Through a series of lively and absorbing portraits of iconic modern Chinese leaders and thinkers, two of today’s foremost specialists on China provide a panoramic narrative of this country’s rise to preeminence that is at once analytical and personal. How did a nation, after a long and painful period of dynastic decline, intellectual upheaval, foreign occupation, civil war, and revolution, manage to burst forth onto the world stage with such an impressive run of hyperdevelopment and wealth...

In the winter of 1952, at the height of the Korean War, the CIA flew a covert mission into China to pick up an agent. Trained on a remote Pacific island, the agent belonged to an obscure anti-communist group known as the Third Force based out of Hong Kong. The exfiltration would fail disastrously, and one of the Americans on the mission, a recent Yale graduate named John T. Downey, ended up a prisoner of Mao Zedong's government for the next twenty years.Unraveling the truth behind ...

Winner of the Lionel Gelber PrizeNational Book Critics Circle Award FinalistAn 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 YearPerhaps no one in the twentieth century ...

In his new book on China, Henry Kissinger turns for the first time at book-length to the country he has known intimately for decades, and whose modern relations with the West he helped shape. Drawing on historical records as well as his conversations with Chinese leaders over the past forty years, Kissinger examines how China has approached diplomacy, strategy, and negotiation throughout its history, and reflects on the consequences for the 21st-century world.As Kissinger underscor...

Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction finalistWinner of the National Book Award in nonfiction.As the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, Evan Osnos was on the ground in China for years, witness to profound political, economic, and cultural upheaval.Age of Ambition provides a vibrant, colorful, and revelatory inner history of China during a moment of profound transformation.From abroad, we often see Chin...

As one of the oldest civilizations in the world, China has a vast, rich history. In order to assist with the study of Chinese history, this book has been broken down into a series of straightforward, easy-to-read vignettes.Inside you will read about...✓ The Great Flood✓ The Great Wall is begun✓ The Terra Cotta Army is created✓ Gunpowder is invented✓ Great Anti-Buddhist Persecution✓ Marco Polo travels to China✓ The Fo...

Red at Heart conjures a tale of cross-cultural romance from a topic that is normally seen in geopolitical or ideological terms--and thereby offers a new interpretation of twentieth century communism's most crucial alliance. This is the multigenerational history of people who experienced Sino-Soviet affairs most intimately: prominent Chinese revolutionaries who traveled to Russia in their youths to study, often falling in love and having children there. Their deeply personal memoir...

A new interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, this book is a celebration of the Way of Harmony and Balance. Ray Grigg transforms what has been traditionally called the Tao Te Ching, what he calls the Lao Tzu, from the mysterious to the meaningful. He accomplishes this by abandoning the historical convention of a literal reading of the Chinese texts. The result is a poetic expression of ancient wisdom in a language that readers can approach directly. The wisdom of the Lao Tzu rests in ...

The incredible story of how Chiang Kai-shek's defeated army came to dominate the Asian drug tradeAfter their defeat in China's civil war, remnants of Chiang Kai-shek's armies took refuge in Burma before being driven into Thailand and Laos. Based on recently declassified government documents, The Secret Army: Chiang Kai-shek and the Drug Warlords of the Golden Triangle reveals the shocking true story of what happened after the Chinese Nationalists lost the ...

This book explains and illustrates as many varieties of Ming ceramics as possible. The text is based primarily on information obtained from Chinese sources and the occasional notes made by Europeans who visited China in Ming times. To these, Mr. Hobson has added his own penetrating deductions, made after careful study of well-authenticated specimens and of observation by earlier scholars. His presentation is not only clear and precise but also incontestably authoritative and at the same ti...

Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), the first of the early Jesuit missionaries of the China mission, is widely considered the most outstanding cultural mediator of all time between China and the West. This engrossing and fluid book offers a thorough, knowledgeable biography of this fascinating and influential man, telling a deeply human and captivating story that still resonates today.Michela Fontana traces Ricci's travels in China in detail, providing a rich portrait of Ming China and the g...

According to conventional wisdom, rising corruption reduces economic growth. And yet, between 1978 and 2010, even as officials were looting state coffers, extorting bribes, raking in kickbacks, and scraping off rents at unprecedented rates, the Chinese economy grew at an average annual rate of 9 percent. In Double Paradox, Andrew Wedeman seeks to explain why the Chinese economy performed so well despite widespread corruption at almost kleptocratic levels.Wedeman finds that ...