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The authors of this text believe that “areas” as assemblages of social processes requiring distinct, culture-bound explanations cannot be replaced with global theories, but that the meaning of “the area” can be different depending on the question one studies. The study of China and Chinese, in particular, is a good arena to challenge the disciplinary and geographic boundaries of conventional area studies for several reasons. First, because of the wealth of simultaneous processes of rapid political, social, and discursive change in contemporary Chinese society; second, because of the problematic relationship between state, territory, nation, and ethnicity in China; third, because China studies, perhaps more than any other area studies at the moment, is a highly competitive political and academic industry whose internal working must be critically examined. In addition, the subject of China has become one of the primary loci of contesting the meanings of globalization and the universality versus relativity of “values” and modernity.

From the respected author of one of the best books on World War II combat, comes an equally captivating saga of battle recovery, healing, and homecoming. 

China Marine is the long-awaited sequel to E. B. Sledge’s critically acclaimed memoir, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa. Picking up where his previous memoir leaves off, Sledge, a young marine in the First Division, traces his company’s movements and charts his own difficult passage to peace following his horrific experiences in the Pacific. He reflects on his duty in the ancient city of Peiping (now Beijing) and recounts the difficulty of returning to his hometown of Mobile, Alabama, and resuming civilian life haunted by the shadows of close combat.

Distinguished historians have praised Sledge’s first book as the definitive rifleman’s account of World War II, ranking it with the Civil War’s Red Badge of Courage and World War I’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Although With the Old Breed ends with the surrender of Japan, marines in the Pacific were still faced with the mission of disarming the immense Japanese forces on the Asian mainland and reestablishing order. For infantrymen so long engaged in the savage and surreal world of close combat, there remained the personal tasks of regaining normalcy and dealing with suppressed memories, fears, and guilt. 

In China Marine, E. B. Sledge completes his story and provides emotional closure to the searing events detailed in his first memoir. He speaks frankly about the real costs of war, emotional and psychological as well as physical, and explains the lifetime loyalties that develop between men who face fear, loss, and horror together. That bond becomes one of the newfound treasures of life after battle.

With his hallmark style of simplicity, directness, and lack of sentimentality, "Sledgehammer" has given us yet another great document of war literature.

From the Pacific’s brutality to China’s uneasy peace—one Marine’s fight to reclaim himself.

In this powerful anniversary edition of China Marine, Eugene B. Sledge—acclaimed author of the classic WWII memoir With the Old Breed—offers an unforgettable portrait of a young Marine navigating the uneasy peace that followed history’s most brutal war. Already celebrated for his visceral honesty and humanity, Sledge deepened his legacy with this rare account of the U.S. occupation of North China, a period as volatile as it was transformative. 

Sledge’s memoirs remain enduringly popular because they never flinch from the truth. His reflections resonate across generations, offering readers not only a veteran’s hard-won wisdom but a moving story of survival, friendship, trauma, and the long journey back to ordinary life. His life and words have become part of American cultural memory, featured prominently in both Ken Burns’s PBS series The War and the HBO production The Pacific. 

This special anniversary edition honors that legacy with a new preface by his son, bestselling author John Sledge and a new foreword by the eminent military historian John McManus, who together illuminate Sledge’s continued relevance in understanding war and its aftermath. 

Intimate, vivid, and deeply human, China Marine stands as a timeless testament to courage, resilience, and the costs of peace after war.

Three hundred million Chinese have left the countryside for the cities since the 1980s, in a flood wave of labor migration that has fueled China’s rise. Known as ‘battlers,’ they belong to a new underclass who face exploitation, discrimination, and harrowing insecurity. And they write poetry.

Battler poetry speaks of being ground down in the factory workshop, of being forced into sex work, of being robbed of your youth. It has made its way into mass media and labor activism, and developed uneasy relations with the literary establishment. It aligns with writing elsewhere in the world that shows the power of poetry as an expression of sociopolitical identity.

Who are China’s battler poets? Where do they find the time and energy, after a 12-hour shift on the assembly line or on a courier moped in big-city traffic? What is their poetry like? Where is it published? Who reads it? What happens when it travels abroad? How has the Chinese state responded? What can battler poetry tell us about the nexus of aesthetics and social experience, in a world where inequality reigns?

China’s Battler Poetry tells the gripping story of an ‘unlikely’ genre. Building on textual and cultural analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, and the collection of underground source material, it sits at the interface of the humanities and social science. It is driven by a desire to understand poetry as both art and social practice, looking at its words through the lifeworlds of its authors and the other way around.

China’s Date Debate is an in-depth investigation of the Chinese Communist Party’s remapping of China’s World War II timeline from eight years (1937–1945) to fourteen years (1931–1945). Instead of the previously accepted starting date of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident on July 7, 1937, the Chinese Communist Party defined the war’s starting date as the Mukden Incident on September 18, 1931, which triggered the Japanese Kwantung Army’s invasion of Manchuria. Since the 1980s, scholars from Manchuria have demanded a fourteen-year war timeline to encompass the invasion of their homeland. By the 1990s, other scholars took notice and started to counter with claims that the eight-year timeline was the more accurate. Subsequently, a fierce “date debate” emerged between the two sides that was only resolved by the 2017 proclamation from the Ministry of Education. 

Emily Matson demonstrates that the decision to set China’s World War II timeline at fourteen years was not merely a top-down decision, but was influenced by decades of Manchurian scholarship on the war. China’s Date Debate recenters Manchuria as a region of critical importance for China’s national identity today and the implications of this “date debate” on the Chinese Communist Party’s domestic legitimacy and international image. 

A tour de force chronicling the development of realism in Chinese cinema

 

The history of Chinese cinema is as long and complicated as the tumultuous history of China itself. Be it the silent, the Communist, or the contemporary, each Chinese cinematic era has necessitated its own form in conversation with broader trends in politics and culture. 

In Chinese Film, Jason McGrath tells this fascinating story by tracing the varied claims to cinematic realism made by Chinese filmmakers, officials, critics, and scholars. Understanding realism as a historical dynamic that is both enabled and mitigated by aesthetic conventions of the day, he analyzes it across six different types of claims: ontological, perceptual, fictional, social, prescriptive, and apophatic.

Through this method, McGrath makes major claims not just about Chinese cinema but also about realism as an aesthetic form that negotiates between cultural conventions and the ever-evolving real. He comes to envision it as more than just a cinematic question, showing how the struggle for realism is central to the Chinese struggle for modernity itself.

Since Singapore declared independence from Malaysia in 1965, Chinese street opera has played a significant role in defining Singaporean identity. Carefully tracing the history of amateur and professional performances in Singapore, Tong Soon Lee reflects on the role of street performance in fostering cultural nationalism and entrepreneurship. He explains that the government welcomes Chinese street opera performances because they combine tradition and modernism and promote a national culture that brings together Singapore's four main ethnic groups--Eurasian, Malay, Chinese, and South Asian.

Chinese Street Opera in Singapore documents the ways in which this politically motivated art form continues to be influenced and transformed by Singaporean politics, ideology, and context in the twenty-first century. By performing Chinese street opera, amateur troupes preserve their rich heritage, underscoring the Confucian mind-set that a learned person engages in the arts for moral and unselfish purposes. Educated performers also control behavior, emotions, and values. They are creative and innovative, and their use of new technologies indicates a modern, entrepreneurial spirit. Their performances bring together diverse ethnic groups to watch and perform, Lee argues, while also encouraging a national attitude focused on both remembering the past and preparing for the future in Singapore.