Download or read book Beijing from Below written by Harriet Evans and published by Duke University Press Books. This book was released on 2020-05-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the early 1950s and the accelerated demolition and construction of Beijing's “old city” in preparation for the 2008 Olympics, the residents of Dashalar—one of the capital city's poorest neighborhoods and only a stone's throw from Tian’anmen Square—lived in dilapidated conditions without sanitation. Few had stable employment. Today, most of Dashalar's original inhabitants have been relocated, displaced by gentrification. In Beijing from Below Harriet Evans captures the last gasps of subaltern life in Dashalar. Drawing on oral histories that reveal memories and experiences of several neighborhood families, she reflects on the relationships between individual, family, neighborhood, and the state; poverty and precarity; gender politics and ethical living; and resistance to and accommodation of party-state authority. Evans contends that residents' assertion of belonging to their neighborhood signifies not a nostalgic clinging to the past, but a rejection of their marginalization and a desire for recognition. Foregrounding the experiences of the last of Dashalar's older denizens as key to understanding Beijing's recent history, Evans complicates official narratives of China's economic success while raising crucial questions about the place of the subaltern in history.

Download or read book Beijing from Below written by Harriet Evans and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-01 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the early 1950s and the accelerated demolition and construction of Beijing's “old city” in preparation for the 2008 Olympics, the residents of Dashalar—one of the capital city's poorest neighborhoods and only a stone's throw from Tian’anmen Square—lived in dilapidated conditions without sanitation. Few had stable employment. Today, most of Dashalar's original inhabitants have been relocated, displaced by gentrification. In Beijing from Below Harriet Evans captures the last gasps of subaltern life in Dashalar. Drawing on oral histories that reveal memories and experiences of several neighborhood families, she reflects on the relationships between individual, family, neighborhood, and the state; poverty and precarity; gender politics and ethical living; and resistance to and accommodation of party-state authority. Evans contends that residents' assertion of belonging to their neighborhood signifies not a nostalgic clinging to the past, but a rejection of their marginalization and a desire for recognition. Foregrounding the experiences of the last of Dashalar's older denizens as key to understanding Beijing's recent history, Evans complicates official narratives of China's economic success while raising crucial questions about the place of the subaltern in history.

Download or read book Capitalism from Below written by Victor Nee and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-19 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over 630 million Chinese escaped poverty since the 1980s, the largest decrease in poverty in history. Studying 700 manufacturing firms in the Yangzi region, the authors argue that the engine of China’s economic miracle—private enterprise—did not originate at the top but bubbled up from below, overcoming initial obstacles set up by the government.

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 Beijing Payback written by Daniel Nieh and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Propulsive. . . . Highly enjoyable. . . . It sets up a sequel, one that I very much look forward to reading.” —The New York Times Book Review A fresh, smart, and fast-paced revenge thriller about a college basketball player who discovers shocking truths about his family in the wake of his father’s murder Victor Li is devastated by his father’s murder, and shocked by a confessional letter he finds among his father’s things. In it, his father admits that he was never just a restaurateur—in fact he was part of a vast international crime syndicate that formed during China’s leanest communist years. Victor travels to Beijing, where he navigates his father’s secret criminal life, confronting decades-old grudges, violent spats, and a shocking new enterprise that the organization wants to undertake. Standing up against it is likely what got his father killed, but Victor remains undeterred. He enlists his growing network of allies and friends to finish what his father started, no matter the costs.

Download or read book China s Great Train written by Abrahm Lustgarten and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-05-12 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lustgarten's book is a timely and provocative account of China's unstoppable quest to build a railway into Tibet, and the nation's obsession to transform its land and its people.

Download or read book Beijing Bastard written by Val Wang and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-10-30 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A humorous and moving coming-of-age story that brings a unique, not-quite-outsider’s perspective to China’s shift from ancient empire to modern superpower Raised in a strict Chinese-American household in the suburbs, Val Wang dutifully got good grades, took piano lessons, and performed in a Chinese dance troupe—until she shaved her head and became a leftist, the stuff of many teenage rebellions. But Val’s true mutiny was when she moved to China, the land her parents had fled before the Communist takeover in 1949. Val arrives in Beijing in 1998 expecting to find freedom but instead lives in the old city with her traditional relatives, who wake her at dawn with the sound of a state-run television program playing next to her cot, make a running joke of how much she eats, and monitor her every move. But outside, she soon discovers a city rebelling against its roots just as she is, struggling too to find a new, modern identity. Rickshaws make way for taxicabs, skyscrapers replace hutong courtyard houses, and Beijing prepares to make its debut on the world stage with the 2008 Olympics. And in the gritty outskirts of the city where she moves, a thriving avant-garde subculture is making art out of the chaos. Val plunges into the city’s dizzying culture and nightlife and begins shooting a documentary, about a Peking Opera family who is witnessing the death of their traditional art. Brilliantly observed and winningly told, Beijing Bastard is a compelling story of a young woman finding her place in the world and of China, as its ancient past gives way to a dazzling but uncertain future.

Download or read book Private Life under Socialism written by Yunxiang Yan and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2003-03-12 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For seven years in the 1970s, the author lived in a village in northeast China as an ordinary farmer. In 1989, he returned to the village as an anthropologist to begin the unparalleled span of eleven years’ fieldwork that has resulted in this book—a comprehensive, vivid, and nuanced account of family change and the transformation of private life in rural China from 1949 to 1999. The author’s focus on the personal and the emotional sets this book apart from most studies of the Chinese family. Yan explores private lives to examine areas of family life that have been largely overlooked, such as emotion, desire, intimacy, privacy, conjugality, and individuality. He concludes that the past five decades have witnessed a dual transformation of private life: the rise of the private family, within which the private lives of individual women and men are thriving.

Download or read book The Man from Beijing written by Henning Mankell and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2010-02-16 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the internationally acclaimed author of the Kurt Wallander mysteries comes an extraordinary stand-alone novel - both a mystery and a sweeping drama - that traces the legacy of the nineteenth-century slave trade between China and America. January 2006. In the small Swedish hamlet of Hesjövallen, a horrific scene is discovered: nineteen people have been tortured and massacred an the only clue is a red silk ribbon found at the scene. Judge Birgitta Roslin has a particular reason to be shocked by the crime: her mother's adoptive parents, the Andréns, are among the victims. Investigating further, she learns that an Andrén family living in Nevada has also been murdered. Travelling to Hesjövallen, she finds a diary, kept by a gangmaster on the railway built across America in the 1860s, full of vivid descriptions of the brutality with which the Chinese and other slave workers were treated. She discovers that the red silk ribbon found at the crime scene came from a local Chinese restaurant, and she learns that a Chinese man, a stranger to the town, was staying at a local boarding house at the time of the atrocity. The police insist that only a lunatic could have committed such a horrific crime, but Birgitta suspects that there is much more to it, and she is determined to uncover the truth. Her search takes her from Sweden to Beijing and back, but Mankell's narrative also takes us 150 years into the past: to China and America when the hatred that fuelled the massacre was born, a hatred transformed and complicated over time and that will catch up to Birgitta as she draws ever closer to discovering who is behind the Hesjövallen murders.

Download or read book Blessings from Beijing written by Greg C. Bruno and published by University Press of New England. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As we approach the sixtieth anniversary of China’s 1959 invasion of Tibet—and the subsequent creation of the Tibetan exile community—the question of the diaspora’s survival looms large. Beijing’s foreign policy has grown more adventurous, particularly since the post-Olympic expansion of 2008. As the pressure mounts, Tibetan refugee families that have made their homes outside China—in the mountains of Nepal, the jungles of India, or the cold concrete houses high above the Dalai Lama’s monastery in Dharamsala—are migrating once again. Blessings from Beijing untangles the chains that tie Tibetans to China and examines the political, social, and economic pressures that are threatening to destroy Tibet’s refugee communities. Journalist Greg Bruno has spent nearly two decades living and working in Tibetan areas. Bruno journeys to the front lines of this fight: to the high Himalayas of Nepal, where Chinese agents pay off Nepali villagers to inform on Tibetan asylum seekers; to the monasteries of southern India, where pro-China monks wish the Dalai Lama dead; to Asia’s meditation caves, where lost souls ponder the fine line between love and war; and to the streets of New York City, where the next generation of refugees strategizes about how to survive China’s relentless assault. But Bruno’s reporting does not stop at well-worn tales of Chinese meddling and political intervention. It goes beyond them—and within them—to explore how China’s strategy is changing the Tibetan exile community forever.

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 WHY CHINA LEADS THE WORLD written by Godfree Roberts and published by Godfree Roberts. This book was released on 2021-01-04 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The First Book to Explain China's Success: Talent at the Top, Data in the Middle, Democracy at the Bottom. The Coronavirus epidemic triggered a change of the global balance of power: by the end of 2020 there were more hungry children, more poor, homeless, drug addicted, and imprisoned people in America than in China. Why China Leads the World investigates why the epidemic accelerated the change of global leadership and examines China's bigger, steadier economy, its leadership in science, stronger military, more powerful allies, and wider diplomatic support. Crammed with charts, footnotes, and quotes, it is a profoundly disturbing book, but one that helps you understand the tectonic shift, adapt to this new era, and thrive in it. China's grand strategy is simple: create a home for the world's happiest people, establish the world's best diplomatic relationships, its strongest economy, healthiest environment, most powerful military, newest technologies, and best human rights record. At that point, the world's hearts and minds will follow.

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 Notes from a Beijing Coffeeshop written by Jon Geldart and published by Lid Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-16 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I was never really a big coffee drinker and, of course, tea is the thing in China. But I just can't help myself. Also, the place I have now landed in, and my favourite, where most of my meetings and conversations seem to take place, is an eclectic mix of Chinese tea house and Western coffeeshop". Thus, begins Notes from a Beijing Coffeeshop, in which the author provides a series of fascinating observations of today's fast-changing China. Jon Geldart has spent the past five years in Beijing. His conversations with Chinese business leaders, opinion formers and ordinary Chinese provide deep insights into Chinese life, business and culture. Engaging and enlightening, the stories and profiles in this book are a gateway to seeing how people are really do business and living in the new China.

Download or read book Lee Kuan Yew written by Graham Allison and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CNN “Book of the Week” Featuring a foreword by Henry Kissinger The grand strategist and founder of modern Singapore offers key insights and opinions on globalization, geopolitics, economic growth, and democracy in a series of interviews with the author of Destined for War, and others “If you are interested in the future of Asia, which means the future of the world, you’ve got to read this book.” —Fareed Zakaria, CNN When Lee Kuan Yew speaks, presidents, prime ministers, diplomats, and CEOs listen. Lee, the founding father of modern Singapore and its prime minister from 1959 to 1990, has honed his wisdom during more than fifty years on the world stage. Almost single-handedly responsible for transforming Singapore into a Western-style economic success, he offers a unique perspective on the geopolitics of East and West. American presidents from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama have welcomed him to the White House; British prime ministers from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair have recognized his wisdom; and business leaders from Rupert Murdoch to Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, have praised his accomplishments. This book gathers key insights from interviews, speeches, and Lee’s voluminous published writings and presents them in an engaging question and answer format. Lee offers his assessment of China’s future, asserting, among other things, that “China will want to share this century as co-equals with the U.S.” He affirms the United States’ position as the world’s sole superpower but expresses dismay at the vagaries of its political system. He offers strategic advice for dealing with China and goes on to discuss India’s future, Islamic terrorism, economic growth, geopolitics and globalization, and democracy. Lee does not pull his punches, offering his unvarnished opinions on multiculturalism, the welfare state, education, and the free market. This little book belongs on the reading list of every world leader.

Download or read book Death in Beijing written by Daniel Asen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-28 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative exploration of China's modern transformation through the history of homicide investigation and forensic science in Republican Beijing. Daniel Asen examines the process through which imperial China's tradition of forensic science came to serve the needs of a changing state and society under dramatically new circumstances.

Download or read book In Search of Old Peking written by L. C. Arlington and published by . This book was released on 2016-11-30 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Search of Old Peking isportrait of one of the world's great cities in the 1930's and a lament for the end of a unique era. First published in 1935, this book was regarded as the standard guide to Peking. It remains astonishingly evocative today, for residents and visitors alike.