Winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist An Economist Best Book of the Year | A Financial Times Book of the Year | A Wall Street Journal Book of the Year | A Washington Post Book of the Year | A Bloomberg News Book of the Year | An Esquire China Book of the Year | A Gates Notes Top Read of the Year Perhaps no one in the twentieth century had a greater long-term impact on world history than Deng Xiaoping. And no scholar of contemporary East Asian history and culture is better qualified than Ezra Vogel to disentangle the many contradictions embodied in the life and legacy of China’s boldest strategist. Once described by Mao Zedong as a “needle inside a ball of cotton,” Deng was the pragmatic yet disciplined driving force behind China’s radical transformation in the late twentieth century. He confronted the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution, dissolved Mao’s cult of personality, and loosened the economic and social policies that had stunted China’s growth. Obsessed with modernization and technology, Deng opened trade relations with the West, which lifted hundreds of millions of his countrymen out of poverty. Yet at the same time he answered to his authoritarian roots, most notably when he ordered the crackdown in June 1989 at Tiananmen Square. Deng’s youthful commitment to the Communist Party was cemented in Paris in the early 1920s, among a group of Chinese student-workers that also included Zhou Enlai. Deng returned home in 1927 to join the Chinese Revolution on the ground floor. In the fifty years of his tumultuous rise to power, he endured accusations, purges, and even exile before becoming China’s preeminent leader from 1978 to 1989 and again in 1992. When he reached the top, Deng saw an opportunity to creatively destroy much of the economic system he had helped build for five decades as a loyal follower of Mao—and he did not hesitate.

Examines the first episode in which American power and good intentions came face-to-face with a powerful Asian revolutionary movement, and challenges familiar assumptions about the origins of modern Sino-American relations. As 1945 opened, America was on surprisingly congenial terms with China's Communist rebels--their soldiers treated their American counterparts as heroes, rescuing airmen shot down over enemy territory. Chinese leaders talked of a future in which American money and technology would help lift China out of poverty. Mao Zedong himself held friendly meetings with U.S. emissaries, vowing to them his intention of establishing an American-style democracy in China. By year's end, however, cordiality had been replaced by chilly hostility and distrust. Chinese Communist soldiers were setting ambushes for American marines in north China; Communist newspapers were portraying the United States as an implacable imperialist enemy; civil war in China was erupting. The pattern was set for a quarter century of almost total Sino-American mistrust, with the devastating wars in Korea and Vietnam among the consequences. Richard Bernstein here tells the incredible story of that year's sea change, brilliantly analyzing its many components, from ferocious infighting among U.S. diplomats, military leaders, and opinion makers to the complex relations between Mao and his patron, Stalin.--From publisher description

In 1965, Joseph R. Levenson began working on a new trilogy to follow his earlier study of modern Chinese intellectual history, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate. By 1969, he had already sketched out basic outlines of the work, which was to be called Provincialism, Nationalism, and Cosmopolitanism. It was to consist of three volumes: one sounding the general themes of the arrangement, and two other elaborating its motifs. Accidental death tragically cut short Levenson's life and the preparation of the work. He did leave behind, however, an embryo of it in the form of this book, Revolution and Cosmopolitanism. Based upon a careful analysis of a wide selection of Western plays translated into Chinese during the twentieth century, Revolution and Cosmopolitanism tries to set the Communist Cultural Revolution into a new kind of historical perspective. Beginning with the demise of a Confucian China which "new youth" intellectuals found too provincial for their palates, Levenson shows how those same cosmopolitans in the 1920s and 1920s damed later Communist intellectuals of the 1950s for being to receptive to non-Chinese values. As Red Guards attacked symbols of a feudal Confucian past and a bourgeois foreign present, China slipped into a new sort of provincialism. Levenson analyzes their transformation with profound subtlety. Convinced that revolutionary China cannot forever seal itself off from universal cosmopolitan influences, he expresses sympathy throughout with the dilemma of rootless intellectuals in a society searching for a particular non-intellectual identity. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.

First edition, limited to 250 copies. Printed under the directtion of Elmer Adler at his Pynson Printers of New York. One of the few books on the subject of Chinese papermaking and printing. 33, 3 pages. cloth-backed decorated paper-covered boards, paper cover label.. square 8vo..