This global environmental and political history “will redefine the way we think about the European colonial project” (Observer).

“ . . . sets the triumph of the late 19th-century Western imperialism in the context of catastrophic El Niño weather patterns at that time . . . groundbreaking, mind-stretching.” —The Independent
Examining a series of El Niño-induced...

On March 8, 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen set sail from China "to the ends of the earth". When it returned in October 1423, the emperor had fallen, leaving China in political and economic chaos. The great ships were left to rot at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost in China's long, self-imposed isolation that followed was the knowledge that the Chinese had reached America seventy years before Columbus...

In the 1980s, after decades of isolation, China opened its doors -- and Communism changed forever. As a foreign correspondent during this pivotal era, Dori Jones fell in love with China and with a Chinese man. This memoir recalls the euphoria of Americans discovering a new China, as well as the despair of Tiananmen.

To escape the Nazis, a young Jewish boy named Marcus and his family move to Shanghai, where Marcus and his new friend Liang build a sukkah on the roof and together they celebrate Sukkot and the Chinese Moon Festival.

A respected Chinese political philosopher calls for the Communist Party to take the lead in moving China along the path to democracy before it is too late. With Xi Jinping potentially set as president for life, China's move toward political democracy may appear stalled. But Jiwei Ci argues that four decades of reform have created a mentality in the Chinese people that is just waiting for the political system to catch up, resulting in a disjunction...

A first-hand account of the remarkable transformation of China over the past forty years. As a 20-year-old exchange student from Stanford in 1981, Pomfret spent a year at Nanjing University in China. His classmates were among those who survived the twin tragedies of Mao's rule--the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution--and whose success in government and private industry today are shaping China's future. Pomfret went on to a career in journalism,...

Starting in 1972 when she is nine, Ling, the daughter of two doctors, struggles to make sense of the communists' Cultural Revolution, which empties stores of food, homes of appliances deemed "bourgeois," and people of laughter.