Rockets were invented in China, the home of many modern inventions, including ancient astronomy, and were used originally for military purposes in the 13th century. The Chinese space program was founded in October 1956 by the father of Chinese rocketry, Tsien Hsue Shen, who lived in California in the 1930s until his expulsion as a Chinese spy. In recent times there have been three manned spaceflights, highlighting China’s ambitious space program and generating worldwide interest. Future missions are planned, including a mission to go to Mars.

The U.S. Navy's patrol of the Yangtze River began in 1854 when the USS Susquehanna was sent to China to safeguard increasing American commerce in the region. As Kemp Tolley explains in this entertaining history of the patrol in which he was to later serve, the presence of gunboats along the river greatly benefited the integrity of the shoreline factories. Tolley was a young naval officer in the 1930s when assigned gunboat duty, first in the Mindanao, then in the Tutuila, and finally the Wake in August 1941. His colorful description of life as a "river rat" is filled with anecdotes about the resourceful and high-spirited sailors who manned the old riverboats in that distant land.

As one of the eighteen field-specific reports comprising the comprehensive scope of the strategic general report of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, this sub-report addresses long-range planning for development of large research infrastructures in China. They each craft a roadmap for their sphere of development to 2050.

Judith Stacey, 2012 winner of the Simon and Gagnon Lifetime Achievement Award presented by the American Sociological Association.

For well over two hundred years we have lived in a western-made world, one where the very notion of being modern is inextricably bound up with being western. The twenty-first century will be different.
The rise of China, India and the Asian tigers means that, for the first time, modernity will no longer be exclusively western. The west will be confronted with the fact that its systems, institutions and values are no longer the only ones on offer. The key idea of Martin Jacques's ground-breaking new book is that we are moving into an era of contested modernity.

Using new research and considering a multidisciplinary set of factors, Contemporary China offers a comprehensive exploration of the making of contemporary China.

Can China and the United States bridge their political differences? Are those differences as large as conventional wisdom suggests? Thirty years after formal U.S.-Chinese diplomatic relations were established, A Bridge Too Far? addresses these essential questions by bridging the academic divide separating scholars who study these countries from Chinese and Western political science perspectives. Rather than bringing together China specialists exclusively, then, this book allows a broad range of scholars using Western analytical tools to examine Chinese politics and political theory in relation to the United States. It also allows Chinese scholars to examine specific policy areas related to countries and thereby confirm or contest the broader analysis offered by their outsider counterparts.

This is a study of intellectual conceptions of sex and sexuality in China from roughly 500 B.C. to A.D. 400. Ancient Chinese writers discussed sex openly and seriously as one of the most important topics of human speculation. This sophisticated and long-standing tradition has been almost entirely neglected by historians for a number of reasons that will be considered presently. The consequence is that studies of writings dealing with sex are sorely needed to redress our ignorance of a subject that was central to the ancient Chinese tradition.

China, Japan and Korea Travel Guides (DK Eyewitness Travel Guides, Frommer's, Hunter Travel Guides, Lonely Planet, Rough Guides).

How Buddhism Acquired a Soul on the Way to China tells the story of the spread of Buddhist religious thinking and practice from India to China and how, along the way, a religion was changed. While Indian Buddhists had constructed their ideas of self by means of empiricism, anti-Brahmanism and analytic reasoning, Chinese Buddhists did so by means of non-analytic insights, utilising pre-established epistemology and cosmogony. Furthermore, many specific Buddhist ideas were transformed when exchanged from an Indian to a Chinese context, often through the work of translators concept-matching Buddhist and Daoist terms.

One of the most popular and controversial Chinese history books ever written, China under the Empress Dowager is also one of the best. Authors Bland and Backhouse take you inside the Forbidden City during the reign of Empress Dowager Cixi (1861-1908), a world of power-thirsty eunuchs, concubines and Mandarins, intrigue, bitter antagonism and ruthless reprisals. The book was unique for its time in its reliance on Chinese source materials, some of which may have been fabricated. As entertaining as it is enlightening, the book that presaged the fall of the Qing dynasty is as readable today as it ever was.

This true story of the Bai Family in China traces how their dev tion to truth placed them on a collision course with the Communist Party. When they became practitioners of Falun Gong, it paved the way for a painful and torturous, yet enlightening, path in life, especially for the two brilliant brothers Xiaojun and Shaohua. After the Chinese Communist regime began its systematic repression of Falun Gong practitioners in 1999, Bai Xiaojun was tortured to death in one of the laogai or "re-education through labour" camps. His brother Bai Shaohua also disappeared in another such prison for the years. Through blood and sweat, Shaohua made it alive out of prison but was once again abducted in early February, 2008.