Carolyn Choa and David Su Li-Qun have brought together in one volume pieces by some of the most radical and popular contemporary Chinese writers. Variously funny, moving, wistful and shocking, these stories will touch and entertain their readers and provide an extraordinary insight into a fascinating and changing culture. 'This collection of stories, mostly written since the death of Mao, is a fount of beautifully translated storytelling that veers between the wistfully romantic and the downright angry' Steven Poole, Guardian 'One of the most striking themes of this enjoyable and fascinating collection involves the courage of seemingly docile and unassuming people in daring to challenge the authorities . . . An exceptional glimpse of the domestic life about which most of the West still knows very little' Caroline Moorhead, Literary Review 'It is both the excitement and the difficulty of this collection that everything becomes a fable. The collection is an exhilarating glimpse into another all too human world' Peter Arnott, Herald 'The stories in the Picador collection attest the move from social conformity. In Liu Xinwu's story "Black Walls", written in 1982, a gentle humour and a call for humanism merge' Olivier Burckhardt, Independent on Sunday
In 1715 a lowly Jesuit brother, Giuseppe Castiglione, arrived in China as a missionary and artist. Once a wild orphan, his life had been transformed by joining the Society of Jesus. In China, he was given the name, Lang Shi Ning, a name that is renowned to this day. The Kang Xi emperor, already elderly and frail, rejected Castiglione's first oil painting as too Western and ordered him to learn the techniques of Chinese painting. Through a fortuitous introduction, Castiglione met Wu Yu, an elderly, celebrated artist. With Wu Yu's guidance, he gained a foundation in Chinese language, culture and art that changed him forever. He quickly became an extraordinary painter, combining Chinese materials and subject matter with Western colouring and perspective. Castiglione made friendships among a wide range of Chinese and Jesuits that impacted greatly on his life in China. His story was interwoven with that of 18th century China encompassing floods, famine, foot binding, castration, struggles over succession, and war. He served as a royal painter to the three most important Qing dynasty emperors but was reminded throughout his 50 years in China, that friendship was as fraught with danger as enmity. Many friends were executed or exiled often putting Castiglione's life in danger and he made one life-long enemy of a eunuch who schemed for many years to exact revenge. Ultimately protected by Qian Long, who adored him, Castiglione was ennobled and named architect for western palaces and fountains in the Summer Palace. The result of collaboration between Chinese and American authors and enriched by insight into both cultures, Vermillion Ink is the dramatic and touching story of a man of extraordinary strength and conviction. David Su Li-Qun and Diana Gore have penned a moving historical novel about a real-life artist and Catholic missionary who managed to straddle two cultures during an important era of Chinese history, leaving behind an artistic legacy that continues to inspire today.
Shortly after 300 AD, barbarian invaders from Inner Asia toppled China's Western Jin dynasty, leaving the country divided and at war for several centuries. Despite this, the empire gradually formed a unified imperial order. Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900 explores the military strategies, institutions and wars that reconstructed the Chinese empire that has survived into modern times. Drawing on classical Chinese sources and the best modern scholarship from China and Japan, David A. Graff connects military affairs with political and social developments to show how China's history was shaped by war.
In ancient China a monster called Taowu was known for both its vicious nature and its power to see the past and the future. Over the centuries Taowu underwent many incarnations until it became identifiable with history itself. Since the seventeenth century, fictive accounts of history have accommodated themselves to the monstrous nature of Taowu. Moving effortlessly across the entire twentieth-century literary landscape, David Der-wei Wang delineates the many meanings of Chinese violence and its literary manifestations. Taking into account the campaigns of violence and brutality that have rocked generations of Chinese—often in the name of enlightenment, rationality, and utopian plenitude—this book places its arguments along two related axes: history and representation, modernity and monstrosity. Wang considers modern Chinese history as a complex of geopolitical, ethnic, gendered, and personal articulations of bygone and ongoing events. His discussion ranges from the politics of decapitation to the poetics of suicide, and from the typology of hunger and starvation to the technology of crime and punishment.
In this book, David Der-wei Wang uses the lyrical to rethink the dynamics of Chinese modernity. Although the form may seem unusual for representing China's social and political crises in the mid-twentieth century, Wang contends that national cataclysm and mass movements intensified Chinese lyricism in extraordinary ways. Wang calls attention to the form's vigor and variety at an unlikely juncture in Chinese history and the precarious consequences it brought about: betrayal, self-abjuration, suicide, and silence. Despite their divergent backgrounds and commitments, the writers, artists, and intellectuals discussed in this book all took lyricism as a way to explore selfhood in relation to solidarity, the role of the artist in history, and the potential for poetry to illuminate crisis. They experimented with poetry, fiction, film, intellectual treatise, political manifesto, painting, calligraphy, and music. Western critics, Wang shows, also used lyricism to critique their perilous, epic time. He reads Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Cleanth Brooks, and Paul de Man, among others, to complete his portrait. The Chinese case only further intensifies the permeable nature of lyrical discourse, forcing us to reengage with the dominant role of revolution and enlightenment in shaping Chinese—and global—modernity. Wang's remarkable survey reestablishes Chinese lyricism's deep roots in its own native traditions, along with Western influences, and realizes the relevance of such a lyrical calling of the past century to our time.
Examining the interaction between the Communist Party of China (CCP) and specific social categories (including peasants, workers, the middle classes, and the dominant class), with a focus on class and class discourse, this volume analyses the CCP’s impact on social change in China between 1921 and 1978. By exploring the CCP’s evolving discourse of class, this book demonstrates that, while class has retained its centrality, its meaning has been re-articulated from an ideological-political tool to a less meaningful signifier, though always used instrumentality. By examining the impact of the CCP’s policies and discourse surrounding class, it also reveals how its own policies since 1921 have shaped the CCP’s current (2021) perspectives on class and stratification. This volume, through an analysis of economic, political, and cultural inequalities in Chinese society even after 1949, also reveals the emergence of a diverse and often overlooked middle class in Chinese society during the 1950s. Delivering a detailed analysis of how the CCP has developed its practical approaches to class and mobilization, this study will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese politics, Chinese history, Asian politics, and Asian studies.
By examining the changing political economy in China through detailed studies of the peasantry, workers, middle classes, and the dominant class, this volume reveals the Communist Party of China’s (CCP’s) impact on social change in China between 1978 and 2021. This book explores in depth the CCP’s programme of reform and openness that had a dramatic impact on China’s socio-economic trajectory following the death of Mao Zedong and the end of the Cultural Revolution. It also goes on to chart the acceptance of Market Socialism, highlighting the resulting emergence of a larger middle class, while also appreciating the profound consequences this created for workers and peasants. Additionally, this volume examines the development of the dominant class which remains a defining feature of China’s political economy and the Party-state. Providing an in-depth analysis of class as understood by the CCP in conjunction with sociological interpretations of socio-economic and socio-political change, this study will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese Politics, Chinese History, Asian Politics, and Asian studies.
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