The Chinese Gateway PDF Download

Author: Berthold Laufer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 18

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Author: Asiapac Editorial
Publisher: Asiapac Books
ISBN: 9812299033
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Have you ever wonder about the significance of the various vibrant festivals celebrated by the Chinese people every year, or why the Chinese eat with Chopsticks? How did the intricate characters of their written language come to be? Ancient Chinese thinkers like Confucius and Sun-zi have left their mark on the Chinese Culture, but who were they? And with the Chinese cuisine that is available in Chinese restaurants all across the world, there's hardly any needs for introductions! Join us on a tour of the ancient and colourful Chinese culture in this part of this Montage Culture Series!

Author: Seiji Shirane
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501765582
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
In Imperial Gateway, Seiji Shirane explores the political, social, and economic significance of colonial Taiwan in the southern expansion of Japan's empire from 1895 to the end of World War II. Challenging understandings of empire that focus on bilateral relations between metropole and colonial periphery, Shirane uncovers a half century of dynamic relations between Japan, Taiwan, China, and Western regional powers. Japanese officials in Taiwan did not simply take orders from Tokyo; rather, they often pursued their own expansionist ambitions in South China and Southeast Asia. When outright conquest was not possible, they promoted alternative strategies, including naturalizing resident Chinese as overseas Taiwanese subjects, extending colonial police networks, and deploying tens of thousands of Taiwanese to war. The Taiwanese—merchants, gangsters, policemen, interpreters, nurses, and soldiers—seized new opportunities for socioeconomic advancement that did not always align with Japan's imperial interests. Drawing on multilingual archives in six countries, Imperial Gateway shows how Japanese officials and Taiwanese subjects transformed Taiwan into a regional gateway for expansion in an ever-shifting international order. Thanks to generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities Open Book Program and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

Author: Michael Sheridan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197576257
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
An epic history of the rise of China and the fall of Hong Kong to authoritarian rule. Essential reading for anyone wishing to deal with China or to understand the world in which we live. The rise of China and the fall of Hong Kong to authoritarian rule are told with unique insight in this new history by Michael Sheridan, drawing on documents from archives in China and the West, interviews with key figures and eyewitness reporting over three decades. The story takes the reader from the earliest days of trade through the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century to the age of globalisation, the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China, the fight for democracy on the city's streets and the ultimate victory of the Chinese Communist Party. As the West seeks a new China policy, we learn from private papers how Margaret Thatcher anguished over the fate of Hong Kong, sought secret American briefings on how to deal with Beijing and put her trust in a spymaster who was tormented by his own doubts. The Chinese version of history, so often unheard, emerges from memoirs and documents, many of them entirely new to the foreign reader, which reveal China's negotiating tactics. The voices of Hong Kong people eloquent, smart and bold speak compellingly here at every turn. The Gate to China tells how Hong Kong was the gate to China as it reformed its economy and changed the world, emerging to challenge the West with a new order that raised fundamental questions about freedom, identity, and progress. Told through real human stories and a gripping narrative for the general reader, it is also critical reading for all who study, trade or deal with China.

Author: Galia Dor
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438497547
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
Unlocking the Chinese Gate offers an innovative analysis of gates in early Chinese thought and material culture. Observing gates from various perspectives—including philosophy, architecture, and psychology—and through the conceptual lens of Chinese correlative thinking, Galia Dor conceptualizes the Chinese gate as a membrane-like apparatus that, from the space "in-between," efficaciously manifests (de) the Way (dao) into the "ten thousand" forms of actualized life. This methodology exposes an open-to-closed gradation between pairs of inside/outside (wai/nei) that resonates throughout the Chinese model of psychocosmic concentric circles. The consequential strategies (e.g., continuity/break, chaos/order) demonstrate how early Chinese cosmological, philosophical, and political idealities, as well as afterlife religious beliefs, were applied—including the various approaches to and practices of self-cultivation. The book sheds new light on ancient Chinese thought and material culture and offers points of comparison to Western thought and modern science, including a model of "decision-gating" that carries relevant implications and insights to our current lives.

Author: Douglas Howland
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822382032
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
D. R. Howland explores China’s representations of Japan in the changing world of the late nineteenth century and, in so doing, examines the cultural and social borders between the two neighbors. Looking at Chinese accounts of Japan written during the 1870s and 1880s, he undertakes an unprecedented analysis of the main genres the Chinese used to portray Japan—the travel diary, poetry, and the geographical treatise. In his discussion of the practice of “brushtalk,” in which Chinese scholars communicated with the Japanese by exchanging ideographs, Howland further shows how the Chinese viewed the communication of their language and its dominant modes—history and poetry—as the textual and cultural basis of a shared civilization between the two societies. With Japan’s decision in the 1870s to modernize and westernize, China’s relationship with Japan underwent a crucial change—one that resulted in its decisive separation from Chinese civilization and, according to Howland, a destabilization of China’s worldview. His examination of the ways in which Chinese perceptions of Japan altered in the 1880s reveals the crucial choice faced by the Chinese of whether to interact with Japan as “kin,” based on geographical proximity and the existence of common cultural threads, or as a “barbarian,” an alien force molded by European influence. By probing China’s poetic and expository modes of portraying Japan, Borders of Chinese Civilization exposes the changing world of the nineteenth century and China’s comprehension of it. This broadly appealing work will engage scholars in the fields of Asian studies, Chinese literature, history, and geography, as well as those interested in theoretical reflections on travel or modernism.

Author: Xiaoxiang Li
Publisher: Asiapac Books Pte Ltd
ISBN: 9789812293947
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
The richness of Chinese classical literature encompasses a range of forms, from poetry and rhymed prose, to essays and novels. Each period has its own unique style, and there are outstanding representative works for each: the pre-Qin Book of Songs, Songs of the South, Han fu, Yue fu songs, Tang poetry, Song ci, Yuan drama and more. Using illustrations and exposition of the various styles of classical Chinese literature, this book takes the reader on a tour of the Chinese literary world, while affording valuable insights into the themes of early Chinese civilizations.

Author: Marie-Claire Bergère
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780804749046
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Details Shanghai's beginnings as a treaty port in the mid-nineteenth century; its capitalist boom following the 1911 Revolution; the fifteen years of economic and social decline initiated by the Japanese invasion in 1937 and attempts at resistance; and the city's disgraced years under Communism.

Author: Byung-Chul Han
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262534363
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
Tracing the thread of “decreation” in Chinese thought, from constantly changing classical masterpieces to fake cell phones that are better than the original. Shanzhai is a Chinese neologism that means “fake,” originally coined to describe knock-off cell phones marketed under such names as Nokir and Samsing. These cell phones were not crude forgeries but multifunctional, stylish, and as good as or better than the originals. Shanzhai has since spread into other parts of Chinese life, with shanzhai books, shanzhai politicians, shanzhai stars. There is a shanzhai Harry Potter: Harry Potter and the Porcelain Doll, in which Harry takes on his nemesis Yandomort. In the West, this would be seen as piracy, or even desecration, but in Chinese culture, originals are continually transformed—deconstructed. In this volume in the Untimely Meditations series, Byung-Chul Han traces the thread of deconstruction, or “decreation,” in Chinese thought, from ancient masterpieces that invite inscription and transcription to Maoism—“a kind a shanzhai Marxism,” Han writes. Han discusses the Chinese concepts of quan, or law, which literally means the weight that slides back and forth on a scale, radically different from Western notions of absoluteness; zhen ji, or original, determined not by an act of creation but by unending process; xian zhan, or seals of leisure, affixed by collectors and part of the picture's composition; fuzhi, or copy, a replica of equal value to the original; and shanzhai. The Far East, Han writes, is not familiar with such “pre-deconstructive” factors as original or identity. Far Eastern thought begins with deconstruction.

Author: Sharon Shinn
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101148837
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
As a Chinese adoptee in St. Louis, teenage Daiyu often feels out of place. When an elderly Asian jewelry seller at a street fair shows her a black jade ring--and tells her that "black jade" translates to "Daiyu"--she buys it as a talisman of her heritage. But it's more than that; it's magic. It takes Daiyu through a gateway into a version of St. Louis much like 19th-century China. Almost immediately she is recruited as a spy, which means hours of training in manners and niceties and sleight of hand. It also means stealing time to be with handsome Kalen, who is in on the plan. There's only one problem. Once her task is done, she must go back to St. Louis and leave him behind forever. . . .