike.
Download or read book Was Mao Really a Monster written by Gregor Benton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday was published in 2005 to a great fanfare. The book portrays Mao as a monster – equal to or worse than Hitler and Stalin – and a fool who won power by native cunning and ruled by terror. It received a rapturous welcome from reviewers in the popular press and rocketed to the top of the worldwide bestseller list. Few works on China by writers in the West have achieved its impact. Reviews by serious China scholars, however, tended to take a different view. Most were sharply critical, questioning its authority and the authors’ methods , arguing that Chang and Halliday’s book is not a work of balanced scholarship, as it purports to be, but a highly selective and even polemical study that sets out to demonise Mao. This book brings together sixteen reviews of Mao: The Unknown Story – all by internationally well-regarded specialists in modern Chinese history, and published in relatively specialised scholarly journals. Taken together they demonstrate that Chang and Halliday’s portrayal of Mao is in many places woefully inaccurate. While agreeing that Mao had many faults and was responsible for some disastrous policies, they conclude that a more balanced picture is needed.
