Is China’s greatest importance to the world really its economy? Jeanne-Marie Gescher, a highly-respected China observer who has lived in Beijing since 1989, argues that China’s importance really lies in a 5,000 year question about order: is order only to be found under a single top-down ruler or does it depend on the voices of human beings? And if the latter, what ‘kind’ of human beings are required? Weaving together the inspirations, ideas, wars and dreams that have shaped the way China’s people have thought about order from the ancient past to the recent present, Gescher reveals a story of China as an epic and continuing battle about order that strikes at the heart of what it means to be Chinese. With the past in perspective, the clashes between China’s people and the Party come to life as never before – and the importance of China’s question becomes clear for everything, including economics. In a thought-provoking conclusion, Gescher invites readers to make their own, informed, views about how order might be found in China – and then to take one step further and apply China’s question to the wider world. "For the first time, a history of China that tells you why it thinks and acts the way it does." -- Richard Spencer, former China bureau chief, Daily Telegraph "This changes the conversation. An extraordinary book." -- Tim Clissold, best-selling author of Mr. China

All Under Heaven: China's Dreams of Order

History

Gescher, Jeanne-Marie

Asia

Frontier Press, LLC

One of the two most powerful states in the world, China continues to be seen as a mystery even after decades of an open door. How does China work, what does it want, why does it want it, and what does its rise to global power mean for the rest of the world? As the twenty-first century looks set to be the stage for a battle about competing geopolitical ideals, these are urgent questions for everyone with an interest in what the future might bring. 
Despite decades of a relatively open door relationship with the rest of the world, China is still a mystery to many outside it. A world of its own, China is both a microcosm and an amplification of questions and events in the wider world. China's story offers us an opportunity to hold a mirror to ourselves: to our own assumptions, to our values, and to our ideas about the most important question of all: what it means to be human in the world of the state.
Epic in scope, this is the story of how China became the state it is today and how its worldview is based on what has gone before. Weaving together inspirations, ideas, wars and dreams to reveal the heart of what it means to be Chinese and how the past impacts on the present.

Becoming China: The Story Behind the State

Bloomsbury Caravel

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

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