Anne F. Thurston

Being prepared in China, says one researcher, can mean "the difference between a headache and a productive day." Acclaimed by readers, this friendly and practical volume - now updated with important new information - offers all the details academic and other visitors need to make long-term stays in China productive, comfortable, and fun. Academic opportunities in the PRC have greatly increased in recent years. China Bound provides an overview of what we have learned from our academic exchanges with China, the opportunities now available, and resources for more information. To help visitors prepare for daily life, the book covers everything from how to obtain the correct travel documents to how to find parts for your computer. Frank discussions on the research and academic environments in China will help students, investigators, and teachers, from their initial assignment to a work unit to leaving the country with research materials intact. The book offers practical guidelines on understanding Chinese attitudes and customs toward study, research, work, and social life. New material in this edition includes an expanded section on science and social science field work. Living costs, health issues, and addresses and fax numbers for important services are updated. Guidance is offered on currency, transportation, communications, taking children to China, and other issues.

From 1954 until Mao Zedong's death twenty-two years later, Dr. Li Zhisui was the Chinese ruler's personal physician, which put him in almost daily - and increasingly intimate - contact with Mao and his inner circle. For most of these years, Mao's health was excellent; thus he and the doctor had time to discuss political and personal matters. Dr. Li recorded many of these conversations in his diaries as well as in his memory. In The Private Life of Chairman Mao he vividly reconstructs his extraordinary experience. The result is a book that will profoundly alter our view of Chairman Mao and of China under his rule. . Dr. Li clarifies numerous long-standing puzzles, such as the true nature of Mao's feelings toward the United States and the Soviet Union. He describes Mao's deliberate rudeness toward Khrushchev when the Soviet leader paid his secret visit to Beijing in 1958, and we learn here, for the first time, how Mao came to invite the American table tennis team to China, a decision that led to Nixon's historic visit a few months later. We also learn why Mao took the disastrous Great Leap Forward, which resulted in the worst famine in recorded history, and his equally strange reason for risking war with the United States by shelling the Taiwanese islands of Quemoy and Matsu. Dr. Li supplies surprising portraits of Zhou Enlai and many other top leaders. He describes Mao's perverse relationship with his wife, and gives us insight into the sexual politics of Mao's court. We witness Mao's bizarre death and the even stranger events that followed it. Dr. Li tells of Mao's remarkable gift for intimacy, as well as of his indifference to the suffering and deaths of millions of his fellow Chinese, including old comrades. Readers will find here a full and accurate account of Mao's sex life, and of such personal details as his peculiar sleeping arrangements and his dependency on barbiturates.

Traces the life of the fourteenth Dalai Lama's older brother, who became the center of the Tibetan independence movement following his brother's exile, providing details on their childhood and the political crisis that has brought him face to face with such leaders as Chiang Kai-shek and Jawaharlal Nehru.