Search results for ""Author Jonathan Spence""

'One of the greatest historians of China' Chris Patten'Balanced, reliable and drawing on the most up-to-date research ... Spence eschews any overall judgement. He lets the facts speak for themselves and they are extraordinary enough' LITERARY REVIEWA biography that penetrates Mao's rhetoric and infamous self-will to distil an intimate portrait of a man as withdrawn and mysterious as the emperors he disdained.From humble origins in the provinces, Mao Zedong rose to absolute power, unifying with an iron fist a vast country torn apart by years of weak leadership, foreign imperialism and war. In this sharply drawn account Jonathan Spence, award-winning historian and author of acclaimed books about the old and the new China, brings to life this modern day emperor and the tumultuous era that he did so much to shape. He presents Mao as a 'Lord of Misrule', who deliberately turned upside-down the traditional hierarchies of Chinese society. Spence captures Mao in all his paradoxical grandeur and sheds light on the radical transformation he unleashed that still reverberates in China today.

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Wilma Fairbank documents, from both a historical and a uniquely personal perspective, the professional and personal achievements of Lin Whei-yin and Liang Sicheng. Liang and Lin were born in early twentieth-century China, a time when the influences of modernism were slowly bearing down on the traditional culture. In the 1920s, they traveled together to the Beaux Arts universe of Philadelphia, where they both graduated with honors from the architecture department of the University of Pennsylvania. Married in 1928, they returned to their native land and became the first two professors at the newly founded school of architecture in Shenyang's Tung Pei University. Wilma Fairbank and her husband, John King Fairbank, Harvard University's eminent historian of modern China, were lifelong friends of Liang and Lin. This relationship allows the author, herself a noted researcher of art and architecture, to paint a vivid picture of the couple within the context of China's turbulent past. Fairbank recounts how Liang and Lin used their Western training to initiate the study of China's architectural evolution. She also documents—as seen through the eyes of Liang and Lin—the tragic events that ravaged the Chinese homeland and its people: the 1937 invasion and bombings by the Japanese military and the ensuing illness and poverty; World War II and the civil war; the rise to power of the Communist government in 1949; and the victimization of the scholar class during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. Fairbank provides a highly readable, emotionally charged personal account of the couple's lives, and the numerous and sometimes horrific torments and humiliations they suffered. And, finally, when it was all too late, the posthumous praise and recognition.

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Set on the eve of the Sino-Japanese war, Fortress Besieged recounts the exuberant misadventures of the hapless hero Fang Hung-chien, who after aimlessly studying in Europe at his family's expense returns to Shanghai armed with a bogus degree from a fake university. On the liner back, Fang's life becomes deeply entangled with those of two Chinese beauties - while when he does finally make it home, he obtains a teaching post at a newly established university, encounters effete pseudo-intellectuals, and falls into a marriage of disastrous proportions. A glorious tale of love, marriage, war, calamity, disillusionment and hope, this is one of the greatest Chinese novels: combining Eastern philosophy, Western traditions, adventure, tragicomedy and satire to create a unique feast of delights.

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By now the world is familiar with the disastrous consequences of the ten year period (1966-1976) in China's history known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The mistakes of Mao Zedong's later years have been officially acknowledged, and the infamous Gang of Four publicly tried and sentence for their crimes. But on the cultural front the thaw had no sooner come than gone. A campaign against what is regarded as "spiritual pollution" is being waged to inhibit free expression among creative writers. Thousands of scholars, authors, respected professors and academicians, who as a class were the most persecuted in what some observers called China's "holocaust," are back at their respective stations, bent over the task of modernization. For understandable reasons, few have written candidly about their experiences during the Cultural Revolution. Yang Jiang is an outstanding exception. In this memoir she give a poignant account of the more than two years she and her husband were sent "downunder" to the barren countryside for reeducation through labor. Yang Jiang touches upon any horrendous acts only in passing, or by indirection; mainly she relates in well-tempered tones the everyday incidents at their "cadre school" which add up to a harrowing tale. Patterned after Shen Fu's "Six Chapters of a Floating Life," a minor classic of the Qing dynasty, Six Chapters form My Life 'Downunder' is a testimony of remarkable sophistication, and at the same time a powerful indictment of the madness of ignorant, totalitarian rule. The author writes in a subtle, almost allegorical style, letting the reader share in her skepticism, disappointment, and frustration with the people, or the system, responsible for what was done to her family and her fellow victims. More in sorrow than in anger, here and there with a touch of wry humor, she records the backwardness and distrust of the peasants who were their "masters"; the utter waste of human resources; the vicious nature of political campaigns and the people involved in them; and, above all, the devotion between husband and wife which kept them going throughout their ordeal. While describing a society in one of its darkest moments, Yang Jiang reaffirms the endurance of humanity. Although Yang Jiang lives in Beijing, Six Chapters from My Life 'Downunder' first appeared in a Hong Kong magazine in April 1981, and was published in book form there in the following month, attracting wide attention. it was published in the People's Republic of China later that year. The edition sold out quickly and no subsequent printings have been available. The present English translation, first published in the journal "Renditions," is issued here in slightly revised form and with the addition of footnotes and background notes.

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