Mr. China's Son


Book Description

He Liyi belongs to one of China's minorities, the Bai, and he lives in a remote area of northwestern Yunnan Province. In 1979 his wife sold her fattest pig to buy him a shortwave radio. He spent every spare moment listening to the BBC and VOA in order to improve the English he had learned at college between 1950 and 1953. For "further practice," he decided to write down his life story in English. Humorous and unfiltered by translation, his autobiography is direct and personal, full of richly descriptive images and phrases from his native Bai language. At the time of He Liyi's graduation, English was being vilified as the language of the imperialists, so the job he was assigned had nothing to do with his education. In 1958 he was labeled a rightist and sent to a "reeducation-through-labor farm." Spirited away by truck on the eve of his marriage, Mr. He spent years in the labor camp, where he schemed to garner favor from the authorities, who nevertheless shamed him publicly and told him that all his problems "belong to contradictions between the people and the enemy." After his release in 1962, the talented Mr. He had no choice but to return to his native village as a peasant. His stratagems for survival, which included stealing "nightsoil" from public toilets and extracting peach-pit oil from thousands of peaches, personify the peasant's universal struggle to endure during those difficult years. He Liyi's autobiography recounts nearly all the major events of China's recent history, including the Japanese occupation, the Communist victory over the Nationalists in 1949, Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, the experience of the labor camps, and changes brought about by China's dramatic re-opening to the world since Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, No other book so poignantly reveals the travails of the common person and village life under China's tempestuous Communist government, which He Liyi ironically refers to as "Mr. China." Yet he describes his saga of poverty and hardship with humor and a surprising lack of bitterness. And rarely has there been such an intimate, frank view of how a Chinese man thinks and feels about personal relationships, revealed in dialogue and letters to his two wives. He Liyi's autobiography stands as perhaps the most readable and authentic account available in English of life in rural China. He Liyi's previous book is The Spring of Butterflies (London and New York, 1985), a translation of Chinese folk tales.




Mr. China


Book Description

The rollicking story of a young man who goes to China with the misguided notion that he will help bring the Chines into the modern world, only to be schooled by the most resourceful and creative operators he would ever meet.




China Nexus


Book Description

Benedict Rogers, born in London, England, first went to China at age eighteen to teach English for six months in Qingdao, three years after the Tiananmen Square massacre. That opened the door to a thirty-year adventure with China, from teaching English in schools and hospitals to working as a journalist in Hong Kong for the first five years after the handover to travelling to China’s borders with Myanmar/Burma and North Korea to document the plight of refugees escaping from Beijing-backed satellite dictatorships and then campaigning for human rights in China, especially for Uyghurs, Christians and Falun Gong practitioners, human rights defenders, journalists and dissidents, and the people of Hong Kong. This book tells the story of his fight for freedom for the peoples of China and neighbouring countries Myanmar and North Korea and sets out how a global movement for human rights in China is emerging and what the free world should do next. It describes the importance of the “China Nexus” in the author’s journey and geopolitics and its challenges. Pioneering international inquiries into forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, the genocide of the Uyghurs and global action for Hong Kong, as well as highlighting the Vatican’s silence, the author has been at the heart of advocacy for human rights in China in recent years. In 2017, on the orders of Beijing, he was denied entry to Hong Kong, 20 years after he had moved to the city and began his working life as a journalist and activist. Benedict Rogers co-founded Hong Kong Watch and worked with a variety of other international groups at the forefront of the fight for freedom, including the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance for China (IPAC), the Stop Uyghur Genocide Campaign, the China Democracy Foundation, the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission which he co-founded, and the international human rights organization CSW with which he has worked for over 25 years. This book hits the Chinese Communist Party hard on their lack of Human Rights efficacy, genocide, and despicable and barbaric organ harvesting programs (an estimated $1 billion US a year business). Rogers takes the readers on a journey through some of the leaders and participants in the Human rights activities that China has suppressed since its inception in 1949. He goes on to dispute and lays to rest all of the specious claims by the tyrants in Beijing that all Chinese citizens are equal and are afforded human and civil rights. Currently, the regime is engaged in re-education, cultural assimilation, and multiple genocides, leading to better citizens for China and the world if one believes Chinese officials. China’s ambassador to Canada says reports of genocide and forced labour of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province are the “lie of the century,” despite international bodies like the United Nations deeming the reports of such activities “numerous and credible.” The author will completely dispel that notion.




Mr. Ma & Son


Book Description




Last Days of the Mighty Mekong


Book Description

Celebrated for its natural beauty and its abundance of wildlife, the Mekong river runs thousands of miles through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Its basin is home to more than 70 million people and has for centuries been one of the world's richest agricultural areas and a biodynamic wonder. Today, however, it is undergoing profound changes. Development policies, led by a rising China in particular, aim to interconnect the region and urbanize the inhabitants. And a series of dams will harness the river's energy, while also stymieing its natural cycles and cutting off food supplies for swathes of the population. In Last Days of the Mighty Mekong, Brian Eyler travels from the river's headwaters in China to its delta in southern Vietnam to explore its modern evolution. Along the way he meets the region’s diverse peoples, from villagers to community leaders, politicians to policy makers. Through conversations with them he reveals the urgent struggle to save the Mekong and its unique ecosystem.




Displacing Desire


Book Description

Why do millions of people from around the world flock to Dali, a small borderland town in the Himalayan foothills of southwest China? "Lonely planeteers"— American, European, and Israeli backpackers named for the guidebook they carry—trek halfway across the globe to "get off the beaten track," yet converge here to drink coffee, eat banana pancakes, and share music from home. Coastal Chinese who are prospering in the phenomenal economic growth of China’s reform era travel thousands of miles to sing songs and dress up as their favorite characters from a revolutionary-era movie musical. Overseas Chinese from Southeast Asia as well as a new generation of mainland youth follow in the footsteps of heroes and villains from Hong Kong martial arts novels, seeking an experience of a Buddhist "wild, wild, West" at a martial arts theme park dubbed "Hollywood East," or "Daliwood." Inspired by representations in popular culture that engender fantasies of the exotic, these tourists, Western and Chinese, journey to Dali, Yunnan, in search of an imagined place where they can indulge their craving for authenticity, display their status in the present, and act out their nostalgia for the past. Based on more than a decade of ethnographic research, Beth Notar explores struggles over place as people in Dali attempt to represent their historical identity and define their future. Displacing Desire takes representation into the realm of practice to consider the ways in which those who are represented must contend with their image in popular culture and the material after-effects of representations even decades after their original production. It contributes to an exploration of travel as performance of nostalgia, fantasy, and status. More specifically it contributes to an understanding of the growth of consumer culture in China, examining what China’s modernization process and market economy mean for different social actors in their struggles over power and place.




China During the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976


Book Description

One of the most tumultuous periods in modern Chinese history, the Cultural Revolution affected virtually all Chinese people and all aspects of Chinese life, including art, music and drama, education, factory management, economic planning, and medical care. Studies of the Cultural Revolution, in both Chinese and Western languages, have burgeoned over the past three decades. This comprehensive, easy-to-use bibliography provides a guide to published English-language sources on the Cultural Revolution. With over a thousand entries, it includes books, monographs, dissertations, and audio-visual materials on a broad range of topics from the military, education, religion, and economics to foreign relations, population, art, literature, and drama. Including titles published through the end of 1997 and a few in 1998, the book provides a general overview of the literature on the Chinese Cultural Revolution and its impact on China. Its scope and coverage make it a useful resource for any library whose readers have an interest in modern Chinese history.




Understanding Chinese Society


Book Description

As China gains power – economically, politically, and militarily – and interaction between the Chinese and people outside China increases, it becomes more and more important that we understand the social factors that influence the daily lives of China's population. This new introductory textbook is suitable for all students taking a course on Chinese society. It presents both historical and contemporary contexts and the latest available research findings. With chapters covering many key aspects of life in China – including religion, social policy, and welfare, the history and impact of the Chinese Communist Party, familial relationships, ethnicity, gender, the media and the education system – this textbook gives the reader a user-friendly and comprehensive introduction to the most important issues affecting Chinese society today. It also includes handy pedagogical features such as a chronology of the People's Republic of China, further reading suggestions, and related novels, films, and autobiographies. Armed with such a book, readers will not only gain a deeper understanding of Chinese society, but a rewarding appreciation for the people, cultures, and social organizations of the world's most populous country. Written by a team of contributors from the UK, China, Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong, Understanding Chinese Society is suitable for anyone studying Chinese Society, Chinese Studies and Asian sociology.




Area Bibliography of China


Book Description

A combination of scholarly, commercial, and popular interests has generated a large quantity of literature on every aspect of Chinese life during the past two decades. This bibliography reflects these combined interests; it is broken up into sections by subject headings, and cross-references refer the researcher to related topics.




The Interior


Book Description

“See paints a fascinating portrait of a complex and enigmatic society, in which nothing is ever quite as it appears, and of the people, peasant and aristocrat alike, who are bound by its subtle strictures.”—San Diego Union-Tribune While David Stark is asked to open a law office in Beijing, his lover, detective Liu Hulan, receives an urgent message from an old friend imploring her to investigate the suspicious death of her daughter, who worked for a toy company about to be sold to David’s new client, Tartan Enterprises. Despite David’s protests, Hulan goes undercover at the toy factory in the rural village of Da Shui, deep in the heart of China. It is a place that forces Hulan to face a past she has long been running from. Once there, rather than finding answers to the girl’s death, Hulan unearths more questions, all of which point to possible crimes committed by David’s client. Suddenly Hulan and David find themselves on opposing sides: One of them is trying to expose a company and unearth a killer, while the other is ethically bound to protect his client. As pressures mount and danger increases, Hulan and David uncover universal truths about good and evil, right and wrong–and the sometimes subtle lines that distinguish them. Praise for The Interior “[See] illuminates tradition and change, Western and Eastern cultural differences. . . . All this in the middle of her thriller which is also about greed, corruption, abuse of the disadvantaged, the desperation of those on the bottom of the food chain, and love.”—The Tennessean “Sophisticated . . . graceful . . . See’s picture of contemporary China’s relationship with the United States is aptly played out through her characters.”—Los Angeles Times “Immediate, haunting and exquisitely rendered.”—San Francisco Chronicle