Paul French studied history, economics, and Mandarin at university and has an MPhil in economics from the University of Glasgow. He is the author of a number of books, including the New York Times bestselling and Edgar Award–winning Midnight in Peking, Carl Crow: A Tough Old China Hand, and Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao.
"Death in those days came not just from the rain of cannons and muskets, the explosions, or the hatchets and spears. It came not just from the infection and the butchery or from the suicides. It came not just from aching famine in the war zone..."
Hysteria broke out midway through the reign of the Qianlong Emperor, as people feared that sorcerers were clipping off the ends of men’s queues and stealing their souls. Philip A. Kuhn's landmark study on this episode illuminated not just a campaign against sorcery, but the inner workings of the Qing state.
Written by an English-Prussian scholar who some considered, in the ugly parlance of the time, to have "gone native," the book "Myths and Legends of China" became an enduring reference for foreign and Chinese readers, writers, and academics.
Both an insider and an outsider, Ma Jian is primarily concerned with discovering his own country — its vastness, but also how it became the nation it had by the early 1980s, and how he had been formed by that process as an individual.
Lin Yutang, who was twice nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature, was a most effective “soft power” tool for China in the 1930s. He comes to us in the book "My Country and My People" from another time of engagement almost unimaginable.
"Lust, Caution" is a masterclass in the short story/novella genre, a tale of high-stakes manipulation against the backdrop of “glossily rouged lips,” “sleeveless cheongsams of electric blue,” and “diamond studded sapphire button earrings."
Maoist campaigns — and to a large extent, the Mao era itself — were as much visual as they were literary. Stefan Landsberger recognized this, and collected a large stash of Chinese propaganda posters that would eventually become one of the most unique books in the China space.
"The question I shall discuss is how members of the Communist Party should cultivate and temper themselves," Liu Shaoqi wrote in the early days of the Chinese Communist Party. Is anyone still interested in the answer?
The Little Red Book was everywhere during the Cultural Revolution, waved enthusiastically more than it was read closely, perhaps, but still a symbol of utmost importance.