Recommendations based on "Laozi's Dao De Jing A New Interpretation for a Transformative Time"

An instant #1 New York Times bestseller!A USA Today bestseller!Pacific Rim meets The Handmaid's Tale in this blend of Chinese history and mecha science fiction for YA readers.The boys of Huaxia dream of pairing up with girls to pilot Chrysalises, giant transforming robots that can battle the mecha aliens that lurk beyond the Great Wall. It doesn't matter that the girls often die from the mental strain.When 18-year-old Zetian offers herself up as a concubine-pilot, it's to assassinate the ace male pilot responsible for her sister's death. But she gets her vengeance in a way nobody expected—she kills him through the psychic link between pilots and emerges from the cockpit unscathed. She is labeled an Iron Widow, a much-feared and much-silenced kind of female pilot who can sacrifice boys to power up Chrysalises instead.To tame her unnerving yet invaluable mental strength, she is paired up with Li Shimin, the strongest and most controversial male pilot in Huaxia. But now that Zetian has had a taste of power, she will not cower so easily. She will miss no opportunity to leverage their combined might and infamy to survive attempt after attempt on her life, until she can figure out exactly why the pilot system works in its misogynist way—and stop more girls from being sacrificed.

After two volumes mainly introductory, Dr Needham now embarks upon his systematic study of the development of the natural sciences in China. The Sciences of the Earth follow: geography and cartography, geology, seismology and mineralogy. Dr Needham distinguishes parallel traditions of scientific cartography and religious cosmography in East and West, discussing orbocentric wheel-maps, the origins of the rectangular grid system, sailing charts and relief maps, Chinese survey methods, and the impact of Renaissance cartography on the East. Finally-and here Dr Needham's work has no Western predecessors-there are full accounts of the Chinese contribution to geology and mineralogy.

A courageous and intimate memoir of China framed in ten telling words: a Duckworth contemporary classic, beautifully repackaged for our 125th anniversary

When Deng Xiaoping’s efforts to “open up” China took root in the late 1980s, Xinran recognized an invaluable opportunity. As an employee for the state radio system, she had long wanted to help improve the lives of Chinese women. But when she was given clearance to host a radio call-in show, she barely anticipated the enthusiasm it would quickly generate. Operating within the constraints imposed by government censors, “Words on the Night Breeze” sparked a tremendous outpouring, and the hours of tape on her answering machines were soon filled every night. Whether angry or muted, posing questions or simply relating experiences, these anonymous women bore witness to decades of civil strife, and of halting attempts at self-understanding in a painfully restrictive society. In this collection, by turns heartrending and inspiring, Xinran brings us the stories that affected her most, and offers a graphically detailed, altogether unprecedented work of oral history.

Lu-Tze is a senior History Monk, also known as Sweeper. Although thought to be 800 years old, there are some who claim he is older yet . . . 5,200 years older, in fact, because for the History Monks, time is a resource to manipulate, and they do . . . Lu-Tze, a bald, yellow-toothed little man with a wispy beard, has a faintly amiable grin, as if constantly waiting for something amusing to happen, and a handy epithet for every occasion. In his life, Lu-Tze has done everything, and his past deeds are legend amongst the History Monks. He is a follower of The Way of Mrs Marietta Cosmopilite. He also grows Bonsai mountains. LU-TZE'S YEARBOOK OF ENLIGHTMENT (including The Way of Mrs Cosmopilite) is the ideal companion for those seeking truth and harmony and, well, the meaning to life - though he doesn't guarantee it will be the right meaning . . .

Late one night in December 2008, police arrived at the home of Liu Xiaobo—China’s leading dissident, a key figure in the prodemocracy manifesto Charter 08—and took him away. When Liu won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize as a political prisoner, the award was bestowed on an empty chair. Inside China, the regime sought to erase every trace of his existence. Liu died of liver cancer in 2017 without ever having been allowed to return home. I Have No Enemies is the definitive biography of Liu Xiaobo, offering a meticulously researched account of the twists and turns of a remarkable life. Perry Link and Wu Dazhi explore Liu’s upbringing, immersion in classical Chinese poetry and philosophy, bold challenges to literary conformity, and involvement in democratic movements. They trace the lifelong evolution of his thinking and chronicle his persecution, incarceration, and death. I Have No Enemies emphasizes Liu’s principled commitment to dissent and the significance of the example he set in China and around the world. Liu was a farsighted strategist whose ultimate goal was “to change a regime by changing a society.” In Tiananmen Square, he showed others how to face down armed soldiers; in daily life, he looked for ways to build a more democratic culture. A powerful record of Liu’s life and times, this book also tells the story of a generation of Chinese intellectuals who sought a better way forward.

Disgraced former Beijing Inspector Shan Tao Yun has been living in the remote mountains of Tibet since his unofficial release from a work camp. Without status, official identity, or the freedom to return to his former home in Beijing, he's lived with the forbidden lamas for the past year. But now there's apparently been a murder in a ruined monastery and the very officials who exiled Shan are after his help. In a baffling case involving the FBI, Chinese Ministers, and British relief workers, Shan travels from Tibet to Beijing to the U. S. to find the links between murder, missing art, his former gulag, and his own long-unseen son.

Anthony C. Yu’s translation of The Journey to the West,initially published in 1983, introduced English-speaking audiences to the classic Chinese novel in its entirety for the first time. Written in the sixteenth century, The Journey to the West tells the story of the fourteen-year pilgrimage of the monk Xuanzang, one of China’s most famous religious heroes, and his three supernatural disciples, in search of Buddhist scriptures. Throughout his journey, Xuanzang fights demons who wish to eat him, communes with spirits, and traverses a land riddled with a multitude of obstacles, both real and fantastical. An adventure rich with danger and excitement, this seminal work of the Chinese literary canonis by turns allegory, satire, and fantasy. With over a hundred chapters written in both prose and poetry, The Journey to the West has always been a complicated and difficult text to render in English while preserving the lyricism of its language and the content of its plot. But Yu has successfully taken on the task, and in this new edition he has made his translations even more accurate and accessible. The explanatory notes are updated and augmented, and Yu has added new material to his introduction, based on his original research as well as on the newest literary criticism and scholarship on Chinese religious traditions. He has also modernized the transliterations included in each volume, using the now-standard Hanyu Pinyin romanization system. Perhaps most important, Yu has made changes to the translation itself in order to make it as precise as possible. One of the great works of Chinese literature, The Journey to the West is not only invaluable to scholars of Eastern religion and literature, but, in Yu’s elegant rendering, also a delight for any reader.

From the acclaimed author of River Town comes a rare portrait, both intimate and epic, of twenty-first-century China as it opens its doors to the outside world. A century ago, outsiders saw Chinaas a place where nothing ever changes. Today the coun-try has become one of the most dynamic regions on earth. That sense of time—the contrast between past and present, and the rhythms that emerge in a vast, ever-evolving country—is brilliantly illuminated by Peter Hessler in Oracle Bones, a book that explores the human side of China's transformation. Hessler tells the story of modern-day China and its growing links to the Western world as seen through the lives of a handful of ordinary people. In addition to the author, an American writer living in Beijing, the narrative follows Polat, a member of a forgotten ethnic minority, who moves to the United States in searchof freedom; William Jefferson Foster, who grew up in an illiterate family and becomes a teacher; Emily,a migrant factory worker in a city without a past; and Chen Mengjia, a scholar of oracle-bone inscriptions, the earliest known writing in East Asia, and a man whosetragic story has been lost since the Cultural Revolution. All are migrants, emigrants, or wanderers who find themselves far from home, their lives dramatically changed by historical forces they are struggling to understand. Peter Hessler excavates the past and puts a remarkable human face on the history he uncovers. In a narrative that gracefully moves between the ancient and the present, the East and the West, Hessler captures the soul of a country that is undergoing a momentous change before our eyes.

How did American schoolchildren, French philosophers, Russian Sinologists, Dutch merchants, and British lawyers imagine China and Chinese law? What happened when agents of presumably dominant Western empires had to endure the humiliations and anxieties of maintaining a profitable but precarious relationship with China? In Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes, Li Chen provides a richly textured analysis of these related issues and their intersection with law, culture, and politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using a wide array of sources, Chen's study focuses on the power dynamics of Sino-Western relations during the formative century before the First Opium War (1839-1842). He highlights the centrality of law to modern imperial ideology and politics and brings new insight to the origins of comparative Chinese law in the West, the First Opium War, and foreign extraterritoriality in China. The shifting balance of economic and political power formed and transformed knowledge of China and Chinese law in different contact zones. Chen argues that recovering the variegated and contradictory roles of Chinese law in Western "modernization" helps provincialize the subsequent Euro-Americentric discourse of global modernity. Chen draws attention to important yet underanalyzed sites in which imperial sovereignty, national identity, cultural tradition, or international law and order were defined and restructured. His valuable case studies show how constructed differences between societies were hardened into cultural or racial boundaries and then politicized to rationalize international conflicts and hierarchy.