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...

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...

This book is a retelling, in easy-to-read Chinese, of the legendary story of how a little stone monkey was born, became king of his troop of monkeys, left his home to pursue enlightenment, received the name Sun Wukong (literally, "ape seeking the void") from his teacher, and returned home to defend his subjects from a ravenous monster.Sun Wukong, the Handsome Monkey King, is one of the most famous characters in Chinese literature and culture. His legendary bravery, his foolish mist...

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...

A note from the depths of Atlantis carries two impossible lines: the right of witness may be suspended, and the Original Text lies in the Lowest Vault.For Lacian Viseran, structural calibration apprentice and unwilling keeper of forbidden evidence, the message turns investigation into trespass. Beneath the Royal Vault, beyond sealed records and erased laws, he finds proof that the city's most sacred institutions were never built to bless return from death. They were built to refuse ...

A king once lit his nation's emergency beacons—not to warn of invasion, but to make his favorite concubine laugh. When the real enemies arrived, no one came to help.That moment helped bring down one of the greatest dynasties in ancient China. And it's only one of the stories waiting inside this book.The Origins of Chinese Civilization: A History of China tells the story of China's earliest age the way it was meant to be told—through the myths, heroes, disasters, and strange h...

Atlantis has begun to count its own people as fuel.When Lacian Viseran follows a hidden coordinate into the city's sealed understructure, he finds the scar left by the first opening of the Second Gate: a wound beneath the memorials, beneath the Temple seals, beneath every official history Atlantis still dares to recite. The city's miracles are not failing by accident. They are waking.Lacian is a structural calibrator, trained to read stress, load, fracture, and collapse. But ...

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 ...

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 ...

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...