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...

In 2009 Slavoj Zizek brought together an acclaimed group of intellectuals to discuss the continued relevance of communism. Unexpectedly the conference attracted an audience of over 1,000 people.The discussion has continued across the world and this book gathers responses from the conference in Seoul. It includes the interventions of regular contributors Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, as well as work from across Asia, notably from Chinese scholar Wang Hui, offering regional perspect...

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...

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.

A king lights emergency beacons just to make his favorite concubine laugh. A prince survives an assassination attempt by pretending to die with an arrow in his belt. A reformer builds the most powerful state in China—only to be destroyed by the very laws he created. Ancient Chinese history is full of moments like these, but you rarely hear them told this way.This book brings the turbulent Spring and Autumn and early Warring States periods to life as a series of vivid human dramas. Y...

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...

The extended critical interview is especially flexible as a form, by turns tenacious and glancing, elliptical or sustained, combining argument and counter-argument, reflection, history and memoir with a freedom normally denied to its subjects in conventional writing formats. Lives on the Left brings together sixteen such interviews from New Left Review in a group portrait of intellectual engagement in the twentieth century and since.Four generations of intellectual...

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. ...