Life in Shanghai played out against a backdrop of shifting political maneuvers until World War II burned off the patina that had made ''Old Shanghai'' a world unto itself. In this personal history we follow one man through JapanOCOs conquest of Shanghai in 1937 to the Chinese civil war and Communist takeover, MaoOCOs desperate attempts to modernize a medieval country and Deng XiaopingOCOs opening the economy but not social freedoms. The protagonist lees burgeoning corruption and makes it to the United States to see for himself what the tales of freedom and democracy might offer."

Mr. Woo continues his history of China from 1911, when the Qing dynasty was overthrown after the death of Empress Dowager Cixi, to modern times: a tumultuous century that saw chaos and warlords, invasions, regime change, confiscation of property, and later a return to a mixed economy allowing some capitalist features. In fact, China now has over 100 billionaires - but many families lost everything along the way. To understand the context of today's international face-off in the South China Sea, readers will appreciate Woo's quick briefing on the extremely bloody Japanese invasion and subsequent repression (1937 to 1941) that left a deep imprint on China's worldview. Since the last decades of the Empire, the Chinese people suffered one seismic event after another as competing political factions fought from one end of the country to the other. Chiang Kai-shek brought a semblance of order by founding the Republic of China in 1928; but the Communist Party was growing, and then came Japan. After World War II, the Communists drove Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist Party out in 1949, and they retreated to Taiwan, taking with them the designation 'Republic of China'. Then the author describes the social and economic devastation that attended the establishment of the People's Republic of China, the repression of capitalists - business owners and property owners in particular - and the destruction of the educated classes. Today, China is moving toward the top position among world powers, a position it enjoyed for centuries prior to Britain's Industrial Revolution. But this has been one long march, indeed.

Digging into Chinese folktales, Mr. Woo tells us stories about falling in love in a world that is distant in time and place, distinct in culture and expectations, each with a touch of the exotic. In these tales dating from the Han Dynasty to the Ming Dynasty, dramas unfold in the Imperial palace, along the back roads, and in gardens perfumed with the scent of peony blossoms in the moonlight.

Shanghai Tai Chi offers a masterful portrait of daily urban life under socialism in a rich social and political history of one of the world's most complex cities. Hanchao Lu explores the lives of people from all areas of society - from capitalists and bourgeois intellectuals to women and youth. Utilizing the metaphor of Tai Chi, he reveals how people in Shanghai experienced and adapted to a new Maoist political culture from 1949. Exploring the multifaceted complexity of everyday life and material culture in Mao's China, Lu addresses the survival of old bourgeois lifestyles under the new proletarian dictatorship, the achievements of intellectuals in an age of anti-intellectualism, the pleasure that urban youth derived from reading taboo literature, the emergence of women's liberation and the politics of greening and horticulture. This captivating, epitomizing, and vivid history transports readers to history as lived on Shanghai's streets and back alleyways.

Based on a unique survey of Chinese respondents, the authors find that participation in social movements during the Cultural Revolution was motivated by the desire to improve social status or maintain existing positions in the social hierarchy. A strong relationship is noted between factional alignment and family background in provinces immersed in class-based struggle; however, the association becomes nil in provinces where sectarian struggle was grounded in class. The authors assert that the social conflict school has failed to adequately examine sectarian internecine fights among rebels in attempts to explain the mass movements, while the political process school has ignored fundamental social conflicts embedded in Chinese society. Potential pitfalls likely to confront future mass movements are identified.

The story of contemporary China typically dates back to Mao's 1949 revolution. But in this classic work of Marxist scholarship, historian Harold Isaacs uncovers how workers and peasants struggled for a different kind of revolution, one built from the bottom up, in the 1920s. The defeat of their heroic efforts profoundly shaped the further course of modern Chinese history. Harold Isaacs was an acclaimed Marxist historian who identified with Leon Trotsky's critique of the Soviet Union's degeneration under Stalinism during the 1920s. The Tragedy, his major work, is dedicated to the "martyrs" of the 1925-1927 revolution, who fought for a truly democratic society.

Mao Zedong launched the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" 30 years ago. This documentary history of the event presents a selection of key primary documents dealing with the Cultural Revolution's massive and bloody assault on China's political and social systems.

This book, a study of revolution in China, considers movements of Western origin, such as Christianity or Communism, only as they appear in the Chinese context, treating them as integral factors in the Chinese revolutionary situation.

Building a Revolution: Chinese Architecture Since 1980 presents a picture of Chinese architecture in transition, as the entire economy shifted from being planned and state-controlled to being market-led. The book also examines the "national form" and Chinese identity, the impact of international architecture, housing reform, and the emergence of architects in private practice. Both celebrated and young Chinese architects are portrayed, and the notable buildings in the prosperous coastal cities are highlighted. Through this book on modern Chinese architecture, the reader will appreciate the influence of globalization and modernization on the most populous country in the world.

Yan Jiaqi, one of the principal leaders of China's pro-democracy movement, and his wife, Gao Gao, a noted sociologist, set out to write a comprehensive narrative account of the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution, which occurred in the second decade after Mao Zedong and his comrades came to power. It appeared in Hong Kong in 1986, and was quickly banned by the Communist government. Not surprisingly, censorship and restricted circulation in China resulted in underground reproduction and serialization. The work was thus widely read, coveted, and appreciated by a populace who had just freed itself from the cultural drought and political dread of the event. Yan and Gao later spent two years revising and expanding their work. The present volume, Turbulent Decade: A History of the Cultural Revolution, is based on the revised edition and has been masterfully edited and translated by D.W.Y. Kwok in consultation with the authors. It makes available for the first time in English Yan and Gao's remarkable record of the traumatic Cultural Revolution decade and remains the only single-volume narrative history of the revolution written from an independent and personal perspective. It is a sweeping historical account, notable for its moral courage, for its empathy, for the significance of the questions it addresses, and for its sobering, ultimately tragic view of human behavior.