This is a murder-mystery story set in England and has at its center the Ainsleigh family. They are an ancient aristocratic family who had been once very wealthy until one of their numbers died in China and, consequently, the family is now supposedly cursed.

A grand tale of intrigue in nineteenth-century China, where imperial rule is crumbling as the Opium Wars and Taiping Rebellion rage, from the author of Manchu. Loyalty is put to cruel test in Shanghai, where Jewish merchant Saul Haleevie and his longtime Chinese partner, Aisek Lee, have weathered hardship and distrust to build a thriving business. When Aisek is falsely accused of “abomination” for causing his mother’s suicide, their world is shattered. Now, Saul must save his friend no matter the cost, navigating a brutal and corrupt penal system that could bring about his own ruin as well. Meanwhile, the quest for true love governs the fate of Saul’s wayward daughter, Fronah. Consorting with the Westerners now thronging Shanghai but truly comfortable only in her Jewish-Asiatic identity, she ends up destroying one man and confounding another. Love and deception also entwine in the imperial palace, where the “Virtuous Concubine” Yehenala contrives to bear the opium-eating, syphilitic Hsien Feng emperor’s only son, thus laying the foundation for her elevation to the pinnacle of command in China as the formidable empress dowager. She wins the power battle, but it is beyond her to win the war, for by then China faces not just the collapse of another imperial dynasty, but the end of the millennial imperial system of rule, threatening the lives and loves of all. This compelling saga of nineteenth-century China is filled with “intricate shuttlecock diplomacy, ceremonial/battle action, family saga/romance—all polished to an entertaining high gloss” (Kirkus Reviews).

In 1927, Chiang Kai-shek - the head of China's military academy and leader of the Kuomintang (KMT) - began the `northern expeditions' to bring China's northern territories back under the control of the state. It was during this period that the KMT purged communist activities, fractured the army and sparked the Chinese Civil War - which would rage for over twenty years. The communists, led by General Mao Tse-Tsung, were for much of the period forced underground and concentrated in the Chinese countryside. As the author argues, this resulted in China's war featuring unusually high levels of espionage and sabotage, and increased the military importance of information gathering. Based on newly declassified material, Panagiotis Dimitrakis charts the double-crossings, secret meetings and bloody assassinations which would come to define China's future. Uniquely, The Secret War for China gives equal weighting to the role of foreign actors: the role of British intelligence in unmasking Communist International (Comintern) agents in China, for example, and the allies' attempts to turn nationalist China against the Japanese. The Secret War for China also documents the clandestine confrontation between Mao and Chiang and the secret negotiations between Chiang and the Axis Powers, whose forces he employed against the CCP once the Second World War was over. In his turn, Mao employed nationalist forces who had defected - during the last three years of the civil war about 105 out of 869 KMT generals defected to the CCP. This book is an urgent and necessary guide to the intricacies of the Chinese Civil War, a war which decisively shaped the modern Asian world.

A group of women, the jin-shei sisterhood, form a uniquely powerful circle that transcends class and social custom. They are bound together by a declaration of loyalty that transcends all other vows, even those with the gods, by their own secret language, passed from mother to daughter, by the knowledge that some of them will have to pay the ultimate sacrifice to enable others to fulfill their destiny. The sisterhood we meet run from the Emperor's sister to the street-beggar, from the trainee warrior in the Emperor's Guard to the apprentice healer, from the artist to the traveller-girl, herself an illegitimate daughter of an emperor and seen as a threat to the throne. And as one of them becomes Dragon Empress, her determination to hold power against the sages of the temple, against the marauding forces from other kingdoms, drags the sisterhood into a dangerous world of court intrigue, plot and counterplot, and brings them into conflict with each other from which only the one who remains true to all the vows she made at the very beginning to the dying Princess Empress can rescue them. An amazing and unusual book, based on some historical fact, full of drama, adventure and conflict like a Shakespearean history play, it's a novel about kinship and a society of women, of mysticism, jealousy, fate, destiny, all set in the wonderful, swirling background of Syai, a fantasy kingdom inspired by Imperial China.

Chinese Translation Studies in the 21st Century, which presents a selection of some of the best articles published in the journal Perspectives in a five-year period (2012-2017), highlights the vitality of Translation Studies as a profession and as a field of enquiry in China. As the country has gradually opened up to the West, translation academic programmes have burgeoned to cater for the needs of Chinese corporations and political institutions. The book is divided into four sections, in which authors explore theoretical and conceptual issues (such as the connection between translation and adaptation, multimodality, and the nature of norms), audiovisual translation (including studies on news translation and the translation of children’s movies), bibliographies and bibliometrics (to assess, for example, the international visibility of Chinese scholars), and interpreting (analyzing pauses in simultaneous interpreting and sign language among other aspects). The book brings together well-established authors and younger scholars from universities in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. The chapters in this book were originally published in various issues of Perspectives: Studies in Translatology.