Modern China: A Very Short Introduction PDF Download

Author: Rana Mitter
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191578797
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
China today is never out of the news: from human rights controversies and the continued legacy of Tiananmen Square, to global coverage of the Beijing Olympics, and the Chinese 'economic miracle'. It seems a country of contradictions: a peasant society with some of the world's most futuristic cities, heir to an ancient civilization that is still trying to find a modern identity. This Very Short Introduction offers the reader with no previous knowledge of China a variety of ways to understand the world's most populous nation, giving a short, integrated picture of modern Chinese society, culture, economy, politics and art. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Author: Daniel Nieh
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062886665
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
“Propulsive. . . . Highly enjoyable. . . . It sets up a sequel, one that I very much look forward to reading.” —The New York Times Book Review A fresh, smart, and fast-paced revenge thriller about a college basketball player who discovers shocking truths about his family in the wake of his father’s murder Victor Li is devastated by his father’s murder, and shocked by a confessional letter he finds among his father’s things. In it, his father admits that he was never just a restaurateur—in fact he was part of a vast international crime syndicate that formed during China’s leanest communist years. Victor travels to Beijing, where he navigates his father’s secret criminal life, confronting decades-old grudges, violent spats, and a shocking new enterprise that the organization wants to undertake. Standing up against it is likely what got his father killed, but Victor remains undeterred. He enlists his growing network of allies and friends to finish what his father started, no matter the costs.

Author: Anthony James Broomhall
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781903689165
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 2000

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Book Description
China is poised to play a most significant role in the third millennium. This authoritative history by Dr Broomhall traces the influence of Protestant and Catholic missions and the work of the United Bible Societies during the nineteenth century on the development of modern-day China. Whereas previous historians in this field had worked mainly from secondary sources, Dr Boomhall drew on the first-hand observations, most significantly by his great uncle, James Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission, who was described by the historian K.S. Latourette as ?one of the four or five most influential foreigners who came to China in the mid-nineteenth century?.Dr J.A. Broomhall (1911-1994) worked as a missionary doctor among the Nosu in southwest China and the Mangyan in the Phillipines. His devotion to the Nosu is epitomized in the fact that just hours before he died he received news that the provincial government in his beloved Nosuland had just given permission for the agency Medical Services International to work there - it was as if he had been waiting to hear that before he could ?depart in peace?. Dr Broomhall?s other books are Strong Tower (1947), Strong Man?s Prey (1953) on his work among the Nosu, Fields for Reaping (1954) on his work in the Philippines, and Time for Action (1965).

Author: Mobo C. F. Gao
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824821234
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
This book is about Gao Village, in Jiangxi province, where the author was born and brought up, leaving when he was twenty-one to study English at Xiamen University. Since emigrating to Australia in 1990, he has returned every year to Gao Village, where his brother still lives. Several accounts of village life in China have been published, but all have been by Western or urban Chinese scholars. Mobo Gao's account is in every sense one from the inside. Though written as an academic work, it does not eschew personal stories and experiences relevant to the themes addressed. These cover a forty-year period and fall into four distinct themes; the village before and after land reform; the commune system; the dismantling of the communes; and the unfolding impact of the market economy, including increased migration to urban areas, from the late 1980s onwards.

Author: Frank Dikötter
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231511872
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
Exotic Commodities is the first book to chart the consumption and spread of foreign goods in China from the mid-nineteenth century to the advent of communism in 1949. Richly illustrated and revealing, this volume recounts how exotic commodities were acquired and adapted in a country commonly believed to have remained "hostile toward alien things" during the industrial era. China was not immune to global trends that prized the modern goods of "civilized" nations. Foreign imports were enthusiastically embraced by both the upper and lower classes and rapidly woven into the fabric of everyday life, often in inventive ways. Scarves, skirts, blouses, and corsets were combined with traditional garments to create strikingly original fashions. Industrially produced rice, sugar, wheat, and canned food revolutionized local cuisine, and mass produced mirrors were hung on doorframes to ward off malignant spirits. Frank Dikötter argues that ordinary people were the least inhibited in acquiring these products and therefore the most instrumental in changing the material culture of China. Landscape paintings, door leaves, and calligraphy scrolls were happily mixed with kitschy oil paintings and modern advertisements. Old and new interacted in ways that might have seemed incongruous to outsiders but were perfectly harmonious to local people. This pragmatic attitude would eventually lead to China's own mass production and export of cheap, modern goods, which today can be found all over the world. The nature of this history raises the question, which Dikötter pursues in his conclusion: If the key to surviving in a fast-changing world is the ability to innovate, could China be more in tune with modernity than Europe?

Author: Jonathan D. Spence
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393307801
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1054

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Book Description
In this widely acclaimed history of modern China, Jonathan Spence achieves a fine blend of narrative richness and efficiency. The Search for Modern China offers a matchless introduction to China's history.

Author: Peter Hessler
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061834122
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 531

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Book Description
A century ago, outsiders saw China as a place where nothing ever changes. Today the country has become one of the most dynamic regions on earth. In Oracle Bones, Peter Hessler explores the human side of China's transformation, viewing modern-day China and its growing links to the Western world through the lives of a handful of ordinary people. In a narrative that gracefully moves between the ancient and the present, the East and the West, Hessler captures the soul of a country that is undergoing a momentous change before our eyes.

Author: Tamara Jacka
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107292298
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
China's rapid economic growth, modernization and globalization have led to astounding social changes. Contemporary China provides a fascinating portrayal of society and social change in the contemporary People's Republic of China. This book introduces readers to key sociological perspectives, themes and debates about Chinese society. It explores topics such as family life, citizenship, gender, ethnicity, labour, religion, education, class and rural/urban inequalities. It considers China's imperial past, the social and institutional legacies of the Maoist era, and the momentous forces shaping it in the present. It also emphasises diversity and multiplicity, encouraging readers to consider new perspectives and rethink Western stereotypes about China and its people. Real-life case studies illustrate the key features of social relations and change in China. Definitions of key terms, discussion questions and lists of further reading help consolidate learning. Including full-colour maps and photographs, this book offers remarkable insight into Chinese society and social change.

Author: Robert Culp
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231545355
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
Amid early twentieth-century China’s epochal shifts, a vital and prolific commercial publishing industry emerged. Recruiting late Qing literati, foreign-trained academics, and recent graduates of the modernized school system to work as authors and editors, publishers produced textbooks, reference books, book series, and reprints of classical texts in large quantities at a significant profit. Work for major publishers provided a living to many Chinese intellectuals and offered them a platform to transform Chinese cultural life. In The Power of Print in Modern China, Robert Culp explores the world of commercial publishing to offer a new perspective on modern China’s cultural transformations. Culp examines China’s largest and most influential publishing companies—Commercial Press, Zhonghua Book Company, and World Book Company—during the late Qing and Republican periods and into the early years of the People’s Republic. He reconstructs editors’ cultural activities and work lives as a lens onto the role of intellectuals in cultural change. Examining China’s distinct modes of industrial publishing, Culp explains the emergence of the modern Chinese intellectual through commercial and industrial processes rather than solely through political revolution and social movements. An original account of Chinese intellectual and cultural history as well as global book history, The Power of Print in Modern China illuminates the production of new forms of knowledge and culture in the twentieth century.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 90

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