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 ...

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 breaks an alliance for land that never existed.A diplomat survives a brutal flogging because he refuses to bite his own tongue.And a teenage ruler faces five invading armies during his father's funeral.Welcome to the world of ancient China's Warring States — a time when a clever speech could change the fate of kingdoms and a single deception could start a war.In The Spring and Autumn & Warring States Periods: A History of China — Part Two, I bring this tu...

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...

An emperor trapped on a frozen mountain. A teenage cavalry prodigy who terrifies an entire empire. A court where brilliant generals can win wars—only to lose their lives in politics.This is the turbulent world of the Western Han Dynasty, one of the most dramatic and influential eras in Chinese history. In , the rise of an empire unfolds not as dry chronology but as a vivid human story filled with ambition, betrayal, brilliance, and survival.It begins with Liu Bang, a former v...

The Liao Dynasty stood between two worlds: the Khitan steppe and the settled civilization of northern China. In Part Two of The Liao Dynasty: A History of China, that balancing act becomes a struggle for survival.The story begins with Empress Dowager Xiao Chuo, Emperor Shengzong, Han Derang, and the Song–Liao confrontation that produced the Peace of Chanyuan. From there, the book follows the dynasty through court rivalries, succession crises, imperial rebellions, corrupt m...

A corrupt emperor rides through his palace in a donkey cart while officials buy their jobs like market goods. A dog is dressed as a minister and paraded in court. Meanwhile, outside the palace walls, millions of desperate people prepare to rise in rebellion. This is not fiction. This is the final chapter of the Eastern Han dynasty.This book brings one of China's most dramatic historical periods vividly to life—where empresses quietly shape empires, eunuchs pull the strings of power,...

A struggling provincial officer, short on food and long on enemies, is asked to marry for politics, gamble on impossible battles, and trust men who may betray him tomorrow. He hesitates, he compromises, and then—almost quietly—he becomes the man who will rebuild an empire.This book tells the rise of Liu Xiu, the future Emperor Guangwu, not as a distant legend but as a sequence of sharp, human choices. You watch him bargain away personal happiness to secure an alliance, burn evidence...