Download or read book Real Life in China at the Height of Empire written by Yun Ji and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Real Life in China at the Height of Empire written by and published by The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. This book was released on 2014-06-25 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toward the end of the eighteenth century Ji Xiaolan, widely regarded as the most eminent scholar and foremost wit of his age, published five collections of anecdotes and discourses centring on the interaction between the mundane and spirit worlds, but also including purely earthly life stories and happenings. Some items represent Ji's own thought and experiences, but the majority were supplied by others, Ji acting only as recorder. Settings range socially from the milieux of peasants, servants and merchants to those of governors and ministers, and geographically extend to the far reaches of the Qing empire. Contents may dwell on comedy or tragedy, cruelty or kindness, corruption or integrity, erudition or ignorance, credulity or scepticism; several items borrow ghost stories to satirize men and manners; some straightforwardly examine current beliefs and practices. Taken together, this miscellany presents a picture of the contemporary world unmatched in its scope and variety of perspectives, and in this way comes nearer to depicting "real life" than novels or institutional histories.
Download or read book Restless Empire written by Odd Arne Westad and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2012-08-28 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the twenty-first century dawns, China stands at a crossroads. The largest and most populous country on earth and currently the world's second biggest economy, China has recently reclaimed its historic place at the center of global affairs after decades of internal chaos and disastrous foreign relations. But even as China tentatively reengages with the outside world, the contradictions of its development risks pushing it back into an era of insularity and instability -- a regression that, as China's recent history shows, would have serious implications for all other nations. In Restless Empire, award-winning historian Odd Arne Westad traces China's complex foreign affairs over the past 250 years, identifying the forces that will determine the country's path in the decades to come. Since the height of the Qing Empire in the eighteenth century, China's interactions -- and confrontations -- with foreign powers have caused its worldview to fluctuate wildly between extremes of dominance and subjugation, emulation and defiance. From the invasion of Burma in the 1760s to the Boxer Rebellion in the early 20th century to the 2001 standoff over a downed U.S. spy plane, many of these encounters have left Chinese with a lingering sense of humiliation and resentment, and inflamed their notions of justice, hierarchy, and Chinese centrality in world affairs. Recently, China's rising influence on the world stage has shown what the country stands to gain from international cooperation and openness. But as Westad shows, the nation's success will ultimately hinge on its ability to engage with potential international partners while simultaneously safeguarding its own strength and stability. An in-depth study by one of our most respected authorities on international relations and contemporary East Asian history, Restless Empire is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the recent past and probable future of this dynamic and complex nation.
Download or read book Daily Life in Ancient China written by Mu-chou Poo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-21 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book employs textual and archaeological material to reconstruct the various features of daily life in ancient China.
Download or read book Red Roulette written by Desmond Shum and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "THE BOOK CHINA DOESN'T WANT YOU TO READ."--CNN A riveting insider's story of how the Party and big money work in China today, by a man who, with his wife, Whitney Duan, rose to the zenith of power and wealth--and then fell out of favor. She was disappeared four years ago. News of this book led to a phone call from Whitney, proof that she's alive. As Desmond Shum was growing up impoverished in China, he vowed his life would be different. Through hard work and sheer tenacity he earned an American college degree and returned to his native country to establish himself in business. There, he met his future wife, the highly intelligent and equally ambitious Whitney Duan who was determined to make her mark within China's male-dominated society. Whitney and Desmond formed an effective team and, aided by relationships they formed with top members of China's Communist Party, the so-called red aristocracy, he vaulted into China's billionaire class. Soon they were developing the massive air cargo facility at Beijing International Airport, and they followed that feat with the creation of one of Beijing's premier hotels. They were dazzlingly successful, traveling in private jets, funding multi-million-dollar buildings and endowments, and purchasing expensive homes, vehicles, and art. But in 2017, their fates diverged irrevocably when Desmond, while residing overseas with his son, learned that his now ex-wife Whitney had vanished along with three coworkers. This is both Desmond's story and Whitney's, because she has not been able to tell it herself.
Download or read book The Long Game written by Rush Doshi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-11 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than a century, no US adversary or coalition of adversaries - not Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the Soviet Union - has ever reached sixty percent of US GDP. China is the sole exception, and it is fast emerging into a global superpower that could rival, if not eclipse, the United States. What does China want, does it have a grand strategy to achieve it, and what should the United States do about it? In The Long Game, Rush Doshi draws from a rich base of Chinese primary sources, including decades worth of party documents, leaked materials, memoirs by party leaders, and a careful analysis of China's conduct to provide a history of China's grand strategy since the end of the Cold War. Taking readers behind the Party's closed doors, he uncovers Beijing's long, methodical game to displace America from its hegemonic position in both the East Asia regional and global orders through three sequential "strategies of displacement." Beginning in the 1980s, China focused for two decades on "hiding capabilities and biding time." After the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, it became more assertive regionally, following a policy of "actively accomplishing something." Finally, in the aftermath populist elections of 2016, China shifted to an even more aggressive strategy for undermining US hegemony, adopting the phrase "great changes unseen in century." After charting how China's long game has evolved, Doshi offers a comprehensive yet asymmetric plan for an effective US response. Ironically, his proposed approach takes a page from Beijing's own strategic playbook to undermine China's ambitions and strengthen American order without competing dollar-for-dollar, ship-for-ship, or loan-for-loan.
Download or read book Making China Modern written by Klaus Mühlhahn and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2019-01-14 with total page 737 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Klaus Mühlhahn situates modern China in the nation's long, dynamic tradition of overcoming adversity and weakness through creative adaptation--a legacy of crisis and recovery that is apparent today in China's triumphs but also in its most worrisome trends. Mühlhahn's panoramic survey rewrites the history of modern China for a new generation.
Download or read book The Story of China written by Michael Wood and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A single volume history of China, offering a look into the past of the global superpower and its significance today. Michael Wood has travelled the length and breadth of China, the world’s oldest civilization and longest lasting state, to tell a thrilling story of intense drama, fabulous creativity, and deep humanity that stretches back thousands of years. After a century and a half of foreign invasion, civil war, and revolution, China has once again returned to center stage as a global superpower and the world’s second largest economy. But how did it become so dominant? Wood argues that in order to comprehend the great significance of China today, we must begin with its history. The Story of China takes a fresh look at the Middle Kingdom in the light of the recent massive changes inside the country. Taking into account exciting new archeological discoveries, the book begins with China’s prehistory—the early dynasties, the origins of the Chinese state, and the roots of Chinese culture in the age of Confucius. Wood looks at particular periods and themes that are now being reevaluated by historians, such as the renaissance of the Song with its brilliant scientific discoveries. He paints a vibrant picture of the Qing Empire in the 18th century, just before the European impact, a time when China’s rich and diverse culture was at its height. Then, Wood explores the encounter with the West, the Opium Wars, the clashes with the British, and the extraordinarily rich debates in the late 19th century that pushed China along the path to modernity. Finally, he provides a clear up-to-date account of post-1949 China, including revelations about the 1989 crisis based on newly leaked inside documents, and fresh insights into the new order of President Xi Jinping. All woven together with landscape history and the author’s own travel journals, The Story of China is the indispensable book about the most intriguing and powerful country on the world stage today.
Download or read book The Japanese Informal Empire in China 1895 1937 written by Peter Duus and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building upon a previous study of Japan's colonial empire, this volume examines the period from 1895 to 1937 when Japan's economic, social, political, and military influence in China expanded so rapidly that it supplanted the influence of Western powers competing there. These fourteen essays discuss how Japan's "informal empire" emerged in China and how that "empire" influenced Japan's own internal development. "Describes in rich detail Japan's organization of a wide range of cultural, educational, economic, military, and bureaucratic institutions that formed the mainstays of Japanese influence in China along with the trading, manufacturing, intelligence-gathering, and political intriguing which they managed."--Wen-hsin Yeh, The Journal of Asian Studies Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Ancient Chinese Warfare written by Ralph D. Sawyer and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of China is a history of warfare. Rarely in its 3,000-year existence has the country not been beset by war, rebellion, or raids. Warfare was a primary source of innovation, social evolution, and material progress in the Legendary Era, Hsia dynasty, and Shang dynasty--indeed, war was the force that formed the first cohesive Chinese empire, setting China on a trajectory of state building and aggressive activity that continues to this day. In Ancient Chinese Warfare, a preeminent expert on Chinese military history uses recently recovered documents and archaeological findings to construct a comprehensive guide to the developing technologies, strategies, and logistics of ancient Chinese militarism. The result is a definitive look at the tools and methods that won wars and shaped culture in ancient China.
Download or read book China s Grand Strategy written by Andrew Scobell and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2020-07-27 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To explore what extended competition between the United States and China might entail out to 2050, the authors of this report identified and characterized China’s grand strategy, analyzed its component national strategies (diplomacy, economics, science and technology, and military affairs), and assessed how successful China might be at implementing these over the next three decades.
Download or read book China Inside Out written by P l Ny¡ri and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "war on terror" has generated a scramble for expertise on Islamic or Asian "culture" and revived support for area studies, but it has done so at the cost of reviving the kinds of dangerous generalizations that area studies have rightly been accused of. This book provides a much-needed perspective on area studies, a perspective that is attentive to both manifestations of "traditional culture" and the new global relationships in which they are being played out. The authors shake off the shackles of the orientalist legacy but retain a close reading of local processes. They challenge the boundaries of China and question its study from different perspectives, but believe that area studies have a role to play if their geographies are studied according to certain common problems. In the case of China, the book shows the diverse array of critical but solidly grounded research approaches that can be used in studying a society. Its approach neither trivializes nor dismisses the elusive effects of culture, and it pays attention to both the state and the multiplicity of voices that challenge it.
Download or read book Imperial Twilight written by Stephen R. Platt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As China reclaims its position as a world power, Imperial Twilight looks back to tell the story of the country’s last age of ascendance and how it came to an end in the nineteenth-century Opium War. As one of the most potent turning points in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it. In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by Western traders and missionaries to “open” China even as China’s imperial rulers were struggling to manage their country’s decline and Confucian scholars grappled with how to use foreign trade to China’s advantage. The book paints an enduring portrait of an immensely profitable—and mostly peaceful—meeting of civilizations that was destined to be shattered by one of the most shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history. Brimming with a fascinating cast of British, Chinese, and American characters, this riveting narrative of relations between China and the West has important implications for today’s uncertain and ever-changing political climate.
Download or read book The Chinese Essay written by and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2002-08 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Veteran sinologist David Pollard has selected and translated the best and most representative examples of Chinese prose writing from the third century to the contemporary period. Though spanning the past 1,800 years, the bulk of the selections are from the twentieth century and range from early masters, such as Lu Xun, to the major writers of the middle generation, such as Ye Chengtao and Liang Yuchun.
Download or read book The China Nightmare written by Dan Blumenthal and published by AEI Press. This book was released on 2020-10-28 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about China's grand strategy and its future as an ambitious, declining, and dangerous rival power. Once the darling of U.S. statesmen, corporate elites, and academics, the People's Republic of China has evolved into America's most challenging strategic competitor. Its future appears increasingly dystopian. This book tells the story of how China got to this place and analyzes where it will go next and what that will mean for the future of U.S. strategy. The China Nightmare makes an extraordinarily compelling case that China's future could be dark and the free world must prepare accordingly.
Download or read book The Water Kingdom written by Philip Ball and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05-05 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Yangtze to the Yellow River, China is traversed by great waterways, which have defined its politics and ways of life for centuries. Water has been so integral to China’s culture, economy, and growth and development that it provides a window on the whole sweep of Chinese history. In The Water Kingdom, renowned writer Philip Ball opens that window to offer an epic and powerful new way of thinking about Chinese civilization. Water, Ball shows, is a key that unlocks much of Chinese culture. In The Water Kingdom, he takes us on a grand journey through China’s past and present, showing how the complexity and energy of the country and its history repeatedly come back to the challenges, opportunities, and inspiration provided by the waterways. Drawing on stories from travelers and explorers, poets and painters, bureaucrats and activists, all of whom have been influenced by an environment shaped and permeated by water, Ball explores how the ubiquitous relationship of the Chinese people to water has made it an enduring metaphor for philosophical thought and artistic expression. From the Han emperors to Mao, the ability to manage the waters ? to provide irrigation and defend against floods ? was a barometer of political legitimacy, often resulting in engineering works on a gigantic scale. It is a struggle that continues today, as the strain of economic growth on water resources may be the greatest threat to China’s future. The Water Kingdom offers an unusual and fascinating history, uncovering just how much of China’s art, politics, and outlook have been defined by the links between humanity and nature.
Download or read book Coping with the Future written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coping with the Future: Theories and Practices of Divination in East Asia offers contributions to various practical and theoretical aspects of divination from antiquity to the present in East Asia.
