This book is about both a person and an organization.The person, Ahn Chang Ho, a Korean visionary, moralist, and patriot, was born in 1878, a tumultuous time in Asia. Japan, a rising military and industrial power, began to challenge the centuries-old Chinese dominance. It was their ambition to take control of Korea, then seize China itself, to become Asia’s supreme power.This was not going to happen without resistance. The two powers go war over Korea from 1894 to1895, the ...

The Korean Kingdom and the United States signed a Treaty of Amity and Commerce in 1882. This treaty opened Korea to American missionaries who proselytized Christianity to the Koreans. When Hawaii sugar planters recruited Koreans to come to Hawaii to work in the Hawaii sugar plantations, they picked most of the Korean Hawaii emigrants from the Korean Christian converts. Between 1902 and 1905, some 7,000 of them immigrated to Hawaii. Of those 7,000, about 2,000 transmigrated to the mainland....

Banned in China, this controversial and politically charged novel tells the story of the search for an entire month erased from official Chinese history.Beijing, sometime in the near future: a month has gone missing from official records. No one has any memory of it, and no one could care less—except for a small circle of friends, who will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of the sinister cheerfulness and amnesia that have possessed the Chinese nation. When they...

Just a few decades ago, the South Koreans were an impoverished, agricultural people. In one generation they moved from the fields to Silicon Valley. They accomplished this through three totally unexpected miracles: economic development, democratization, and the arrival of their culture to global attention.Who are the Koreans? What are they like? The New Koreans examines how they have been perceived by outsiders, the features that color their "national character," and how th...

War does not stop when the armed conflict ends. This compelling eyewitness account of a key political crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2007 demonstrates how interventions from foreign powers to end armed conflict can create new forms of conflict that are not only as determined and resilient, but can lead groups to challenge the power of fragile states through political and legal means. Countering such challenges is an integral but often ignored part of peace processes. How do these nonv...

The need to understand this global giant has never been more pressing: China is constantly in the news, yet conflicting impressions abound. Within one generation, China has transformed from an impoverished, repressive state into an economic and political powerhouse. In China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, Jeffrey Wasserstrom provides cogent answers to the most urgent questions regarding the newest superpower and offers a framework for understanding its meteoric rise.Focusin...

"Daniel Tudor covers all the important issues, yet does not simply tell the more familiar stories, but looks deeper and wider to give the full story of Korea today." —Martin Uden, Former British Ambassador to South KoreaIn just fifty years, South Korea has transformed itself from a failed state, ruined and partitioned by war and decades of colonial rule, into an economic powerhouse and a democracy that serves as a model for other countries.How was it able t...

Andrei Lankov has gone where few outsiders have ever been. A native of the former Soviet Union, he lived as an exchange student in North Korea in the 1980s. He has studied it for his entire career, using his fluency in Korean and personal contacts to build a rich, nuanced understanding. In The Real North Korea, Lankov substitutes cold, clear analysis for the overheated rhetoric surrounding this opaque police state. After providing an accessible history of the nation, he turns his focus to ...

East-West business is booming as thousands of people flock to China. The author, with 25 years of experience dealing with the Chinese, provides up-to-date advice on how to succeed, avoid gaffes, interpret behaviour and make positive impressions.

Zhou Enlai, the premier of the People's Republic of China from 1949 until his death in 1976, is the last Communist political leader to be revered by the Chinese people. He is considered "a modern saint" who offered protection to his people during the Cultural Revolution; an admirable figure in an otherwise traumatic and bloody era. Works about Zhou in China are heavily censored, and every hint of criticism is removed -- so when Gao Wenqian first published this groundbreaking, provocative b...

A well-known observer of Taiwan and Asian history and culture provides an insightful biography of Lee Teng Hui, the pro-democracy statesman and former president of the Republic of China. As head of the Taiwanese government from 1988 to 2000, Lee managed, without violence or major civil unrest, to reform the authoritarian state into a constitutional democracy with a multi-party political system. This examination of Lee's success puts to rest the idea that Asian values support only authorita...

“Spence draws upon his extensive knowledge of Chinese politics and culture to create an illuminating picture of Mao. . . . Superb.” (Chicago Tribune)From humble origins in the provinces, Mao Zedong rose to absolute power, unifying with an iron fist a vast country torn apart by years of weak leadership, colonialism, and war. This sharply drawn and insightful account brings to life this modern-day emperor and the tumultuous era that he did so much to shape.