/lit/ - Literature

>>11773437
>Liberalism still marches forward without any real contest. Any opponents are simply reactions completely determined by their opposition to liberalism, rather than any affirmation of their own ideas.
laughing out loud

Please recommend me nonfic that helps me understand contemporary China.

>>11540180
Sooner or later some high-ranking CCP individual--I mean one of the "princes" currently running things, or being set up to run things--is going to be exposed as a secret Christian, and that's going to be a huge shitshow. It's inevitable.

>>10726506
Now

>china is to be the dominant economy of the world within this decade
>failed

inb4 real communism has never been tried

>>10662662
The Chinese seem to do a pretty good job at it. They're a great example of making authoritarianism work with modern technology.

>>9908554
I wonder if this means that, under Trump, American and Russia will combine to take down China. China is the greatest current threat to the West and needs to be knuckled under at all costs. All stops must be pulled out to cripple and dismantle China, up to and including warfare.

>>9028740
>50 years

Much sooner. Chinks don't feel queasy about CRISPR babbies, AI and automation.

>In Xi’s two-hour talk, Guancha reports, the president reminisced about his youth, and how much he loved Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. On his first visit to Cuba, he specifically visited the locale where Hemingway wrote that novel, and on his second visit, he went to a bar Hemingway frequented and “ordered Hemingway’s favorite drink — rum with mint leaves and ice cubes”. We suspect he may have been referring to a Mojito. The report continued with the the lengthy reading list Xi had disclosed previously:

>“…Krylov, Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Nekrasov, Chernyshevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Sholokhov, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Sartre, Montaigne, La Fontaine, Molière, Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, Flaubert, Alexandre Dumas (fils), Maupassant, and Romain Rolland… ‘Not to exaggerate, I read all the classic literary works I could find at that time’.”

>With his stunning litany of high-brow European tastes, Xi also recalled reading The Red and the Black and War and Peace, and confessed that he likes Pushkin’s love poems and Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, and preferred Tolstoy over Dostoyevsky. He said he was overwhelmed by Hugo’s Les Misérables and Ninety-Three, and was a fan of Cézanne and Degas.

>New additions to his list of authors include Byron, Shelley, George Bernard Shaw, Dickens, Goethe, Schiller, Heinrich Heine, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Jack London. Xi, evidently, reads rather a lot.

Occident BTFO.

>In Xi’s two-hour talk, Guancha reports, the president reminisced about his youth, and how much he loved Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. On his first visit to Cuba, he specifically visited the locale where Hemingway wrote that novel, and on his second visit, he went to a bar Hemingway frequented and “ordered Hemingway’s favorite drink — rum with mint leaves and ice cubes”. We suspect he may have been referring to a Mojito. The report continued with the the lengthy reading list Xi had disclosed previously:

>“…Krylov, Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Nekrasov, Chernyshevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Sholokhov, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Sartre, Montaigne, La Fontaine, Molière, Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, Flaubert, Alexandre Dumas (fils), Maupassant, and Romain Rolland… ‘Not to exaggerate, I read all the classic literary works I could find at that time’.”

>With his stunning litany of high-brow European tastes, Xi also recalled reading The Red and the Black and War and Peace, and confessed that he likes Pushkin’s love poems and Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, and preferred Tolstoy over Dostoyevsky. He said he was overwhelmed by Hugo’s Les Misérables and Ninety-Three, and was a fan of Cézanne and Degas.

>New additions to his list of authors include Byron, Shelley, George Bernard Shaw, Dickens, Goethe, Schiller, Heinrich Heine, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Jack London. Xi, evidently, reads rather a lot.

>>8835272
>tfw your first ubermensch factory is up and running while the west is still talking about its feelings regarding genetic engineering

>When he was interviewed in Sochi during the 2014 Winter Olympics, he provided a laundry list of Russian authors he admired: “Krylov, Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Nekrasov, Chernyshevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, [and] Sholokhov.” In France a month later, Xi had a similar list handy of French figures: Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Sartre, Montaigne, La Fontaine, Molière, Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, Flaubert, Alexandre Dumas fils, Maupassant, Romain Rolland, and Jules Verne. In Germany he noted his fondness for Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Heidegger, and Marcuse and spoke of the “enchanting melodies by Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms.

Can America even compete?

>>8298636
>gymrats
>ubermensch

wrong priorities mate, they might as well be literal women

>>8201179
>Nobody gives a shit if there won't be any more white people.
That's what they think until they realise the Chinese call the shots after the great white demise and the Chinese aren't particularly sensitive to brown people playing the victim to get what they want.

>>8185338
Hit me with a quotation, comrade

>>8169019
>my mommy says the tests don't matter i'm still her smart little boy

>>8110535
>You have more in common with a modern East Asian than you do with the ancient Greeks
No shit, considering I am one. I just find it funny that westerners has such an hardon for anything eastern because they think it's exotic and better because of that. Like white middle class buddhists. Try to pull your head out of your asshole lah.
>>8111659
>enslaved to the West capitalism.
Good joke.

>>5134454
butthurt Amerifat detected

Anyway OP, to understand modern China you need to understand three things: the history (roughly) of pre-Communist China, the myths and ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, and the reality of the Chinese Communist Party. For a basic crash course I'd recommend Jonathan Spence as >>5134440
says, especially his Penguin History of Modern China, although he's not really all that hot on post-Mao China. For a more broad history, John Keay's China: A History. For the Party there's, well, Richard McGregor's The Party. For Mao there's Mao The Real Story by Alexander Pantsov and The Battle for China's Past by Mobo Gao, and as a general rule don't trust most other specialised writing on the man himself, like the awful Chang and Halliday book, because it's so badly sourced and inaccurate you won't get a realistic picture of the period beyond the cartoonish "Mao was evil and killed billions of Chinese for fun".

And for a very penetrating look at the biggest problem with the Chinese Communist Party, A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel, by Pin Ho and Wenguang Huang. It's an account of the Bo Xilai affair. Oh, and When China Rules The World by Martin Jacques, for what our Sinophobic friend up there is terrified of.

I've lived in China for a while and I'd say that these are the texts that can give you the best broad understanding of the political life of China today. But a general rule is don't take anything, even what I'm saying, for granted.

>>5078012
>mfw an eastern European blames someone else for his problems yet again

>>5061472
>he says, posting on 4chan anyway

>>5047889
>tfw left communists still mad nearly a hundred years on

>>5021492
>tfw every era has people saying the past was much better
>tfw no fucks are ever given about this by most of society
>tfw /lit/'s very noisy traditionalist community will never accomplish anything

>>5009840
>all this eternal western butthurt