With a population of nearly 1.5 billion and the world’s second largest economy, China is a major player in the world today, and yet many in the West know very little about contemporary China. This book provides a clear, authoritative and up-to-date history of China since 1949, drawing on extensive research to describe and explain the key developments and to dispel the many myths and misconceptions surrounding this twenty-first-century superpower.
In contrast to many commentators who overstate the novelty of the Communist regime, Guiheux emphasizes instead its complex political heritage, highlighting the many continuities it shares with the reformers and revolutionaries of the early twentieth century. At the same time, the ability of China’s authoritarian regime to transform the economy and society is key to understanding its breakneck trajectory of modernization – an ability that, as Guiheux explains, far outweighed the importance and effectiveness of Mao’s utopian vision. Guiheux also aims to ‘de-exoticize’ China. While not on the path of a Western-style modernity, China has experienced the same phenomena that have characterized every historical process of modernization: industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization and globalization.
This expertly researched history of the People’s Republic of China will be essential reading for all students and scholars of Chinese history and politics, and for anyone interested in contemporary China.
Wonderfully there’s a Vietnamese language edition of my book Midnight in Peking coming out this summer from Hanoi publishers Nhà Xuất Bản Thanh Niên and the cover is, frankly, very different and wild….
Gdansk-born Eduard Hildebrandt (1817-1869) trained by Wilhelm Krause in Berlin, and most famous for his evening sunset pictures of varioius locales, took a 1862-1864 world trip, which included China, Macao and Hong Kong. This picture of Queen’s Road is from around 1862-1864. It was also produced as an engraving as below too…
Some Shanghai silversmiths i’ve noted before include Wang Hing, Wo Shing, Hung Chong, Luen Wo, and Zeewo, Tuck Chang, Zee Sung Luen Hing and others (just put “silversmiths” in the search box). Add to this Hong Kong and Shanghai-based Wing Nam (most of the silversmithing companies in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Shanghai were originally from Hong Kong or Guangzhou)…
silver rectangular cigarette box, quite plain, hinged cover, cedar lined
The interest among Victorian readers in classical literature from Asia has been greatly underestimated. The popularity of the Arabian Nights and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is well documented. Yet this was also an era in which freethinkers consulted the Quran, in which schoolchildren were given abridgements of the Ramayana to read, in which names like ‘Kalidasa’ and ‘Firdusi’ were carved on the façades of public libraries, and in which women’s book clubs discussed Japanese poetry. But for the most part, such readers were not consulting the specialist publications of scholarly orientalists. What then were the translations that catalysed these intercultural encounters? Based on a unique methodology marrying translation theory with empirical techniques developed by historians of reading, this book shines light for the first time on the numerous amateur translators or ‘popularizers’, who were responsible for making these texts accessible and disseminating them to the Victorian general readership.
Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf explains the process whereby popular translations were written, published, distributed to bookshops and libraries, and ultimately consumed by readers. It uses the working papers and correspondence of popularizers to demonstrate their techniques and motivations, while the responses of contemporary readers are traced through the pencil marginalia they left behind in dozens of original copies. In spite of their typically limited knowledge of source-languages, Asian Classics argues that popularizers produced versions more respectful of the complexity, cultural difference, and fundamental untranslatability of Asian texts than the professional orientalists whose work they were often adapting. The responses of their readers, likewise, frequently deviated from interpretive norms, and it is proposed that this combination of eccentric translators and unorthodox readers triggered ‘flights of translation’, whereby historical individuals can be seen to escape the hegemony of orientalist forms of knowledge.
An interesting little story that appeared in the American newspapers in the 1920s – (fake) pearl sellers, a hundred or so, in Paris apparently attracted to the French capital by the tales of returning Chinese Labour Corps members. A strange tale as most of the CLC came from Shandong (though we know when they returned many got off the boat in Shanghai and stayed in the eastern China region. But, fake Zhejiang pearls were a well-known and big business between the wars and often a way for new emigrants to Europe to start making some money. Paris was a centre (as much of the business was done through a Sino-French company), but they were also spotted in Dutch, German and Spanish cities (and apparently Tokyo too) in the 1920s and 1930s.
A Hong Kong 1946 Victory 30c stamp – obviously with a youngish looking George VI.
Includes the slogan ‘1941-1945 Resurgo’, or ‘Arise’. The stamp was designed by Head Postmaster of Hong Kong, Edward Wynne-Jones, while he was interned in Stanley Camp, as an activity to relieve boredom. Eventually is rough pencil sketch done in Stanley. A fellow internee W. E. Jones (no relation), formerbeen Chief Draughtsman of the Hong Kong Public Works Department weorked it up in crayon.
A quite remarkable stamp – more on its unusual creation, production and issuance here from The Smithsonian….
