A name is still knocking from inside the stone.Beneath the rising Golden Pyramid, a buried maintenance level has begun to answer a man the kingdom tried to erase: Besa, a quarry craftsman classified not as a father, not as a worker, but as material. His daughter has the right to witness what was done to him. Kai, a scribe carrying fragments the archives should have destroyed, and Tawi, a former mortuary attendant who knows how bodies are made silent, must reach him before the royal ...

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...

The Golden Pyramid was built to make death obey. But beneath its sacred stone, something older than Egypt has begun to answer.After escaping the Chamber of Silence, scribe Kai Nefer and former mortuary attendant Tawi Meret carry proof that the official story is already being written against them. Survivors are being renamed as contamination. Failed bodies are being sealed away as samples. A damaged record points toward a forbidden place beneath the royal city: the Hall Without Light...

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...

A royal body should not move after sealing. It should not open its eyes beneath the linen. It should not speak from an empty chest.In the mortuary chambers beneath the Golden Pyramid, Tawi Meret knows the rules of death better than anyone. Every body has a procedure. Every anomaly has a classification. Every witness has a place in the record—unless the record must be changed. When a sealed royal corpse produces black water, a forbidden white line, and a voice no dead mouth should ca...

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 ...

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...

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.

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...

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...

Jerusalem: A History of the Middle East takes you on a sweeping, unforgettable journey through five thousand years of human faith and struggle. From the first sparks of settled life on a rocky hill to today's headlines, this book traces how a small, stubborn city grew into the heartbeat of three great religions and the battleground of countless empires. I wanted to tell a story that feels alive—not a dry textbook, but a living chronicle of the people who built Jerusalem, t...