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This book presents a survey of rural and urban Chinese people examining the dramatic changes in traditional culture that have taken place, and documenting the nature of contemporary Chinese culture. Chu and Ju examine attitudes about family relations, social relations, job preferences and work ethic, organizational relations, community life, and belief systems. Although there remains some limited continuity with the past, mainly in family stability, the book shows how lifestyle and values in post-Mao China today reveal a radical departure from traditional Chinese culture. The authors discover that Chinese people no longer endorse the Confucian precepts of harmony and tolerance, nor do they submit compliantly to authority as previous generations did. They now demonstrate, in an environment of rising aspirations and mounting frustration, a new assertiveness, as seen in the tragic outburst in the Tiananmen demonstrations.
In this seminal and controversial debut, Julia Lovell tackles the history of China - and its relationship with the wider world - through the dramatic story of its most famous landmark. Fabled to be 2200 years old and 4300 miles long, the Great Wall seems to make an overwhelmingly confident physical statement about China's age-old sense of itself as an advanced civilisation anxious to draw a line, keeping the "barbarians" at its borders. But behind the Wall's intimidating exterior - and the myths that have built up around it - lies a complex history of China's view of the outside world, and itself. Lovell looks behind the modern mythology of the Great Wall, uncovering a three-thousand-year history far more fragmented, bloody and less illustrious than its crowds of visitors imagine today. The story of the Wall winds through that of the Chinese empire and the frontier policy that defined it. Lovell restores a human dimension to this astonishing structure, writing about the emperors who planned new phases of building, the people who constructed, lived next to and guarded the walls, and the millions who died - of overwork, starvation, cold and battle. The Great Wall is an epic history which explores the conquests and cataclysms of the Chinese empire over the past 3000 years. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand China's past, present and future.
Family members hurt us. Friends betray us. Fellow Christians deceive us. But Jesus provides a path through the pain—the Lord’s Prayer. In The Wall Around Your Heart, Mary DeMuth shows you that you can reach wholeness and healing in the aftermath of painful relationships by following the road map of the Lord’s Prayer. You’ll walk through story after story of hurt people who are led through biblical truth into amazing, life-sustaining, joyful growth. Life is hard. People can be mean and petty and awful. But they can also be amazing and beautiful and sacrificial. God is good. He is faithful. You can trust him with your relationships. “He’ll send people to call out what is hard in your heart,” Mary shares. “And that’s a gift to you.” Allow God to access the wall around your heart. Dare to say, “Tear down the bricks, Lord, whatever it takes.” Pray first. Ask for bravery—for yourself and for others. Risk engaging despite your hurt. Seek the shelter of Jesus. You don’t have to resign yourself to your wounds! You can rise above the pain. You’ll usher in a new life—an openhearted way of relating to others that expands the kingdom of God. In the process, you’ll draw closer to Jesus, be healed, and become an agent of healing to others.
This richly illustrated book examines the changing significance of ruins as vehicles for cultural memory in Chinese art and visual culture from ancient times to the present. The story of ruins in China is different from but connected to “ruin culture” in the West. This book explores indigenous Chinese concepts of ruins and their visual manifestations, as well as the complex historical interactions between China and the West since the eighteenth century. Wu Hung leads us through an array of traditional and contemporary visual materials, including painting, architecture, photography, prints, and cinema. A Story of Ruins shows how ruins are integral to traditional Chinese culture in both architecture and pictorial forms. It traces the changes in their representation over time, from indigenous methods of recording damage and decay in ancient China, to realistic images of architectural ruins in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the strong interest in urban ruins in contemporary China, as shown in the many artworks that depict demolished houses and decaying industrial sites. The result is an original interpretation of the development of Chinese art, as well as a unique contribution to global art history.
This is the first full scholarly study of the Great Wall of China to appear in any language, and it challenges many deeply held ideas about Chinese history. Drawing both on primary sources and on the latest archaeology, the book first demonstrates that the standard account of the Great Wall is untrue and misleading and then presents a convincing new account. It begins by tracing the various walls and systems of frontier defences that existed in early Chinese history, and shows how the greatest of these achieved a mythical symbolic stature which long survived the Wall itself. A striking concluding chapter traces how the true history of the Wall was lost in the early twentieth century as it was gradually transformed into a Chinese national symbol explained through historical myth. The book is an important contribution to the history of China's defensive policy, and her ideological attitudes, and will be of interest both to students of Chinese history and of international relations in the pre-modern world.
Yi Min, a young girl living outside of Beijing, China, has a problem. A hungry bunny has started munching on the plants in her classroom garden. A trip to the Great Wall of China inspires Yi Min to enlist the help of her friend Chen in building a Great Wall of their very own. Grandfather, a former materials engineer, tells Yi Min about the materials he developed in his work. Yi Min begins to explore the properties of earth materials, and she realizes that not all materials are created equal when it comes to building a wall. Together, Yi Min and Chen design and build a bunny-proof solution for the school garden.
"In 'The Ruins Lesson,' the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet-critic Susan Stewart explores the West's fascination with ruins in literature, visual art, and architecture, covering a vast chronological and geographical range from the ancient Egyptians to T. S. Eliot. In the multiplication of images of ruins, artists, and writers she surveys, Stewart shows how these thinkers struggled to recover lessons out of the fragility or our cultural remains. She tries to understand the appeal in the West of ruins and ruination, particularly Roman ruins, in the work and thought of Goethe, Piranesi, Blake, and Wordsworth, whom she returns to throughout the book. Her sweeping, deeply felt study encompasses the founding legends of broken covenants and original sin; Christian transformations of the classical past; the myths and rituals of human fertility; images of ruins in Renaissance allegory, eighteenth-century melancholy, and nineteenth-century cataloguing; and new gardens that eventually emerged from ancient sites of disaster"--
An intimate account of the Arab Spring, and Egypt’s past and present, seen through the eyes of a wide range of Egyptians: political operators, archaeologists and garbage collectors; women, the queer community and migrants.
Set in Virginia during the Civil War and a century beyond, this novel by the award-winning author of The Yellow Birds explores the brutal legacy of violence and exploitation in American society. Spanning over one hundred years, from the antebellum era to the 1980's, A Shout in the Ruins examines the fates of the inhabitants of Beauvais Plantation outside of Richmond, Virginia. When war arrives, the master of Beauvais, Anthony Levallios, foresees that dominion in a new America will be measured not in acres of tobacco under cultivation by his slaves, but in industry and capital. A grievously wounded Confederate veteran loses his grip on a world he no longer understands, and his daughter finds herself married to Levallois, an arrangement that feels little better than imprisonment. And two people enslaved at Beauvais plantation, Nurse and Rawls, overcome impossible odds to be together, only to find that the promise of coming freedom may not be something they will live to see. Seamlessly interwoven is the story of George Seldom, a man orphaned by the storm of the Civil War, looking back from the 1950s on the void where his childhood ought to have been. Watching the government destroy his neighborhood to build a stretch of interstate highway through Richmond, he travels south in an attempt to recover his true origins. With the help of a young woman named Lottie, he goes in search of the place he once called home, all the while reckoning with the more than 90 years he lived as witness to so much that changed during the 20th century, and so much that didn't. As we then watch Lottie grapple with life's disappointments and joys in the 1980's, now in her own middle-age, the questions remain: How do we live in a world built on the suffering of others? And can love exist in a place where for 400 years violence has been the strongest form of intimacy? Written with the same emotional intensity, harrowing realism, and poetic precision that made The Yellow Birds one of the most celebrated novels of the past decade, A Shout in the Ruins cements Powers' place in the forefront of American letters and demands that we reckon with the moral weight of our troubling history.