China Politics

Have you ever heard about the old mother of waters? How about Miao Shan? Or the medicine god?The Chinese had so many gods that it's probably a huge task to remember or memorize them all. For almost everything, there was either a god or a goddess. But a simple list of all the gods wouldn’t suffice to satisfy your appetite for the mystery of religious history in this massive country. So, to help you enjoy this audiobook, the intricate stories of betrayal, supernatural powers, love, and hatred are described in detail in this guide.

For the first time in any modern language, a female scholar and translator reimagines The Art of War. Sun Tzu’s ancient book of strategy and psychology has as much to tell us today as when it was first written 2,500 years ago. In a world forever at odds, his rules for anticipating the motivations and strategies of our competitors never cease to inspire leaders of all kinds.

In 1966 Fan Shen, a newly minted Red Guard, plunged happily into China's Cultural Revolution. Disillusionment soon followed, then turned to disgust and fear when Shen discovered that his compatriots had tortured and murdered a doctor whose house he'd helped raid and whose beautiful daughter he secretly adored. A story of coming of age in the midst of monumental historical upheaval, Shen's Gang of One is more than a memoir of one young man's harrowing experience during a time of terror.

La figura di Mao Zedong è rappresentativa della Cina e del suo cambiamento avvenuto nell'ultimo secolo. Intellettuale, leader ma soprattutto politico di spicco e dalle grandi vedute, Mao ha rappresentato per il suo paese la speranza di vivere in un mondo nuovo, libero dal giogo imperiale.

Historian and geopolitical expert Michael Auslin argues that far from being a cohesive powerhouse, Asia is a fractured region threatened by stagnation and instability. Here he provides a comprehensive account of the economic, military, political, and demographic risks that bedevil half of our world, arguing that Asia, working with the United States, has a unique opportunity to avert catastrophe - but only if it acts boldly.

While Pang-Mei Natasha Chang was a Chinese Studies major at Harvard University, she stumbled across the name of her 83-year-old great aunt Chang Yu-i in a history book. Over the next several years, Pang-Mei spent long afternoons drawing forth her aunt's story. Born in Shanghai to a well-to-do family, Chang Yu-i lived a life of defiance, continually breaking class and culture barriers.

In 1973, when Wenguang Huang was eight, his grandmother became obsessed with her own death. Fearing cremation, she appealed to her family to promise to bury her after she'd died. This was in Xi'an, a city in central China, at a time when a national ban on all traditional Chinese practices, including burials, was strictly enforced. But his grandmother was persistent, and two years later, Huang's father built her a coffin. Over the next 15 years, the whole family was consumed with planning Grandma's burial.

When Ye Pei dreamed of Venice as a girl, she imagined a magical floating city of canals and gondola rides. And she imagined her mother, successful in her new life and eager to embrace the daughter she had never forgotten. But when Ye Pei arrives in Italy, she learns her mother works on a farm far from the city. Her only connection, a mean-spirited Chinese auntie, puts Ye Pei to work in a small-town café. Rather than giving up and returning to China, a determined Ye Pei takes on a grueling schedule.

It's a sure sign of fame when a man is known simply by his first name, and Mao Zedong, often referred to simply as Mao or Chairman Mao, was one of the most influential men of the 20th century. He was also arguably the most controversial; as the founder of the People's Republic of China, Mao rose from being a communist revolutionary to successfully overthrowing a regime and transforming China into a communist powerhouse in Asia.

The Japanese army's brutal occupation of the city of Nanking during the 1937 Sino-Japanese War is known, for good reason, as the rape of Nanking. As they slaughtered an estimated 300,000 people, the invading soldiers raped more than 20,000 women - some estimates run as high as 80,000. Hua-ling Hu presents here the amazing untold story of the American missionary Minnie Vautrin, whose unswerving defiance of the Japanese protected 10,000 Chinese women and children.

The murder of a young Tibetan nun at the hands of Chinese border guards at the rooftop of the world offers a unique parable for the tale of modern Tibet. Chinese police are instructed to take any measures necessary to protect the border of Tibet. When a group of climbers witness the murder of a young Tibetan nun who is fleeing to India, two men have a choice: turn a blind eye and preserve their climbing careers or alert the world to the grand scale of human injustice played out daily in Tibet.

What can the massive protests that have roiled Hong Kong and the harsh repressive moves made against activists tell us about where this special metropolis is heading? And about how a resurgent China under strongman rule is challenging and reshaping the international order? Jeffrey Wasserstrom draws on his many visits to the city and his background as a specialist in the history of protests against authoritarianism to make a powerful and sobering case for the near inevitability of China’s imposing its model on Hong Kong.

For decades, a few numbers came to define Chinese politics—until those numbers did not count what mattered and what they counted did not measure up. Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts argues that the Chinese government adopted a system of limited, quantified vision in order to survive the disasters unleashed by Mao Zedong's ideological leadership. Jeremy Wallace explains how that system worked and analyzes how the problems that accumulated in its blind spots led Xi Jinping to take drastic action.

On the dark waterside docks of Shanghai, a photographer is recording cargo being secretly loaded when he's brutally killed and his camera destroyed. Shortly thereafter Covert-One director Fred Klein brings the word to the President that there's a Chinese cargo ship rumored to be carrying tons of chemicals to be used by a rogue nation to create new biological weapons. Klein is ordered to get the President solid proof of what the Chinese ship is ferrying.

Nachdem der chinesische Ermittler Shan in Peking in Ungnade gefallen ist, gelingt ihm die Flucht in ein geheimes tibetisches Kloster.

Flying the notorious "hump route" between India and China in 1943, a twin-engine plane suffered mechanical failure and crashed in a dense mountain jungle. Among the passengers and crew were celebrated CBS journalist Eric Sevareid, a Soviet double agent posing as an OSS operative, and General Joseph "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell's personal political adviser. Against the odds, all but one of the 21 people aboard the aircraft survived - but they fell from the frying pan into the fire.

Admiral Jake Grafton takes his wife, Callie, along when the U.S. government sends him to Hong Kong to find out how deeply the American consul-general is embedded in a political money-raising scandal. And why not? Jake and Callie met and fell in love in Hong Kong during the Vietnam War, and the consul-general is a friend from those days.

Is India ready to emerge as a world leader? Our times are characterized not by estranged superpowers building formidable arsenals but by engaged societies building a robust global economy. Emerging countries are redefining the geo-economic (and geopolitical) dynamic. The twenty-first century will be led, says Raghav Bahl, by a handful of Super Economies - large, prosperous countries with a high growth rate, ranking among the world’s top trading partners, commanding 15 to 20 percent of global GDP, having nuclear arms but using economic leadership to effect significant change.

The downfall of Bo Xilai in China was more than a darkly thrilling mystery. It revealed a cataclysmic internal power struggle between Communist Party factions, one that reached all the way to China’s new president Xi Jinping. The scandalous story of the corruption of the Bo Xilai family - the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood; Bo’s secret lovers; the secret maneuverings of Bo’s supporters; the hasty trial and sentencing of Gu Kailai, Bo’s wife - was just the first rumble of a seismic power struggle that continues to rock the very foundation of China’s all-powerful Communist Party.

Lange galt China als eine Art sanfter, schlafender Riese. Zwar war das politische System und dessen Menschenrechtsverletzungen nur schwer vereinbar mit westlichen demokratischen Werten, doch man setzte auf das Prinzip »Wandel durch Handel«. China würde sich mit steigendem Wohlstand schon öffnen. Doch das Gegenteil ist eingetreten: China verschließt sich nach außen, hat aber enorm an wirtschaftlichen und politischen Einfluss gewonnen. Bereits seit 2013 schafft die kommunistische Partei mit Krediten, Investitionen und Entwicklungsprojekten neue Absatzmärkte und hat neue Seidenstraßen erschlossen.