Emily Feng's focus on ordinary people--bravely determined to shape their own lives--captures the mood of the Xi Jinping era more essentially than reams of statistics ever can.--Evan Osnos, National Book Award winner, author of Age of Ambition

The rise of China and its great power competition with the U.S. will be one of the defining issues of our generation. But to understand modern China, one has to understand the people who live there - and the way the Chinese state is trying to control them along lines of identity and free expression.

In vivid, cinematic detail, Let Only Red Flowers Bloom tells the stories of nearly two dozen people who are pushing back. They include a Uyghur family, separated as China detains hundreds of thousands of their fellow Uyghurs in camps; human rights lawyers fighting to defend civil liberties in the face of mammoth odds; a teacher from Inner Mongolia, forced to make hard choices because of his support of his mother tongue; and a Hong Kong fugitive trying to find a new home and live in freedom.

Reporting despite the personal risks, journalist Emily Feng reveals dramatic human stories of resistance and survival in a country that is increasingly closing itself off to the world. Feng illustrates what it is like to run against the grain in China, and the myriad ways people are trying to survive, with dignity.

Astonishing...Brings to life a thriving - and rather civilized - empire - The Telegraph

sparkles with energy, insight and passion... difficult to put down. Nicholas Morton, BBC History Magazine

Control the sea, and you control everything...a gripping tale of dynastic rivalry and innovation, from the author of the classic work Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.

Genghis Khan built a formidable land empire, but he never crossed the sea. Yet by the time his grandson Kublai Khan had defeated the last vestiges of the Song empire and established the Yuan dynasty in 1279, the Mongols controlled the most powerful navy in the world. How did a nomad come to conquer China and master the sea? Based on ten years of research and a lifetime of immersion in Mongol culture and tradition, Emperor of the Seas brings this little-known story vibrantly to life.

Kublai Khan is one of history's most fascinating characters. He brought Islamic mathematicians to his court, where they invented modern cartography and celestial measurement. He transformed the world's largest land mass into a unified, diverse and economically progressive empire, introducing paper money. And, after bitter early setbacks, he transformed China into an outward looking sea-faring empire.

By the end of his reign, the Chinese were building and supplying remarkable ships to transport men, grain, and weapons over vast distances, of a size and dexterity that would be inconceivable in Europe for hundreds of years. Khan had come to a brilliant realization: control the sea, and you control everything.

A master storyteller with an unparalleled grasp of Mongol sources, Jack Weatherford shows how Chinese naval hegemony changed the world forever - revolutionizing world commerce and transforming tastes as far away as England and France.

Taiwan expert Kerry Brown sums up the history of Taiwan and the danger of a Chinese takeover in this succinct and authoritative book.

When the bloody Chinese Civil War concluded in 1949, two Chinas were born. Mao's Communists won and took China's mainland; Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists fled to Taiwan island. Since then, China and Taiwan have drifted into being separate political and cultural entities.

Taiwan is now a flourishing democracy and an economic success story: just one of its companies produces over 90 per cent of the semiconductors that power the world's economy. It is a free and vibrant society. For the United States and the West, the island is a bastion of freedom against China's assertive presence in the region. And yet China, increasingly bellicose under Xi Jinping, insists Taiwan is part of its territory and must be returned to it. Should China blockade the island and mount an invasion, it would set off a chain reaction that would pitch it against the US - escalating a regional war into a global one. Taiwan is thus a geopolitical powder keg.

Why Taiwan Matters helps us understand how and why we've arrived at this dangerous moment in history. With unparalleled access to Taiwan's political leaders and a deep understanding of the island's history and culture, Professor Kerry Brown provides a new reading of Taiwan, its twenty-three million people, and how they navigate being caught in this frightening geopolitical standoff. Why Taiwan Matters is the essential book for understanding Taiwan's unique story told in an accessible, expert and urgent way.

In December 1937, one of the most horrific atrocities in the long annals of wartime barbarity occurred. The Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking (what was then the capital of China), and within weeks, more than 300,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers were systematically raped, tortured, and murdered. In this seminal work, Iris Chang, whose own grandparents barely escaped the massacre, tells this history from three perspectives: that of the Japanese soldiers, that of the Chinese, and that of a group of Westerners who refused to abandon the city and created a safety zone, which saved almost 300,000 Chinese.

Drawing on extensive interviews with survivors and documents brought to light for the first time, Iris Chang's classic book is the definitive history of this horrifying episode.

An epic story of modern China that weaves a riveting family memoir with vital reporting by the New York Times diplomatic correspondent

The son of Chinese immigrants in Washington, DC, Edward Wong grew up among family secrets. His father toiled in Chinese restaurants and rarely spoke of his native land or his years in the People's Liberation Army under Mao. Yook Kearn Wong came of age during the Japanese occupation in World War II and the Communist revolution, when he fell under the spell of Mao's promise of a powerful China. His astonishing journey as a soldier took him from Manchuria during the Korean War to Xinjiang on the Central Asian frontier. In 1962, disillusioned with the Communist Party, he made plans for a desperate escape to Hong Kong.

When Edward Wong became the Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times, he investigated his father's mysterious past while assessing for himself the dream of a resurgent China. He met the citizens driving the nation's astounding economic boom and global expansion--and grappling with the vortex of nationalistic rule under Xi Jinping, the most powerful leader since Mao. Following in his father's footsteps, he witnessed ethnic struggles in Xinjiang and Tibet and pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. And he had an insider's view of the world's two superpowers meeting at a perilous crossroads.

Wong tells a moving chronicle of a family and a nation that spans decades of momentous change and gives profound insight into a new authoritarian age transforming the world. A groundbreaking book, At the Edge of Empire is the essential work for understanding China today.

Named a Best Book of 2024 by the New Statesman

As tensions over Taiwan escalate, the United States and China stand on the brink of a catastrophic war. Resolving the impasse demands we understand how it began. In 1943, the Allies declared that Japanese-held Taiwan would return to China at the conclusion of World War II. The Chinese civil war led to a change of plans. The Communist Party came to power in China and the defeated Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, fled to Taiwan, where he was afforded US protection. The specter of conflict has loomed ever since.

In The Struggle for Taiwan, Sulmaan Wasif Khan offers the first comprehensive history of the triangular relationship between the United States, China, and Taiwan, exploring America's ambivalent commitment to Taiwan's defense, China's bitterness about the separation, and Taiwan's impressive transformation into a flourishing democracy. War is not inevitable, Khan shows, but to avoid it, decision-makers must heed the lessons of the past.

From the White Terror to the Taiwan Straits Crises, from the normalization of Sino-American relations to Trump-era rising tensions, The Struggle for Taiwan charts the paths to our present predicament to show what futures might be possible.

Almost every page contains an eye-opening detail. . . . The Great Transformation evokes the multiple paths, ideas and possibilities that have shaped, and continue to shape, China's present.--Julia Lovell, Financial Times

Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian chronicle how an impoverished and terrorized China experienced radical political changes in the long 1970s and how ordinary people broke free from the beliefs that had shaped their lives during Mao's Cultural Revolution. These changes, and the unprecedented and sustained economic growth that followed, transformed China and the world.

In this rigorous account, Westad and Chen construct a panorama of catastrophe and progress in China. They chronicle China's gradual opening to the world--the interplay of power in an era of aged and ailing leadership, the people's rebellion against the earlier government system, and the roles of unlikely characters: overseas Chinese capitalists, American engineers, Japanese professors, and German designers. This is a story of revolutionary change that neither foreigners nor the Chinese themselves could have predicted.

A Financial Times Best Book of the Year

The definitive biography of Zhou Enlai, the first premier and preeminent diplomat of the People's Republic of China, who protected his country against the excesses of his boss--Chairman Mao.

Zhou Enlai spent twenty-seven years as premier of the People's Republic of China and ten as its foreign minister. He was the architect of the country's administrative apparatus and its relationship to the world, as well as its legendary spymaster. Richard Nixon proclaimed him the greatest statesman of our era. Yet Zhou has always been overshadowed by Chairman Mao. Chen Jian brings Zhou into the light, offering a nuanced portrait of his complex life as a revolutionary, a master diplomat, and a man with his own vision and aspirations who did much to make China, as well as the larger world, what it is today.

Born to a declining mandarin family in 1898, Zhou received a classical education and as a teenager spent time in Japan. As a young man, driven by the desire for China's development, Zhou embraced the communist revolution as a vehicle of China's salvation. He helped Mao govern through a series of transformations, including the disastrous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Yet, as Chen shows, Zhou was never a committed Maoist. His extraordinary political and bureaucratic skill, combined with his centrist approaches, enabled him to mitigate the enormous damage caused by Mao's radicalism.

When Zhou died in 1976, the PRC that we know of was not yet visible on the horizon; he never saw glistening twenty-first-century Shanghai or the broader emergence of Chinese capitalism. But it was Zhou's work that shaped the nation whose influence and power are today felt in every corner of the globe.

Weaving together history and a first-hand account of his experiences in China, John Man tells the fascinating story of how and why these astonishing figures were created in the third century BC, and how they have become a symbol of China's history, culture, and society.

A book that has long cried out to be written. -- Observer (UK), Books of the Year

In 1937, two years before Hitler invaded Poland, Chinese troops clashed with Japanese occupiers in the first battle of World War II. Joining with the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, China became the fourth great ally in a devastating struggle for its very survival.

Prizewinning historian Rana Mitter unfurls China's drama of invasion, resistance, slaughter, and political intrigue as never before. Based on groundbreaking research, this gripping narrative focuses on a handful of unforgettable characters, including Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, and Chiang's American chief of staff, Vinegar Joe Stilwell. Mitter also recounts the sacrifice and resilience of everyday Chinese people through the horrors of bombings, famines, and the infamous Rape of Nanking.

More than any other twentieth-century event, World War II was crucial in shaping China's worldview, making Forgotten Ally both a definitive work of history and an indispensable guide to today's China and its relationship with the West.

In the manner of David McCullough, [Mitter] creates a complex history that is urgently alive. -- Kirkus Reviews

In this sweeping and insightful history, Henry Kissinger turns for the first time at book length to a country he has known intimately for decades and whose modern relations with the West he helped shape. On China illuminates the inner workings of Chinese diplomacy during such pivotal events as the initial encounters between China and tight line modern European powers, the formation and breakdown of the Sino-Soviet alliance, the Korean War, and Richard Nixon's historic trip to Beijing. With a new final chapter on the emerging superpower's twenty-first-century role in global politics and economics, On China provides historical perspective on Chinese foreign affairs from one of the premier statesmen of our time.

An epic, multigenerational story of two rival dynasties who flourished in Shanghai and Hong Kong as twentieth-century China surged into the modern era, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist

The Sassoons and the Kadoories stood astride Chinese business and politics for more than one hundred seventy-five years, profiting from the Opium Wars; surviving Japanese occupation; courting Chiang Kai-shek; and nearly losing everything as the Communists swept into power. Jonathan Kaufman tells the remarkable history of how these families ignited an economic boom and opened China to the world, but remained blind to the country's deep inequality and to the political turmoil on their doorsteps. In a story stretching from Baghdad to Hong Kong to Shanghai to London, Kaufman enters the lives and minds of these ambitious men and women to forge a tale of opium smuggling, family rivalry, political intrigue, and survival.

It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution, Tania Branigan writes. During this decade of Maoist fanaticism between 1966 and 1976, children turned on parents, students condemned teachers, and as many as two million people died for their supposed political sins, while tens of millions were hounded, ostracized, and imprisoned. Yet in China this brutal and turbulent period exists, for the most part, as an absence; official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia.

Red Memory uncovers forty years of silence through the stories of individuals who lived through the madness. Deftly exploring how this era defined a generation and continues to impact China today, Branigan asks: What happens to a society when you can no longer trust those closest to you? What happens to the present when the past is buried, exploited, or redrawn? And how do you live with yourself when the worst is over?

From 1919 to 1924, R.F. Johnston, a British colonial official, scholar, writer and great admirer of Chinese culture, served as tutor and adviser to the last Emperor of China, who had abdicated his throne in 1912. However, in order to ensure a rapid and peaceful transfer of power, the emperor was allowed to retain his title and was permitted to remain in residence in the Forbidden City in Beijing [Peking], which he did until the winter of 1924. This book, first published in 1934, is Johnston's account of that period, during which he was uniquely placed to observe the twilight years of the Ch'ing Dynasty.

Wa moguls are unrivaled in the region's $60 billion meth trade and infamous for mass-producing pink, vanilla-scented speed pills. Drugs finance Wa State, a bona fide nation with its own laws, anthems, schools, and electricity grid. Though revered by their people, Wa leaders are scorned by US policymakers as vicious kingpins who poison our society for profit.

In Narcotopia, award-winning journalist Patrick Winn uncovers the truth behind Asia's top drug-trafficking organization, as told by a Wa commander turned DEA informant. This gripping narrative shreds drug war myths and leads to a chilling revelation: the Wa syndicate's origins are smudged with CIA fingerprints.

This is a saga of native people tapping the power of narcotics to create a nation where there was none before -- and covert US intelligence operations gone wrong.

Formosa Betrayed is a detailed, impassioned account of Chinese Nationalist (KMT) misrule that remains the most important English-language book ever written about Taiwan.

Author George H. Kerr lived in Taiwan in the late 1930s, when the island was a colony of Japan. During the war, he worked for the U.S. Navy as a Taiwan expert. From 1945 to 1947, Kerr served as vice consul of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Taipei, where he was an eyewitness to the February 28 Massacre and the subsequent mass arrests and executions.

As well as chronicling KMT repression during the early years of the White Terror, Kerr documents widespread corruption, showing how the island was systematically looted. The betrayed in the title refers not only to the crushing disappointment Taiwanese felt when they realized KMT rule was worse than that of the Japanese but also to the culpability of the American government. The United States was in large part responsible for handing Taiwan over to the Nationalists and helping them maintain their grip on power.

Formosa Betrayed has served as a foundational text for generations of Taiwanese democracy and independence activists. It has an explosive effect among overseas Taiwanese students; for many, the book was their first encounter in print with their country's dark, forbidden history. A 1974 Chinese-language translation increased its impact still more. It is a powerful classic that has withstood the test of time, a must-read book that will change the way you look at Taiwan.

In this definitive edition Kerr scholar Jonathan Benda has added a detailed, thoroughly-researched introduction as well as a biographical sketch of the author.

Many nations define themselves in terms of territory or people; China defines itself in terms of history. Taking into account the country's unrivaled, voluminous tradition of history writing, John Keay has composed a vital and illuminating overview of the nation's complex and vivid past. Keay's authoritative history examines 5,000 years in China, from the time of the Three Dynasties through Chairman Mao and the current economic transformation of the country. Crisp, judicious, and engaging, China is the classic single-volume history for anyone seeking to understand the present and future of this immensely powerful nation.

When the People's Republic of China was proclaimed on 1 October 1949, China was one of the poorest and most wretched societies on earth. Illiteracy was as high as life expectancy was low but as Chinese leader Mao Zedong had remarked even before the formal announcement of the creation of the PRC, The Chinese people have stood up.

Today's China is at the forefront of the world economy, it has eliminated absolute poverty and is leading the world in tackling climate change, and the development of new, high quality productive forces, essentially conforming to the fifth industrial revolution.

China has achieved this unprecedented development in less than a century, yet these achievements are frequently misinterpreted or distorted. This collection of essays, organised by the co-editors of Friends of Socialist China, aims to challenge these misconceptions and provide the political, historical and economic context that best explains China's astonishing rise.