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...

A young boy finds himself alone in a ship in a terrible storm. All the other passengers and crew are dead. Suddenly he sees a bright yellow ball of fire on the mast...This is a short story in Simplified Chinese, pinyin and English, excerpted from the short story collection "Learn to Read Chinese, Book 1" by Jeff Pepper and Xiao Hui Wang. It's based on stories told by Norman Hinsdale Pitman in "A Chinese Wonder Book" originally published in 1918.Folk tales are immen...

China, 1057 B.C. The foolish king of the Shang Dynasty has gravely insulted a goddess. In revenge, the goddess sends a thousand-year-old fox demon to extinguish the soul of the beautiful young Daji, inhabit her body, and seduce the king into taking her as his chief concubine. Daji slowly gains control of the king and his kingdom, leading the Shang Dynasty towards chaos and disaster. But gods and demons are all watching closely and try to take matters into their own hands.This book ...

Atlantis is perfect. That is what makes it dangerous.Before dawn, a supply vessel races toward the Harbor District beneath the white beam of the Star Tower. For Lacian Viseran, a structural calibration apprentice born among harbor workers, the city has always been a machine of sacred precision: towers, bridges, rituals, records, and laws bound into one flawless order.Then a cold white light rises from beneath the sea.The ship drops. Steel fails. People are injured. And...

The royal banquet ends in darkness, black water, and a question no city is permitted to ask: what if an ancient king's return is not a miracle, but a system waking beneath the stones?Namsin, a young scribe trained to trust clay more than memory, escapes the ruined banquet hall with a damaged record fragment and half of the stolen seventh seal. What he has seen cannot be written safely. What he carries cannot be surrendered. Beside him, Cassandra reads the city through gates, pressur...

A clay tablet enters the archive with one impossible flaw: its weight is wrong.In the Tablet Library of Uruk, every debt, death, offering, boundary, and royal name is preserved in fired clay. Namsin, a junior scribe trained to trust the record above all things, discovers an older text buried beneath an ordinary tribute account. A dead king's name has been written again and again across centuries. Beside it are water-gate numbers, erased seals, and the quiet arithmetic of missing peo...

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...

The boat stops without striking stone, sand, or timber. Beneath the black water, something has closed around the keel—and at the center of the current, a white foundation rises from the Flood, blank, wordless, and forbidden to name.Namsin, a young scribe carrying fragments of dangerous evidence, has already learned that some records do more than remember. They can open doors. They can summon kings. They can turn the dead into procedure and the missing into numbers. When the ruined b...

Mossad: Civilizations of the Middle East, pulls you into the hidden world where politics, faith, and espionage collide. From David Ben-Gurion's early calls to arms to Golda Meir's covert meetings in the run‑up to statehood, the book traces how a small, exposed nation stitched together one of the world's most feared intelligence services. Writing it felt like chasing ghosts through history — the Mossad's origins were ragged and improvisational, yet shot through with fierce ...

The Yuan Dynasty: China Under Foreign Rule tells the dramatic story of China during the century when it was ruled by the Mongols. It is the 5th book in the Dynasties of Ancient China series of graded readers, written for English-speaking readers who are learning Chinese.Beginning with a divided China and the rise of the Mongols, the book describes the country's conquest by Kublai Khan, the founding of the new dynasty, and the challenges of foreign rule. Readers wil...

Ancient Greece: Europe in History, PART ONE, is the book I wrote to chase one question that kept bothering me: where did Europe really start to take shape? Not Europe as a modern idea, but Europe as a lived experience — a mosaic of places, practices, and habits people actually inhabited and remembered.The story opens before written records, threads through prehistory, and finally steps into documented history with Minoan Crete and the Mycenaeans of the Bronze Age. ...

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...