Five Gentlemen of Japan: The Portrait of a Nation's Character

History

Gibney, Frank

Asia

Eastbridge Books

Four Hundred Million Customers (1937) is a collection of humorous essays and piquant anecdotes underpinned by well-informed insight and highlighted by witty drawings by G. Sapojnikoff. Like a bowl of salted peanuts, these vignettes make you want “more.” The book was welcomed on its publication as the most entertaining and instructive introduction to the rapidly modernizing people of the new China and their resilient customs. While it has been taught in recent years at the Harvard Business School, the book — or at least its title — has been cited much more than read, usually to illustrate American illusions about the China market. Yet the book has lost none of its still perceptive insights into China, which is now more than triple “four hundred million.”“Crow, living in Shanghai [in the early twentieth century], wrote in a bemused manner about city dwellers. [While] Crow’s book was of little value to the China watcher of the 1950s and 1960s . . . once Chinese reform and opening took off after 1978, the clever city dwellers that Crow described in the 1930s are a far better guide to the China of today than [Edgar] Snow’s revolutionaries or [Pearl] Buck’s peasants. “I have a former student, a successful businessman, who opened a factory in Shanghai a few months ago. On his reading stand he keeps a copy of Four Hundred Million Customers. ‘No other book,’ he said, ‘including many more contemporary works on the Chinese economy, provides as much insight into the business environment I face. And it helps me keep my sense of humor as I face the frustrations of doing business in China.’ No need to repeat the wonderful stories and phrases found in the book. Enjoy.”  — from the Introduction by Ezra F. Vogel

Four Hundred Million Customers: The Experiences - Some Happy, Some Sad -of an American in China and What They Taught Him

Business & Money

Crow, Carl

International

Four Hundred Million Customers (1937) is a collection of humorous essays and piquant anecdotes underpinned by well-informed insight and highlighted by witty drawings by G. Sapojnikoff. Like a bowl of salted peanuts, these vignettes make you want "more." The book was welcomed on its publication as the most entertaining and instructive introduction to the rapidly modernizing people of the new China and their resilient customs. While it has been taught in recent years at the Harvard Business School, the book -- or at least its title -- has been cited much more than read, usually to illustrate American illusions about the China market. Yet the book has lost none of its still perceptive insights into China, which is now more than triple "four hundred million." "Crow, living in Shanghai [in the early twentieth century], wrote in a bemused manner about city dwellers. [While] Crow's book was of little value to the China watcher of the 1950s and 1960s . . . once Chinese reform and opening took off after 1978, the clever city dwellers that Crow described in the 1930s are a far better guide to the China of today than [Edgar] Snow's revolutionaries or [Pearl] Buck's peasants. "I have a former student, a successful businessman, who opened a factory in Shanghai a few months ago. On his reading stand he keeps a copy of Four Hundred Million Customers. 'No other book, ' he said, 'including many more contemporary works on the Chinese economy, provides as much insight into the business environment I face. And it helps me keep my sense of humor as I face the frustrations of doing business in China.' No need to repeat the wonderful stories and phrases found in the book. Enjoy." -- from the Introduction by Ezra F. Vogel

Four Hundred Million Customers: The Experiences - Some Happy, Some Sad - of an American in China and What They Taught Him

Vogel, Henry Ford II Research Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus Ezra F

"Logan Herbert Roots (1870-1945) was a very important figure in the history of the Christian missionary movement in modern China who, by his exemplary life in China, contributed to the later development of a vibrant and fully Chinese church after the missionary era ended." --Daniel Bays, PhD - Calvin College "[Bishop Roots] was no ordinary churchman. One could find in his drawing room leaders of the Communist Party, as well as those of the Kuomintang. Here was a man whose influence on the thought patterns of China's leaders was measureless." --Captain Evans ("Gung-ho") Carlson, USMC, in his book Twin Stars over China. From China with Love is a family portrait drawn by the letters of a married couple madly in love for over thirty years. Because their home is in China, the letters also tell us something about China; but what stands out most are the tender expressions of endearment, of concern, and of love for each other, for their children, and for their friends, both Chinese and foreign, in China and in the United States. It is a delightful experience tracing the love and commitment of two intelligent and eloquent Americans from 1900 until Eliza's death in 1934.

From China with Love: The Personal Letters of Bishop and Mrs. Logan Roots, Two American Missionaries in China (1900-1934)

From Yan'an to the World: The Origin and Development of Chinese Communist Foreign Policy

Niu, Jun

In Limpid Dream: Nostalgia and Zhang Dai's Reminiscences of the Ming

In Limpid Dream presents a group of seventeenth-century Chinese personal essays which explores how we perceive our existence in remembered fragments. It focuses on the Dream Reminiscences of Tao’an (Tao’an mengyi), written by Zhang Dai (1597–1648?). A wealthy literatus, historian, bon vivant, and Ming loyalist, Zhang composed 123 short essays (many translated in this book) after the Ming dynasty fell to the Manchus in 1644. These essays describe Zhang’s extravagant life in the prosperous Jiangnan region before the Ming collapse. Because they were written, assembled, and introduced by a single author, these essays give us a vivid glimpse of how shards of personal experience can, in effect, commemorate a personal side of existence normally not acknowledged in more conventional, public biographical forms.
The first part of the book introduces essays on fantastic lantern displays, tranquil snoozes in drifting boats, remarkable objects, shrewd distinctions in social behaviors, crab feasts, quirky relatives, dramatic military exercises, and artifacts of Ming glory — the things that in memory still provided a sense of shared identity and presence to one who held no office and who had watched his dynasty fall. 
The second part of the book begins by questioning the usefulness of the conversational genre of xiaopin, and then introduces a fresh approach to Zhang’s essays through analogy to the mnemonic genre of nostalgia, which Professor Kafalas examines in both Chinese and Western contexts. Nostalgia becomes the pattern by which these seemingly trivial essays assert a powerful sense of origin, presence, and place through minutely known objects, aesthetically overwhelming experiences and small social gestures.
In Limpid Dream is a compelling and stimulating literary history elucidating Zhang’s nostalgic fragmentation of place and time. Zhang’s introspective nostalgia strikes us as rather modern while Kafalas’ insightful analysis iterates the legacies of Zhang’s “small” prose in later Chinese writing and reflects on our own understanding of our non-narrative existence.

Literature & Fiction

Kafalas, Philip A

World Literature

Local Politics in Rural Taiwan under Dictatorship and Democracy

Politics & Social Sciences

Jacobs, J. Bruce

Anthropology

Mission to China: Memoirs of a Soviet Military Adviser to Chiang Kai-shek

In late 1940, General Vasilii Chuikov was sent by the Soviet government to China to serve as chief military adviser to General Chiang Kaishek, head of the Nationalist government. China was still fighting alone against Japan after more than three years of war. It was Chuikov's task to oversee the provision of Soviet military aid to Chiang's armies, and to press the Chinese leadership toward a more aggressive resistance to the Japanese. Chuikov arrived with experience, as he had studied Chinese as an officer cadet and had been twice sent to China on missions in the 1920s. 
Chuikov's evaluation of the Chinese Army was much more positive than that of American and British observers of the time. While he recognized problems in the highly politicized senior command, he commended the fighting spirit of the junior officers and the enlisted men. Chuikov not only saw Nationalist China as unconquerable; he also believed that the Nationalists were capable of sustained offensive operations against the Japanese. From his field inspections, he offers professional assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the Chinese army and he subjects a number of major engagements fought in 1941 to close analysis. 
Chuikov's memoir ranges widely. He portrays in sharp outline the Nationalist military elite, he memorably describes life in the wartime capital of Chungking, and he writes vividly of his travels through rural China. On his return to the Soviet Union in 1942, Chuikov was assigned command of the 62nd army, and made his name as the victor of Stalingrad. 
This perceptive and keenly observed memoir, written by one of the great commanders of the Second World War, is suffused with deep sympathy for the Chinese people in their resistance struggle.

Chuikov, Vasilii I

In late 1940, General Vasilii Chuikov was sent by the Soviet government to China to serve as chief military adviser to General Chiang Kaishek, head of the Nationalist government. China was still fighting alone against Japan after more than three years of war. It was Chuikov’s task to oversee the provision of Soviet military aid to Chiang’s armies, and to press the Chinese leadership toward a more aggressive resistance to the Japanese. Chuikov arrived with experience, as he had studied Chinese as an officer cadet and had been twice sent to China on missions in the 1920s. 
Chuikov’s evaluation of the Chinese Army was much more positive than that of American and British observers of the time. While he recognized problems in the highly politicized senior command, he commended the fighting spirit of the junior officers and the enlisted men. Chuikov not only saw Nationalist China as unconquerable; he also believed that the Nationalists were capable of sustained offensive operations against the Japanese. From his field inspections, he offers professional assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the Chinese army and he subjects a number of major engagements fought in 1941 to close analysis.
Chuikov’s memoir ranges widely. He portrays in sharp outline the Nationalist military elite, he memorably describes life in the wartime capital of Chungking, and he writes vividly of his travels through rural China. On his return to the Soviet Union in 1942, Chuikov was assigned command of the 62nd army, and made his name as the victor of Stalingrad.
This perceptive and keenly observed memoir, written by one of the great commanders of the Second World War, is suffused with deep sympathy for the Chinese people in their resistance struggle.

Oil for the Lamps of China

Oil for the Lamps of China (1934) was a best-selling novel when it was first published, just a few years after Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth (1931). The hero of the story is a keen, young American businessman who wants to bring “light” and progress to China in the form of oil and oil lamps, but who is caught between Chinese revolutionary nationalism in the 1920s and the heartless American corporation that has built his career. The title became a catch phrase for expansive American dreams of the vast China market even though the novel itself, written at the beginning of the Great Depression, was skeptical of large business and any supposed American ability to improve China. The author presents a clear portrait of Western idealism versus Eastern pragmatism in the doubly exotic setting of Mainland China before the advent of large-scale industrialization. The portrayal is unflattering to both sides. While some might now regard the more sympathetic treatment of the young American as out of date, others would counter that the picture is both historically and contextually accurate. "Now, nearly seventy years since it was originally published, . . . Oil for the Lamps of China again seems timely. Once again ambitious young Americans like Stephen Chase are working for big corporations in China. . . . Once again sensitive young spouses like Hester are coping with the rigors of living simultaneously in American corporate culture and Chinese culture. . . . As these parallels suggest, if Oil for the Lamps of China was timely in the 1930s, then it also seems timely today.”— from the introduction by Sherman Cochran  

Hobart, Alice Tisdale

Literary

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