A Bitter Revolution

A Bitter Revolution PDF Author: Rana Mitter
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780192806055
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Book Description
China is now poised to take a key role on the world stage, but in the early twentieth century the situation could not have been more different. Rana Mitter goes back to this pivotal moment in Chinese history to uncover the origins of the painful transition from a premodern past into a modern world. By the 1920s the seemingly civilized world shaped over the last two thousand years by the legacy of the great philosopher Confucius was falling apart in the face of western imperialism and internal warfare. Chinese cities still bore the imprints of its ancient past with narrow, lanes and temples to long-worshipped gods, but these were starting to change with the influx of foreign traders, teachers, and missionaries, all eager to shape China's ancient past into a modern present. Mitter takes us through the resulting social turmoil and political promise, the devastating war against Japan in the 1940s, Communism and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and the new era of hope in the 1980s ended by the Tian'anmen uprising. He reveals the impetus behind the dramatic changes in Chinese culture and politics as being China's "New Culture" - a strain of thought which celebrated youth, individualism, and the heady mixture of strange and seductive new cultures from places as far apart as America, India, and Japan.

A Bitter Revolution

A Bitter Revolution PDF Author: Rana Mitter
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0192803417
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 379

Book Description
China is now poised to take a key role on the world stage, but in the early twentieth century the situation could not have been more different. Rana Mitter goes back to this pivotal moment in Chinese history to uncover the origins of the painful transition from a premodern past into a modern world. Mitter takes us through the resulting social turmoil and political promise, the devastating war against Japan in the 1940s, Communism and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and the new era of hope in the 1980s ended by the Tian'anmen uprising. He reveals the impetus behind the dramatic changes in Chinese culture and politics as being China's "New Culture" - a strain of thought which celebrated youth, individualism, and the heady mixture of strange and seductive new cultures from places as far apart as America, India, and Japan. - ;China is now poised to take a key role on the world stage, but in the early twentieth century the situation could not have been more different. Rana Mitter goes back to this pivotal moment in Chinese history to uncover the origins of the painful transition from a premodern past into a modern world. By the 1920s the seemingly civilized world shaped over the last two thousand years by the legacy of the great philosopher Confucius was falling apart in the face of western imperialism and internal warfare. Chinese cities still bore the imprints of its ancient past with narrow, lanes and temples to long-worshipped gods, but these were starting to change with the influx of foreign traders, teachers, and missionaries, all eager to shape China's ancient past into a modern present. Mitter takes us through the resulting social turmoil and political promise, the devastating war against Japan in the 1940s, Communism and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and the new era of hope in the 1980s ended by the Tian'anmen uprising. He reveals the impetus behind the dramatic changes in Chinese culture and politics as being China's "New Culture" - a strain of thought which celebrated youth, individualism, and the heady mixture of strange and seductive new cultures from places as far apart as America, India, and Japan. - ;an impressive and inventively researched book - Jonathan Fenby, FT Magazine

A Bitter Veil: American Woman Trapped in Khomeini's Iran

A Bitter Veil: American Woman Trapped in Khomeini's Iran PDF Author: Libby Fischer Hellmann
Publisher: The Red Herrings Press
ISBN: 193873372X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Book Description
Anna & Nouri fall in love, move to Tehran, and marry. Four months later the shah is deposed. Anna, a young American studying in Chicago falls in love with fellow-student Nouri, the son of a wealthy Iranian business executive. Anna, whose parents are divorced and remote, eagerly moves to Tehran where she marries and is embraced by Nouri's family. A few months later, however, in February 1978, the Shah is deposed and the Islamic Republic of Iran is formed. . Readers will be drawn in through the well-researched inside look at Iran in the late 1970s and gain perspective on what the people in that time and place endured. A Bitter Veil is so thought-provoking that it especially would be a great title for book clubs to discuss. Amy Alessio, BookReporter.com Life turns upside down for the couple as men, and especially women, are restricted in their activities, clothing, and behavior. Arrests and torture are frequent, education for women is prohibited, and Anna cannot travel without her husband's permission. Although she tries to conform to please her husband and new family, Anna chafes under the oppression, while Nouri seems to embrace it. Anna grows increasingly unhappy, and as events become more explosive, so does Nouri. Anna is desperate to return to America, but Nouri refuses to allow it. Tension builds until a shattering event changes everything and plunges Anna into a tumultuous—and dangerous—vortex, raising the possibility she will never leave Iran alive. Hellmann crafts a tragically beautiful story around a message that is both subtle and vibrant. The author does an amazing job of delivering her point but never by sacrificing the quality of her storytelling. Instead, the message drives the psychological and emotional conflict painting a bleak and heart-wrenching tale that will stick with the reader long after they finish the book. Bryan Van Meter, CrimeSpree Magazine If you enjoy the historical novels of Ken Follett, Kristin Hannah, and Kate Quinn, you'll love the Compulsively Readable Thrillers by Libby Hellmann.

Forgotten Ally

Forgotten Ally PDF Author: Rana Mitter
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 054784056X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 485

Book Description
A history of the Chinese experience in WWII, named a Book of the Year by both the Economist and the Financial Times: “Superb” (The New York Times Book Review). In 1937, two years before Hitler invaded Poland, Chinese troops clashed with Japanese occupiers in the first battle of World War II. Joining with the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, China became the fourth great ally in a devastating struggle for its very survival. In this book, prize-winning historian Rana Mitter unfurls China’s drama of invasion, resistance, slaughter, and political intrigue as never before. Based on groundbreaking research, this gripping narrative focuses on a handful of unforgettable characters, including Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, and Chiang’s American chief of staff, “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell—and also recounts the sacrifice and resilience of everyday Chinese people through the horrors of bombings, famines, and the infamous Rape of Nanking. More than any other twentieth-century event, World War II was crucial in shaping China’s worldview, making Forgotten Ally both a definitive work of history and an indispensable guide to today’s China and its relationship with the West.

Modern China: A Very Short Introduction

Modern China: A Very Short Introduction PDF Author: Rana Mitter
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191578797
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 170

Book Description
China today is never out of the news: from human rights controversies and the continued legacy of Tiananmen Square, to global coverage of the Beijing Olympics, and the Chinese 'economic miracle'. It seems a country of contradictions: a peasant society with some of the world's most futuristic cities, heir to an ancient civilization that is still trying to find a modern identity. This Very Short Introduction offers the reader with no previous knowledge of China a variety of ways to understand the world's most populous nation, giving a short, integrated picture of modern Chinese society, culture, economy, politics and art. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

China’s Good War

China’s Good War PDF Author: Rana Mitter
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 0674984269
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
A Foreign Affairs Book of the Year A Spectator Book of the Year “Insightful...a deft, textured work of intellectual history.” —Foreign Affairs “A timely insight into how memories and ideas about the second world war play a hugely important role in conceptualizations about the past and the present in contemporary China.” —Peter Frankopan, The Spectator For most of its history, China frowned on public discussion of the war against Japan. But as the country has grown more powerful, a wide-ranging reassessment of the war years has been central to new confidence abroad and mounting nationalism at home. Encouraged by reforms under Deng Xiaoping, Chinese scholars began to examine the long-taboo Guomindang war effort, and to investigate collaboration with the Japanese and China’s role in the post-war global order. Today museums, television shows, magazines, and social media present the war as a founding myth for an ascendant China that emerges as victor rather than victim. One narrative positions Beijing as creator and protector of the international order—a virtuous system that many in China now believe to be under threat from the United States. China’s radical reassessment of its own past is a new founding myth for a nation that sees itself as destined to shape the world. “A detailed and fascinating account of how the Chinese leadership’s strategy has evolved across eras...At its most interesting when probing Beijing’s motives for undertaking such an ambitious retooling of its past.” —Wall Street Journal “The range of evidence that Mitter marshals is impressive. The argument he makes about war, memory, and the international order is...original.” —The Economist

Bitter

Bitter PDF Author: Akwaeke Emezi
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 0593309065
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
From National Book Award finalist Akwaeke Emezi comes a companion novel to PET that explores both the importance and cost of social revolution--and how youth lead the way. Bitter is an aspiring artist who has been invited to cultivate her talents at a special school in the town of Lucille. Surrounded by other creative teens, she can focus on her painting--though she hides a secret from everyone around her. Meanwhile, the streets of Lucille are filled with social unrest. This is Lucille before the Revolution. A place of darkness and injustice. A place where a few ruling elites control the fates of the many. The young people of Lucille know they deserve better--they aren't willing to settle for this world that the adults say is "just the way things are." They are protesting, leading a much-needed push for social change. But Bitter isn't sure where she belongs--in the art studio or in the streets. And if she does find a way to help the Revolution while being true to who she is, she must also ask: what are the costs? Acclaimed novelist Akwaeke Emezi looks at the power of youth, protest, and art in this timely and provocative novel, a companion to National Book Award Finalist Pet. Praise for PET: "The word hype was invented to describe books like this." --Refinery29 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST "[A] beautiful, genre-expanding debut. . . . Pet is a nesting doll of creative possibilities." --The New York Times "Like [Madeleine] L'Engle, Akwaeke Emezi asks questions of good and evil and agency, all wrapped up in the terrifying and glorious spectacle of fantastical theology." --NPR

Forbidden Memory

Forbidden Memory PDF Author: Tsering Woeser
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1640122907
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 576

Book Description
When Red Guards arrived in Tibet in 1966, intent on creating a classless society, they unleashed a decade of revolutionary violence, political rallies, and factional warfare marked by the ransacking of temples, the destruction of religious artifacts, the burning of books, and the public humiliation of Tibet's remaining lamas and scholars. Within Tibet, discussion of those events has long been banned, and no visual records of this history were known to have survived. In Forbidden Memory the leading Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser presents three hundred previously unseen photographs taken by her father, then an officer in the People's Liberation Army, that show for the first time the frenzy and violence of the Cultural Revolution in Tibet. Found only after his death, Woeser's annotations and reflections on the photographs, edited and introduced by the Tibet historian Robert Barnett, are based on scores of interviews she conducted privately in Tibet with survivors. Her book explores the motives and thinking of those who participated in the extraordinary rituals of public degradation and destruction that took place, carried out by Tibetans as much as Chinese on the former leaders of their culture. Heartbreaking and revelatory, Forbidden Memory offers a personal, literary discussion of the nature of memory, violence, and responsibility, while giving insight into the condition of a people whose violently truncated history they are still unable to discuss today. Access the glossary.

Modernization and Revolution in China

Modernization and Revolution in China PDF Author: June Grasso
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317464540
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Book Description
Extensively revised and updated, this popular text conveys the drama of China's struggle to modernize against the backdrop of a proud and difficult history. Spanning the years from China's humiliating defeat in the Opium Wars to its triumphant hosting of the 2008 summer Olympics, the authors narrate the major developments of that journey: the breakdown of imperial China in the face of Japanese and Western encroachments; Sun-Yatsen and the founding of the Chinese republic; the early struggles between the ideologies and armies of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong; China's bitter and costly war with Japan; the final shootout that sent Chiang to Taiwan and Mao to Beijing; the turbulent first decades of the People's Republic; and the dramatic shift to a globalizing economic strategy. This edition features all new analysis of issues facing China's leaders today, including environmental challenges, rural economic developments, corruption, the current economic climate, China's relations with its neighbors and the United States, the latest Tibet crisis, and the reelection of Hu Jintao. The authors have also incorporated some of the latest scholarship on Chinese historical events, making this the best and most up-to-date brief text on modern China currently available.
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