Book #20 on The China Project Ultimate China Bookshelf is the stylish, witty and ever-sophistcated L:in Yutang’s 1935 My Country and My People, a book that introduced China to so many western readers and in a time of mutual curiousity and friendship almost unimaginable now…click here.
By the way, Internet Archive has a downloadable version of the book (which has been out of print for some time now) for free – here.
In Among Women across Worlds, Suzy Kim excavates the transnational linkages between women of North Korea and a worldwide women’s movement. Women of Asia, especially those espousing communism, are often portrayed as victims or pawns of a patriarchal Confucian state. Kim undercuts this standard analysis through detailed archival work in the international women’s press, and finds that North Korean women asserted themselves in unexpected places from the late 1940s—just before the official beginning of the Korean War—to 1975, the year designated by the UN as International Women’s Year.
By centering North Korea and the “East,” Kim defies convention to offer an entirely new genealogy of the global women’s movement. Women of the Korean Democratic Women’s Union (KDWU), as part of the global left women’s movement led by the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), insisted family and domestic issues must be part of both national and international debates, highlighting how race, nationality, sex, and class connect to form systems of colonial and capitalist exploitation. Their intersectional program claimed that there is “no peace without justice,” that “the personal is the political,” and that “women’s rights are human rights” many decades before activists of the West embraced such agendas. Among Women across Worlds is an archaeology of forgotten movements and ideas that became the foundation for those that have come to define our era.
“Fortune’s Bazaar – The Making of Hong Kong” is a re-drawing of the history of Hong Kong which takes it far beyond being a British colony, or just another Chinese city. Instead, this history connects Hong Kong into a network of Asian port cities, directly through the people who first settled around the deep-sea harbour and made a cosmopolitan community. These are the in-between people, those of mixed origins, mixed motives and mixed relationships. What started as a history of the Eurasians of Hong Kong grew into new definitions of human categories as well as new levels of crossover between diverse diasporic networks.
After years of research — in archives, attics, and interviews with descendants of some of Hong Kong’s first families — an inescapable conclusion is that without the Armenians, Parsis, Jews, Portuguese and above all the Eurasians, this place would not have worked. So real was this community of people from around the world that it was their sacrifice – of Eurasian soldiers during World War Two, of Portuguese, Chinese and other agents behind the lines, of Bohra traders protecting western bankers, Parsi women feeding all comers – that laid the groundwork for post-war Hong Kong.
HOW MUCH: Free forRASBJ members, RMB 50 for members of partner RAS branches, and RMB 100 for non-members. Interested in becoming an RASBJ member? Please go to https://rasbj.org/membership/
HOW TO JOIN THE EVENT: Click “Register” or “I will Attend” and follow the instructions. After successful registration and payment, you’ll receive a confirmation email. If you seem not to have received it, please check your spam folder. If you encounter difficulties paying via WeChat Pay, you may wish to try Alipay instead. Members of partner RAS branches: Please register at least 72 hours in advance to allow time for membership verification. You will receive several emails from RASBJ: one confirming receipt of your registration request, another requesting payment, and a third confirming your registration and payment, with a link to join the event. In cases of non-payment, you will not receive login information. If you have questions please contact communications@rasbj.org
silver dragon heart scent bottle, with relief embossed chrysanthemum decoration
silver shaped circular serving tray, the field engraved with a pair of dragons, the border chased with alternating panels of the Three Friends of Winter and further dragons
Another month, another novel set in the Shanghai Jewish “ghetto” – The Box with the Sunflower Clasp by Rachel Meller…(perhaps it’s time, given the welter of history books, novels, articles, docs etc on the subject, to cease using the “hidden history” tagline?)…
Rachel Meller was never close to her aunt Lisbeth, a cool, unemotional woman with a drawling Viennese-Californian accent, a cigarette in her hand. But when Lisbeth died, she left Rachel an intricately carved Chinese box with a sunflower clasp. Inside the box were photographs, letters and documents that led Rachel to uncover a story she had never known: that of a passionate Jewish teenager growing up in elegant Vienna, who was caught up by war, and forced to flee to Shanghai.
Far from home, in a strange city, Lisbeth and her parents build a new life – a life of small joys and great hardship, surrounded by many others who, like them, have fled Hitler and the Nazis. 1930s Shanghai is a metropolis where the old rules do not apply – a city of fabulous wealth and crushing poverty, where disease is rife, and gangsters rub shoulders with rich emigrés; where summer brings unspeakable heat, and winter is bitterly cold; and where European refugees build community and, maybe, a young woman can find love.
Set against a backdrop of the war in the Far East, The Box with the Sunflower Clasp is a sweeping family memoir that tells the hidden history of the Jews of Shanghai. Rachel Meller writes with elegance and insight as she examines what it means to survive, and what the legacy of displacement and war might mean for the generation that comes afterwards.
I just repost this as I thought the book came out earlier this year, but it appears it was just published this May – so a reminder…
I guess the recent Chinese movie The Eight Hundred raised awareness of the Nationalist army’s battle of Sihang Warehouse in 1937 Shanghai and perhaps partly prompted this book by Stephen Robinson, which i was asked to blurb: Here’s a link to the book and below my blurb….and I also note Guan Hu’s movie is available to rent on amazon…
“The story of the 1937 battle of Sihang Warehouse, the resistance against the Japanese onslaught of Shanghai, and the heroism of the 800 Chinese soldiers who fought to the bitter end is one of the great stories of bravery in the Second Sino-Japanese War. Yet it is so little acknowledged outside China. Stephen Robinson’s highly readable history of the event is both comprehensive and concise, detailed yet placing this definitive event within the broader history of wartime China.” ― Paul French, author of City of Devils and Destination Shanghai
Alexander V Pantsov’s new Chiang Kai-shek biography…
An extensively researched, comprehensive biography of Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, one of the twentieth century’s most powerful and controversial figures
Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975) led the Republic of China for almost fifty years, starting in 1926. He was the architect of a new, republican China, a hero of the Second World War, and a faithful ally of the United States. Simultaneously a Christian and a Confucian, Chiang dreamed of universal equality yet was a perfidious and cunning dictator responsible for the deaths of over 1.5 million innocent people.
This critical biography is based on Chiang Kai-shek’s unpublished diaries, his extensive personal files from the Russian archives, and the Russian files of his relatives, associates, and foes. Alexander V. Pantsov sheds new light on the role played by the Russians in Chiang’s rise to power in the 1920s and throughout his political career—and indeed the Russian influence on the Chinese revolutionary movement as a whole—as well as on Chiang’s complex relationship with top officials of the United States. It is a detailed portrait of a man who ranks with Stalin, Roosevelt, Hitler, Churchill, and Gandhi as leaders who shaped our world.
