China Books

China surpassed Japan in 2003 to become America's 3rd largest trade partner, after Canada and Mexico. Indeed, it won't be long - a couple of years at most - before China overtakes Mexico's position. In addition, China is already the world's 4th largest merchandise trader after the US, EU and Japan, and one of the top leading overall (merchandise plus services) trading nations of the world. By the end of this decade, perhaps before then, China will take over Japan's place as the world's 3rd largest overall trader in both merchandise and services - an astonishing performance for a country which practically did zero trade with the rest of the world only 25 years ago.

Policy-makers and businesspeople everywhere, and in America especially, need to sit up and listen to the sound, balanced, non-partisan, and cool-headed analysis by one of the world's leading experts on China and its role in the global trading system. And his name is Nicholas Lardy of the Brookings Institution.

Globalization is the hot topic and major concerns for every government and enterprises in 2002.

How China can integrate into the Global ecomony ?
And How Hong Kong can still alive when facing the competition with China in 2003?

Mr. Zhu Rongji (Prime Minister of China) has spoken to all elite people and officials when trip to Hong Kong in November, 2002.

Hong Kong is facing the highest un-empolyment percentage in 2002 and it is over 8% of the total population now.

How to make Hong Kong can be rapid changing in the next decade? There are no industrial development as before due the higher costs than other provinces in China. So China will give them more pressure when getting the orders from Oversea's markets.

Reckon you can see the speeches of " Zhu Rongji " in his last trip to Hong Kong.

China and Hong Kong are the Business Partners since 1983.
But now they are the competitor in every business development.
So how Hong Kong can stay alive when facing the Global economy?

Hong Kong can only run their own way and don't let China copy their old ways.

Although it is not easy to go the new way, it is their own choice.
Don't think too late and must run from this minute.

E-commerce and E-business development is the only way to go and reckon it can work more faster than China's doer.

Hong Kong should be forgotten your doer's way and think to re-enginnering in your business structures and models.

Hard work is the old fashion for Hong Kong now.
New Fashion is the new ideas and new models when stepping into the E-business.

Hope Hong Kong's government can bring up all the elite people to come across the crisis of economy and deflation in the next decade.

This is one of my most used, most favorite cookbooks and believe me, I have a lot of cookbooks. I love this book b/c every recipe tastes great! I love the pictures, the text, everything! Do yourself a favor and buy this book. Just the soup recipes alone are worth the price but really, every recipe I have ever tried is great!

this book has lots of super delicious recipes, and their easy to follow too. 1 of my fave recipe books 2 thumbs up! :O)

As a person that has studied East Asian cultural history academically for years, and a person who will be teaching China just four months from now, I found this book to be perfect. It was not written by a scholar, and I think in reality that is what makes it great. It is simply a man with a love for Asian culture, who came to be exposed to the reality of modern China. Still, even with all the hardships, his love remained. It is a testament to Americans that can see beyond the perceptions built by our own society, and also to the Chinese culture that was able to shine even under the political turmoil. Mark Salzman would not only write a wonderful book from his experience, but he also carried the beauty of wushu back to the United States, which is an accomplishment in and of itself. This book has incredible insight into Chinese culture, of course from an American perspective. There are too many good points about this book, and the movie that was produced as a result, to begin to list them here. I suggest you simply buy it and be prepared for a very enjoyable read, and maybe possibly a change in your perceptions.

This book, even though not written by a professional writer, tells the true life story of a martial artist and his search for a teacher. The story combines a description of China and its traditions , and the teachings of a true martial artist. It is focused on philosophy and changes the traditional view of martial arts as a violent art. It's a novel with a message.

The book is well researched & documented. It's awsome.
If later excacations by archaeologists and proved beyond reasonable doubt it was a Chinese settlement, the history of the western world should be rewritten.

When I first picked up this book and started to read it, it glued itself to my hands and did not want to let go. Anyway, that's how it felt as I read page after exciting page of this excellent work. This rendition of the author's historical/archaeological research and discovery is of the highest and most exciting caliber. The author's quest was to find who built certain structures on Cape Dauphin on Cape Breton Island. In his effort to find out, in the first half of the book, the author discusses the European discovery and early colonization of North Eastern North America, more specifically, Cape Breton Island and its surroundings. The second half is more concerned with the local Mi'kmaq Indians, including parallels between their culture and that of the Chinese. Chinese history is also briefly covered in this half, as it pertains to the main theme of this book. Included throughout are snippets of the author's personal life as he conducts his painstaking research. When I first read the book's subtitle, I was very skeptical: how could the Chinese have made their way to Eastern North America before the Europeans? After having read the author's arguments and his well-constructed analysis, I am now willing to entertain the possibility that he may indeed be on the right track. The author's writing style is very chatty, friendly and engaging, so much so that, as stated earlier, I could not put the book down. This book would be of great interest to history buffs as well as anyone who loves a good who-done-it story.

This is a collection of poetry salvaged from the walls of the barracks on Angel Island, where Chinese immigrants were detained between 1910 and 1940. Poems are in both English and Chinese. In addition to the poems, the editors provide an introduction to early Chinese immigration, and there are several pages of quotes from various immigrants, on various subjects such as the voyage to America and their impressions of Westerners. The poetry speaks for itself -- poems of desperation, despair, homesickness, and anger. This is a wonderful collection.

No immigrant population has ever been treated as shabbily and violently as the Chinese, who began arriving in large numbers during the California Gold Rush and who were recruited in even larger numbers to build transcontinental railroads, build levees in California, and to supplant African-American cotton pickers in Mississippi. The Chinese were brutalized, excluded, mocked, and TAXED! In 1852, a Foreign Miner's Tax, which accounted for more than half of the tax revenue collected in California between 1850 and 1870, was imposed on Chinese miners. Parallel fears fueled the antagonism against the Chinese: first, that they were unassimilable; second, that they would pollute the bloodlines of the Great Race, the Anglo-Saxon stock, which would seem to imply a measure of assimilation, or else outbreed "us". Laws were passed to exclude Chinese women, and then, in 1882, to exclude all immigration from China. Laws continued to severely curtail Chinese immigration until the 1960s, but exclusion was never 100% effective. The principal loohole was the acknowledged human right of Chinese-Americans to bring their wives and children to "Gold Mountain." The officials charged with overseeing this trickle of migration were invariably convinced that most of it was fraudulent; they were fierce and self-righteous in ferreting out the "paper sons," those illegal immigrants of yesteryear.

From 1910 to 1940, all immigrants arriving in California from China - including many who were en route to Mexico or Cuba - were quarantined in wooden barracks on the hidden side of Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, north of Alcatraz. About 175,000 Chinese, men, women and children, spent from three days to three years in detention on Angel Island, and quite a few of them ended up being shipped home. This book tells the story of that immigration in thirty pages of general history and through interviews with thirty-nine elderly survivors of the Island experience. Pictures of the detention station and its operations are also included, and suggest the bleak, crowded, disrespectful conditions that prevailed.

In 1940, the barracks on Angel Island were closed and abandoned. The buildings remained in disrepair until 1970, by which time Angel Island was a state park. Then the buildings were slated for demolition, but during an inspection, a park ranger, Alexander Weiss, noticed that the walls of the wooden buildings were covered with Chinese characters, carved or inscribed. He notified scholars at San Francisco State University, the inscriptions were photographed and translated, it was confirmed that they were chiefly poems composed in inmates during detention, and the Asian American community of San Francisco bagan to lobby for preservation of the historical site, equivalent to Ellis Island in the memory of European American immigrant descendents.

The station is now a major tourist attraction of the Bay Area, and easily one of the most interesting, to which thousands of visitors travel by ferry. The calligraphic inscriptions are visible, and translations are readily available. Unlike the stereoptype of "coolie" immigrants, the Chinese who cut these characters in the walls were literate representatives of a great civilization, however penniless and friendless they may have been when they arrived in the Land of the Free, only to be imprisoned.

The bulk of this touching book is composed of selected poems, in Chinese and in English translation, from the walls of the Island. Some express desolation:

"Living on Island, away from home elicits a hundred feelings.
My chest is filled with a sadness I cannot bear to explain.
Night and day, I sit passively and listlessly.
Fortunately, I have a novel as my companion."

Some are angry:

"Sadly, I listen to insects and angry surf.
The laws pile layer upon layer; how can I dissipate my hatred?
Drifting in as a traveler, I met with thsi calamity.
It's more miserable than owning only a flute
in the marketplace of Wu."

A few are vengeful:

"I have 10,000 hopes that the revolutionary armies
will complete their victory,
And help make the mining enterprises successful
in the ancestral land.
They will build many battleships and come
to the U.S. territory,
Vowing never to stop till the white men
are completely annihilated."

Of course the battleships never came. Instead there were waves of industrious and civil immigrants, and then further waves of industrial wares which we in America have come to depend on. Have the Chinese terrorized America? Stolen American jobs? Degraded American racial purity? Here in San Francisco, it seems obvious that the Chinese have been among the most valuable and assimilable immigrant populations ever. Their crime rate and public assistance rate are extremely low, and their employment rate is unmatched by any European American group. They've excelled in our public schools, raising the standards of performance for "white" students by their example of seriousness. They exceed the averages of European Americans in education, income, and marital stability. Their consumption of illegal drugs is far lower than that of white suburbanites. They are a major component of the thriving multi-culturalism that makes San Francisco the most desirable place to live in all the United States, as proven by housing prices.

America was built by immigrants, and then rebuilt again and again by later waves of immigrants, each time a richer and stronger culture. Those who blame problems on recent immigrants are wrong; they themselves are the problem.

I expected good artwork from this author as I've seen other work of his, but it has so much more than that! After receiving a copy as a gift, I sat down to read a little bit and read it from cover to cover. I found it engrossing and very amusing. I plan on going through it again now to look at the artwork in more detail, as I often find hidden things in Ben Wu's work. I recommend this book!

This book is fantastic, if not only for the storyline, which could only be described as bedtime stories for Wednesday Addams, but also for the fantasticly detailed artwork. The author is also the artist, and I am sure someday will be a major name, both in literature and art.

A magnificent insight of pre-World War II Japan and China by the hands of the most represantive of Greek soul of all writers.

The book proved invaluable in researching my new novel set in China as a sequel to THE SHANGHAI MURDERS. It was glorious to hear Kazantzakis's words on places that I have seen and his insights, as is true in his great fiction, are devistating in their accuracy. A book that all travel writers should read. A great treat.

The book, "The Jews of Kaifeng, China: History, Culture and Religion," by Xin Xu is a wonderful work which describes in great detail the culture, religious rites and history of the community of Jews that settled in Kaifeng back when it was the capital city.
He talks about relations with their neighbors, their clothing styles, religion, customs, language, diet and more.
Xin conducts a thorough and intricate study regarding this unique and astounding group of Jews who were cut off from the rest of the Jewish world for centuries.
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The Jews Of Kaifeng, China: History, Culture, And Religion by Ux Xin (Nanjing University) examines the indigenous Jewish community that lived in the city of Kaifeng in northeastern China. Far removed from the rest of the world, the Kaifeng Jews gradually adopted Chinese customs into their traditional way of life, and intermarried with the non-Jewish populace, so that eventually their descendants were almost completely assimilated. A truly fascinating and extensively researched historical study, The Jews Of Kaifeng is a unique and very welcome contribution to Judaic Studies reference shelves and supplemental reading lists.

John Sung was a man with a mission. He nearly didn't find that mission though. Having seen God move in revival in his home town of Hinghwa, while just a boy of nine, and having experienced God answering prayer in extraordinary ways while still in his minority, he came to America at about the age of 18. In America he studied chemistry at the same time as studying theology.

A brilliant academic, achieving a doctorate in Chemistry, he finally burnt his liberal theological books, as being "demonic", withdrew himself from lectures and waited on God until God met with him. So great was the transformation of the gloomy John Sung, that the principal of Union Theological College had him committed to a sanatorium for 193 days. While there he read the bible over and over again (though it is hard to see how he could have read it 40 times as this book claims - but check out Holman's "Light Speed Bible", which claims you can read the full bible in 24 hours!).

John had seen enough to turn him off of religion altogether, but he was not deterred. Back in China, he got involved in Christian ministry, but at first he said, it comprised largely of "going around in circles in the atmosphere of talk about 'movements' and 'education', 'sacrifice' and 'service'. All my work up to this time had been lacking in direction and purpose. I had been trying to serve God within the framework of liberal Christianity. I did not fit in but I saw no way out!" (page 60).

Of course, at this stage he wasn't really in liberal circles - or was he? Note that phrase: "the framework of liberal Christianity". How many of us feel as he did, when he said, "I did not fit in but I saw no way out!"?

But John Sung found a way out. It was a way of preaching in the power of the transforming Spirit of God. Some men are made for revival times, and John was one such. In the last months of his life and ministry, before tuberculosis took him, he would prop himself up in the pulpit as he preached. He knew that his life and ministry would be short (he was dead at 43) and he knew that the time for China was short: first the Japanese invasion and then the Communist take over. He preached to a lukewarm church and to the lost millions and God worked with him.

Probably your pastor wouldn't invite someone like John Sung to preach in his church. These sorts of men aren't liked by those who just want to keep the ship on an even keel. John Sung was a boat rocker.

John Sung was a man of God. This is his story. More than that, it is part of God's story.

P.S. Good news for anyone who has read John Sung's life and wondered about those missing diarys John gave so much time to writing. Amazon have just posted an advert on this site for "The Journal Once Lost - Extracts From The Diary of John Sung" by Levi Sung. I cannot comment upon it since I have only just ordered it but though not many people in the West have even heard of this man, he is up there with the John Wesleys. Also, Timothy Tow (FEBC) has translated Dr. Sung's sermons; maybe with the release of this latest book Amazon might start selling those too? (PS added 2nd October 2007.)

I just ordered this book after hearing only the name of John Sung. I am picky about my books, and this one I could not put down. I tore through it in 2 days. The man was a true Christian....obeying the call of God to win souls to the very end of his health and life. What God can do through one man is amazing and challenged me all the more to pursue His plan. Get this book and let it challenge you.

Journey To Heavenly Mountain: An American's Pilgrimage To The Heart Of Buddhism In Modern China is the personal story of Jay Martin, an American who personally journeyed through modern-day China in a dedicated search for eternal wisdom and personal enlightenment. Jay's travels took him into the heart of monastic Buddhist territory, where he learned of new ways for seeing with clarity and tranquility. Journey To Heavenly Mountain is highly recommended for Buddhist reference collections and supplemental reading lists as being an insightful, communicative, and broad-minded memoir.

This is one of those books that won't let you put it down until you've finished it. As a piece of travel writing, it's interesting enough; but it is as an account of a spiritual journey that the book especially succeeds. Author Jay Martin's aim was to live in some of the great Buddhist temples in China, and to absorb the wisdom of the spiritual masters who live there. One might expect, in his recounting of his dialogues with these spiritual figures, just more of the rather befuddling Eastern philosophical jargon that many have come to expect. What is refreshing about Martin's account is both the accessibility of the teachings, and the fact that we get to see the teachings APPLIED in the course of Martin's adventures.