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...

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...

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...

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...

A king lights emergency beacons just to make his favorite concubine laugh. A prince survives an assassination attempt by pretending to die with an arrow in his belt. A reformer builds the most powerful state in China—only to be destroyed by the very laws he created. Ancient Chinese history is full of moments like these, but you rarely hear them told this way.This book brings the turbulent Spring and Autumn and early Warring States periods to life as a series of vivid human dramas. Y...

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...

A king breaks an alliance for land that never existed.A diplomat survives a brutal flogging because he refuses to bite his own tongue.And a teenage ruler faces five invading armies during his father's funeral.Welcome to the world of ancient China's Warring States — a time when a clever speech could change the fate of kingdoms and a single deception could start a war.In The Spring and Autumn & Warring States Periods: A History of China — Part Two, I bring this tu...

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...

The Yuan Dynasty: China Under Foreign Rule tells the dramatic story of China during the century when it was ruled by the Mongols. It is the 5th book in the Dynasties of Ancient China series of graded readers, written for English-speaking readers who are learning Chinese.Beginning with a divided China and the rise of the Mongols, the book describes the country's conquest by Kublai Khan, the founding of the new dynasty, and the challenges of foreign rule. Readers wil...

Jerusalem: A History of the Middle East takes you on a sweeping, unforgettable journey through five thousand years of human faith and struggle. From the first sparks of settled life on a rocky hill to today's headlines, this book traces how a small, stubborn city grew into the heartbeat of three great religions and the battleground of countless empires. I wanted to tell a story that feels alive—not a dry textbook, but a living chronicle of the people who built Jerusalem, t...