"One Finger's Worth of Historical Events"

Author: David Wolff
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 90

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Book Description

"One Finger's Worth of Historical Events"

Author: David Wolff
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 90

Get Book Here

Book Description


Strong Borders, Secure Nation

Strong Borders, Secure Nation PDF Author: M. Taylor Fravel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400828872
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
As China emerges as an international economic and military power, the world waits to see how the nation will assert itself globally. Yet, as M. Taylor Fravel shows in Strong Borders, Secure Nation, concerns that China might be prone to violent conflict over territory are overstated. The first comprehensive study of China's territorial disputes, Strong Borders, Secure Nation contends that China over the past sixty years has been more likely to compromise in these conflicts with its Asian neighbors and less likely to use force than many scholars or analysts might expect. By developing theories of cooperation and escalation in territorial disputes, Fravel explains China's willingness to either compromise or use force. When faced with internal threats to regime security, especially ethnic rebellion, China has been willing to offer concessions in exchange for assistance that strengthens the state's control over its territory and people. By contrast, China has used force to halt or reverse decline in its bargaining power in disputes with its militarily most powerful neighbors or in disputes where it has controlled none of the land being contested. Drawing on a rich array of previously unexamined Chinese language sources, Strong Borders, Secure Nation offers a compelling account of China's foreign policy on one of the most volatile issues in international relations.

China–Japan Relations after World War Two

China–Japan Relations after World War Two PDF Author: Amy King
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316668517
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
A rich empirical account of China's foreign economic policy towards Japan after World War Two, drawing on hundreds of recently declassified Chinese sources. Amy King offers an innovative conceptual framework for the role of ideas in shaping foreign policy, and examines how China's Communist leaders conceived of Japan after the war. The book shows how Japan became China's most important economic partner in 1971, despite the recent history of war and the ongoing Cold War divide between the two countries. It explains that China's Communist leaders saw Japan as a symbol of a modern, industrialised nation, and Japanese goods, technology and expertise as crucial in strengthening China's economy and military. For China and Japan, the years between 1949 and 1971 were not simply a moment disrupted by the Cold War, but rather an important moment of non-Western modernisation stemming from the legacy of Japanese empire, industry and war in China.

Mao: The Real Story

Mao: The Real Story PDF Author: Alexander V. Pantsov
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451654499
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 794

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Book Description
This major new biography of Mao uses extensive Russian documents previously unavailable to biographers to reveal surprising details about Mao’s rise to power and his leadership in China. Mao Zedong was one of the most important figures of the twentieth century, the most important in the history of modern China. A complex figure, he was champion of the poor and brutal tyrant, poet and despot. Pantsov and Levine show Mao’s relentless drive to succeed, vividly describing his growing role in the nascent Communist Party of China. They disclose startling facts about his personal life, particularly regarding his health and his lifelong serial affairs with young women. They portray him as the loyal Stalinist that he was, who never broke with the Soviet Union until after Stalin’s death. Mao brought his country from poverty and economic backwardness into the modern age and onto the world stage. But he was also responsible for an unprecedented loss of life. The disastrous Great Leap Forward with its accompanying famine and the bloody Cultural Revolution were Mao’s creations. Internationally Mao began to distance China from the USSR under Khrushchev and shrewdly renewed relations with the U.S. as a counter to the Soviets. He lived and behaved as China’s last emperor.

Wild Swans

Wild Swans PDF Author: Jung Chang
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439106495
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
The story of three generations in twentieth-century China that blends the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history—a bestselling classic in thirty languages with more than ten million copies sold around the world, now with a new introduction from the author. An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraordinary lives and experiences of her family members: her grandmother, a warlord’s concubine; her mother’s struggles as a young idealistic Communist; and her parents’ experience as members of the Communist elite and their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution. Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen, then worked as a peasant, a “barefoot doctor,” a steelworker, and an electrician. As the story of each generation unfolds, Chang captures in gripping, moving—and ultimately uplifting—detail the cycles of violent drama visited on her own family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history.

Tyranny of the Weak

Tyranny of the Weak PDF Author: Charles K. Armstrong
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801468949
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
To much of the world, North Korea is an impenetrable mystery, its inner workings unknown and its actions toward the outside unpredictable and frequently provocative. Tyranny of the Weak reveals for the first time the motivations, processes, and effects of North Korea's foreign relations during the Cold War era. Drawing on extensive research in the archives of North Korea's present and former communist allies, including the Soviet Union, China, and East Germany, Charles K. Armstrong tells in vivid detail how North Korea managed its alliances with fellow communist states, maintained a precarious independence in the Sino-Soviet split, attempted to reach out to the capitalist West and present itself as a model for Third World development, and confronted and engaged with its archenemies, the United States and South Korea. From the invasion that set off the Korean War in June 1950 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Tyranny of the Weak shows how—despite its objective weakness—North Korea has managed for much of its history to deal with the outside world to its maximum advantage. Insisting on a path of "self-reliance" since the 1950s, North Korea has continually resisted pressure to change from enemies and allies alike. A worldview formed in the crucible of the Korean War and Cold War still maintains a powerful hold on North Korea in the twenty-first century, and understanding those historical forces is as urgent today as it was sixty years ago.

Realms of Freedom in Modern China

Realms of Freedom in Modern China PDF Author: William C. Kirby
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804752329
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
The fifteenth and final volume of the series The Making of Modern Freedom, this book explores a variety of issues surrounding questions of human rights and freedom in China. The chapters suggest very significant realms of freedom, with or without the protection of law, in the personal, social, and economic lives of people in China before the twentieth century. This was recognized, and partly codified, in the early twentieth century, when legal experts sought to establish a republic of laws and limits. The process of legal reform, however, would be placed firmly in the service of strengthening the post-imperial Chinese nation-state, culminating after 1949 in despotism unparalleled in Chinese history. Nevertheless, the last decades of the twentieth century and the first years of our own would witness a slow, steady, but unmistakable reassertion of realms of personal and communal autonomy that show, even in an era of strong states, at least the prospect of institutionalized freedoms.

Mao

Mao PDF Author: Jung Chang
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307807134
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 857

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Book Description
The most authoritative life of the Chinese leader every written, Mao: The Unknown Story is based on a decade of research, and on interviews with many of Mao’s close circle in China who have never talked before — and with virtually everyone outside China who had significant dealings with him. It is full of startling revelations, exploding the myth of the Long March, and showing a completely unknown Mao: he was not driven by idealism or ideology; his intimate and intricate relationship with Stalin went back to the 1920s, ultimately bringing him to power; he welcomed Japanese occupation of much of China; and he schemed, poisoned, and blackmailed to get his way. After Mao conquered China in 1949, his secret goal was to dominate the world. In chasing this dream he caused the deaths of 38 million people in the greatest famine in history. In all, well over 70 million Chinese perished under Mao’s rule — in peacetime.

Two Suns in the Heavens

Two Suns in the Heavens PDF Author: Sergey Radchenko
Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press
ISBN: 9780804758796
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
This book examines the deterioration of relations between the USSR and China in the 1960s, whereby once powerful allies became estranged, competitive, and increasingly hostile neighbors. It shows how the intrinsic inequality of the Sino-Soviet alliance - seen as entirely natural by the Russians but bitterly resented by the Chinese - resulted in its ultimate collapse.

The Global Revolution

The Global Revolution PDF Author: Silvio Pons
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191054100
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
The Global Revolution. A History of International Communism 1917-1991 establishes a relationship between the history of communism and the main processes of globalization in the past century. Drawing on a wealth of archival sources, Silvio Pons analyses the multifaceted and contradictory relationship between the Soviet Union and the international communist movement, to show how communism played a major part in the formation of our modern world. The volume presents the argument that during the age of wars from 1914 to 1945, the establishment of the Soviet state in Russia and the birth of the communist movement had an enormous impact because of their promise of world revolution and international civil war. Such perspective appeared even more plausible in the aftermath of the Second World War and of revolution in China, which paved the way for the expansion of communism in the post-colonial world. Communism challenged the West in the Cold War - by means of anti-capitalist modernization and anti-imperialist mobilization - showing itself to be a powerful factor in the politicization of global trends. However, the international legitimacy of communism declined rapidly in the post-war era. Soviet power exposed its inability to exercise hegemony, as distinct from domination. The consequences of Sovietization in Europe and the break between the Soviet Union and China were the primary reasons for the decline of communist influence and appeal. Since communism lost its political credibility and cultural cohesion, its global project had failed. The ground was prepared for the devastating impact of Western globalization on communist regimes in Europe and the Soviet Union.