In late 1940, Soviet General Vasilii Chuikov was sent 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.

Mission to China: Memoirs of a Soviet Military Adviser to Chiang Kaishek (Signature Books)

Barrett, David P.

Chuikov, V. I.

Pacific Century Pr

A descriptive memoir of a boat trip through the famed Three Gorges of the Yangtse River, now dammed and gone for our lifetimes.

Through the Dragon's Mouth: Journeys into the Yangzi's Three Gorges (Missionary Enterprise in Asia)

Cowles, Ben Thomson

History

Stone Mirror: Reflections on Contemporary Korea (Signature Books)

The transformation of the Republic of Korea from an impoverished state to a leading industrialized nation has been spectacular, but it has also masked the continuities of Korean society and culture. For more than four decades, David I. Steinberg has been observing Korea and is uniquely qualified to write on the evolution of modern Korea. As the resident representative of The Asia Foundation in 1963–68 and then again in 1994–98, he has been a participant in and close observer of the Korean scene. His trenchant comments on a broad spectrum of Korean life and mores illuminate many aspects of Korean society most often ignored in both the academic and popular literature. The short essays selected for this volume come from the over 230 columns he has published in the Korea Times since 1995. They present a series of vignettes on the cultural, socioeconomic, and political life of Korea today. 
Trained first in Chinese studies and then in Southeast Asian history, Steinberg has lived in a variety of Asian countries over the past 17 years. He brings to this book a comparative focus that provides deeper perspective on Korean affairs. Because he personally experienced Korea at both an early stage of its growth and a much later period, he is able to report changes in the society in a manner that few other foreigners have been able to do.

Politics & Social Sciences

Steinberg, David I.

Social Sciences

Living Dangerously in Korea: The Western Experience, 1900-1950 (The Missionary Enterprise in Asia)

Korea was "discovered" by the West after World War II when it became a flashpoint in the Cold War. Before the war, however, it was home to many hundreds of Westerners who experienced life there under Japanese colonial rule. These included missionaries who opened Korea as a field for evangelism, education, and medicine; speculators who risked much and reaped riches from mining concessions; and diplomats who tried to keep them neutral, even as the Japanese forced them out of business on the eve of the Pacific War. In the first part of the book, the author reconstructs the foreign community and highlights the role of Americans in particular as participants in Korean history, bringing vividly to life the lives and suffering and triumphs of the expatriate community in Korea, especially the missionaries. In the second part of the book, the author presents the altered circumstances of American military occupation after 1945 and the consequences of the Americans’ assuming a role not unlike the one that had been played earlier by the colonial Japanese. By telling the lives and experiences of Westerners, the author highlights the major historical events of modern Korean history. Accounts of foreigners in the Independence Movement and during the period of militarization in the 1930s shed new light on what Japanese colonial rule meant to the Korean people. Similarly, Western experiences in Korea in the 1940s amount to a commentary on the way Korea was divided and the events that led inexorably to the ordeal of the Korean War. The stories recounted in this extraordinary book, highlighted by more than sixty photographs, are a valuable commentary on Korea’s early modernization and the consequences of the Korean War as it set the stage for Korea’s relations with the world in the late twentieth century.

Clark, Donald N.

No Exit: The Origin and Evolution of U.S. Policy Toward China, 1945-1950 (Study of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center)

"When the Chinese original of this volume appeared in 1987, it constituted a historical breakthrough in the People’s Republic. It introduced into discussions of American policy a degree of complexity and nuance missing in earlier formulations constrained by Maoist ideology and isolation from the United States. The large documentary base on which the account was built and Professor Zi Zhongyun’s own political and scholarly credibility helped not only to change minds about the nature of the Sino-American relationship, but also set a new standard for foreign policy history in China. . . . "She has been both a forceful and effective proponent of building American studies in China and a model for how to create and sustain contacts between Chinese scholars and their foreign counterparts. . . . Readers of this volume will see at least some of the reasons for her considerable impact on scholarship in China, and can tune into a voice likely to remain influential in Chinese interpretations of the United States." –– from the Foreword by Michael H. Hunt China’s rise to world power status has changed the shape of the world. The U.S.-China bilateral relationship is arguably already the most important one for both countries and it embraces issues of global and regional security, economic prosperity, and the environment, among many others. If Americans tend to ignore history, Chinese do not. The five years in the U.S.-China relationship between 1945 and 1950 that are the focus of Professor Zi Zhongyun’s important study are the seedbed of almost everything that has followed in the ensuing fifty years. Zi Zhongyun is one of China’s leading scholars of international relations and an authority on U.S. foreign policy. Her books, essays, and reviews are widely read in China. This is the first of her books to appear in English. No Exit? The Origin and Evolution of U.S. Policy Toward China, 1949–1950 offers a fresh and provocative interpretation by an influential Chinese scholar of that critical period of the early Cold War when the United States assumed the role of dominant world power and the Chinese Communists achieved nationwide victory. Using a wide variety of original materials and calling on her profound knowledge of China as well as the United States, Professor Zi skillfully untangles the multiple threads of U.S. China policy. She uncovers the roots of American hostility to the victory of the Chinese Communist revolution and the origins of the continuing Sino-American impasse over Taiwan. Hers is a sophisticated, subtle, and closely argued work of historical scholarship that is essential for anyone interested in the historical roots of contemporary U.S.-China relations.

Zi Zhongyun

Asia

In late 1940, Soviet General Vasilii Chuikov was sent 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.

Mission to China: Memoirs of a Military Adviser to Chiang Kaishek (Signature Books)

China's Water Crisis (Voices of Asia)

An International Rivers Network Book translated by Nancy Yang Lui and Lawrence R. Sullivan China’s Water Crisis (Zhongguo shui weiji) is the most comprehensive, authoritative, and up-to-date-source of information on the enormous water resource crisis confronting the People’s Republic of China. The author describes in great detail the floods, water scarcity, and pollution problems existing in all seven of China’s major drainage basins—large and small—and proposes workable solutions for sustainable management. Of greatest concern to Mr. Ma is the condition of China’s two major rivers, the Yellow and the Yangzi. The very existence of the Yellow River is threatened by massive reductions in water flow caused by a variety of man-made programs while chronic soil erosion resulting from deforestation together with dam construction has led to a cycle of flood and drought in the Yangzi River basin. The same issues are reflected in China’s smaller rivers. Mr. Ma documents the persistent drought conditions in the southeast, the impact of pollutants on the Tibetan plateau, the defects in China’s large-scale reservoirs, steadily diminishing underground water tables, and the growing abuse of aquifers for urbanization and industrialization. Despite his alarming findings, Mr. Ma feels that there is hope if major remedial programs are put in place very soon. Otherwise, he paints a compelling picture of a nation which will experience—over the next several decades—dramatic deterioration in its clean water.

Lawrence R. Sullivan

Business & Money

To the Mouths of the Ganges: An Ecological and Cultural Journey (Signature Books)

This book deals with the ecology and culture of the lower Ganges delta, where 150 million people live. A land traversed by thousands of miles of rivers and canals in West Bengal and Bangladesh, there is hardly any place on earth where so much poverty is concentrated and where nature can be so demanding. It is a place where rivers change course and devour whole villages and croplands, where floods submerge millions of acres, where devastating cyclones create mayhem on a grand scale, and where, with global warming, conditions can only get worse.The author describes how irrigation and flood control have degraded the natural environment; how commercial shrimp production has destroyed wetlands and livelihoods; how landless peasants have settled on shifting islands of sediment that can be washed away in hours; how swelling populations have pushed ever deeper into mangrove forests where they face dangers from man-eating tigers, crocodiles, and venomous snakes; how peasants contend with landlords whose callousness is truly unbelievable.But the overall picture is not entirely bleak. Bengalis are extraordinarily resilient and ingenious in adapting to the environment. They love their land and its broad rivers, its culture and its age-old traditions. Hindus and Muslims live side-by-side, sharing shrines and respecting each other's beliefs and customs, although religious offenses can unleash violent fanaticism and atrocities.Historical materials and vivid accounts of early travelers are brought up-to-date by the author's observations and contemporary reports that reveal the futility of many of the efforts to manage river systems and wetlands. Travelling by bus, boat, and rickshaw, the author's impressions and anecdotes add an immediacy and human dimension which, accompanied by his striking photographs, complete the picture of a fascinating part of the world that is rarely seen by Western tourists.

Thomas, Frederic C.

The Oriole's Song: An American Girlhood in Wartime China (Signature Books)

The author relates the experiences of her first sixteen years growing up in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, during the turbulent years of the Japanese invasion through World War II and the civil war that followed.

Oriole's Song: Growing Up American in Wartime China (Signature Books)

Elder, Bj

The Abbot and the Widow: Tales from the Ming Dynasty (Signature Books)

Literature & Fiction

Ling, Mengchu

Classics

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