All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
HOW THE US, UK & OTHERS MADE CHINA THE WORLD’S FOREMOST TRADING POWER – Today’s contentious trading relationship between China & the West shows how times have changed, according Made in China by Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson. I spoke with Ingelson for my May China-Britain Business Council Focus magazine author Q&A – click here to read…
Two intrepid women artists in China, who documented country one painting at a time, almost forgotten today – They have faded from view now, but Anna Hotchkis and Mary Mullikin were intrepid artists who documented China in paintings before World War II tore them apart. Click to read here in the South China Morning Post weekend magazine….
An early plug – pre-orders really help books – for Yao Emei’s collection of four short stories, The Unfilial, out this September from Sinoist Books (translators: Honey Watson, Martin Ward, Olivia Milburn, Will Spence). I was lucky enough to get an early copy and it’s among the best writing out of China I’ve read in the last few years.
Read the excerpt here. Buy the book here!
Selda Antan’s Chinese Workers of the World (Stanford University Press)…
Chinese workers helped build the modern world. They labored on New World plantations, worked in South African mines, and toiled through the construction of the Panama Canal, among many other projects. While most investigations of Chinese workers focus on migrant labor, Chinese Workers of the World explores Chinese labor under colonial regimes within China thorough examination of the Yunnan-Indochina Railway, constructed between 1898–1910. The Yunnan railway—a French investment in imperial China during the age of “railroad colonialism”—connected French-colonized Indochina to Chinese markets with a promise of cross-border trade in tin, silk, tea, and opium. However, this ambitious project resulted in fiasco. Thousands of Chinese workers died during the horrid construction process, and costs exceeded original estimates by 74%.
Drawing on Chinese, French, and British archival accounts of day-to-day worker struggles and labor conflicts along the railway, Selda Altan argues that long before the Chinese Communist Party defined Chinese workers as the vanguard of a revolutionary movement in the 1920s, the modern figure of the Chinese worker was born in the crosscurrents of empire and nation in the late nineteenth century. Yunnan railway workers contested the conditions of their employment with the knowledge of a globalizing capitalist market, fundamentally reshaping Chinese ideas of free labor, national sovereignty, and regional leadership in East and Southeast Asia.
About the author
Selda Altan is Assistant Professor of History at Randolph College.
Join us for a fascinating talk with Paul French in conversation with Patrick Winn on his new book Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel that Survived the CIA on June 8th, 7pm.
The jagged mountains dividing China and Burma belong to the Wa, an indigenous group who have outwitted the CIA to create the world’s mightiest narco-state, controlling more territory than Israel and with more troops than Sweden. Are they crime lords? Or visionaries?
Wa State has become a real nation with its own highways, anthems, schools and flags. Its leaders promise freedom, using profits from trafficking heroin and meth to attain what China’s other frontier peoples, Tibetans and Uyghurs, can only dream of: a state of their own. Patrick Winn embarks on a risky journey of discovery, chasing clues about the forbidden republic from Thailand to Burma to the secretive Wa State itself.
Patrick Winn is an award-winning investigative journalist. He mostly covers rebellion and black markets in Southeast Asia.
Tickets and more details here
Chinese Marines on the wall round Peking, 1937. By Russian-born photographer Serge Vargassoff (1906-1965) who started work at 20 in Peking. He Later set up Serge Vargassoff Photography at 3A Wyndham Street, HK & worked at Gainsborough Studio, Morning Post Building, HK
Caroline Alexander’s Skies of Thunder: The Deadly World War II Mission Over the Roof of the World (Viking Press USA) remembers the pilots of the Hump…
In April 1942, the Imperial Japanese Army steamrolled through Burma, capturing the only ground route from India to China. Supplies to this critical zone would now have to come from India by air – meaning across the Himalayas, on the most hazardous air route in the world. SKIES OF THUNDER is a story of an epic human endeavor, in which Allied troops faced the monumental challenge of operating from airfields hacked from the jungle, and took on ‘the Hump,’ the fearsome mountain barrier that defined the air route.They flew fickle, untested aircraft through monsoons and enemy fire, with inaccurate maps and only primitive navigation technology. The result was a litany of both deadly crashes and astonishing feats of survival. The most chaotic of all the war’s arenas, the China-Burma-India theater was further confused by the conflicting political interests of Roosevelt, Churchill and their demanding, nominal ally, Chiang Kai-shek. Caroline Alexander, who wrote the defining books on Shackleton’s Endurance and Bligh’s Bounty, is brilliant at probing what it takes to survive extreme circumstances. She has unearthed obscure memoirs and long-ignored records to give us the pilots’ and soldiers’ eye views of flying and combat, as well as honest portraits of commanders like the celebrated ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stillwell and Claire Lee Chennault. She assesses the real contributions of units like the Flying Tigers, Merrill’s Marauders, and the British Chindits, who pioneered new and unconventional forms of warfare. Decisions in this theater exposed the fault-lines between the Allies – America and Britain, Britain and India, and ultimately and most fatefully between America and China, as FDR pressed to help the Chinese nationalists in order to forge a bond with China after the war. A masterpiece of modern war history.
There’s also a good piece on the book by the author at Crimeresads.com here.