Thurston has written the extraordinary life of Ni Yuxian, one of the founders of China's democracy movement. Born in 1945, Ni's first memories are of the Communists taking over his village. Although subjected to humiliation, imprisonment and torture, Ni bravely waged repeated battles against corruption and hypocrisy within the Chinese system.

Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money is a groundbreaking study covering a range of contemporary authors and issues, from Haizi to Yin Lichuan and from poetic rhythm to exile-bashing. Its rigorous scholarship, literary sensitivity and lively style make it eminently fit for classroom use.

Saltwater City pays tribute to those who went through the hard times, to those who swallowed their pride, to those who were powerless and humiliated, but who still carried on. They all had faith that things would be better for future generations. They have been proven correct. Canada’s first Chinese arrived in British Columbia in 1858 from California. Almost all mee—merchants, peasants, and laborers — and almost all from eight rural counties in the Pearl River delta in what is now Guangdong province — they came in search of gold and better fortune, escaping the rebellions, flood and drought of their homeland. By 1863 over 4,000 Chinese lived in B.C., filling jobs shunned by whites: miners, road builders, teamsters, laundry men, restaurateurs, domestic servants and cannery workers. Between 1881 and 1885, thousands more arrived, most imported to build the transcontinental railway. They were to create, in Vancouver, Canada’s largest and most dynamic Chinese Community, known to its original inhabitants as Saltwater City.

In this book, distinguished historian Philip A. Kuhn tells the remarkable five-century story of Chinese emigration as an integral part of China's modern history. Although emigration has a much longer past, its "modern" phase dates from the sixteenth century, when European colonialists began to collaborate with Chinese emigrants to develop a worldwide trading system. The author explores both internal and external migration, complementary parts of a far-reaching process of adaptation that enabled Chinese families to deal with their changing social environments. Skills and institutions developed in the course of internal migration were creatively modified to serve the needs of emigrants in foreign lands. As emigrants, Chinese inevitably found themselves "among others." The various human ecologies in which they lived have faced Chinese settlers with a diversity of challenges and opportunities in the colonial and postcolonial states of Southeast Asia, in the settler societies of the Americas and Australasia, and in Europe. Kuhn traces their experiences worldwide alongside those of the "others" among whom they settled: the colonial elites, indigenous peoples, and rival immigrant groups that have profited from their Chinese minorities but also have envied, feared, and sometimes persecuted them. A rich selection of primary sources allows these protagonists a personal voice to express their hopes, sorrows, and worldviews. The post-Mao era offers emigrants new opportunities to leverage their expatriate status to do business with a Chinese nation eager for their investments, donations, and technologies. The resulting "new migration," the author argues, is but the latest phase of a centuries-old process by which Chinese have sought livelihoods away from home.

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded.

This innovative collection opens a door into the rich history of animals in China. This title is also available as Open Access.

A sociologist of international migration examines the Chinese American experience.

A sweeping look at Chinese art across the millennia that upends traditional perspectives and offers new pathways for art history Throughout Chinese history, dynastic time—the organization of history through the lens of successive dynasties—has been the dominant mode of narrating the story of Chinese art, even though there has been little examination of this concept in discourse and practice until now. Chinese Art and Dynastic Time uncovers how the development of Chinese art was described in its original cultural, sociopolitical, and artistic contexts, and how these narratives were interwoven with contemporaneous artistic creation. In doing so, leading art historian Wu Hung opens up new pathways for the consideration of not only Chinese art, but also the whole of art history. Wu Hung brings together ten case studies, ranging from the third millennium BCE to the early twentieth century CE, and spanning ritual and religious art, painting, sculpture, the built environment, and popular art in order to examine the deep-rooted patterns in the historical conceptualization of Chinese art. Elucidating the changing notions of dynastic time in various contexts, he also challenges the preoccupation with this concept as the default mode in art historical writing. This critical investigation of dynastic time thus constitutes an essential foundation to pursue new narrative and interpretative frameworks in thinking about art history. Remarkable for the sweep and scope of its arguments and lucid style, Chinese Art and Dynastic Time probes the roots of the collective imagination in Chinese art and frees us from long-held perspectives on how this art should be understood. Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC