‎Porcelaine chinoise‎

‎Scheidel Walter‎

‎Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity‎

‎8vo, hardcover in dj. The gripping story of how the end of the Roman Empire was the beginning of the modern world. The fall of the Roman Empire has long been considered one of the greatest disasters in history. But in this groundbreaking book, Walter Scheidel argues that Rome's dramatic collapse was actually the best thing that ever happened, clearing the path for Europe's economic rise and the creation of the modern age. Ranging across the entire premodern world, Escape from Rome offers new answers to some of the biggest questions in history: Why did the Roman Empire appear? Why did nothing like it ever return to Europe? And, above all, why did Europeans come to dominate the world? In an absorbing narrative that begins with ancient Rome but stretches far beyond it, from Byzantium to China and from Genghis Khan to Napoleon, Scheidel shows how the demise of Rome and the enduring failure of empire-building on European soil ensured competitive fragmentation between and within states. This rich diversity encouraged political, economic, scientific, and technological breakthroughs that allowed Europe to surge ahead while other parts of the world lagged behind, burdened as they were by traditional empires and predatory regimes that lived by conquest. It wasn’t until Europe "escaped" from Rome that it launched an economic transformation that changed the continent and ultimately the world. What has the Roman Empire ever done for us? Fall and go away. : 94 (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)‎

‎Sorace Christian‎

‎Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi‎

‎8vo, br. ed. 404pp. Seventy years after the Chinese Revolution of 1949, what remains of Mao&;s communist legacy? Afterlives of Chinese Communism comprises essays from over fifty world-renowned scholars in the China field, from various disciplines and continents. It provides an indispensable guide for understanding how the Mao era continues to shape Chinese politics today. Each chapter discusses a concept or practice from the Mao period, what it attempted to do, and what has become of it since. The authors respond to the legacy of Maoism from numerous perspectives to consider what lessons Chinese communism can offer today, and whether there is a future for the egalitarian politics that it once promised.‎

‎Giles Herbert A.‎

‎China and the Chinese. March 1902 Delivered at Columbia University New York‎

‎8vo, br. ed. pp. 104.‎

‎Jiang Qing, Daniel A. Bell, Ruiping Fan, Edmund Ryden‎

‎A Confucian Constitutional Order: How China's Ancient Past Can Shape Its Political Future‎

‎8vo, hardcover in dust jacket, p'p.272. As China continues to transform itself, many assume that the nation will eventually move beyond communism and adopt a Western-style democracy. But could China develop a unique form of government based on its own distinct traditions Jiang Qing--China's most original, provocative, and controversial Confucian political thinker--says yes. In this book, he sets out a vision for a Confucian constitutional order that offers a compelling alternative to both the status quo in China and to a Western-style liberal democracy. A Confucian Constitutional Order is the most detailed and systematic work on Confucian constitutionalism to date.‎

‎Eftimiades, Nicholas‎

‎Chinese Espionage Operations and Tactics‎

‎8vo, br. ed.Mr. Eftimiades’ monograph is an important contribution to our understanding of how and why the Chinese espionage Tsunami has appeared in every aspect of American life from culture to nuclear weapons. It builds on earlier work by Mr. Eftimiades and others on China’s economic and industrial espionage, and exposes the consequences of changes in Chinese law made in 2014 and 2017. These change in law made the conduct of espionage an obligation of citizenship the “must not refuse”. By doing so, China has de facto expanded its relatively small cadre of professional intelligence officers by using the power of the State to compel any of its hundreds of thousands of students and businessmen resident outside of China to undertake espionage missions and in doing so, are overwhelming the counterintelligence resources of the US and allied nations. Dr. William Schneider, former US Undersecretary of State, Arms Control and International Security Affairs. Eftimiades’ meticulously documented study shows how China’s massive ‘whole of society’ approach to espionage has created a new paradigm on how intelligence activities are conducted and provides a cautionary tale for the numerous countries it has been directed against. - June Teufel Dreyer???Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Miami. Know before you buy. This short book is the most detailed work ever published in the unclassified world on China's intelligence tradecraft. It is NOT a causal description of a few cases of Chinese espionage with pictures thrown in for intrigue and excitement. This monograph (50 pages) is a critical analysis of China's current intelligence activities and associated espionage tradecraft. It reviews 595 cases of espionage, economic espionage, covert action, theft of technology and trade secrets. The study identifies and analyzes the specific espionage tradecraft used by China's intelligence services, State Owned Enterprises, universities, private companies, and individuals. This work is for Insider Threat specialists, Intelligence Officers, security professionals, attorneys, policy makers, journalists, and anyone else who needs a detailed understanding of China's espionage operations and tactics.‎

‎Chen Congzhou‎

‎I Giardini Cinesi‎

‎8vo, br. ed. illustrazioni ft. a colori.‎

‎Bailey F. M.‎

‎No Passport to Tibet‎

‎Hardcover. very Good. 294 pages, 8 maps, index, 23cm.‎

‎Simoons, Frederick J.‎

‎Food in China: A Cultural and Historical Inqu‎

‎large 8vo, hardcver First edition. 559pp + index b/w illustrations large octavo‎

‎Griffiths John‎

‎Tea: The Drink That Changed the World‎

‎16mo, hardcover in dj, 384pp, colour & monochrome plate section, sources, index. small former owner's ex-libris sta ow excellent condition. A study of the phenomenon as well as the commodity, this is a comprehensive survey of the drink that is imbibed daily by more than half the population of the world. After water, tea is the second most-consumed drink in the world. Almost every corner of the globe is addressed in this comprehensive look at 4,500 years of tea history. Tea has affected international relations, exposed divisions of class and race, shaped the ethics of business, and even led to significant‎

‎Zheng Tiantian‎

‎Red Lights : The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China‎

‎8vo, br. ed. used, labels. In China today, sex work cannot be untangled from the phenomenon of rural-urban migration, the entertainment industry, and state power. In Red Lights, Tiantian Zheng highlights the urban karaoke bar as the locus at which these three factors intersect and provides a rich account of the lives of karaoke hostesses-a career whose name disguises the sex work and minimizes the surprising influence these women often have as power brokers.Zheng embarked on two years of intensely embedded ethnographic fieldwork in her birthplace, Dalian, a large northeastern Chinese seaport of over six million people. During this time, Zheng lived and worked with a group of hostesses in a karaoke bar, facing many of the same dangers that they did and forming strong, intimate bonds with them. The result is an especially engaging, moving story of young, rural women struggling to find meaning, develop a modern and autonomous identity, and, ultimately, survive within an oppressively patriarchal state system.Moving from her case studies to broader theories of sex, gender, and power, Zheng connects a growth in capitalist entrepreneurialism to the emergence of an urban sex industry, brilliantly illuminating the ways in which hostesses, their clients, and the state are mutually created in postsocialist China.‎

‎Wang Jing‎

‎The Story of Stone: Intertextuality, Ancient Chinese Stone Lore, and the Stone Symbolism in Dream of the Red Chamber, Water Margin, and The Journey to the West (Post-Contemporary Interventions)‎

‎8vo br. ed. In this pathbreaking study of three of the most familiar texts in the Chinese tradition-all concerning stones endowed with magical properties-Jing Wang develops a monumental reconstruction of ancient Chinese stone lore. Wang's thorough and systematic comparison of these classic works illuminates the various tellings of the stone story and provides new insight into major topics in traditional Chinese literature.Bringing together Chinese myth, religion, folklore, art, and literature, this book is the first in any language to amass the sources of stone myth and stone lore in Chinese culture. Uniting classical Chinese studies with contemporary Western theoretical concerns, Wang examines these stone narratives by analyzing intertextuality within Chinese traditions. She offers revelatory interpretations to long-standing critical issues, such as the paradoxical character of the monkey in The Journey to the West, the circularity of narrative logic in The Dream of the Red Chamber, and the structural necessity of the stone tablet in Water Margin.By both challenging and incorporating traditional sinological scholarship, Wang's The Story of Stone reveals the ideological ramifications of these three literary works on Chinese cultural history and makes the past relevant to contemporary intellectual discourse. Specialists in Chinese literature and culture, comparative literature, literary theory, and religious studies will find much of interest in this outstanding work, which is sure to become a standard reference on the subject.‎

‎Wilson Andrew‎

‎The 'Ever-Victorious army': a History of the Chinese Campaign Under Lt-Col C.G. Gordon, CB, RE, and of the Suppression of the Tai-Ping Rebellion‎

‎8vo, br. ed. Journalist and traveller Andrew Wilson (1831-1881) was born in India to colonial missionaries. Educated in Europe, he later edited the China Mail in Hong Kong, and the Bombay Times. This, his best known work, was published in 1868, and recounts the suppression of the Taiping uprising in 1863-1864 by Colonel Charles G. ('Chinese') Gordon, leading a small multinational force. The Taiping rebellion against the Qing dynasty lasted from 1850 to 1864, and it is estimated that some 20 million people died as a result. Wilson was given access to Gordon's journals to write the book. Wilson was very pro-Chinese, and was quite critical of British colonial policy towards China. Despite this bias, the work contains much fascinating information on nineteenth-century China, and sheds light on the early career of one of Britain's greatest Victorian military heroes.‎

‎Jun Jing‎

‎The Temple of Memories: History, Power, and Morality in a Chinese Village‎

‎8vo, br. ed. This study focuses on the politics of memory in the village of Dachuan in northwest China, in which 85 percent of the villagers are surnamed Kong and believe themselves to be descendants of Confucius. It recounts both how this proud community was subjected to intense suffering during the Maoist era, culminating in its forcible resettlement in December 1960 to make way for the construction of a major hydroelectric dam, and how the village eventually sought recovery through the commemoration of that suffering and the revival of a redefined religion.Before 1949, the Kongs had dominated their area because of their political influence, wealth, and, above all, their identification with Confucius, whose precepts underlay so much of the Chinese ethical and political tradition. After the Communists came to power in 1949, these people, as a literal embodiment of the Confucian heritage, became prime targets for Maoist political campaigns attacking the traditional order, from land reform to the ?Criticize Confucius? movement. Many villagers were arrested, three were beheaded, and others died in labor camps. When the villagers were forced to hastily abandon their homes and the village temple, they had time to disinter only the bones of their closest family members; the tombs of earlier generations were destroyed by construction workers for the dam.‎

‎Wu Qingyun‎

‎Female Rule in Chinese and English Literary Utopias‎

‎8vo, br. ed. This comparative study of paired English and Chinese works presenting female rule, spans texts from the 16th to the 20th century. The works examined include Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen. .240 pages‎

‎N. Harry Rothschild (a cura di), Leslie V. Wallace‎

‎Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China‎

‎8vo, br. ed. Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China presents a rogues’ gallery of treacherous regicides, impious monks, cutthroat underlings, ill-bred offspring, and disloyal officials. It plumbs the dark matter of the human condition, placing front and center transgressive individuals and groups traditionally demonized by Confucian annalists and largely shunned by modern scholars. The work endeavors to apprehend the actions and motivations of these men and women, whose conduct deviated from normative social, cultural, and religious expectations. Early chapters examine how core Confucian bonds such as those between parents and children, and ruler and minister, were compromised, even severed. The living did not always reverently pay homage to the dead, children did not honor their parents with due filiality, a decorous distance was not necessarily observed between sons and stepmothers, and subjects often pursued their own interests before those of the ruler or the state. The elasticity of ritual and social norms is explored: Chapters on brazen Eastern Han (25–220) mourners and deviant calligraphers, audacious falconers, volatile Tang (618–907) Buddhist monks, and drunken Song (960–1279) literati reveal social norms treated not as universal truths but as debated questions of taste wherein political and social expedience both determined and highlighted individual roles within larger social structures and defined what was and was not aberrant. A Confucian predilection to “valorize [the] civil and disparage the martial” and Buddhist proscriptions on killing led literati and monks alike to condemn the cruelty and chaos of war. The book scrutinizes cultural attitudes toward military action and warfare, including those surrounding the bloody and capricious world of the Zuozhuan (Chronicle of Zuo), the relentless violence of the Five Dynasties and Ten States periods (907–979), and the exploits of Tang warrior priests—a series of studies that complicates the rhetoric by situating it within the turbulent realities of the times. By the end of this volume, readers will come away with the understanding that behaving badly in early and medieval China was not about morality but perspective, politics, and power.‎

‎Katz Paul R.‎

‎Demon Hordes and Burning Boats: The Cult of Marshal Wen in Late Imperial Chekiang‎

‎8vo, br. ed. 284pp. Provides a lively description of how the cult of a popular plague-fighting deity named Marshal Wen arose and spread in late imperial China. Paul R. Katz is a Assistant Professor in the Institute of History at National Central University in Taiwan.‎

‎WANG SHeng-Wei‎

‎The Last Journey of the San Bao Eunuch, Admiral Zheng He‎

‎8vo, br. ed. 400pp. From 1405, in order to maintain and expand the Ming Dynasty’s tributary system, Yongle Emperor Zhu Di (reigning 1402-1424) and Xuande Emperor Zhu Zhanji (reigning 1425-1435) ordered eunuch Zheng He to lead giant fleets across the seas. But soon after Zheng He’s seventh and last voyage in the 1430s, the Ming emperors put an end to this activity and ordered all records of previous voyages to be destroyed. Chinese writer Luo Maodeng (???), knowing the history of some of these voyages, wished to preserve a record of them, but, conscious of the possible penalty, decided to record the facts “under a veil”, in his 1597 novel, An Account of the Western World Voyage of the San Bao Eunuch («???????»). This is what Dr. Sheng-Wei Wang has concluded after reading and analysing Luo’s novel. Her book, The last journey of the San Bao Eunuch, Admiral Zheng He, shows the methodology and evidential arguments by which she has sought to lift the veil and the conclusions she suggests, including the derivation of the complete trans-Atlantic navigational routes and timelines of that last journey and the idea that Zheng He’s last expedition plausibly reached the ancient American Indian city, Cahokia, in the U.S. central Mississippi Valley in late autumn, 1433, long before Christopher Columbus set foot for the first time in the Americas. She supports the hotly debated view that Ming Chinese sailors and ships reached farther than previously accepted in modern times and calls for further research. She hopes this book will become an important step in bridging the gap in our understanding of ancient China-America history in the era before the Age of Discovery. An interesting contribution to an ongoing debate. This edition has 48 scattered b/w illustrations and 8 b/w plates.‎

‎Cohen, Paul A.‎

‎China Unbound: Evolving Perspectives on the Chinese Past‎

‎8vo, br. ed. contains a number of articles on modern Chinese history and historiography written by one of the leading academic experts on the subject. The author provides a critique of older approaches to nineteenth-century history and offers powerful reinterpretations of such key events in the recent history of China as the boxer rebellion, Mao's ascension to power in 1949, and the process of political and economic reform in the post-Mao era. This is a strong collection which will be of enormous interest to scholars of East Asian history.‎

‎Fokkema Douwe‎

‎Perfect Worlds: Utopian Fiction in China and the West‎

‎8vo, br. ed.448pp. Perfect Worlds is an extensive, comparative study of utopian narratives in both the East and the West. Douwe Fokkema provides an elegant argument about the human impulse to imagine new and better worlds, astutely observing that the utopian imagination thrives in the context of secularization. Fokkema also tracks the rise of dystopian narratives, invoking authors as diverse as Margaret Atwood and Lao She, and provides a cogent evaluation of the role of imagined worlds in both Chinese and Euro-American fiction. A shrewd comparison of cultures, as well as a vivid account of cross-cultural influence, this volume is a welcome addition to the scholarly discourse on utopias. Perfect Worlds offers an extensive historical analysis of utopian narratives in the Chinese and Euro-American traditions. This comparative study discusses, among other things, More?s criticism of Plato, the European orientalist search for utopia in China, Wells?s Modern Utopia and his talk with Stalin, Chinese writers constructing their Confucianist utopia, traces of Daoism in Mao Zedong?s utopianism and politics and finally the rise of dystopian writing ? a negative expression of the utopian impulse ? in Europe and America as well as in China.‎

‎Lu Wenfu‎

‎Vita e passione di un gastronomo Cinese‎

‎8vo, br. ed. pp.144. in -8 (14 x 22 cm.), brossura editoriale con alette col. beige con illustr. a colori e titoli in nero sul piatto ant., pp. 140, (4). In ottime condizioni. Collana: NARRATORI DELLA FENICE - Traduzione e nota sull'autore di Cristina Pisciotta.‎

‎Jin Feng‎

‎Tasting Paradise on Earth: Jiangnan Foodways‎

‎8vo, br. ed. 216pp. Preparing and consuming food is an integral part of identity formation, which in contemporary China embodies tension between fast-forward modernization and cultural nostalgia. Jin Feng?s wide-ranging exploration of cities in the Lower Yangzi Delta?or Jiangnan, a region known for its paradisiacal beauty and abundant resources?illustrates how people preserve culinary inheritance while also revamping it for the new millennium. Throughout Chinese history, food nostalgia has generated cultural currency for individuals. Feng examines literary treatments of Jiangnan foodways from late imperial and twentieth-century China, highlighting the role played by gender and tracing the contemporary metamorphosis of this cultural landscape, with its new platforms for food culture, such as television and the internet. As communities in Jiangnan refashion their regional heritage, culinary arts shine as markers of ethnic and social distinction. Jin Feng is professor of Chinese and the Orville and Mary Patterson Routt Professor of Literature at Grinnell College. She is the author of Romancing the Internet: Consuming and Producing Chinese Web Romance, The Making of a Family Saga: Ginling College (1915-1952), and The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction. She is also the translator of Chen Hengzhe's Early Autobiography and the editor of Nostalgia and the Modern City.‎

‎Aresu Alessandro‎

‎Le potenze del capitalismo politico. Stati Uniti e Cina‎

‎8vo, br. ed. "La difesa è molto più importante della ricchezza". Adam Smith segna così i confini dell'economia politica, nel momento della sua nascita. Anche oggi il mercato ha il suo unico limite nella sicurezza nazionale, dominio arcano dei grandi contendenti dell'arena globale, gli Stati Uniti e la Cina. Le due potenze fondono l'ambito economico e quello politico, attraverso le decisioni del Partito comunista cinese e degli apparati di difesa e sicurezza nazionale degli Stati Uniti. Pechino e Washington vivono un acceso conflitto di geodiritto: una guerra giuridica e tecnologica combattuta attraverso sanzioni, uso politico delle istituzioni internazionali, blocchi agli investimenti esteri. Partendo dalla filosofia, Alessandro Aresu traccia un percorso chiaro che porta il lettore fino alla più recente attualità, descrivendo in dettaglio il conflitto tra diritto ed economia in atto tra Stati Uniti e Cina.‎

‎Wang Di‎

‎The Teahouse under Socialism: The Decline and Renewal of Public Life in Chengdu, 1950-2000‎

‎8vo,br. ed. 311pp. To understand a city fully, writes Di Wang, we must observe its most basic units of social life. In The Teahouse under Socialism, Wang does just that, arguing that the teahouses of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, are some of the most important public spaces—perfect sites for examining the social and economic activities of everyday Chinese. Wang looks at the transformation of these teahouses from private businesses to collective ownership and how state policy and the proprietors’ response to it changed the overall economic and social structure of the city. He uses this transformation to illuminate broader trends in China’s urban public life from 1950 through the end of the Cultural Revolution and into the post-Mao reform era. In doing so, The Teahouse under Socialism charts the fluctuations in fortune of this ancient cultural institution and analyzes how it survived, and even thrived, under bleak conditions. Throughout, Wang asks such questions as: Why and how did state power intervene in the operation of small businesses? How was "socialist entertainment" established in a local society? How did the well-known waves of political contestation and struggle in China change Chengdu’s teahouses and public life? In the end, Wang argues, the answers to such questions enhance our understanding of public life and political culture in the Communist state.‎

‎Unger Jonathan, Ed.‎

‎Chinese Nationalism‎

‎8vo, br. ed. 236pp. Provides conceptual insights that put the reader in a position to come to grips intellectually with the complex weave of Chinese nationalist sentiment today and in the future. contents: Introduction / Jonathan Unger 1. Chinese Nationalism / James Townsend 2. De-Constructing the Chinese Nation / Prasenjit Duara 3. The Nationless State: The Search for a Nation in Modern Chinese Nationalism / John Fitzgerald 4. How China's Nationalism Was Shanghaied / Lucian W. Pye 5. Openness and Nationalism: Outside the Chinese Revolution / Wang Gungwu 6. From Nationalism to Nationalizing: Cultural Imagination and State Formation in Postwar Taiwan / Allen Chun 7. 'Special Things in Special Ways': National Economic Identity and China's Special Economic Zones / George T. Crane 8. A Democratic Chinese Nationalism? / Edward Friedman 9. To Screw Foreigners Is Patriotic: China's Avant-Garde Nationalists / Geremie R. Barmé.‎

‎Ackerman Elliot, Admiral James Stavridis‎

‎2034: A Novel of the Next World War‎

‎8vo, hardcover in dj, pp.303. From two former military officers and award-winning authors, a chillingly authentic, geopolitical thriller that imagines a naval clash between the US and China in the South China Sea in 2034--and the path from there to a nightmarish global conflagration. On March 12, 2034, US Navy Commodore Sarah Hunt is on the bridge of her flagship, the guided missile destroyer USS John Paul Jones, conducting a routine freedom of navigation patrol in the South China Sea when her ship detects an unflagged trawler in clear distress, smoke billowing from its bridge. On that same day, US Marine aviator Major Chris "Wedge" Mitchell is flying an F35E Lightning over the Strait of Hormuz, testing a new stealth technology as he flirts with Iranian airspace. By the end of that day, Wedge will be an Iranian prisoner, and Sarah Hunt's destroyer will lie at the bottom of the sea, sunk by the Chinese Navy. Iran and China have clearly coordinated their moves, which involve the use of powerful new forms of cyber weaponry that render US ships and planes defenseless. In a single day, America's faith in its military's strategic pre-eminence is in tatters. A new, terrifying era is at hand. So begins a disturbingly plausible work of speculative fiction, co-authored by an award-winning novelist and decorated Marine veteran and the former commander of NATO, a legendary admiral who has spent much of his career strategically out maneuvering America's most tenacious adversaries. Written with a powerful blend of geopolitical sophistication and literary, human empathy, 2034 takes us inside the minds of a global cast of characters--Americans, Chinese, Iranians, Russians, Indians--as a series of arrogant miscalculations on all sides leads the world into an intensifying international storm. In the end, China and the United States will have paid a staggering cost, one that forever alters the global balance of power. Everything in 2034 is an imaginative extrapolation from present-day facts on the ground combined with the authors' years working at the highest and most classified levels of national security. Sometimes it takes a brilliant work of fiction to illuminate the most dire of warnings: 2034 is all too close at hand, and this cautionary tale presents the reader a dark yet possible future that we must do all we can to avoid. Admiral Jim Stavridis, USN (Ret.) spent more than thirty years in the US Navy, rising to the rank of four-star admiral. He was Supreme Allied Commander at NATO and previously commanded US Southern Command, overseeing military operations through Latin America. At sea, he commanded a Navy destroyer, a destroyer squadron, and an aircraft carrier battle group in combat. He holds a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he recently served five years as dean. He has published eight previous books. Admiral Stavridis is Chief International Security and Diplomacy Analyst for NBC News, and a columnist at both Time magazine and Bloomberg Opinion. Based in Washington, D.C., he is an operating executive of the Carlyle Group, an international private equity firm. Elliot Ackerman is the author of the novels Red Dress In Black and White, Waiting for Eden, Dark at the Crossing, and Green on Blue, as well as the memoir Places and Names: On War, Revolution and Returning. His books have been nominated for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal in both fiction and non-fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He is both a former White House Fellow and Marine, and served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart.‎