All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
A Christmas treat for the China Hand in your life! – all 3 of my Destination… books of collected essays – Shanghai, Peking & Macao – nearly 600 pages, over 50 essays and dozens of old photos & maps of old China!! – Save 20% by buying this book bundle direct from Blacksmith Books…
The good people at WildChina in Beijing are running Midnight in Peking Walking Tours on the last Sunday of every month – including December (28th). Other than the regular tours, they can also organise a private tour on request.
A c.1957 guide/booklet to Macau issued by the Tourist Department. It features a painting of St Paul’s Cathedral ruins by George Smirnoff (who gets a chapter in my Destination Macao) and a map of Macao.
Excellent to see Misha Glenny will be taking over the chair for BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time from Melvyn Bragg. Had great fun chatting with Misha last year for the 4-part The Invention of China, which if you haven’t listened yet is right here…..
Daunt Books Marylebone China section… with a little Wallis (& other Christmas gift ideas)…..
David Guerrero’s You Won’t See Me – A very fun read about when the Beatles ghosted Imelda Marcos in 1966 Manila…. more here….
On Lantau and want to buy the full set of my China Revisited set of historic reprints of travel writing on HK, Macao and southern China from the 1870s to the 1930s? VIBE in Mui Wo has got ‘em all – everywhere else in Hong Kong there’s Bookazine and everywhere else in the world there’s the Blacksmith Books web site! Get the 5-book bundle at a Christmas discount here…
Lei Ping’s Shanghai Mundane: Survival and Revival of Bourgeois Sentiments under Chinese Socialism (Bloomsbury)…
This book offers a new critical intervention into the studies of the paradox of Chinese socialism. Centering on the “unremodable” Shanghai bourgeoisie and middle class, the book brilliantly discovers Chinese society’s persistent aspiration to bourgeois lifestyle and remarkable resistance to socialist ideology from the Mao era to the Xi era.
Shanghai Mundane offers a new critical intervention into the studies of the paradox of Chinese socialism. Through the lens of contested state-society relations, the book challenges conventional China Studies by repositioning Shanghai as the key to decode the protracted ideological warfare between socialism and capitalism. Based on significant archival, ethnographic, and theoretical evidence unearthed from the distinct cases of Shanghai bourgeoisie and middle class, Lei Ping discovers the city’s persistent aspiration to bourgeois lifestyle and remarkable resistance to socialist ideology throughout the entire history of the People’s Republic of China. Ping argues that despite the socialist remolding of capitalist industry and commerce, the post-1949 Chinese state failed to eradicate bourgeois heritage in the domain of everyday life in the Mao era, which ironically contributed to its controversial policy reversals in the post-Mao era, from Deng to Xi. What lies at the heart of the major intellectual conundrum, namely the survival and revival of bourgeois sentiments, is what Ping calls the “unremodable Shanghai mundane.” This captivating and provocative account sheds new light on understanding the larger questions as to the crisis-ridden practices of Chinese socialism and the raison d’être of the Chinese Communist Party in the twenty-first century.