Chinese Biographies chronicles the lives of pop culture icons with connections to the Chinese-speaking world. The Pinyin-annotated biographies are designed for students who have mastered 1000-1200 vocabulary words. Each chapter is preceded and followed by comprehension questions to facilitate dialogue between teachers and students.
The Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography (1979-2015) provides a riveting new way to understand twenty-first-century China and a personal look at the changes that have taken place since the Reform and Opening Up era started in 1979. One hundred key individuals from this period were selected by an international group of experts, and the stories were written by more than 70 authors in 14 countries. The authors map the paths taken by these individuals-some rocky, some meandering, some fateful-and in telling their stories give contemporary Chinese history a human face. The editors have included-with the advice of myriad experts around the world-not only the life stories of politicians and government officials, who play a crucial role in the development of the country, but the stories of cultural figures including, film directors, activists, writers, and entrepreneurs from the mainland China, Hong Kong, and also from Taiwan. The "Greater China" that comes through in this volume has diverse ideas and identities. It is often contradictory, sometimes fractious, and always full of creative human complexity. Some of the lives rendered here are heroic. Some are tragic, and many are inspirational. Some figures come in for trenchant criticism, and others are celebrated with a sense of wonder and awe. Like previous volumes of the Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography, this volume includes a range of appendices, including a pronunciation guide, a bibliography, and a timeline of key events.
The study of modern Chinese history has developed rapidly in recent decades and has seen increased exploration of new topics and innovative approaches. Resulting from a special issue of Modern Chinese History Studies, this set is devoted to showcasing the healthy development of Chinese modern history studies, and has already been revised twice in the original language. This three-volume set exhibits major achievements on the study of modern Chinese history and shows how the role of history was in debate, transformation, and re-evaluation throughout this tortuous yet prosperous period. Articles on 23 different topics are collected from over 30 prominent historians in order to represent their insights on the developmental paths of Chinese historical studies. Drawing on a large number of case studies of critical historical events that contribute to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, this set offers a panoramic view on the studies of modern Chinese history. In addition, it incorporates more pioneering topics such as intellectual history, cultural history, and translations of overseas studies on contemporary Chinese history. This book will be a valuable reference for scholars and students of Chinese history.
Jin Yong's Martial Arts Fiction and the Kungfu Industrial Complex explores the role of Jin Yong's popular martial arts fiction in Chinese literary and cultural discourse. The kungfu industrial complex accounts for how his characters, stories, and tropes maintain cultural significance via adaptation in television and film.
"... an essential source for the study of events in early China, a guide to the moral philosophy of the gentlemen of Han, and a splendid work of literature which may be read for the pleasure of its style and the power of its narrative.... This work makes ÂShi ji and its scholarship accessible to any reader of English, and it is a model for any work in this field and style." —Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Oxford Journals "Through such work as this, the scholary and literary community of the West will learn more of the splendour and romance of early China, and may better appreciate the lessons in humanity presented by its great historian." —Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies "... Nienhauser's new translation is scrupulously scholarly... the design of this series is nearly flawless... the translation itself is very precise..." —Chinese Literature, Essays, Articles, Reviews This project will result in the first complete translation (in nine volumes) of the ÂShih chi (The Grand Scribe's Records), one of the most important narratives in traditional China. Ssu-ma Ch'ien (145-c.86 B.C.), who compiled the work, is known as the Herodotus of China.
Edgar Snow (1905--1972) was one of the most notable Western journalists to report on China in both the revolutionary and postrevolutionary periods. He first became famous in the mid-1930s when he broke through a Nationalist blockade and reached the Communists in northwest China. For nearly a decade, no foreign reporter had seen the Communists, who were widely regarded as a ragtag bandit army. Snow took them seriously as a national movement. His reporting in the now-famous book Red Star over China was major news, even to the Chinese, thousands of whom joined the Communists after reading it. It has remained a seminal reference on the early Chinese Communist movement. In this award-winning biography, journalist John Maxwell Hamilton follows Snow from his birth in Kansas City to his rise as a celebrated foreign correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post, his ostracism during the cold war, and his role as a singular journalistic bridge between Communist China and the United States. With a new preface by the author, this revealing portrait of the widely misunderstood Snow firmly establishes him as a model for the kind of committed reporting that is crucial to understanding our interdependent world.
Compiled by two skilled librarians and a Taiwanese film and culture specialist, this volume is the first multilingual and most comprehensive bibliography of Taiwanese film scholarship, designed to satisfy the broad interests of the modern researcher. The second book in a remarkable three-volume research project, An Annotated Bibliography for Taiwan Film Studies catalogues the published and unpublished monographs, theses, manuscripts, and conference proceedings of Taiwanese film scholars from the 1950s to 2013. Paired with An Annotated Bibliography for Chinese Film Studies (2004), which accounts for texts dating back to the 1920s, this series brings together like no other reference the disparate voices of Chinese film scholarship, charting its unique intellectual arc. Organized intuitively, the volume begins with reference materials (bibliographies, cinematographies, directories, indexes, dictionaries, and handbooks) and then moves through film history (the colonial period, Taiwan dialect film, new Taiwan cinema, the 2/28 incident); film genres (animated, anticommunist, documentary, ethnographic, martial arts, teen); film reviews; film theory and technique; interdisciplinary studies (Taiwan and mainland China, Taiwan and Japan, film and aboriginal peoples, film and literature, film and nationality); biographical materials; film stories, screenplays, and scripts; film technology; and miscellaneous aspects of Taiwanese film scholarship (artifacts, acts of censorship, copyright law, distribution channels, film festivals, and industry practice). Works written in multiple languages include transliteration/romanized and original script entries, which follow universal AACR-2 and American cataloguing standards, and professional notations by the editors to aid in the use of sources.
Since the mid-1990s, Taiwan’s unique brand of Mandopop (Mandarin Chinese–language pop music) has dictated the musical tastes of the mainland and the rest of Chinese-speaking Asia. Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow explores Mandopop’s surprisingly complex cultural implications in Taiwan and the PRC, where it has established new gender roles, created a vocabulary to express individualism, and introduced transnational culture to a country that had closed its doors to the world for twenty years. In his early chapters, Marc L. Moskowitz provides the historical background necessary to understand the contemporary Mandopop scene, beginning with the birth of Chinese popular music in the East Asian jazz Mecca of 1920s Shanghai. A brief overview of alternative musical genres in the PRC such as Beijing rock and revolutionary opera is included. The section concludes with a look at the manner in which Taiwan’s musical ethos has influenced the mainland’s music industry and how Mandopop has brought Western music and cultural values to the PRC. This leads to a discussion of Taiwan pop’s exceptional hybridity, beginning with foreign influences during the colonial period under the Dutch and Japanese and continuing with the country’s political, cultural, and economic alliance with the U.S. Moskowitz addresses the resulting wealth of transnational musical influences from the rest of East Asia and the U.S. and Taiwan pop’s appeal to audiences in both the PRC and Taiwan. In doing so, he explores how Mandopop’s "songs of sorrow," with their ubiquitous themes of loneliness and isolation, engage a range of emotional expression that resonates strongly in the PRC. Later chapters examine the construction of male and female identities in Mandopop and look at the widespread condemnation of the genre by critics. Drawing on analyses and data from earlier chapters (including interviews with dozens of performers, song writers, and lay people in Taipei and Shanghai), Moskowitz attempts to answer the question: Why, if the music is as bad as some assert, is it so central to the lives of the largest population in the world? To answer, he highlights Mandopop’s important contribution as a poetic lament that simultaneously embraces and protests modern life. Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow is a highly readable introduction to an important but understudied East Asian phenomenon. It will find a ready audience among scholars and students of Chinese and Taiwanese popular culture as well as musicologists studying transnational music flows and non-Western popular music.
In 1890, the author's maternal great-grandfather Chow Chih was the firstborn son of a wealthy family in Canton, China, who could have pursued virtually any career. But China was swirling in revolutions and counterrevolutions as warlords and foreign interlopers fought for control after 2,000 years of imperial rule. Dr. Sun Yat-sen said China had become "the poorest and weakest nation in the world. We occupy the lowest position in international affairs. Other men are the carving knife and serving dish; we are the fish and the meat." Chow chose to fight for his country and graduated as an officer from the first class of the prestigious Whampoa Military Academy in 1924. His military prowess caught the eye of a powerful warlord in north China who tried to woo him to lead an army. Chow chose instead to join Sun Yat-sen's new national army to fight the warlords and hopefully unify a splintered China. Chow served as a general for Sun Yat-sen and later became a four-star general for Chiang Kai-shek who described Chow as having "brilliance in all things military and deserves respect as the supreme commander of the military world." Like Sun Yat-sen, Chow was described by his soldiers as being selfless. Despite his high rank, Chow was regularly called to the front lines of China's civil war and the second Sino-Japanese War. As a voracious reader of Sun Tzu's The Art of War, Chow was a military genius famed for leading one hundred battles during the Chinese Civil War and World War II. Would he be able to successfully maneuver in a post-Nationalist government world? As the Communists took over to rule China in 1949, the East Coast of China seemed in chaos with fellow Nationalists jumping onto steamships and trains to escape to Hong Kong and Taiwan. But Chow had fought hard and long to unify his beloved China and chose to stay behind. He hoped he would be able to read the new Communist regime that was bent on hard change to drive China into modern times. The chaos of the Communist takeover then turned to terror.
Publisher: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
ISBN: 9789629969776
Category: Biography & Autobiography
Page: 326
View: 656
A Pragmatist and His Free Spirit portrays the unconventional love between a Chinese social reformer and an American avantgarde artist. Hu Shi was a student at Cornell when he first met Edith Clifford Williams. They exchanged some 300 letters between 1914 and 1962; these, alongside Hu's diaries, poems and other correspondence, provide the substance of this book. In Williams, Hu met his intellectual match. She helped him reconcile his selfimage as an independent thinker with his acquiescence to an arranged marriage. Best known for his contribution to China's Literary Revolution, Hu's experimental vernacular poetry was partly inspired by his exposure to Williams's avantgarde art. In reconstructing their romance, the authors deftly exemplify the dilemmas which confronted a generation of Chinese intellectuals, particularly those educated in the West. Although Hu shared his contemporaries' patriotic hopes for China, he never subscribed to the prevailing ideology. Sustained by Williams's unflinching honesty, he advocated John Dewey's pragmatic approach, one which has recently regained acceptance in China. Although the romantic ardor dwindled, the two retained, in each other's eyes, an image of their idealistic youth.
