The past hundred years in China have seen almost continuous transformation and upheaval. From Confucianist monarchy to warlordism, from fanatically doctrinaire socialist tyranny to almost doctrineless social-capitalism, China has experienced political, cultural and economic disintegration, reunion, and revolution on an unprecedented scale.Beginning with the overthrow of the Emperor in 1911, Moise guides us through a century of ever-unfolding drama with characteristic clarity and ba...

This first book to consider land reform in both countries show that reform, as the Communists have conducted it, can be justified in China and North Vietnam for both economic reasons and ideological imperatives. Moise argues that the violence associated with land reform was as much a function of the social inequities that preceded reform as it was of the reform policy itself and explains the difficulties the Communist leaders encountered in developing a successful program.Originall...

State–society relations and governance are closely related areas of study and have become important topics in the social sciences in the past decades, not only in developed countries but also in the developing world. In China, state-society relations have been changing in the new era of reform and opening, and governance has become a central concern in policy practice and in academia. In this wide-ranging collection of essays, written by scholars from both inside and outside China, the con...

The Vietnam War is anything but a forgotten war. Even today, the strategies that led to an unexpected American defeat are hotly debated, and much remains controversial and unclear, which is not surprising given the nature of the combat in which the Vietnamese guerrilla warfare eventually won out over high-tech weaponry.The task of clarifying the issues without oversimplifying this complex war that impacted the world is undertaken by The A to Z of the Vietnam War: first in ...

As the author details in the first chapter, it is intended to be a memorial to the damsels he knew in his youth: friends, relatives and servants. The novel is remarkable not only for its huge cast of characters and psychological scope, but also for its precise and detailed observation of the life and social structures typical of 18th-century Chinese society.

Winner of the Lionel Gelber PrizeNational Book Critics Circle Award FinalistAn Economist Best Book of the Year | A Financial Times Book of the Year | A Wall Street Journal Book of the Year | A Washington Post Book of the Year | A Bloomberg News Book of the Year | An Esquire China Book of the Year | A Gates Notes Top Read of the YearPerhaps no one in the twentieth century ...

The Death of Mao opens in the summer of 1976, as Mao Zedong lay dying and China was struck by a great natural disaster. The earthquake that struck Tangshan, a shoddily built mining city, was one of the worst in recorded history, killing half a million people.But the Chinese Communist rulers in Beijing were distracted, paralysed by in-fighting over who would take control after Chairman Mao finally died. Would Mao's fanatical wife and her collaborators, the Gang of Four, be ...

A candid, rollicking literary travelogue from a pioneering New Yorker writer, an intrepid heroine who documented China in the years before World War II.Deemed scandalous at the time of its publication in 1944, Emily Hahn's now classic memoir of her years in China remains remarkable for her insights into a tumultuous period and her frankness about her personal exploits. A proud feminist and fearless traveler, she set out for China in 1935 and stayed through ...

China is now poised to take a key role on the world stage, but in the early twentieth century the situation could not have been more different. Rana Mitter goes back to this pivotal moment in Chinese history to uncover the origins of the painful transition from a premodern past into a modern world. Mitter takes us through the resulting social turmoil and political promise, the devastating war against Japan in the 1940s, Communism and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and the new era of...

East Asia is now the world’s economic powerhouse, but ghosts of history continue to trouble relations between the key countries of the region, particularly between Japan, China and the two Koreas. Unhappy legacies of Japan’s military expansion in pre-war Asia prompt on-going calls for apologies, while conflicts over ownership of cultural heritage cause friction between China and Korea, and no peace treaty has ever been signed to conclude the Korean War.For over a decade, the region...

Pirates, plagues, pistols and poisons; with adventure of all varieties, the third instalment of the popular 'Tales' series is a rollicking journey into colonial Hong Kong. A collection of historical odds and ends - stories, quotations, cartoons, postcards and drawings - recount in thrilling detail how a 'barren rock' seemingly destined to fail rose to become one of the richest trading outposts in Asia.

RUINS OF DESERT CATHAY (Published 1912)PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF EXPLORATIONS IN CENTRAL ASIA AND WESTERNMOST CHINA IN 1912 BY M. AUREL STEIN.WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS, COLOUR PLATES, PANORAMAS, AND MAPS FROM ORIGINAL SURVEYS IN TWO VOLUMES - VOL. 1This is the complete and unabridged version and includes every image that appears in the original printed version. This is NOT a scanned copy with unreadable, missing or jumbled text, but, other than ...