Author: E. Y. Goren and Lintao Publisher: Xlibris Corporation ISBN: 141347196X Category : Family & Relationships Languages : en Pages : 187
Book Description
Many books describe the experiences of an American traveler in China, and still others describe the experiences of Chinese in their native country. But this book is unique. It is a nonfiction love story, not a travelogue--an East-West romance that focuses on the lovers' responses to absurd bureaucratic challenges during an other, wise idyllic courtship. After the first part, narrated by the American, the authors alternate rather than merge their viewpoints in a single voice. They tell their story from the different perspec, tives of a Western man and a Chinese woman. As they work through their cultural differences and the obstacles frustrating their desire to marry, the two storytellers mature. Novelists have traced teenagers coming of age, but here is a nonfic, tion account of growth achieved by a middle-aged couple. They learn from each other, from their allies in Beijing, even from the bureau, crats, as they move toward an emotional and sexual climax. This memoir has a fictional shape!
Author: Chan Koonchung Publisher: Anchor ISBN: 0385534353 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 308
Book Description
Banned in China, this controversial and politically charged novel tells the story of the search for an entire month erased from official Chinese history. Beijing, sometime in the near future: a month has gone missing from official records. No one has any memory of it, and no one could care less—except for a small circle of friends, who will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of the sinister cheerfulness and amnesia that have possessed the Chinese nation. When they kidnap a high-ranking official and force him to reveal all, what they learn—not only about their leaders, but also about their own people—stuns them to the core. It is a message that will astound the world. A kind of Brave New World reflecting the China of our times, The Fat Years is a complex novel of ideas that reveals all too chillingly the machinations of the postmodern totalitarian state, and sets in sharp relief the importance of remembering the past to protect the future.
Author: Alok Barman Publisher: Alok Barman ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 249
Book Description
The history of China is a journey through time and space, a story that is both epic and intimate, stretching from the earliest records of human life to the thresholds of the modern era. When I first embarked on the ambitious task of compiling this complete history, my intention was not only to recount the major events and dynasties that have shaped China, but also to explore the cultural, social, and intellectual movements that have defined its people and influenced the world. China’s long history is often divided into epochs of unity and disunity, prosperity and hardship, tradition and reform. Yet, underlying these shifts is a profound continuity—a sense of identity and endurance that has allowed Chinese civilization to adapt and thrive through dramatic change. The aim of this book is to present that continuity alongside the remarkable transformations, from the ancient cultures of 10,000 BC to the end of the imperial era in 1950 AD. This volume is not merely a collection of dates, events, and rulers. It is an exploration of China’s philosophical contributions—from Confucianism to Daoism—its scientific innovations, its struggles for unity, and its responses to external challenges, both military and cultural. I have also sought to highlight the voices and lives of ordinary people, the workers, scholars, and artists whose contributions have often been overshadowed by the grand narratives of emperors and generals.
Author: C. Fred Blake Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 0824860101 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
For a thousand years across the length and breadth of China and beyond, people have burned paper replicas of valuable things—most often money—for the spirits of deceased family members, ancestors, and myriads of demons and divinities. Although frequently denigrated as wasteful and vulgar and at times prohibited by governing elites, today this venerable custom is as popular as ever. Burning Money explores the cultural logic of this common practice while addressing larger anthropological questions concerning the nature of value. The heart of the work integrates Chinese and Western thought and analytics to develop a theoretical framework that the author calls a “materialist aesthetics.” This includes consideration of how the burning of paper money meshes with other customs in China and around the world. The work examines the custom in contemporary everyday life, its origins in folklore and history, as well as its role in common rituals, in the social formations of dynastic and modern times, and as a “sacrifice” in the act of consecrating the paper money before burning it. Here the author suggests a great divide between the modern means of cultural reproduction through ideology and reification, with its emphasis on nature and realism, and previous pre-capitalist means through ritual and mystification, with its emphasis on authenticity. The final chapters consider how the burning money custom has survived its encounter with the modern global system and internet technology. Innovative and original in its interpretation of a common ritual in Chinese popular religion, Burning Money will be welcomed by scholars and students of Chinese religion as well as comparative religion specialists and anthropologists interested in contemporary social theory.
Author: Ana Carolina Hosne Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135018340 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 212
Book Description
The rulers of the overseas empires summoned the Society of Jesus to evangelize their new subjects in the ‘New World’ which Spain and Portugal shared; this book is about how two different missions, in China and Peru, evolved in the early modern world. From a European perspective, this book is about the way Christianity expanded in the early modern period, craving universalism. In China, Matteo Ricci was so impressed by the influence that the scholar-officials were able to exert on the Ming Emperor himself that he likened them to the philosopher-kings of Plato’s Republic. The Jesuits in China were in the hands of the scholar-officials, with the Emperor at the apex, who had the power to decide whether they could stay or not. Meanwhile, in Peru, the Society of Jesus was required to impose Tridentine Catholicism by Philip II, independently of Rome, a task that entailed compliance with the colonial authorities’ demands. This book explores how leading Jesuits, Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) in China and José de Acosta (1540-1600) in Peru, envisioned mission projects and reflected them on the catechisms they both composed, with a remarkable power of endurance. It offers a reflection on how the Jesuits conceived and assessed these mission spaces, in which their keen political acumen and a certain taste for power unfolded, playing key roles in envisioning new doctrinal directions and reflecting them in their doctrinal texts.
Author: Kingsley Bolton Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 9780415243964 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 696
Book Description
This set comprises a comprehensive selection of colonial Western scholarly texts on Chinese secret societies from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. It includes a selection of important papers on Chinese secret societies by a variety of scholars, missionaries, and colonial officials.
Author: E. Y. Goren and Lintao
Author: David Decker
Author: David Kinsley
Author: Pavel Jakovlevič Pjaseckij
Author: Chan Koonchung
Author: Alok Barman 
Author: C. Fred Blake
Author: Ana Carolina Hosne
Author: Kingsley Bolton
Author: John Sebastian Marlow Ward