Author: Louisa Lim Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0199347700 Category : HISTORY Languages : en Pages : 281
Book Description
An NPR correspondent explains how the Tiananmen Square massacre changed China, and how China changed the events of that day by rewriting its own history.
Author: Louisa Lim Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 059319182X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR An award-winning journalist and longtime Hong Konger indelibly captures the place, its people, and the untold history they are claiming, just as it is being erased. The story of Hong Kong has long been dominated by competing myths: to Britain, a “barren rock” with no appreciable history; to China, a part of Chinese soil from time immemorial, at last returned to the ancestral fold. For decades, Hong Kong’s history was simply not taught, especially to Hong Kongers, obscuring its origins as a place of refuge and rebellion. When protests erupted in 2019 and were met with escalating suppression from Beijing, Louisa Lim—raised in Hong Kong as a half-Chinese, half-English child, and now a reporter who has covered the region for nearly two decades—realized that she was uniquely positioned to unearth the city’s untold stories. Lim’s deeply researched and personal account casts startling new light on key moments: the British takeover in 1842, the negotiations over the 1997 return to China, and the future Beijing seeks to impose. Indelible City features guerrilla calligraphers, amateur historians and archaeologists, and others who, like Lim, aim to put Hong Kongers at the center of their own story. Wending through it all is the King of Kowloon, whose iconic street art both embodied and inspired the identity of Hong Kong—a site of disappearance and reappearance, power and powerlessness, loss and reclamation.
Author: Liao Yiwu Publisher: Atria/One Signal Publishers ISBN: 1982126655 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
A “memorable series of portraits of the working class people who defended Tiananmen Square” (The New York Review of Books) during the protests from the award-winning poet, dissident, and “one of the most original and remarkable Chinese writers of our time” (Philip Gourevitch). Much has been written about the Tiananmen Square protests, but very little exists in the words of those who were actually there. For over seven years, Liao Yiwu—a master of contemporary Chinese literature, imprisoned and persecuted as a counter-revolutionary until he fled the country in 2011—secretly interviewed survivors of the devastating 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Tortured, imprisoned, and forced into silence and the margins of Chinese society for thirty years, their harrowing and unforgettable stories are now finally revealed in this “indispensable historical document” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
Author: Gore Vidal Publisher: Bold Type Books ISBN: 078673826X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 193
Book Description
Gore Vidal has been described as the last 'noble defender" of the American republic. In Imperial America, Vidal steals the thunder of a right wing America -- those who have camouflaged their extremist rhetoric in the Old Glory and the Red, White, and Blue -- by demonstrating that those whose protest arbitrary and secret government, those who defend the bill of rights, those who seek to restrain America's international power, are the true patriots. "Those Americans who refuse to plunge blindly into the maelstrom of European and Asiatic politics are not defeatist or neurotic," he writes. "They are giving evidence of sanity, not cowardice, of adult thinking as distinguished from infantilism. They intend to preserve and defend the Republic. America is not to be Rome or Britain. It is to be America."
Author: Rana Mitter Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674984269 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
Chinese leaders once tried to suppress memories of their nation’s brutal experience during World War II. Now they celebrate the “victory”—a key foundation of China’s rising nationalism. For most of its history, the People’s Republic of China discouraged public discussion of the war against Japan. It was an experience of victimization—and one that saw Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek fighting for the same goals. But now, as China grows more powerful, the meaning of the war is changing. Rana Mitter argues that China’s reassessment of the war years is central to its newfound confidence abroad and to mounting nationalism at home. China’s Good War begins with the academics who shepherded the once-taboo subject into wider discourse. Encouraged by reforms under Deng Xiaoping, they researched the Guomindang war effort, collaboration with the Japanese, and China’s role in forming the post-1945 global order. But interest in the war would not stay confined to scholarly journals. Today public sites of memory—including museums, movies and television shows, street art, popular writing, and social media—define the war as a founding myth for an ascendant China. Wartime China emerges as victor rather than victim. The shifting story has nurtured a number of new views. One rehabilitates Chiang Kai-shek’s war efforts, minimizing the bloody conflicts between him and Mao and aiming to heal the wounds of the Cultural Revolution. Another narrative positions Beijing as creator and protector of the international order that emerged from the war—an order, China argues, under threat today largely from the United States. China’s radical reassessment of its collective memory of the war has created a new foundation for a people destined to shape the world.
Author: Guobin Yang Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231520484 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 283
Book Description
Raised to be "flowers of the nation," the first generation born after the founding of the People's Republic of China was united in its political outlook and at first embraced the Cultural Revolution of 1966, but then split into warring factions. Investigating the causes of this fracture, Guobin Yang argues that Chinese youth engaged in an imaginary revolution from 1966 to 1968, enacting a political mythology that encouraged violence as a way to prove one's revolutionary credentials. This same competitive dynamic would later turn the Red Guard against the communist government. Throughout the 1970s, the majority of Red Guard youth were sent to work in rural villages, where they developed an appreciation for the values of ordinary life. From this experience, an underground cultural movement was born. Rejecting idolatry, these relocated revolutionaries developed a new form of resistance that signaled a new era of enlightenment, culminating in the Democracy Wall movement of the late 1970s and the Tiananmen protest of 1989. Yang's final chapter on the politics of history and memory argues that contemporary memories of the Cultural Revolution are factionalized along these lines of political division, formed fifty years before.
Author: Lawrence R. Sullivan Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1442264691 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 816
Book Description
When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) assumed power in October 1949 China was one of the poorest nations in the world and so weak it had been conquered in the late 1930s and early 1940s by its neighbor Japan, a country one-10th its size. More than five decades later, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is an emerging economic, political, and major military power with the world’s fastest growing economy and largest population (1.35 billion in 2015). A member of the United Nations Security Council since the early 1970s and a nuclear power, China wields enormous influence in the world community while at home what was once a nation of largely poverty-stricken peasants and urban areas with little-to-no industry has been transformed into an increasingly urbanized society with a growing middle class and an industrial and service sector that leads the world in such industries as steel and textiles while becoming a major player in computers and telecommunications. All the while the country has remained under the tight political control of a one-party system dominated by the Chinese Communist Party that despite periods of intense political conflict and turmoil governs China with a membership in 2014 of 88 million people—the largest single organization on earth. This third edition of Historical Dictionary ofthe People's Republic of China contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about China.
Author: Katie Stallard Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0197575358 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
Dancing on Bones is the story of how the leaders of China, Russia, and North Korea manipulate the past to serve the present and secure the future of authoritarian rule.History didn't end. Democracy didn't triumph. America's leading role in the world is no longer assured. Instead, authoritarian rule is on the rise, and the global order established after 1945 is under attack. This is the phenomenon Katie Stallard tackles in Dancing on Bones, probing the version ofhistory that leaders in China, Russia, and North Korea teach their citizens.These three states consistently top the list of threats to the global order and US national security. All are governed by autocratic regimes. All have nuclear weapons and believe that the era of American hegemony is fading. All three share a sense of historical grievance, rooted in the wars of thelast century - specifically World War II and the Korean War - that their leaders exploit to shore up popular support at home and fuel increasingly aggressive foreign policy. Decades after the real guns fell silent, these wars rage on in China, Russia, and North Korea, reimagined in popular media,public memorials, and patriotic education campaigns. This is not history as it was, but as the current rulers need it to be. Since coming to power in China, Xi Jinping has almost doubled the length of the war with Japan, Vladimir Putin has brought back bombastic military parades through Red Square,and Kim Jong Un has invested vast sums in rebuilding war museums in his impoverished state, while historians who try to challenge the official line are silenced and jailed. But this didn't start with the current leaders and it won't end with them.Drawing on first-hand, on-the-ground reporting, Dancing on Bones is the story of how the leaders of China, Russia, and North Korea manipulate the past to serve the present and secure the future of authoritarian rule. If we want to understand where these three nuclear powers are heading, we mustunderstand the stories they are telling their citizens about the past.
Author: Louisa Lim
Author: Louisa Lim
Author: Liao Yiwu
Author: Gore Vidal
Author: Rana Mitter
Author: Guobin Yang
Author: Lawrence R. Sullivan
Author: Julia Strauss
Author: 
Author: Katie Stallard