Opium is an awkward commodity. For the West, it’s a reminder of some of the shadier and best forgotten parts of its history. For China (and a few other countries), it’s a symbol of national humiliation, left to the past–unless it needs to shame a foreign country. But the opium trade survived for decades, through to the end of the Second World War. How did that trade actually work? How was it possible to trade a good that was, at best, tolerated in the strange gap between legal and illegal. This trade is what Peter Thilly covers in his book The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China.
Yuwa is a novel originally published in Chinese in 2019. Set in a dirt-poor area of Gansu Province in China’s far west, it features a boy who rises above his marginal existence in a village bypassed by economic growth.
Common sense has it that corruption is a quid pro quo practiced by individuals who disregard their institutional duties and responsibilities in favor of personal gain. However, this is a relatively recent definition or association that came to be enshrined in establishments bureaucratic in nature (as opposed to monarchical or feudal systems that existed previously) from the mid-18th century to mid-19th century when allegations against and among East India Company’s officials reached the British Parliament.
Contemporary China is a socio-political assessment of China since 1949, at the advent of the People’s Republic of China. The author, Gilles Guiheux, is a historian and sociologist at Université Paris Cité. Those familiar with 20th- and 21st-century Chinese history will find little new or surprising in Guiheux’s account, though unlike some other works on the Communist period he emphasizes continuity as well as change. The Communist regime, he writes, had a “multiplicity of inheritances”, and its “programme of action” since 1949 has much in common with other early 20th-century reform movements and even the interwar Republican period, though it also borrowed from Stalin’s Soviet Union. China’s societal evolution during the Communist period, he suggests, was not unique but instead like other countries in Asia and elsewhere experienced “industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization and globalization”.
Needle at the Bottom of the Sea, five Bengali romances from the 17th to 19th centuries in English translation, reflect on the folkloric world of the Sunderbans “where tigers talk, rocks float and waters part, and faeries carry a sleeping Sufi holy man into the bedroom of a Hindu princess with whom the god of fate, Bidhata, has ordained his marriage.” Named after the local “Sundari” tree, the Sunderbans, locally known as atharobhati or the land of the eighteen tides, is the planet’s largest delta, formed by the merging of large rivers: the Ganges, the Brahmaputra and the Meghna in the Bay of Bengal region of India and Bangladesh.
When development began in earnest in Beijing, migrants from around China flocked to the capital city for jobs of all sorts. There was money to be made and when young people did not pass their university entrance exams—or didn’t take them in the first place—they viewed Beijing as as good a place to make money as anywhere else in China. Xu Zechen sets his novel Beijing Sprawl in pre-Olympics Beijing on the outskirts of the city where four young men originally from a small town in Zhejiang province live and work.
Children are considered to be a group of special interest by media scholars and advocates, especially because they are seen as a vulnerable group whose rights must be protected and also because they represent the future of the world, and so their education and socialisation is of particular importance. While there has been global research on children’s media practices, in India, there has been very little critical work in this area.
Monica Macias, the youngest daughter of Equatorial Guinea’s first president at just seven years old, lands in Pyongyang, North Korea in 1979. Her father had sent her to the country to study, but what was meant to be a shorter visit grew to a decade-long stay when her father was ousted in a coup.
At the beginning of Once Our Lives, Qin Sun Stubis’s family memoir, the author’s grandmother feeds a beggar because she feels sorry for him. She is pregnant with the author’s father at the time and goes on to break the traditional month-long confinement after giving birth in order to continue giving food to the beggar. What ensues, according to the grandmother, is a curse that plagues her son throughout her life, and the family indeed meets with much hardship. But so did most people in China between the years of 1942 and 1975, the time in which most of the multi-generation story takes place.
On 29 September 1985, four men arrive at the Mill House, located deep in the mountains of Okayama prefecture, for their annual visit, but the weekend quickly spirals into a sinister nightmare: two bodies are discovered, a guest goes missing, and a valuable painting disappears. Exactly one year later, the remaining guests gather again, hoping to put the past behind them. However, with the approach of a typhoon and the arrival of an unexpected visitor, an eerie sense of foreboding returns.
You must be logged in to post a comment.