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Kinkley, Jeffrey C.
Chinese Justice, the Fiction: Law and Literature in Modern China
8vo, 497pp. During the first thirty years under communism, China completely banned crime fiction. After Mao, however, crime genres of all kinds?old and new, Chinese and Western?sprang up in profusion. Crime narrative again became one of the most prolific and best-loved forms of Chinese popular culture, and it often embodied the Chinese people?s most trenchant and open critiques of their newly restored socialist legal system. This is the first full-length study in any language of Chinese crime fiction in all eras: ancient, modern, and contemporary. It is also the first book to apply legal scholars? ?law and literature? inquiry to the rich field of Chinese legal and literary culture. Familiar Holmesian, quintessentially Chinese, and bizarre East-West hybrids of plots, crimes, detectives, judges, suspects, and ideas of law and corruption emerge from the pages of China?s new crime fiction, which is alternately embraced and condemned by the Chinese establishment as it lurches uncertainly toward post-communist society. Informed by contemporary comparative and theoretical perspectives on popular culture and the fiction of crime and detection, this book is based on extensive readings of Chinese crime fiction and interviews?in China and abroad?with the communist regime?s exiled and still-in-power security and judicial officers. It was in the Orwellian year of 1984 that the authorities set out to control China?s crime fiction and even to manufacture it themselves?only to find that fiction, like the social phenomena it depicts, seems destined to remain one step ahead of the law. Dalla quarta di copertina ?Kinkley illuminates Chinese conceptions of crime, law, and justice at both official and popular levels from pre-modern times through the 1990s, comparing traditions of Chinese detective fiction with those of American and European authors. . . . Students of Chinese history, literature, sociology, and law all will learn much from this unique book.??Perry Link, Princeton University ?Through his analysis of the works, authors, genres and plots of Chinese crime and court case fiction, Kinkley succeeds in illuminating China?s new legal culture from diverse angels. He has written an entertaining and intelligent book on the fiction and facts of the Chinese justice system.??The China Journal
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Eberhard Crailsheim e María Dolores Elizalde
The Representation of External Threats: From the Middle Ages to the Modern World
8vo hardcover, pp.466. In The Representation of External Threats, Eberhard Crailsheim and María Dolores Elizalde present a collection of articles that trace the phenomenon of external threats over three continents and four oceans, offering new perspectives on their development, social construction, and representation. Eberhard Crailsheim, Ph.D. (2008), is Marie-Curie fellow (IF) at the Institute of History, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). He is the author of The Spanish Connection (Böhlau 2016), and has published many articles on threats on the Philippines. María Dolores Elizalde, Ph.D. (1988), is Scientific Researcher at the Institute of History, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). She is specialized in international history and in colonial and postcolonial processes in Asia and the Pacific, with a particular focus on the Philippines.
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Kinkley Jeffrey C.
Chinese Justice, the Fiction: Law and Literature in Modern China
8vo, hardcover in dj, pp-497. During the first thirty years under communism, China completely banned crime fiction. After Mao, however, crime genres of all kinds?old and new, Chinese and Western?sprang up in profusion. Crime narrative again became one of the most prolific and best-loved forms of Chinese popular culture, and it often embodied the Chinese people?s most trenchant and open critiques of their newly restored socialist legal system.This is the first full-length study in any language of Chinese crime fiction in all eras: ancient, modern, and contemporary. It is also the first book to apply legal scholars? ?law and literature? inquiry to the rich field of Chinese legal and literary culture. Familiar Holmesian, quintessentially Chinese, and bizarre East-West hybrids of plots, crimes, detectives, judges, suspects, and ideas of law and corruption emerge from the pages of China?s new crime fiction, which is alternately embraced and condemned by the Chinese establishment as it lurches uncertainly toward post-communist society.Informed by contemporary comparative and theoretical perspectives on popular culture and the fiction of crime and detection, this book is based on extensive readings of Chinese crime fiction and interviews?in China and abroad?with the communist regime?s exiled and still-in-power security and judicial officers. It was in the Orwellian year of 1984 that the authorities set out to control China?s crime fiction and even to manufacture it themselves?only to find that fiction, like the social phenomena it depicts, seems destined to remain one step ahead of the law.
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Zhu Xiao-mei
Il pianoforte Segreto
8vo, br. ed. pp.288. Nel '68, gli studenti manifestavano sventolando il Libretto rosso del presidente Mao. Nel frattempo, in Cina, la Rivoluzione culturale mieteva vittime proprio tra i giovani. Una di questi, al tempo studentessa di musica, decide pochi anni fa di ignorare l'insegnamento del padre, di «andarsene in silenzio, senza lasciare traccia», e raccontare invece la sua storia, e quella di un'intera generazione di giovani sottoposta a un diffuso lavaggio del cervello e convinta della giustezza di un'ideologia che li costringeva alla delazione e alla denuncia, oltre a togliere loro ogni libertà. Uccidendoli anche nell'anima: commoventi il rimorso, il dolore e il pentimento di Zhu Xiao-Mei per aver creduto alle menzogne del maoismo e avere agito di conseguenza. È anche per «chiedere scusa», che l'autrice scrive, ed è proprio il pentimento, tra i tanti sentimenti contrastanti, ad animare la sua scrittura. Nata in una di quelle famiglie che al tempo vennero disgregate ed etichettate con il bollo infamante «di cattive origini», cioè di musicisti e intellettuali, Zhu Xiao-Mei viene internata per cinque anni in un campo di rieducazione ai confini con la Mongolia. La storia di come le note di una fisarmonica risveglino in lei l'amore per la musica e la spingano a procurarsi avventurosamente un pianoforte è raccontata con semplicità, la stessa che aggiunge pathos involontario al resoconto dei mille soprusi perpetrati dai sorveglianti sugli internati. Il potere salvifico della musica anche in circostanze orribili è un tema trattato diffusamente in letteratura a proposito della Shoah, ma Zhu Xiao-Mei aggiunge una quantità di riflessioni inedite, e racconta il percorso a dir poco accidentato che la porta negli Stati Uniti, le difficoltà che affronta per continuare a studiare pianoforte, per poi approdare a Parigi dove dà il primo concerto, dedicato a Bach. Il compositore che per lei indica una «via» molto simile a quella del Tao. Suonerà le Variazioni Goldberg ovunque, e la sua esecuzione è diventata un culto.
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Kaplan Robert D.
The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century
8vo, hrdcover in dj, 280pp. A bracing assessment of U.S. foreign policy and world disorder over the past two decades from the bestselling author of The Revenge of Geography and The Coming Anarchy “[Kaplan] has emerged not only as an eloquent defender of foreign-policy realism but as a grand strategist to whom the Pentagon turns for a tour d’horizon.”—The Wall Street Journal In the late thirteenth century, Marco Polo began a decades-long trek from Venice to China along the trade route between Europe and Asia known as the Silk Road—a foundation of Kublai Khan’s sprawling empire. Now, in the early twenty-first century, the Chinese regime has proposed a land-and-maritime Silk Road that duplicates exactly the route Marco Polo traveled. Drawing on decades of firsthand experience as a foreign correspondent and military embed for The Atlantic, Robert D. Kaplan outlines the timeless principles that should shape America’s role in a turbulent world that encompasses the Chinese challenge. From Kaplan’s immediate thoughts on President Trump to a frank examination of what will happen in the event of war with North Korea, these essays are a vigorous reckoning with the difficult choices the United States will face in the years ahead. Praise for The Return of Marco Polo’s World “Elegant and humane . . . [a] prophecy from an observer with a depressingly accurate record of predictions.”—Bret Stephens, The New York Times Book Review “These essays constitute a truly pathbreaking, brilliant synthesis and analysis of geographic, political, technological, and economic trends with far-reaching consequences. The Return of Marco Polo’s World is another work by Robert D. Kaplan that will be regarded as a classic.”—General David Petraeus (U.S. Army, Ret.) “Thoughtful, unsettling, but not apocalyptic analyses of world affairs flow steadily off the presses, and this is a superior example. . . . Presented with enough verve and insight to tempt readers to set it aside to reread in a few years.”—Kirkus Review (starred review) “An astute, powerfully stated, and bracing presentation.”—Booklist “This volume compiles sixteen major essays on America’s foreign policy from national security commentator Kaplan. . . . An overview of thoughtful, multilayered positions and perspectives evolving through changing circumstances.”—Publishers Weekly
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Doniselli Eramo, Isabella
Il drago in Cina. Storia straordinaria di Un'icona
8vo, br. ed. Il drago è forse il più appariscente esempio di "ibrido" mitologico ed è presente nella mitologia e nelle tradizioni popolari di molte culture fiorite nei diversi continenti, si lega ai miti cosmogonici della nascita del mondo e ovunque porta con sé una forte valenza simbolica di potenza e di forza. In Cina, il drago è creatura benevola, simbolo yang della forza e della fertilità maschile, principio attivo dell'energia, della luce, della forza. Trascorre l'inverno sottoterra e al risveglio, nell'equinozio di primavera, provoca il primo tuono e dà inizio alle piogge primaverili, benefiche per l'agricoltura. Dunque un'importanza vitale in un paese da sempre prevalentemente agricolo. Il motivo del drago attraversa l'intera storia dell'arte cinese, assumendo innumerevoli fogge a seconda delle credenze dell'epoca, a seconda degli stili e delle possibilità offerte dai materiali e dalle tecniche impiegati. Questo studio ripercorre la straordinaria evoluzione nel tempo dell'icona del drago cinese, dalle essenziali raffigurazioni di epoca neolitica, fino alla fantasmagorica immagine codificata nel momento di massimo splendore della Cina imperiale. Un'icona che diventa spunto di confronto e di dialogo tra Oriente e Occidente.
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Leffman David
The Mercenary Mandarin: How A British Adventurer Became A General In Qing-Dynasty China
8vo, br. ed. 372pp. William Mesny ran off to sea as a boy and jumped ship at Shanghai in 1860 when he was just 18. Amid the chaos of foreign intrigue and civil war in 19th-century China, he became a smuggler, a prisoner of the Taiping rebels, a gun-runner and finally enlisted in the Chinese military. After five years of fierce campaigning against the Miao in remote Guizhou province, Mesny rose to the rank of general and used this privileged position to travel around China - to the borders with Burma, Tibet and Vietnam - writing opinionated newspaper articles, collecting plants and advising government officials on the development of railways, telegraphs and other modern reforms. Mesny eventually settled in Shanghai with a 16-year-old concubine and published Mesny's Chinese Miscellany, a weekly magazine about his experiences. But his story was not to end well. After his implication in an illicit arms deal, his fortunes never recovered, and when he died in 1919 he was working as a desk clerk. David Leffman has spent over 15 years footstepping Mesny's travels across China, interviewing locals and piecing together his life story from contemporary journals, private letters and newspaper articles
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Zia Helen
Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution
8vo, hardcover in dj, pp.446. Shanghai has historically been China’s jewel, its richest, most modern and westernized city. The bustling metropolis was home to sophisticated intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and a thriving middle class when Mao’s proletarian revolution emerged victorious from the long civil war. Terrified of the horrors the Communists would wreak upon their lives, citizens of Shanghai who could afford to fled in every direction. Seventy years later, members of the last generation to fully recall this massive exodus have revealed their stories to Chinese American journalist Helen Zia, who interviewed hundreds of exiles about their journey through one of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century. From these moving accounts, Zia weaves together the stories of four young Shanghai residents who wrestled with the decision to abandon everything for an uncertain life as refugees in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States. Benny, who as a teenager became the unwilling heir to his father’s dark wartime legacy, must decide either to escape to Hong Kong or navigate the intricacies of a newly Communist China. The resolute Annuo, forced to flee her home with her father, a defeated Nationalist official, becomes an unwelcome exile in Taiwan. The financially strapped Ho fights deportation from the U.S. in order to continue his studies while his family struggles at home. And Bing, given away by her poor parents, faces the prospect of a new life among strangers in America. The lives of these men and women are marvelously portrayed, revealing the dignity and triumph of personal survival. Herself the daughter of immigrants from China, Zia is uniquely equipped to explain how crises like the Shanghai transition affect children and their families, students and their futures, and, ultimately, the way we see ourselves and those around us. Last Boat Out of Shanghai brings a poignant personal angle to the experiences of refugees then and, by extension, today. “Zia’s portraits are compassionate and heartbreaking, and they are, ultimately, the universal story of many families who leave their homeland as refugees and find less-than-welcoming circumstances on the other side.”—Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club
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Dawson Raymond
The Chinese Chameleon
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SKLOVSKIJ Viktor.
Marco Polo
8vo, tela rossa con scritte oro in sovracoperta. editoriale illustrata con ali; 286 pp.; 2 apparati fuori testo di bellissime tavv. a colori applicate; a cura di M. Olsùfieva
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Mao Tse-tung, Pref. Aldo Natoli
Note Su Stalin e Il Socialismo Sovietico
16mo, br. e. pp.152
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Whitfield S. Ed.
Le vie della seta. Popoli, culture, Paesaggi
4to, ril. ed. in sovracoperta. pp.480. Dalle pietre preziose alle spezie, dalle fedi religiose alle innovazioni tecnologiche, lo scambio di merci e idee lungo le antiche rotte commerciali delle Vie della Seta svolse un ruolo cruciale nello sviluppo delle civiltà asiatiche, africane ed europee. Questo libro offre la prima visione complessiva di 1500 anni di storia, ponendo al centro del discorso le tipologie dei territori. Con contributi di oltre settanta specialisti di tutto il mondo, ogni capitolo esplora la storia del commercio e delle culture lungo le Vie della Seta nel contesto dei diversi luoghi - steppe, montagne, deserti, fiumi e mari - per rivelare l'estrema importanza che i paesaggi hanno avuto nel determinare i viaggi, le economie e le comunità di coloro che vissero e commerciarono lungo tali rotte. Splendidamente illustrato con le mappe dettagliate degli itinerari, le fotografie degli spettacolari paesaggi dell'Asia centrale e cento tesori iconici, tra oggetti e strutture architettoniche, questo innovativo libro celebra la storia e l'eredità di culture diversissime che si sono sviluppate e hanno prosperato non a dispetto delle loro differenze, ma in virtù di esse.
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Fraser Ronald
Lord of the East
8vo, original red cloth, no dj. pp.246. ex library stamps., ow good. A story of 3rd B.C. ancient China in social turmoil and its first emperor Qin shi huang (259 B.C.-210 B.C.). Ex-Library
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Yuan Mei
Censored by Confucius: Ghost Stories by Yuan Mei (New Studies in Asian Culture)
8vo, br. ed. 260pp. "The one hundred-some stories depict the important role ghosts played in the lives of the Chinese, as well as revealing a great deal about sex, revenge, transvestism, corruption, and other topics banned by Mei's puritanical mid-Qing society". -- Reference & Research Book News.
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Silbey David J.
The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China
8vo, br. ed. pp.273. A concise history of the pivotal uprising challenges popular academic views to reveal how the Boxers nearly defeated imperial powers, drawing on diaries and letters by Allied soldiers and diplomats to offer insight into their successes and role in inspiring subsequent generations of Chinese nationalists. 10,000 first printing. David J. Silbey teaches at Cornell University's Washington, D.C., campus. He is the author of A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899?1902.
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Dong Stella
Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City
8vo, br. ed. Transformed from a swampland wilderness into a dazzling, modern-day Babylon, the Shanghai that predated Mao's cultural revolution was a city like no other: redolent with opium and underworld crime, booming with foreign trade, blessed with untold wealth and marred by abject squalor. Journalist Stella Dong captures all the exoticism, extremes, and excitement of this legendary city as if it were a larger-than-life character in a fantastic novel. Review: For a good, spicy read about colonial Asia's most decadent city, this is the book. Stella Dong, a second-generation Chinese-American living in New York, tells the story of Old Shanghai in racy style: readers expecting tales of drugs, prostitution, and gang warfare will not be disappointed. Her scholarship is sound, however, and at the end of each chapter she provides bibliographies of drier, more academic studies for those wishing to delve deeper. The Treaty of Nanking that ended the First Opium War between Britain and China in 1842 granted trading concessions in Shanghai to the European powers. The international currents shaping the city over the next hundred years were complex: British merchants, Chinese warlords, Russian emigrés, Sephardic Jews, and German spies exploited its extraterritorial status to make Shanghai a hotbed of greed, vice, and intrigue. Opium was crucial to the city's extraordinary wealth and lawlessness, though Dong also relates the rise of its criminal gangs to the development of coastal steamships and consequent loss of inland-transportation jobs. Foreign participation in the opium trade was not confined to the British: the role of the French Concession in Shanghai is described in well-researched detail. The flamboyant personalities that prospered in the city's unfettered environment come alive, characters like Pockmarked Huang, who combined the post of police chief in the French Concession with leadership of the Green Gang. Dong explores Shanghai's political significance both as the source of Chiang Kai-shek's fortunes and as a center of Communist revolutionary activity. As the city again becomes the leading commercial metropolis of a dynamic national economy, Shanghai 1842-1949 successfully documents its unique role in the development of modern China. --John Stevenson
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Mann James
The China Fantasy: Why Capitalism Will Not Bring Democracy to China
br. ed. The book that got China right: a prophetic work on how America's policies towards China led it away from liberalization and further towards authoritarianism, from the bestselling author of Rise of the Vulcans "[The China Fantasy] predicted, China would remain an authoritarian country, and its success would encourage other authoritarian regimes to resist pressures to change . . . Mann’s prediction turned out to be true." -New York Review of Books, October 2017 "From Clinton to Bush to Obama, the prevailing belief was engagement with China would make China more like the West. Instead, as [James] Mann predicted, China has gone in the opposite direction." -The New York Times, February 2018 One of our most perceptive China experts, James Mann wrote The China Fantasy as a vital wake-up call to all who are ignorant of America's true relationship with the Asian giant. For years, our leaders posited that China could be drawn to increasing liberalization through the power of the free market, but Mann asked us to consider a very real alternative: What if China's economy continues to expand but its government remains as dismissive of democracy and human rights as it is now? Now the results are in: the reign of Xi Jinping has proven that Mann was right. To understand how China got to its current state and why it may not be too late to turn back, The China Fantasy is essential reading. Calling for an end to the current policy of overlooking China's abuses for the sake of business opportunities, Mann presents an alternative path to a better China.
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Vincent Durand-Dastès
Récits de rêve en Asie Orientale
8vo, br. ed. 192pp. Métaphore de l'existence, indice de l'avenir, les rêves furent aussi lus comme des symptômes par les traités de médecine chinoise. Les maîtres de rituels exorcistes surent y relever la trace des démons à la poursuite desquels ils s'étaient lancés. Mais ce ne sont pas de ces " rêves savants " dont nous parle Extrême-Orient Extrême-Occident. La perspective est ici avant tout littéraire. Quels sont les traits rhétoriques du récit de rêve en Asie orientale ? Quel rôle joue l'image onirique, le récit de rêve, au sein d'un poème, d'une anecdote ou d'un conte classique, d'une pièce de théâtre ou d'un roman long aux maints rebondissements ? Quelle langue, autrement dit, parle les rêves ? En Asie orientale, les rêves font beaucoup de choses à l'écriture.
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Gelber Harry Gregory
Dragon and the Foreign Devils: China and the World, 1100 Bc to the Present
8vo, hardcover in dj, pp.512. China is the most exciting rising power in the world today. The explosive growth of its economy and the possibility that it might soon become the next superpower, dominant in East Asia and influential in every part of the world, has attracted universal interest, admiration and envy. Most histories of China approach that huge and populous country through the story of its dynasties, its struggle to defend its borders and its internal politics. Harry Gelber's "The Dragon and the Foreign Devils" is the first history for the general reader to tell the story of China from the outside as well as from the inside. It explores the relationships involved, from the incursions into China of steppe horsemen around 200 BC to the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century AD, from the first arrival of European travellers to China's decline, after 1911, into an object of the policies of the major powers, and on to the Revolution on 1949 and the Tienanmen Square protest in 1989. It explains what moved these minor and major foreign societies and how concerns with China fitted into their own major interests and views of the world. And, it outlines the recurring cycles of Chinese history, from turmoil and disorder to strong central government and back to turmoil. Informative text boxes elaborate on particular people, topics or key moments to complement the main narrative. These mini-essays deal with a wide range of topics from 'Confucius' and 'Concubines' to 'Tea' and 'Silk', and from the debilitating influence of the last nineteenth-century empress, 'Cixi', to the decisive influence on the 1941-45 Pacific War of the US Navy's ability to read 'Japanese naval codes'; and from 'Madame Chiang's' glamour to 'Mao's Sexual Habits'.
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Gelber Harry Gregory
Dragon and the Foreign Devils: China and the World, 1100 Bc to the Present
8vo, hardcover in dj. pp.512. China is the most exciting rising power in the world today. The explosive growth of its economy and the possibility that it might soon become the next superpower, dominant in East Asia and influential in every part of the world, has attracted universal interest, admiration and envy. Most histories of China approach that huge and populous country through the story of its dynasties, its struggle to defend its borders and its internal politics. Harry Gelber's "The Dragon and the Foreign Devils" is the first history for the general reader to tell the story of China from the outside as well as from the inside. It explores the relationships involved, from the incursions into China of steppe horsemen around 200 BC to the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century AD, from the first arrival of European travellers to China's decline, after 1911, into an object of the policies of the major powers, and on to the Revolution on 1949 and the Tienanmen Square protest in 1989. It explains what moved these minor and major foreign societies and how concerns with China fitted into their own major interests and views of the world. And, it outlines the recurring cycles of Chinese history, from turmoil and disorder to strong central government and back to turmoil. Informative text boxes elaborate on particular people, topics or key moments to complement the main narrative. These mini-essays deal with a wide range of topics from 'Confucius' and 'Concubines' to 'Tea' and 'Silk', and from the debilitating influence of the last nineteenth-century empress, 'Cixi', to the decisive influence on the 1941-45 Pacific War of the US Navy's ability to read 'Japanese naval codes'; and from 'Madame Chiang's' glamour to 'Mao's Sexual Habits'.
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Hsia Florence C.
Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and Their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China
8vo, cloth in dj, ex-library labels ow, as new. Though Jesuits assumed a variety of roles as missionaries in late imperial China, their most memorable guise was that of scientific expert, whose maps, clocks, astrolabes, and armillaries reportedly astonished the Chinese. But the icon of the missionary-scientist is itself a complex myth. Masterfully correcting the standard story of China Jesuits as simple conduits for Western science, Florence C. Hsia shows how these missionary-scientists remade themselves as they negotiated the place of the profane sciences in a religious enterprise. Sojourners in a Strange Land develops a genealogy of Jesuit conceptions of scientific life within the Chinese mission field from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Analyzing the printed record of their endeavors in natural philosophy and mathematics, Hsia identifies three models of the missionary man of science by their genres of writing: mission history, travelogue, and academic collection. Drawing on the history of early modern Europe’s scientific, religious, and print culture, she uses the elaboration and reception of these scientific personae to construct the first collective biography of the Jesuit missionary-scientist’s many incarnations in late imperial China. Ex-Library
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Denis, Antoine
the perfect union the chinese Methods
4to, hardcover in dj. The ancient secrets of Chinese love-making, illustrated in color.
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DE Smedt Marc
Chinese Erotism
4to, hardcover in dj. Ril. cm. 22x28, pp. 94, ill a col. Monografia sull'erotismo che ne ricerca i presupposti e le citazioni letterarie in una società edonistica. in english.
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Benton Gregor and Lin Chun
Was Mao Really a Monster?: The Academic Response to Chang and Halliday's "Mao: The Unknown Story"
8vo, br. ed. 208. Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday was published in 2005 to a great fanfare. The book portrays Mao as a monster – equal to or worse than Hitler and Stalin – and a fool who won power by native cunning and ruled by terror. It received a rapturous welcome from reviewers in the popular press and rocketed to the top of the worldwide bestseller list. Few works on China by writers in the West have achieved its impact. Reviews by serious China scholars, however, tended to take a different view. Most were sharply critical, questioning its authority and the authors’ methods , arguing that Chang and Halliday’s book is not a work of balanced scholarship, as it purports to be, but a highly selective and even polemical study that sets out to demonise Mao. This book brings together sixteen reviews of Mao: The Unknown Story – all by internationally well-regarded specialists in modern Chinese history, and published in relatively specialised scholarly journals. Taken together they demonstrate that Chang and Halliday’s portrayal of Mao is in many places woefully inaccurate. While agreeing that Mao had many faults and was responsible for some disastrous policies, they conclude that a more balanced picture is needed.
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Zhang Lping
Sanmao. Avventure di un piccolo eroe vagabondo. Ediz. Illustrata
4to. copertina rigida. pp.76. Il piccolo Sanmao ha viaggiato in lungo e in largo, dalla Shanghai degli anni '30 sino a oggi, grazie al suo linguaggio universale e innovativo. Attraverso tante storie a fumetti in bianco e nero e senza parole, il suo autore Zhang Leping è riuscito a parlare a intere generazioni di bambini e adulti: dai contadini della Cina di allora, che spesso non sapevano leggere né scrivere, fino ai lettori colti e attenti di oggi. Tra mille avventure e disavventure, questo ragazzino orfano e vagabondo ci porta nelle strade della Parigi d'Oriente per raccontarci la vita e la società cinese di inizio secolo. Ai suoi celebri tre capelli è lasciato il compito di infonderci tutta l'ironia, la sensibilità e persino la denuncia di cui il nostro eroico Sanmao è capace. Età di lettura: da 6 anni.
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Preston Diana
The Boxer Rebellion: The Dramatic Story of China's War on Foreigners That Shook the World in the Summer of 1900
8vo, br. ed. 436pp. Portrays the dramatic human experience of the Boxer Rebellion from both a Western and Chinese perspective, drawing on diaries, memoirs, and letters of those that lived through this pivotal time in the history of China. Reprint.
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Cohen Paul A.
History in Three Keys: The Boxers As Event, Experience, and Myth
8vo, hardcover pp.428. Paul A. Cohen is Edith Stix Wasserman Professor of Asian Studies and History at Wellesley College and an associate at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University. His publications include the award-winning Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (Columbia).
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Luo Guanzhong
Quelling the Demons' Revolt: A Novel of Ming China
8vo, br. ed. 213pp. In this Ming-era novel, historical narrative, raucous humor, and the supernatural are interwoven to tell the tale of an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Song dynasty. A poor young girl meets an old woman who gives her a magic book that allows her to create rice and money. Her father, terrified that his daughter's demonic nature might be discovered, marries her off. Forced to flee, she and others with supernatural abilities find themselves in the midst of a grotesque version of a historical uprising, in which facts are intermingled with slapstick humor and wild fictions. Attributed to the writer Luo Guanzhong, Quelling the Demons' Revolt is centered on the events of the rebellion led by Wang Ze in 1047?48. But it is a distorted, humorous version, in which Wang Ze's lieutenants show up as a comical peddler and a mysterious Daoist priest and a celebrated warrior appears despite having died many years earlier. Rather than fantastic adventures and supernatural marvels, the author points to human vanities and fixations as well as social injustice, warning of the vulnerability of any pursuit of order in a world plagued by demonic forces as well as mundane corruption. Although the story takes place long before the era in which it was written, ultimately Quelling the Demons' Revolt is the story of the Ming dynasty in Song masquerade, presciently warning of the dynasty's downfall. The novel is divided into chapters, but in many ways it is an arrangement of self-contained stories that draw on vernacular storytelling. This translation offers English-speaking readers a spirited example of social critique combined with caustic humor from the era of Luo Guanzhong.
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Xuewu, Qiu
Viaje Por el Rio Changjiang
16mo quadr. br. ed. pp.136. illustrado. en espanol. como nuevo.
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Goebel Rolf J.
Constructing China. Kafka's Orientalist Discourse
8vo, original cloth (no dj issued).137pp. Constructing China: Kafka's Orientalist Discourse (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) (ISBN:1571131442) Goebel studies four representative works by Kafka that explore the problems of the Western representation of the Orient: his 'Description of a Struggle'; several letters to Felice Bauer, offering an interpretation of Chinese poetry in connection with the conflict between writing and Kafka's love for Felice; the canonical story 'The Great Wall of China', parodically appropriating sterotypes of China's stagnant history and authoritarian emperors for a refutation of colonialist ideas of progress; and the sequel 'An Old Manuscript', dramatising China's invasion by foreign powers and the breakdown of crosscultural communication. Elucidating these themes from a broadly comparative perspective, Goebel shows Kafka to be one of German modernism's most intriguing and self-reflective writers on the Orient.ROLF J. GOEBEL is Professor of German at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
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Chen Janet Y.
Guilty of Indigence: The Urban Poor in China, 1900-1953
8vo, br. ed. pp.309. In the early twentieth century, a time of political fragmentation and social upheaval in China, poverty became the focus of an anguished national conversation about the future of the country. Investigating the lives of the urban poor in China during this critical era, Guilty of Indigence examines the solutions implemented by a nation attempting to deal with "society's most fundamental problem." Interweaving analysis of shifting social viewpoints, the evolution of poor relief institutions, and the lived experiences of the urban poor, Janet Chen explores the development of Chinese attitudes toward urban poverty and of policies intended for its alleviation. Chen concentrates on Beijing and Shanghai, two of China's most important cities, and she considers how various interventions carried a lasting influence. The advent of the workhouse, the denigration of the nonworking poor as "social parasites," efforts to police homelessness and vagrancy--all had significant impact on the lives of people struggling to survive. Chen provides a crucially needed historical lens for understanding how beliefs about poverty intersected with shattering historical events, producing new welfare policies and institutions for the benefit of some, but to the detriment of others. Drawing on vast archival material, Guilty of Indigence deepens the historical perspective on poverty in China and reveals critical lessons about a still-pervasive social issue.
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STOECKLIN Daniel, Pref. Jean-Luc Domenach
Enfants des rues en Chine
8vo, br. ed. en français. pp.367. pref. Jean-Luc Domenach
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Cohen Paul A.
Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute)
8vo, br. ed. Synopsis: Since its first publication, Paul A. Cohen's Discovering History in China has occupied a singular place in American China scholarship. Translated into three East Asian languages, the volume has become essential to the study of China from the early nineteenth century to today. Cohen critiques the work of leading postwar scholars and is especially adamant about not reading China through the lens of Western history. To this end, he uncovers the strong ethnocentric bias pervading the three major conceptual frameworks of American scholarship of the 1950s and 1960s: the impact-response, modernization, and imperialism approaches. In place of these, Cohen favors a "China-centered" approach in which historians understand Chinese history on its own terms, paying close attention to Chinese historical trajectories and Chinese perceptions of their problems, rather than a set of expectations derived from Western history. In an important new introduction, Cohen reflects on his fifty-year career as a historian of China and discusses major recent trends in the field. Although some of these developments challenge a narrowly conceived China-centered approach, insofar as they enable more balanced comparisons between China and the West and recast the Chinese and their history in more human, less exotic terms, they powerfully affirm the central thrust of Cohen's work. Book Description: A critical reassessment of the reception of China's history in American historical writing.
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Petrucci Raphael
Chinese Painters a Critical Study
Very Good.in good jacket. Well-illustrated work on Chinese painters, with sections on technique and evolution of style, illustrated with 25 duotone plates. Describes the painter's equipment, representation of forms, division of subjects and inspiration, as well as analyzing the art chronologically, from its origins through the intervention of Buddhism on through the T'ang, Sung, Yuan, Ming and Chi'ing Periods. Yellowish tan cloth, 155 pages. First Edition.. 8vol
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Harrison James P.
The Communists and Chinese Peasant Rebellions;: A study in the rewriting of Chinese history (Studies of the East Asian Institute, Columbia University)
8vo, original cloth ex library labels ans tamps, ow. very good.363pp. Ex-Library
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Norman Smith (Editor) James Flath (Editor)
Beyond Suffering: Recounting War in Modern China (Contemporary Chinese Studies)
8vo, br. ed. 306pp. China was afflicted by a brutal succession of conflicts through much of the 19th and 20th centuries. In this examination of how wartime suffering defined the nation and shaped its people, a distinguished group of historians of modern China look beyond the geopolitical aspects of war to explore its social, institutional, and cultural dimensions, from child rearing and education to massacres and warlord mutinies. Though accounts of war-inflicted suffering are often fragmented or politically motivated, the authors show that they are crucial to understanding the multiple fronts on which wars are fought, experienced, and remembered.
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Human Rights Watch; Robin Munro; Editor-Robin Munro; Editor-Jeff Rigsby
Death by Default: A Policy of Fatal Neglect in China's State Orphanages
8vo, br. ed. few pencil underlinings ow very good. 394pp. China's claim to guarantee the "Right to Subsistence" conceals a secret world of starvation, disease, and unnatural death. A world into which thousands of Chinese citizens disappear each year. The victims are not the political and religious dissidents, they are orphans and abandoned children in custodial institutions run by China's Ministry of Civil Affairs. Death By Default: A Policy Of Fatal Neglect In China's State Orphanages documents the pattern of cruelty, abuse, and malign neglect which has dominated child welfare work in China since the early 1950s, and which now constitutes one of the country's gravest human rights problems. Many institutions (including some in major cities) appear to be operating as little more than assembly lines for the elimination of unwanted orphans, with an annual turnover of admissions and deaths far exceeding the number of beds available. Death By Default is a long needed expose on a severe humanitarian crisis afflicting the Chinese populace. -- Midwest Book Review
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Scherzer F.
La Puissance Paternelle En Chine. Etude De Droit Chinois ( Bibliothequw Orientale Elzévirienne)
16mo, pp.79, paper wrap (would need rebinding), ow. very good, uncut, scarce. trés rare, necessite reliure, autrement Trés Bon Etat. copertine conservate. avrebbe bisogno di rilegatura, altrimenti ottimo, pagine intonse. patriarcato in cina. Cet ouvrage est le volume XXIII de la fameuse bibliothèque Elzévirienne.
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Mayer Ruth
Serial Fu Manchu: The Chinese Supervillain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology
8vo, br. ed. 199pp. he evil mastermind&;and master of disguise&;Fu Manchu has long threatened to take over the world. In the past century, his dastardly plans have driven serialized novels, comic books, films, and TV. Yet this sinister Oriental character represents more than an invincible criminal in pop culture; Fu Manchu became the embodiment of the Yellow Peril. Serial Fu Manchu provides a savvy cultural, historical, and media-based analysis that shows how Fu Manchu&;s irrepressibility gives shape to&;and reinforces&;the persistent Yellow Peril myth. Ruth Mayer argues that seriality is not merely a commercial strategy but essential to the spread of European and American fears of Asian expansion.Tracing Fu Manchu through transnational serials in varied media from 1913 to the 1970s, Mayer shows how the icon evolved. She pays particular attention to the figure&;s literary foundations, the impact of media changes on his dissemination, and his legacy. In the series Asian American History and Culture, edited by Sucheng Chan, David Palumbo-Liu, Michael Omi, K. Scott Wong, and Linda Trinh
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Terzani Tiziano
La Fine è Il Mio Inizio
8vo, rileg. edit. pp.446. qualche orecchietta e sottolineatura a matita, altrimenti ottimo. Tiziano Terzani, sapendo di essere arrivato alla fine del suo percorso, parla al figlio Folco di cos'è stata la sua vita e di cos'è la vita: "Se hai capito qualcosa la vuoi lasciare lì in un pacchetto", dice. Così racconta di tutta una vita trascorsa a viaggiare per il mondo alla ricerca della verità. E cercando il senso delle tante cose che ha fatto e delle tante persone che è stato, delinea un affresco delle grandi passioni del proprio tempo. "Se mi chiedi alla fine cosa lascio, lascio un libro che forse potrà aiutare qualcuno a vedere il mondo in modo migliore, a godere di più della propria vita, a vederla in un contesto più grande, come quello che io sento così forte."
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Muirhead Richard
China: a Yellow peril? Western Relationships with China
8v.oi, br. ed. If some Victorian antiquarians are to be believed, contact between the Chinese Empire, and other Middle Eastern and Western Empires goes back to long before the birth of Christ; such as the ancient Egyptians and the Roman Empire. A Roman coin from the the time of Hadrian in the second century of the Christian era was found in Oshkosh in Wisconsin in 1883, thought at the time to have been carried there across the Bering Straits to Wisconsin by way of Alaska by a Chinese person. Muirhead`s book China: A Yellow Peril? Western Relationships with the Chinese From the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Centuries looks at a time period long after these very early contacts, to the beginning of trading links between the West and China in the Seventeenth Century, with the arrival of the Jesuit intellectual and religious leaders. The impact of these individuals as well as the British, French, Russians, Japanese, Germans and Americans in the following three hundred or so years created a tension that resulted negatively in the West and elsewhere in the racist Yellow Peril scare; and positively in developments such as an appreciation of China as a cultured civilisation with trade in Chinoiserie and food stuffs. In fact, between the late eighteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century there was a debate between detractors and supporters of China as either barbarian or civilised, with relationships between British and Chinese in the colony of Hong Kong perhaps surprisingly surviving the complex change of events in China that led to the rise of communism in rural and urban China from the 1920s onwards. The Yellow Peril scare, essentially a fear of Chinese expansionism and morals, is the main subject matter of this book. Muirhead concludes that with the pressures brought upon the world by China`s massive economic growth and pollution comes the risk of a revival of the Yellow Peril scare." Muirhead hopes his book will dispel a tendency amongst some commentators to portray everything in black and white and an unnecessary overwhelming guilt for colonialism. In fact, there were good imperialists and Victorians, and patriotic Chinese communists
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by Franck Billé (Editor, Contributor), Sören Urbansky (Editor, Contributor), Christos Lynteris , David Walker , Kevin Carrico, Magnus Fiskesjö , Romain Dittgen , Ross Anthony, ,Xiaojian Zhao , Yu Qiu
Yellow Perils: China Narratives in the Contemporary World
8vo, br. ed. pp.284. China’s meteoric rise and ever expanding economic and cultural footprint have been accompanied by widespread global disquiet. Whether admiring or alarmist, media discourse and representations of China often tap into the myths and prejudices that emerged through specific historical encounters. These deeply embedded anxieties have shown great resilience, as in recent media treatments of SARS and the H5N1 virus, which echoed past beliefs connecting China and disease. Popular perceptions of Asia, too, continue to be framed by entrenched racial stereotypes: its people are unfathomable, exploitative, cunning, or excessively hardworking. This interdisciplinary collection of original essays offers a broad view of the mechanics that underlie Yellow Peril discourse by looking at its cultural deployment and repercussions worldwide. Building on the richly detailed historical studies already published in the context of the United States and Europe, contributors to Yellow Perils confront the phenomenon in Italy, Australia, South Africa, Nigeria, Mongolia, Hong Kong, and China itself. With chapters based on archival material and interviews, the collection supplements and often challenges superficial journalistic accounts and top-down studies by economists and political scientists. Yellow Peril narratives, contributors find, constitute cultural vectors of multiple kinds of anxieties, spanning the cultural, racial, political, and economic. Indeed, the emergence of the term “Yellow Peril” in such disparate contexts cannot be assumed to be singular, to refer to the same fears, or to revolve around the same stereotypes. The discourse, even when used in reference to a single country like China, is therefore inherently fractured and multiple. The term “Yellow Peril” may feel unpalatable and dated today, but the ethnographic, geographic, and historical breadth of this collection?experiences of Chinese migration and diaspora, historical reflections on the discourse of the Yellow Peril in China, and contemporary analyses of the global reverberations of China’s economic rise?offers a unique overview of the ways in which anti-Chinese narratives continue to play out in today’s world. This timely and provocative book will appeal to Chinese and Asian Studies scholars, but will also be highly relevant to historians and anthropologists working on diasporic communities and on ethnic formations both within and beyond Asia. Contributors: Christos Lynteris David Walker Kevin Carrico Magnus Fiskesjö Romain Dittgen Ross Anthony Xiaojian Zhao Yu Qiu
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Rossi Vittorio G.
Festa delle Lanterne
8vo, cartonato editoriale
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Rossi Vittorio G.
La Terra è Un'arancia Dolce
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PANIKKAR MADHAVA KAVALAM
STORIA DELLA DOMINAZIONE EUROPEA IN ASIA DAL CINQUECENTO AI NOSTRI GIORNI ( BIBLIOTECA DI CULTURA STORICA, 59)
8vo, pp. 542. XXXV ( 35 ) tavole illustrate in nero, fuori testo, con didascalie e II ( 2 ) cartine gografiche ripiegate all' interno. Traduzione di Vittorio Radicati di Marmoreto. dedica all'antiporta bianca. altrimenti ottimo, indici, nota dell'editore, introduzione 20.8x14.5 cm. legatura editoriale in tela con titoli al dorso, sovraccoperta illustrata 542 pp. numerose illustrazioni n.t. prima edizione . ottimo.
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Klausner Carla L.
The Seljuk Vezirate:a Study of Civil Administration, 1055-1194: A Study of Civil Administration, 1055-1194
8vo, br. ed. Pp. viii, 143 Original stiff wrappers. In a very good condition, crisp interior. ~ First edition. Harvard Middle Eastern Monograph Series, XXII
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Muirhead Richard
China and the West: Conflict and Opportunity: With special reference to the "Yellow Peril" Prejudice
8vo, br, ed. 120pp. This book is a survey and history of the relationship between China and the West from the earliest times of antiquity to the present day with particular reference to the racist Yellow Peril scare and its sad consequences. In this book I take a thorough and relevant and right up to date examination of all aspects of the history and popular culture of the interaction between the British Isles,the USA,Africa and Australia from ancient times onwards up to the era of Donald Trump and Premier Xi of China,taking in childrens comics,the band Devo, Rupert the Bear, popular music and so on to see how the tragic and racist Yellow Peril scare coloured the opinions of historians,journalists and authors and many others.
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Platt Stephen R.
Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War
8vo, br. ed. xix-470pp. A gripping account of China’s nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion, one of the largest civil wars in history. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom brims with unforgettable characters and vivid re-creations of massive and often gruesome battles—a sweeping yet intimate portrait of the conflict that shaped the fate of modern China. The story begins in the early 1850s, the waning years of the Qing dynasty, when word spread of a major revolution brewing in the provinces, led by a failed civil servant who claimed to be the son of God and brother of Jesus. The Taiping rebels drew their power from the poor and the disenfranchised, unleashing the ethnic rage of millions of Chinese against their Manchu rulers. This homegrown movement seemed all but unstoppable until Britain and the United States stepped in and threw their support behind the Manchus: after years of massive carnage, all opposition to Qing rule was effectively snuffed out for generations. Stephen R. Platt recounts these events in spellbinding detail, building his story on two fascinating characters with opposing visions for China’s future: the conservative Confucian scholar Zeng Guofan, an accidental general who emerged as the most influential military strategist in China’s modern history; and Hong Rengan, a brilliant Taiping leader whose grand vision of building a modern, industrial, and pro-Western Chinese state ended in tragic failure. This is an essential and enthralling history of the rise and fall of the movement that, a century and a half ago, might have launched China on an entirely different path into the modern world. Hong Kong in 1852 was a diseased and watery place, a rocky island off the southern shore of the Qing Empire where the inhabitants lived in dread of what one described as "the miasma set free from the ground which was everywhere being turned up." A small British settlement sat between the mountains and the bay, but the emerald and sapphire glory of the scene belied the darkness below the surface. Leaving the concentration of godowns, military barracks, and trading firms along the colony's nostalgically named central streets (The Queen's Road, Wellington Street, Holly-wood Road), one could find the grandest vistas in the gravel paths that led up the coast into the hills, but the European settlement soon gave way to scattered Chinese houses among fields growing rice and sweet potatoes unchanged in the decade since the British took the island as their prize in the Opium War. Some of the wealthier merchants had built opulent mansions in those hills, with terraced gardens commanding a view of the harbor and town. But as though their builders had strayed too far from the protection of the settlement, the inhabitants of those houses sickened and died. Marked as "homes of fever or death," the ghostly manors sat silent and abandoned, their empty gaze passing judgment on the settlers below. One of those settlers was Theodore Hamberg, a young Swedish missionary with a thin chinstrap beard that set off his delicate, nearly effeminate features. He was blessed with a lovely voice, and in his youth in Stockholm he had sung together with Jenny Lind, the "Swedish Nightingale." But while Lind went on to conquer the opera halls of Europe and America, bringing suitors such as Frédéric Chopin and Hans Christian Andersen to their knees along the way, Hamberg's life took an entirely different path. His strong tenor found its destined outlet in preaching, and in 1847 he left his native Sweden to sail to the opposite end of the world, to this malarial colony of Hong Kong, with the sole purpose of bringing the Chinese to their knees after a different fashion. Theodore Hamberg might well have lived his life in obscurity, for his proudest accomplishments meant little to anyone beyond a small circle of Protestant missionaries. He was one of the first Europeans in his generation to brave the Chinese countryside, leaving the relative safety of Hong Kong to preach in a village outside the Chinese trading port of Canton a hundred miles up the Pearl River (though for health reasons he finally returned to the colony). He was also the first to learn to speak the dialect of the Hakka, or "guest people"-a gypsy minority thickly populous in south China. All of that might have meant little to anyone in the world outside except that one day in the late spring of 1852, one of his converts from the countryside brought a guest to meet him, a short, round-faced Hakka named Hong Rengan who had a remarkable story to tell. The strangest thing about this Hakka, Hamberg recalled from their first meeting, was how much he already seemed to know about God and Jesus despite the fact that he hailed from well beyond the narrow reach of the Hong Kong missionaries. Hamberg listened with curiosity as Hong Rengan gave a baffling account of the events leading to his arrival in Hong Kong. He spoke of visions and battles, armies and congregations of believers, a heavenly prophet from among the Hakkas. He had, or at least so he claimed, been hunted by the agents of the Qing dynasty and had lived in disguise under an assumed name. He had been kidnapped, had escaped, and had lived for four days in the forest, six days in a cave. None of it made much sense, though, and Hamberg confessed, "I could form no clear conception of the whole matter." Not knowing what to make of the story, he asked Hong Rengan to write it down, which he did, and then-though Hamberg had expected him to stay for baptism-he left without explanation. Hamberg put the sheets of paper with Hong Rengan's story into his desk and turned his mind to other matters. He would think little of them again for nearly a year, until the spring of 1853 when the news came that Nanjing had fallen in a torrent of blood, and Hamberg realized that the strange events sketched out in Hong Rengan's tale meant more than he had ever imagined. News of the mounting upheaval in China reached Hamberg and the other settlers in Hong Kong and up the coast in Shanghai only in scattered and vague accounts. From Chinese government reports there seemed no pattern to the rising disorder of the early 1850s, no principle or cohesion. Local uprisings and small-scale banditry in China's countryside were a perennial thorn in the side of the imperial authorities, hardly anything new or noteworthy, though they certainly did seem to have increased in the years following the Opium War. Chinese travelers and clandestine Catholic missionaries deep in the interior forwarded rumors of some larger movement led by a man known as "Tian De," or "Heavenly Virtue," but just as many accounts reported that the man was dead, killed by imperial forces, or that he had never existed in the first place. In the absence of any clear news, the foreigners in their coastal ports paid little attention, concerned only that bandits might disrupt the production of tea and silk. But the fall of the southern capital of Nanjing in 1853 brought a massive civil war right to the doorstep of the foreign settlement in Shanghai, which was just two hundred miles downriver at the mouth of the sea. Half a million rebels calling themselves the Taiping Tianguo ("Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace") flooded down the Yangtze from central China on a grand flotilla of commandeered ships to Nanjing, leaving a swath of emptied cities and shattered imperial defenses behind them, and the debate was settled; this was no mere bandit uprising. Fear gripped the city of Shanghai. There was no direct communication with Nanjing, no concrete information (the American steamer Susquehanna tried to sail upriver to Nanjing to investigate but ran aground). Rumors spread that the insurgents would next march on Shanghai to attack the foreigners, and the city's Chinese population boarded up their houses, packed up their furniture, and took to riverboats or fled into the countryside for safety. The foreign settlers called up their unready defenses, rallying a haphazard volunteer defense corps to man the city walls and bringing up the few ships in ready reach-two British steamers and a brig-of- war, and one steamer each for the French and Americans. But there it ended, at least for the time being. The Taiping did not march on Shanghai, and the city's vigilance eased off. Instead, the rebels set their targets northward toward Beijing, the capital of the Manchu rulers, and dug in for a long and bloody campaign with Nanjing as their base of operations. Their "Heavenly Capital," as Nanjing was now renamed, lay tantalizingly just out of reach of Shanghai. One British ship did manage to visit in late April 1853 but brought back conflicting impressions of what was happening there, the clearest opinion being that of the British plenipotentiary, who declared the Taiping to have an ideology of "superstition and nonsense." The visitors learned nothing about the rebels' origins. Despite the scarcity of clear information, raw accounts of the civil war in China radiated outward from Shanghai and Hong Kong to capture the imagination of the Western world. Europe had been through its own convulsions just five years earlier with the revolutions of 1848, and the events in China seemed a remarkable parallel: the downtrodden people of China, oppressed by their Manchu overlords, had, it seemed, risen up to demand satisfaction. The Economist called it "a social change or convulsion such as have of late afflicted Europe" and mused that "it is singular to find similar commotions at the same time in Asia and Europe." Here was evidence that the empire at the other end of the world was now connected to the economic and political systems of the West. Karl Marx, in 1853 a London correspondent for the New-York Daily Tribune struggling to give shape to his ideas on capitalism, likewise considered the rebellion in China to be a sign of China's integration into the global economy, describing it as the end result of Britain's forcing China open to foreign trade in the recent Opium War. In Marx's terminology, what was happening in China was not merely a rebellion or a hodgepodge of uprisings but "one formidable revolution," one that demonstrated the interconnectedness of the industrial world. Indeed, it was in China, he argued, that one could see the future of the West: "the next uprising of the people of Europe, and their next movement for republican freedom and economy of Government," he wrote, "may depend more probably on what is now passing in the Celestial Empire- the very opposite of Europe-than on any other political cause that now exists." As he explained it, the disorder in China had its roots in the opium trade; a decade earlier, Britain had cracked China's markets open with its warships, and in doing so it had undermined the "superstitious faith" of the Chinese in their ruling dynasty. Exposure to the world meant the destruction of the old order, he believed, for "dissolution must follow as surely as that of any mummy carefully preserved in a hermetically sealed coffin, whenever it is brought into contact with the open air." But the effects of the Qing dynasty's dissolution would not be limited to China itself. The whole of the Taiping Revolution was, in his mind, Britain's fault, and now the effects of her actions overseas were going to be felt back home: "the question," he wrote, "is how that revolution will in time react on England, and through England on Europe." Marx predicted that the loss of China's markets to the Taiping Revolution would undermine British exports of cotton and wool. Merchants in a chaotic China would accept only bullion in exchange for their goods, sapping Britain's stores of precious metals. Worse, the revolution would cut off England's source of tea imports, and the price of tea (to which most of the British were addicted) would spike in England at the same time that a poor harvest in Western Europe looked likely to send food prices through the roof, reducing still further the demand for manufactured goods and undermining the whole manufacturing industry on which Britain's economy depended. "It may be safely augured," Marx concluded, "that the Chinese revolution will throw the spark into the overloaded mine of the present industrial system and cause the explosion of the long-prepared general crisis, which, spreading abroad, will be closely followed by political revolutions on the Continent." If Marx was keen to convince the readers of the New-York Daily Tribune that the Chinese civil war was one of class struggle and economic revolution analogous to the movements in Europe, the editors of the Daily Picayune in the southern slave port of New Orleans saw it in rather different terms, after their own particular vision of the world. It was, as they saw it, a racial war, and China was a slave state in upheaval. The Taiping had emerged, the editors explained, from the southern provinces of Guangxi and Guangdong, whose inhabitants were "principally of the primitive Chinese race." The northern Manchus, in contrast, were "the ruling race in China" who had taken the throne two hundred years earlier, since which time "China has been accordingly ruled as a conquered country by its masters." The two races never mixed, they explained, and in accordance with their southern vision of a harmonious slave-based society, the Picayune offered that in China "The quiet, patient, laboring millions have submitted to their masters mostly with exemplary gentleness." The sole threat to the stability of this Manchu-Chinese country of peacefully coexisting masters and slaves was these "primitive" people of south China who refused to submit to the yoke. The Taiping Rebellion, then, was a dark analogy to an uprising of African slaves in the United States. The London Times, for its part, was the most prescient of observers, honing in immediately on the question of whether Britain should send its navy into the Chinese conflict and, if so, on which side. In an editorial on May 17, 1853, just after the news of Nanjing's fall reached London, an editorial in The Times noted that the Taiping seemed unstoppable and that "according to all computable chances, they will succeed thus far in subverting the Government of China." The Times had also run a report from a Shanghai paper asking whether "a change of masters" was something desired by the Chinese nation at large, offering that the Taiping-though hardly beloved in northern China-represented a force of change that was indeed welcome to the Chinese, and "throughout the country the feeling seems to be growing deeper that the exactions and oppressions of the mandarins are no longer to be borne." By the end of the summer, The Times declared flatly that the rebellion in China was "in all respects the greatest revolution the world has yet seen." But the rebels themselves were a cipher. The reader of The Times would easily conclude that the Taiping enjoyed the support, grudging at least, of the Chinese people and were poised to overthrow the Manchus and usher in a new era of government. But the editors also sounded a note of caution about Britain's ignorance. "We are without any substantial information as to the origin or objects of the rebellion," they wrote. "We know that the existing Government of China is likely to be subverted in a civil war, but nothing more." Britain, they worried, simply didn't know enough about the nature or ideology of the rebels to decide whether it should support or encourage them: "We cannot tell in the case before us on which side our interest or our duties may lie-whether the insurrection is justifiable or unjustifiable, promising or unpromising; whether the feelings of the people are involved in it or not, or whether its success would bring a change for the better or worse, or any change at all, in our own relations with the Chinese." As it turned out, however, answers to the most pressing of these questions-of the origins of the rebellion, of who the Taiping really were and what they believed in-were to be found in Hong Kong, scribbled on a few stray sheets of paper stuffed into a drawer in Theodore Hamberg's desk.
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Miller J. Martin
China, the yellow peril at war with the world: a history of the Chinese empire from the dawn of civilization to the present time Including descriptions of the people, their pursuits and manner of life to which is added a complete account of boxer Uprising
China, the yellow peril at war with the world: a history of the Chinese empire from the dawn of civilization to the present time Including descriptions of the people, their pursuits and manner of life to which is added a complete account of the boxer uprising, the outbreak of hostilities, massacre of missionaries, etc. 8vo, br. ed. 490pp. images in b.& w.
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Bova Ben and eric Choi
Carbide Tipped Pens: Seventeen Tales of Hard Science Fiction
8vo, br. ed. minor shelfwear, ow good.
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