China: A History

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The incredible revival of religion in China began in 1982. The Communist Party allowed the small-scale practice of religion under strict government watch. Today, over 300 million Chinese now practice a faith and villages and cities are dotted with churches, temples and mosques. Johnson delved into this resurgence, spending six years living with three religious communities, including Protestants, Buddhists and Daoists. He speaks to Chinese locals to get their perspective on spirituality and discovers a great reawakening of faith in China. Metzger, Thomas A. (1980). "The Cambridge History of China Volume 10 Pt 1 Late Ch'ing". Pacific Affairs. 53 (1): 124–127. doi: 10.2307/2756967. JSTOR 2756967. S2CID 158899948. There is much to learn here and it is one of the most enjoyable history books I have ever had the pleasure to read. Five stars.

Confucius is summarized, Mencius barely gets mentioned, but their legacy is worked through the summaries of the evolution of imperial government. I really appreciated the attention paid to the poets, both male and female, and the marvelous descriptions of ancient cities, such as Chang’An. There is also superlative focus on specific works of art that convey an idea of its time as well as its timeless beauty. The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 2 (edited by Twitchett and Mote), January 1998. ISBN 978-0-521-24333-9. This volume covers government, law, foreign relations, economy, culture, and religion of the Ming dynasty. It’s all in there. I used it as a textbook, and it seemed to work quite well. It’s sort of an anti-textbook, but those are the textbooks that I like to use. It’s not in the grade school textbook genre, in which it’s all names and dates. It gives you lots of information, but it’s carried forward by gripping tales and nicely crafted profiles. You follow the factory girls throughout their days: in the dorms, the karaoke bars, the eateries, and the hospitals. You get a firsthand view of what it’s really like to be a woman in China in the twenty-first century.

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Throughout the text he examines the psyche of Chinese culture and how this idea of a unified state and a feeling of togetherness has persisted through peasant uprising, warlords, Japanese invasions, civil wars, revolution, famine and trauma. He examines both the cities and countryside equally, as “China in the 1920s and ’30s was a land of extraordinary extremes and hugely uneven development. In places in the deep countryside , peasants laboured barefoot with medieval implements, faced with famine and flood, selling their children into slavery while warlords and their militias extorted and murdered at will.” B.C.: Shang Dynasty - The earliest ruling dynasty of China to be established in recorded history, the Shang was headed by a tribal chief named Tan. The Shang era is marked by intellectual advances in astronomy and math. Between 20-30 million dead after the Taiping rebellion, while the 1907 famine led to 25 million dead; its amazing that the dynasty managed to keep on ruling in the face of such disasters Lu Xun should be known to a wide range of readers overseas for two reasons. One – in a sense the more boring reason – is that he is politically very important. He’s always been brought up by the Communist Party as being the single most important writer of the 20th century in China. That’s partly because his message is about how China needed to radically reject its past associated with the Confucian system of ethics that underpinned the old empires, and instead embrace something more new and radical. You can see how that appealed to people involved in the Communist project.

China is home to 130 million migrant workers. Every year they travel to their home villages for the New Year’s holiday and it’s the world’s largest human migration. Leslie T. Chang tells the story of these migrant workers through two young women working on the assembly lines of the industrial city Dongguan. Chang follows the women for three years, observing how the economic boom of China has changed the lives of many women working in the factories. From Chang’s own history to the real hardships and human side of China’s manufacturing industry, this book is a must-read on Chinese culture and history. Nobody is allowed to publish a book saying it’s time to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party – that’s not going to happen now or anytime soon. But discussions in another sense on the future direction of China are meat and drink for the more intellectual sorts of magazines in China, and figures like Wang Hui play a very important role in that debate. So to get something of the pulse of thinking in modern China a century after the 1911 revolution, Wang Hui is a really good starting point.Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount. What I wanted to avoid was anti-Chinese bias and Western bias as much as I can. I did not want to read a history narrative rife with exoticism or told the story of the sun setting on the Chinese empire. These are common complaints that other books on Chinese history received and it was something I wanted to avoid because I knew it would bug the shit out of me. Lastly, I couldn’t leave this review without special mention of the author’s inclusion of some rare but welcome puns and wry observations. I won’t spoil anything, and they certainly aren’t everywhere but they certainly added some extra fun to learning. I could imagine the author sitting of their desk giving a little cheer as they thought of a really good line to throw in.

China’s empire was long lasting one, apart from ‘colonization’ it was its bureaucracy which led to this longevity. As author of this book quotes, ‘Though often violent and sometimes downright aggressive, China always remained a state where civil authorities dominated the military’. So, if you read this book, you have a pretty good sense of what’s going on in Xinjiang with the Uyghurs? If this sounds like you, take a read of my article specifically about planning a trip to China which you should find beneficial.It’s been reviewed paired with a book that I recommended last year, which was the new edition of James Millward’s big history of Xinjiang, Eurasian Crossroads, that was updated with a chapter on recent repression. What’s important about In the Camps is that there hasn’t been a short, deeply informed book about Xinjiang that you could point somebody to who says, ‘I don’t have a lot of time to devote to this subject, but I want to go deeper than I can even through a long-form journalism piece’.