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Red Star Over China
''Red Star Over China'' is a 1937 book by Edgar Snow. It is an account of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that was written when it was a guerrilla army and still obscure to Westerners. Along with Pearl S. Buck's ''The Good Earth'' (1931), it was the most influential book on Western understanding of China as well as the most influential book on Western sympathy for Red China in the 1930s. Overview In ''Red Star Over China'', Edgar Snow recounts the months that he spent with the Chinese Red Army in 1936. Most of this time, he was at their then-capital Bao'an (Pao An). They moved to the famous Yan'an only after he left. Snow uses his extensive interviews with Mao and the other top leaders to present vivid descriptions of the Long March, as well as biographical accounts of leaders on both sides of the conflicts, including Zhou Enlai, Peng Dehuai, Lin Biao, He Long, and Mao Zedong's own account of his life. When Snow wrote, there were no reliable reports reaching the West ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sweden
Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. It borders Norway to the west and north, Finland to the east, and is connected to Denmark in the southwest by a bridgetunnel across the Öresund. At , Sweden is the largest Nordic country, the third-largest country in the European Union, and the fifth-largest country in Europe. The capital and largest city is Stockholm. Sweden has a total population of 10.5 million, and a low population density of , with around 87% of Swedes residing in urban areas in the central and southern half of the country. Sweden has a nature dominated by forests and a large amount of lakes, including some of the largest in Europe. Many long rivers run from the Scandes range through the landscape, primarily ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Unknown Story
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with pronouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of pronoun ''thee'') when followed by a v ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jon Halliday
Jon Halliday (born 28 June 1939) is an Irish historian specialising in modern Asia. He was formerly a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London. He was educated at University of Oxford and has been married to Jung Chang since 1991. Halliday is the older brother of the late Irish International relations academic and writer Fred Halliday. Halliday has written or edited eight books, including a long interview with the U.S. film-maker Douglas Sirk. In addition, he and his wife, Jung Chang, with whom he lives in Notting Hill, West London, researched and wrote a biography of Mao Zedong, '' Mao: the Unknown Story''. The book was highly praised in the popular press, and also elicited some controversy. ''The Sydney Morning Herald'' reported that while few commentators disputed it, "some of the world's most eminent scholars of modern Chinese history" had referred to the book as "a gross distortion of the records." Some scholars offered measured praise of the range of scholars ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jung Chang
Jung Chang (, , born 25 March 1952) is a Chinese-British writer now living in London, best known for her family autobiography ''Wild Swans'', selling over 10 million copies worldwide but banned in the People's Republic of China. Her 832-page biography of Mao Zedong, '' Mao: The Unknown Story'', written with her husband, the Irish historian Jon Halliday, was published in June 2005. Life in China Chang was born on 25 March 1952 in Yibin, Sichuan Province. Her parents were both Chinese Communist Party officials, and her father was greatly interested in literature. As a child she quickly developed a love of reading and writing, which included composing poetry. As Party cadres, life was relatively good for her family at first; her parents worked hard, and her father became successful as a propagandist at a regional level. His formal ranking was as a "level 10 official", meaning that he was one of 20,000 or so most important cadres, or ''ganbu'', in the country. The Communist P ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Great Yu
Yu the Great (大禹) was a legendary king in ancient China who was famed for his introduction of flood control, his establishment of the Xia dynasty which inaugurated dynastic rule in China, and his upright moral character. He figures prominently in the Chinese legend of "Great Yu Who Controlled the Waters" (). The dates which have been proposed for Yu's reign predate the oldest-known written records in China, the oracle bones of the late Shang dynasty, by nearly a millennium. Yu's name was not inscribed on any artifacts which were produced during the proposed era in which he lived, nor was it inscribed on the later oracle bones; his name was first inscribed on vessels which date back to the Western Zhou period (c. 1045–771 BC). The lack of substantial contemporary documentary evidence has caused some controversy over Yu's historicity. Thus, proponents of his existence theorize that stories about his life and reign were orally transmitted in various areas of China until the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Victor Gollancz
Sir Victor Gollancz (; 9 April 1893 – 8 February 1967) was a British publisher and humanitarian. Gollancz was known as a supporter of left-wing causes. His loyalties shifted between liberalism and communism, but he defined himself as a Christian socialist and internationalist. He used his publishing house chiefly to promote pacifist and socialist non-fiction, and also launched the Left Book Club. In the postwar era, he focused his attention on Germany and became known for his promotion of friendship and reconciliation based on his internationalism and his ethic of brotherly love. He founded the organisation Save Europe Now (SEN) in 1945 to campaign for humane treatment of German civilians, and drew attention to their suffering, especially children, and atrocities committed against German civilians. He received an honorary doctorate at the University of Frankfurt in 1949, the Großes Bundesverdienstkreuz of Germany in 1953 and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1960 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Left Book Club
The Left Book Club was a publishing group that exerted a strong left-wing influence in Great Britain from 1936 to 1948. Pioneered by Victor Gollancz, it offered a monthly book choice, for sale to members only, as well as a newsletter that acquired the status of a major political magazine. It also held an annual rally. Membership peaked at 57,000, but after the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact of 1939, it disowned its large Communist element, and subsequent years of paper-rationing, during and after the war, led to further decline. It ceased publishing in 1948. The concept and series was revived in 2015, following at least one earlier effort to relaunch the series in the early 2000s. Early success and organisation The Left Book Club, founded in May 1936, was a key left-wing institution of the late 1930s and the 1940s in the United Kingdom. It was set up by Stafford Cripps, Victor Gollancz and John Strachey to revitalise and educate the British Left.... The club's aim was t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Xi'an Incident
The Xi'an Incident, previously romanized as the Sian Incident, was a political crisis that took place in Xi'an, Shaanxi in 1936. Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist government of China, was detained by his subordinate generals Chang Hsüeh-liang (Zhang Xueliang) and Yang Hucheng, in order to force the ruling Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) to change its policies regarding the Empire of Japan and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Prior to the incident, Chiang Kai-shek followed a strategy of "first internal pacification, then external resistance" that entailed eliminating the CCP and appeasing Japan to allow time for the modernization of China and its military. After the incident, Chiang aligned with the Communists against the Japanese. However, by the time Chiang arrived in Xi'an on 4 December 1936, negotiations for a united front had been in the works for two years. The crisis ended after two weeks of negotiation, in which Chiang was eventually released ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harold Isaacs
Harold Robert Isaacs (1910–1986) was an American journalist and political scientist. Career Isaacs graduated from Columbia University in 1929, then briefly worked as a reporter for the ''New York Times.'' He went to China in 1930 with no strong political views, but became involved with left-wing politics in Shanghai, especially through a friendship with Frank Glass, a Trotskyist from South Africa, and with Agnes Smedley, an American journalist with Communist sympathies. He wrote ''The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution'', about the Chinese Revolution of 1925–27, first published in 1938 with a preface by Leon Trotsky. The book includes dramatic descriptions of the Shanghai Massacre of 1927, which wiped out Communists and those thought to be communist. Isaacs condemned the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party for following the instructions of Joseph Stalin to ally with the Nationalist Party rather than arming the workers and pursuing a genuinely revolutionary program. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Class Struggle
Class conflict, also referred to as class struggle and class warfare, is the political tension and economic antagonism that exists in society because of socio-economic competition among the social classes or between rich and poor. The forms of class conflict include direct violence such as wars for resources and cheap labor, assassinations or revolution; indirect violence such as deaths from poverty and starvation, illness and unsafe working conditions; and economic coercion such as the threat of unemployment or the withdrawal of investment capital (capital flight); or ideologically, by way of political literature. Additionally, political forms of class warfare include legal and illegal lobbying, and bribery of legislators. The social-class conflict can be direct, as in a dispute between labour and management such as an employer's industrial lockout of their employees in effort to weaken the bargaining power of the corresponding trade union; or indirect such as a workers' sl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Second United Front
The Second United Front ( zh, t=第二次國共合作 , s=第二次国共合作 , first=t ) was the alliance between the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to resist the Japanese invasion of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War, which suspended the Chinese Civil War from 1937 to 1945. Background In 1927 the Chinese Communists retaliated against Kuomintang following a betrayal of its members in Shanghai by National Revolutionary Army commander Chiang Kai-shek, which marked the end of the KMT's four-year alliance with the Soviet Union and its cooperation with the CCP during the Northern Expedition (aka First United Front) to defeat warlords and unify China. In 1931 the Japanese launched its invasion and subsequent occupation of Manchuria. Chiang Kai-shek, who ''de facto'' led the central government of China, decided that China must avoid all-out war with Japan due to domestic turmoil and inadequate preparation. Therefore, he "pursued a stra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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