This is the first comprehensive study of popular culture in twentieth-century China, and of its political impact during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 (known in China as "The War of Resistance against Japan"). Chang-tai Hung shows in compelling detail how Chinese resisters used a variety of popular cultural forms—especially dramas, cartoons, and newspapers—to reach out to the rural audience and galvanize support for the war cause. While the Nationalists used popular culture as a patriotic tool, the Communists refashioned it into a socialist propaganda instrument, creating lively symbols of peasant heroes and joyful images of village life under their rule. In the end, Hung argues, the Communists' use of popular culture contributed to their victory in revolution.

This book gives a unique personal glimpse of modern Chinese history from the beginning of the century to the "Cultural Revolution" through the eyes of one of the builders of the Chinese Red Army. Born into a poor peasant family in Hunan Province, Marshal Peng Dehuai (1898-1974) enlisted in 1916 in one of the old warlords' armies. While rising through the ranks to become a regimental commander, Peng Dehuai worked underground to organize soldiers' rights groups. He joined the Communist Party shortly before leading the Pingjiang Uprising in 1928 against reactionary rule. After founding the Third Army of the Chinese Red Army, Peng Dehuai went on to a brilliant career as an eminent commander before and during the epic Long March, in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the War of Liberation, and in the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea. After Liberation in 1949, he senred as Vice-Premier of the State Council and Minister of Defence. Marshal Peng Dehuai fell into political disgrace in 1959 after addressing a letter to Chairman Mao Zedong pointing out some of the problems in the "Great Leap Forward." Under virtual house arrest for most of the last 16 years of his life, Marshal Peng did manual labour and wrote biographical notes in response to demands for "confessions." He died under persecution during the "Cultural Revolution" on November 29, 1974. Exonerated by the CPC Central Committee in 1978, Marshal Peng Dehuai has been restored to his rightful place in history as one of the greatest military leaders in China's revolution.

A pathbreaking collection of essays on early Chinese-language cinema

The Letters of Chan Master Dahui Pujue offers a complete annotated translation, the first into English, of a Chan Buddhist classic, the collected letters of the Southern Song Linji Chan teacher Dahui Zonggao (1089-1163). Addressed to forty scholar-officials, members of the elite class in Chinese society, and to two Chan masters, these letters are dharma talks on how to engage in Buddhist cultivation. Each of the letters to laymen is fascinating as a document directed to a specific scholar-official with his distinctive niche, high or low, in the Song-dynasty social-political landscape, and his idiosyncratic stage of development on the Buddhist path. Dahui is engaging, incisive, and often quite humorous in presenting his teaching of "constantly lifting to awareness the phrase (huatou)," his favored phrases being No (wu) and dried turd. Throughout one's busy twenty-four hours, the practitioner is not to perform any mental operation whatsoever on this phrase, and to "take awakening as the standard." This epistolary compilation has long constituted a self-contained course of study for Chan practitioners. For centuries, Letters of Dahui has been revered throughout East Asia. It has exerted a formative influence on Linji Chan practice in China, molded S

A splendid essay collection focusing on ordinary people in the chaotic post-emperor, pre-Communist period of China's history.