(Part 2) Best historical china biographies according to redditors
We found 84 Reddit comments discussing the best historical china biographies. We ranked the 35 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
They plan to acquire the AEGIS systems - they don't have any yet - and in any event they will only be mounted on a single destroyer and frigate each.
For now, they rely instead on an indigenous copy that is also exclusively for naval use.
The Exocet missiles were acquired together with the French ships in the course of a infamous procurement scandal that is nearly 30 years old, and to my knowledge Taiwan has not acquired any updated stock since then. Instead, they have their own indigenous copy of the US Navy's Harpoon anti-ship missile.
The diplomatic fallout from the scandal had a serious negative effect on France-China relations - it was covered in a book by China's top diplomat at the time, Qian Qichen, and in it he mentions that France's foreign minister at the time, Roland Dumas, was so embarrassed that he was lost for words.
Except for that one incident, it is safe to say that the US exclusively supplies foreign materiel to Taiwan.
EDIT: missed out a word
Her book, Factory Girls, is also excellent. The Dongguan she describes is practically AnCap because the growth is happening so fast the government can't really keep up.
Firstly, sorry I cannot give you a detailed answer here. I did ancient Chinese as one half of my undergraduate degree, but haven't read anything recently (i.e. years).
However, I can direct you to some sources that I read which really helped inform me about the late Eastern Han/Three Kingdoms era.
In regards to some of your questions, I'll take a shot at answering from memory (sources as above basically!)
> if Dong Zhuo and others are so bent on being that powerful, why would they stop at Prime Minister?
Dong Zhuo was thought to have been preparing to name himself Emperor under a new dynasty. But even besides that, we did try to rise higher than Prime Minister. He named himself Imperial Father, as in Father to the Son of Heaven (the Emperor Xian). This is important, as in Chinese political society where filial piety was important, the Emperor was the father of the empire, with only heaven as his superior. By naming himself the Imperial Father, he was de facto naming himself above the Emperor.
In regards to regional warlords accepting the legitimacy of the Han Emperor while fighting each other, you need to understand where the political authority was seen to have originated, which was the The Mandate of Heaven (mostly). It was more politically difficult to get the rest of the empire to accept that you had gained the Mandate and the Han had lost it than to simply kidnap the emperor and issue decrees in his name (as Dong Zhuo and Cao Cao did). By acting 'under' Han imperial authority, warlords in control of the Emperor had more legitimacy to their actions than without him. This was made easier by the fact that the majority of later emperors in the Eastern Han were child emperors, who were the sovereign in name only, with court officials or eunuchs with real authority governing the state in the Emperor's name.
Apologies I could not be more detailed, I have not read any of my books on this in a long time. But I think once my thesis is done, this question has knocked enough nostalgia into me to revisit them!
> Are there books on why
what a surprise /s. there are
The Battle for china's past by Mobo Gao
Was Mao Really A Monster by Gregor Benton
The rise of the Chinese people's communes by Anna Louise Strong
The Chinese road to socialism: Economics of the cultural revolution by E. L Wheelwright
Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village by William Hinton
Turning Point in China: An Essay on the Cultural Revolution by William Hinton
Mao Zedong and China in the 20th Century World: A Concise History is a good place to start. I appreciate it because the author is familiar with Marxism and isn't hostile toward Mao like most of Mao's biographers.
Am I reading this correctly..No forced sterilization in China? Are you even aware how wrong you are? A Mother's Ordeal This is about Chi An, a health worker that enforces the policy who subsiquently becomes under fire for a birth that is not authorized. And not only sterilization but permanent rings inserted in the woman was also very common.
Jonathan Clements wrote a great book on the life of China’s First Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi. Link: https://www.amazon.com/First-Emperor-China-Jonathan-Clements/dp/1909771112
He has also written books on Confucius, Kublai Khan and Wu Zetian, as well as a translation of Sunzi’s The Art of War.
For the early history of tea in China (with side trips to Japan) see Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History. A recent translation of Lu Yu can be found here [PDF].
The English attempted to interest the Chinese in buying English trade goods almost from the beginning, but China had a pretty autarkic economy and took the position "we are not buyers, only sellers, and cash one the barrel head." With growing use of tea in the 18th century, England began to have a capital outflow problem with the amount of silver being sent to China to buy tea. See for example.
Most tea outside of China, Japan, and Taiwan is assamica variety derived from aboriginal India stock. Darjeeling is a singular exception. For All the Tea in China is a pretty good recounting of how there came to be China tea growing in Darjeeling, with some side material about the industry in Assam. Probably the
most comprehensive history ofbiggest compendium of historical facts about the English colonial industries in India, Ceylon, and elsewhere is in All About Tea, which is in many ways horribly out-of-date (it was written 80-some years ago) and terribly expensive, but you could try interlibrary loan.[EDIT] A phrase.
You might be interested in reading this. Deng Xiaoping was one of the most interesting and influential people in 20th Century China, and learning about his policies and strategies will help to fill your post-Mao knowledge gap.
Gregor Benton and Lin Chun has published a book of critical academic reviews of Chang and Hallidays controversial biography that is worth reading for balance.
As for biographies, "Mao: The Real Story" is very good. It's very critical, but nuanced and not demonizing unlike The Untold Story.
https://www.amazon.com/Mao-Story-Alexander-V-Pantsov/dp/1451654480
A few for me had the biggest impact:
Forgotten Voices of the Great War: A History of World War I in the Words of the Men and Women Who Were There
Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud
Troublemaker:: One Man's Crusade Against China's Cruelty
Tim Severin wrote a book called In Search of Genghis Khan which recounts his experiences on the Mongolian steppes. He went to Mongolia shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and found some of the Mongolians who still held fairly closely (with some interesting anachronisms) to the old ways and lived with them for awhile. Fascinating account.
>You can literally read that article and its written in the SECERT documents.
Nope. Doesn't say anything in the diplomatic attachments you refer to. No mention of threats of war from anybody.
There's lots of other stuff on this too, its just only become available more recently.
Nope, there isn't.
>The UK feared a Falklands like incident that may spiral out of control.
Nope. The handover was going to happen anyway because we signed an agreement to the original lease. We were just concerned that the global economy would lose a valued economic hub.
>The now released secret documents concerning the negotiation have changed the narrative on the situation quite a bit.
These documents have been available for some time. If they weren't, how was that historians, such as James Tang or Vigor could discuss these events. Even the Chief Secretary David Akers-Jones was able to write about these meetings fifteen-years ago.
>Outwardly, it looked much more civil, clearly internally that was not the case and many options were on the table for both sides.
That, in no way, ever means China threatened the UK with war. Ever.
Hypatia of Alexandria. Super smarty pants in Ancient Greek times. All work destroyed :(
Empress Dowager Cixi of China. Fascinating figure in Chinese history with a very polarizing legacy. Generally blamed for the fall of the Qing empire, but there's a fascinating book about her launching modern China.
Catherine the Great, for obvious reasons.
Evita Person, for her life and work. I love that she was someone known for both her glamour and activism, and for the significant role she played in her husband's regime.