A king once lit his nation's emergency beacons—not to warn of invasion, but to make his favorite concubine laugh. When the real enemies arrived, no one came to help.That moment helped bring down one of the greatest dynasties in ancient China. And it's only one of the stories waiting inside this book.The Origins of Chinese Civilization: A History of China tells the story of China's earliest age the way it was meant to be told—through the myths, heroes, disasters, and strange h...

In 2009 Slavoj Zizek brought together an acclaimed group of intellectuals to discuss the continued relevance of communism. Unexpectedly the conference attracted an audience of over 1,000 people.The discussion has continued across the world and this book gathers responses from the conference in Seoul. It includes the interventions of regular contributors Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, as well as work from across Asia, notably from Chinese scholar Wang Hui, offering regional perspect...

What must China do to become truly democratic and equitable? This question animates most progressive debates about this potential superpower, and inChina's Twentieth Century the country's leading critic, Wang Hui, turns to the past for an answer. Beginning with the birth of modern politics in the 1911 revolution, Wang tracks the initial flourishing of political life, its blossoming in the radical sixties, and its decline in China's more recent liberalization, to arrive at the cros...

Challenging both the bureaucratic one-party regime and the Western neoliberal paradigm, China's leading critic shatters the myth of progress and reflects upon the inheritance of a revolutionary past. In this original and wide-ranging study, Wang Hui examines the roots of China's social and political problems, and traces the reforms and struggles that have led to the current state of mass depoliticization.Arguing that China's revolutionary history and its current liberalization are p...

The story of Cinderella is possibly the world's most popular folk tale. The earliest known version is from Greece around two thousand years ago, and over the next thousand years, it traveled to France, Italy and Germany, and eventually to the Walt Disney studio in America.But as the Cinderella story traveled from Greece to Western Europe, it was also carried eastward to Asia along the Silk Road and other ancient trade routes. The story of Ye Xian in this book is the oldest known As...

A young boy finds himself alone in a ship in a terrible storm. All the other passengers and crew are dead. Suddenly he sees a bright yellow ball of fire on the mast...This is a short story in Simplified Chinese, pinyin and English, excerpted from the short story collection "Learn to Read Chinese, Book 1" by Jeff Pepper and Xiao Hui Wang. It's based on stories told by Norman Hinsdale Pitman in "A Chinese Wonder Book" originally published in 1918.Folk tales are immen...

The royal banquet ends in darkness, black water, and a question no city is permitted to ask: what if an ancient king's return is not a miracle, but a system waking beneath the stones?Namsin, a young scribe trained to trust clay more than memory, escapes the ruined banquet hall with a damaged record fragment and half of the stolen seventh seal. What he has seen cannot be written safely. What he carries cannot be surrendered. Beside him, Cassandra reads the city through gates, pressur...

The extended critical interview is especially flexible as a form, by turns tenacious and glancing, elliptical or sustained, combining argument and counter-argument, reflection, history and memoir with a freedom normally denied to its subjects in conventional writing formats. Lives on the Left brings together sixteen such interviews from New Left Review in a group portrait of intellectual engagement in the twentieth century and since.Four generations of intellectual...

A struggling provincial officer, short on food and long on enemies, is asked to marry for politics, gamble on impossible battles, and trust men who may betray him tomorrow. He hesitates, he compromises, and then—almost quietly—he becomes the man who will rebuild an empire.This book tells the rise of Liu Xiu, the future Emperor Guangwu, not as a distant legend but as a sequence of sharp, human choices. You watch him bargain away personal happiness to secure an alliance, burn evidence...

The An Lushan Rebellion had failed to destroy the Tang dynasty—but surviving the catastrophe created a new problem: who actually controlled the empire afterward?The Sui, Tang, Five Dynasties: A History of China — Part Three follows the Tang dynasty from Emperor Daizong's accession in 762 CE through the increasingly unstable world of the late ninth century. Imperial rulers struggle with powerful eunuchs and increasingly autonomous jiedushi military governor...

A starving general begs for a single bowl of porridge… a fortune-teller crowns himself emperor… and a hunted man, fleeing like a fugitive, somehow becomes the founder of a new dynasty. This is not legend. This is history—just far stranger than most people realize.This volume brings the final, turbulent years of the Western Han Dynasty to life with the pace and drama of a novel. You'll meet unforgettable figures: Wang Zhengjun, whose rise from overlooked palace maid to empress begins...

Before Genghis Khan ruled an empire, he was Temüjin: the son of Yesügei and Hoelun, heir to a battered Mongol lineage, and a boy growing up in a Mongolian steppe divided among rival clans and powerful neighbors.Genghis Khan: A History of China, Part One follows the rise of Temüjin from the legendary origins of the Borjigin "Golden Lineage" through the violent tribal world that shaped him. The story moves between the Mongols and the Jurchen Jin dynasty, the long feud with t...