Throughout its imperial golden ages, China was the world's most developed nation, home to advanced technologies, a robust economy, and thriving cities. Its thousands of years of cultural and artistic achievements combined with its vastness and ethnic complexity have made China both fascinating and forbidding for those encountering it for the first time.

This new volume offers readers a concise, single-stop introduction to Chinese history, culture, economics, politics, and social issues. As they trace China's history from the creation stories of ancient Chinese myths to the Communist...

This volume in the Contemporary Anarchist Studies series focuses on anti-statist critiques in ancient and modern China and demonstrates that China does not have an unchallenged authoritarian political culture.

Treating anarchism as a critique of centralized state power, the work first examines radical Daoist thought from the 4th century BCE to the 9th century CE and compares Daoist philosophers and poets to Western anarchist and utopian thinkers. This is followed by a survey of anarchist themes in dissident thought in the People's Republic of China from 1949 to the present. A...