Tag Archives: China

In My Hands Today…

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Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age – Stephen R. Platt

As China reclaims its position as a world power, Imperial Twilight looks back to tell the story of the country’s last age of ascendance and how it came to an end in the nineteenth-century Opium War.

When Britain launched its first war on China in 1839, pushed into hostilities by profiteering drug merchants and free-trade interests, it sealed the fate of what had long been seen as the most prosperous and powerful empire in Asia, if not the world. But internal problems of corruption, popular unrest, and dwindling finances had weakened China far more than was commonly understood, and the war would help set in motion the eventual fall of the Qing dynasty–which, in turn, would lead to the rise of nationalism and communism in the twentieth century. As one of the most potent turning points in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it.

In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by Western traders and missionaries to “open” China–traveling mostly in secret beyond Canton, the single port where they were allowed–even as China’s imperial rulers were struggling to manage their country’s decline and Confucian scholars grappled with how to use foreign trade to China’s advantage. The book paints an enduring portrait of an immensely profitable–and mostly peaceful–meeting of civilizations at Canton over the long term that was destined to be shattered by one of the most shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history. Brimming with a fascinating cast of British, Chinese, and American individuals, this riveting narrative of relations between China and the West has important implications for today’s uncertain and ever-changing political climate.

In My Hands Today…

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House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company – Eva Dou

On December 1, 2018, Meng Wanzhou, daughter of Ren Zhengfei, founder and CEO of China’s most powerful company, Huawei Technologies, was detained at the request of U.S. authorities as she prepared to board a flight out of Vancouver, Canada. The detention of Huawei’s female scion set the U.S.-China trade skirmish on fire – and, for the first time, revealed the Ren family’s prominence in Beijing’s power structure.

In The Listening State, acclaimed Washington Post reporter Eva Dou exposes the untold story of the rise of Ren Zhengfei and the mysterious family dynasty at the center of Huawei, whose connections to state apparatus reveal a deeper truth about China’s surveillance web and its global ambitions. Through its technologies, Huawei has helped solidify and enforce China’s growing police state, in which outspoken entrepreneurs like Jack Ma have been silenced, tycoons have disappeared, and executives must put patriotism above profit.

Based on over a decade of on-the-ground reporting and an astonishing trove of confidential documents never published in English, The Listening State paints an epic story of familial and political intrigue that shines a clarifying light on how business and government work together in an authoritarian state, and how companies fit into China’s international ambitions under Xi Jinping.

The story of Ren Zhengfei and Huawei exposes the human face of China’s modern security state and gets to the heart of the central questions of the U.S.-China trade How did these turbocharged Chinese companies emerge? Who really controls them? And what does China’s growing surveillance web mean for the Chinese people – and for the rest of the world?

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Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping’s China – Emily Feng

In the hot summer months of 2021, China celebrated the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party. Authorities held propaganda and education campaigns across the country defining the ideal Chinese ethnically Han Chinese, Mandarin speaking, solidly atheist, and devoted to the socialist project of strengthening China against western powers.

No one can understand modern China—including its response to the pandemic—without understanding who actually lives there, and the ways that the Chinese State tries to control its people. Let Only Red Flowers Bloom collects the stories of more than two dozen people who together represent a more holistic picture of Chinese identity. The Uyghurs who have seen millions of their fellow citizens detained in camps; mainland human rights lawyer Ren Quanniu, who lost his law license in a bureaucratic dispute after representing a Hong Kong activist; a teacher from Inner Mongolia, forced to escape persecution because of his support of his mother tongue. These are just a few narratives that journalist Emily Feng reports on, revealing human stories about resistance against a hegemonic state and introducing readers to the people who know about Chinese identity the best.

Illuminating a country that has for too long been secretive of the real lives its citizens are living, Feng reveals what it’s really like to be anything other than party-supporting Han Chinese in China, and the myriad ways they’re trying to survive in the face of an oppressive regime.

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Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World – Bethany Allen

Beijing Rules is a superb expose which reveals how China learned to master capitalism which it now wields in its own authoritarian form to achieve global dominance. As Bethany Allen, the China reporter for Axios, reveals, the long-standing belief that free-trade capitalism is a democratizing force–the assumption underlying much of American and Western policy since World War II–is demonstrably false. Capitalism is actually a two-way street: if democratic values can travel in one direction, authoritarianism can travel in the other. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has successfully engineered what Cold War champions believed to be impossible: an unabashedly Communist Party leading a prosperous capitalist state.

Written by the first American journalist to expose covert Chinese influence operations in the United States, Beijing Rules includes headline-making stories of western institutions bowing to Beijing’s coercion–a glimpse of what American’s future might look like should liberal democracy come firmly under the thumb of authoritarian capitalism. Grounded in deep investigative reporting, it sounds the alarm about what we must do to prevent the loss of freedoms we now take for granted.

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Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution – Tania Branigan

“It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution,” Tania Branigan writes. During this decade of Maoist fanaticism between 1966 and 1976, children condemned parents, students condemned teachers, and as many as two million people died for their supposed political sins, while tens of millions were hounded, ostracized, and imprisoned.

Yet in China this brutal and turbulent period exists, for the most part, as an absence; official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia. Red Memory uncovers forty years of silence through the stories of individuals who lived through the madness. Deftly exploring how this era defined a generation and continues to impact China today, Branigan asks: What happens to a society when you can no longer trust those closest to you? What happens to the present when the past is buried, exploited, or redrawn? And how do you live with yourself when the worst is over?