What must China do to become truly democratic and equitable? This question animates most progressive debates about this potential superpower, and inChina's Twentieth Century the country's leading critic, Wang Hui, turns to the past for an answer. Beginning with the birth of modern politics in the 1911 revolution, Wang tracks the initial flourishing of political life, its blossoming in the radical sixties, and its decline in China's more recent liberalization, to arrive at the cros...

Challenging both the bureaucratic one-party regime and the Western neoliberal paradigm, China's leading critic shatters the myth of progress and reflects upon the inheritance of a revolutionary past. In this original and wide-ranging study, Wang Hui examines the roots of China's social and political problems, and traces the reforms and struggles that have led to the current state of mass depoliticization.Arguing that China's revolutionary history and its current liberalization are p...

This translation of the introduction to Wang Hui’s Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (2004) makes part of his four-volume masterwork available to English readers for the first time. A leading public intellectual in China, Wang charts the historical currents that have shaped Chinese modernity from the Song Dynasty to the present day.

Ancient Greece: Europe in History, PART TWO, is my attempt to tell the Greek story the way it actually felt to live it—tense, unstable, and full of agonizing choices. I open the book with two competing roads to power, Athens and Sparta, and trace how their very different ideas about freedom, discipline, and leadership pushed the Greek world toward confrontation. What begins as cooperation—alliances and shared purpose—slowly hardens into rivalry, and then into something far...

Modern Europe: Europe in History, PART ONE, is my attempt to guide readers through the dramatic transformation of France from a Bourbon monarchy into a revolutionary republic. I begin with Henry IV (reigned 1589–1610 CE), the founder of Bourbon rule in France, then turn to Cardinal Richelieu—chief minister to Louis XIII (serving roughly 1624–1642 CE)—and the early consolidation of royal authority. From there I move into the long reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King (1643–1715 ...

Early Modern Europe: Europe in History, PART TWO, is where I guide you into the turning point of a continent caught between empire and belief. The story opens with giants of the age—Charles V, Ferdinand, and Philip II—rulers who straddled old feudal orders and rising confessional conflicts. These were men who tried to hold together a fragile world of layered loyalties even as religious change chipped away at their authority. I want you to meet them not as distant statues, ...

Modern Europe: Europe in History, PART TWO, is my attempt to trace one of the most dramatic transformations in political history — the long, turbulent arc by which Europe moved from revolutions and empires toward systems of representation and the idea of universal suffrage. The story opens amid the chaos of the French Revolution: from the fall of Maximilien Robespierre in the Thermidorian Reaction of 1794 to the eventual collapse of the Directory in 1799 — moments when Fra...

Wars, Oil, and Power: The Middle East in History, is my attempt to tell the story behind the headlines — the people, the pressures, and those hinge moments when history might still have gone a different way. The book begins six days before the storm, when leaders such as Gamal Abdel Nasser, David Ben-Gurion, and King Hussein were all making fateful choices under unbearable strain. From the Suez Canal to Jerusalem, this is a tale of how power was tested, how fear spread lik...

"Origins of Chinese Civilization: A History of China" by Hui Wang takes you on a journey through China's ancient past, told in a way that feels like you're listening to an elder recounting myths around a campfire. The book starts with Fuxi, the first leader, whose inventions like the Eight Trigrams and fishing nets shaped early Chinese culture. The story moves through key figures like Nüwa, who patched the sky and shaped humanity from clay, and the Yan Emperor, who pioneered agriculture an...

The Qing Dynasty: A History of China, PART ONE, takes you on an unforgettable journey through the rise, glory, and transformation of China's last imperial dynasty. From the scattered Wild Jurchens of the northern forests to the disciplined warriors of Jianzhou, this story traces how Nurhaci forged order out of chaos and laid the foundations of a state that would outlive him by centuries. He bound his movement together around five guiding principles — discipline, loyalty, l...

The Qing Dynasty: A History of China, PART THREE, plunges you into the rise and fall of China's last imperial house — a realm of emperors and generals, reformers and dreamers, all standing on the ragged edge of a world in flux. I wrote this book to let readers step inside the Forbidden City and feel what it was like when the court truly believed it could endure forever. From Emperor Qianlong's ostentatious triumphs to the final, reluctant abdication of the child emperor Pu...

The Northern Song Dynasty: A History of China, PART ONE, transports you back to an era when a fragmented land was being stitched together — when battlefield commanders could become emperors, when poets and scholar-officials shaped the currents of policy, and when the fate of a dynasty sometimes hinged on a single, shadowy night. I wrote this book to bring that world to life, to let readers feel the tension, ambition, and brilliance of the men and women who built one of Chi...