Title: Fanshen

Author: William Hinton

Publisher: Monthly Review Press

Price: £18.95

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: Mao Zedong

Category: Chinese History

More than forty years after its initial publication, William Hinton's Fanshen continues to be the essential volume for those fascinated with China's revolutionary process of rural reform and social change. A pioneering work, "Fanshan" is a marvelous and revealing look into life in the Chinese countryside, where tradition and modernity have had both a complimentary and caustic relationship in the years since the Chinese Communist Party first came to power. It is a rare, concrete record of social struggle and transformation, as witnessed by a participant. "Fanshen" continues to offer profound insight into the lives of peasants and China's complex social processes. This classic volume includes a new preface by Fred Magdoff.

Title: The Forbidden City

Author: Geremie R. Barme

Publisher: Profile

Price: £15.99

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: China

Category: Chinese History

It was built by a Ming Emperor in our fifteenth century – to be a terrestrial reflection of the celestial realm of the Jade Emperor. Destroyed and rebuilt on an even more splendid scale by the final ManchuQuing Emperors, it consists of a series of courtyards approached by gates (chief among them Tianan Men) and an imperial way. This book brilliantly reconstructs the life that went on in those ancestral temples, lacquered chambers and vermilion halls both in the imperial heyday and in the decadent decline under the Dowager Empress. Fifty years ago Mao considered razing all to the ground. Now it is a Wonder of the World.

Title: Through a Glass Darkly

Author: William Hinton

Publisher: Monthly Review Press

Price: £14.95

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: China

Category: Chinese History

"Through a Glass Darkly" was William Hinton's last book. It draws on a lifetime of immersion in Chinese politics and society, beginning with the seven years he spent in China, working mainly in agriculture and land reform, until 1953. On his return to the United States in that year, Hinton first encountered the distortions and misrepresentations of the Chinese Revolution that he examines in this book. Hinton defends the achievements of the Chinese Revolution during the three decades from 1948 to 1979 from its detractors both in the United States and, since 1979, in China itself. His starting point is the work of John K. Fairbank, for many years a professor at Harvard and the "dean of China Studies" in the United States. But it is not limited to critique. Instead, Hinton's critique of Fairbank leads into a wide-ranging examination of the nature of the transformation attempted in China, its social and political bases, and the causes and consequences of its policies in land reform, agriculture, combating famine, popular culture, industrialization, morality, and much else besides. Moving from large questions to concrete details, often drawn from his own experiences, Hinton brings everyday life in revolutionary China graphically to life. In a time when the distorted views first developed by U.S. critics of the Chinese Revolution are often propagated by the new Chinese elite themselves, "Through a Glass Darkly" has more than just historical relevance. For anyone wishing to understand present-day rivalries between the United States and China, Hinton shows how these began. This is a fitting completion of the work of a great scholar and revolutionary.

Title: The First Emperor of China

Author: Frances Wood

Publisher: Profile

Price: £15.99

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: China

Category: Chinese History

The First Emperor gave us the name by which China is known in the West and, by his unification or elimination of six states, created imperial China. He stressed the rule of law but suppressed all opposition, burning books and burying scholars alive. His military achievements are reflected in the ‘buried armies’ that surround his tomb, and his Great Wall still fascinates the world. Despite his achievements, however, he has been vilified since his death. This book describes his life and times and reflects the historical arguments over the real founder of China and one of the most important men in Chinese history.

Title: The Imperial Capital of China

Author: Arthur Cotterell

Publisher: Pimlico

Price: £20.00

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: China

Category: Chinese History

From the First Emperor's obsessive - and fatal - attempts to engage the Immortals in 219-210 BC, to the striking creativity that produced the golden age of literature and art in Tang Chang'an, to the culmination of architectural virtuosity seen in The Forbidden City of Yong Lee's Beijing in the fifteenth century, this absorbing new book offers a panoramic sweep of an empire that lasted over two millennia through the imperial cities that were the very foundations of each dynasty. Using original Chinese sources and eye-witness accounts, Arthur Cotterell provides an inside view of the rich array of characters, political and ideological tensions, and technological genius that defined the imperial cities of China, as each in turn is revealed, explored, and celebrated. The oldest continuous civilization in existence today stands to become the most influential, its economy expected to exceed that of the United States by 2020. From the cosmological foundations of the first capital to the politics of empire and cataclysmic civil wars, "Imperial Cities of China" offers a level of insight indispensable for a true understanding of China today.

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