The story of The White Snake is one of the "four great narratives" of China and yet it is almost unknown in the West. It is as much a founding text in China as The Odyssey is in the West. Like The Odyssey, it is not only an enchanting tale full of adventure, monsters, and romance, it also has something profound to say about human nature. In its more modern iterations it argues strongly for tolerance of the strange, the uncanny, and for compassion for human frailty. It drives home the argument that love is without boundary and is transformative. The Global White Snake is a major, accessible contribution to our knowledge of the story, its traditional interpretations and its importance throughout history; at the same time, it offers a refreshing new reading of the text as surprisingly disruptive and revolutionary. Anyone with an interest in the story, or in the uses of the fantastic and the fabulous, will want to read this book. It highlights a spirit of persistent anti-authoritarianism and tolerance for the strange and the unusual that the average American has not particularly associated with China throughout its modern transformations. The book creates a gentle yet persuasive counterargument to the prevailing discourse of "cultural appropriation" as high crime. It shows how Lady White Snake travels through a multitude of translations and adaptations across cultures, time, geography, and media, transforming from demoness to goddess, and continues the circle all over again, her story bending and twisting in meaning, always on the move and in mediation. It implies that culture itself is that which appropriates. Culture is on the move; its artifacts are always in the process of transformation, and this ability to travel and transform is what keeps them alive as they shed skin after skin to reach new stages of life and afterlife.

The story of The White Snake is one of the "four great narratives" of China and yet it is almost unknown in the West. It is as much a founding text in China as The Odyssey is in the West. Like The Odyssey, it is not only an enchanting tale full of adventure, monsters, and romance, it also has something profound to say about human nature. In its more modern iterations it argues strongly for tolerance of the strange, the uncanny, and for compassion for human frailty. It drives home the argument that love is without boundary and is transformative. The Global White Snake is a major, accessible contribution to our knowledge of the story, its traditional interpretations and its importance throughout history; at the same time, it offers a refreshing new reading of the text as surprisingly disruptive and revolutionary. Anyone with an interest in the story, or in the uses of the fantastic and the fabulous, will want to read this book. It highlights a spirit of persistent anti-authoritarianism and tolerance for the strange and the unusual that the average American has not particularly associated with China throughout its modern transformations. The book creates a gentle yet persuasive counterargument to the prevailing discourse of "cultural appropriation" as high crime. It shows how Lady White Snake travels through a multitude of translations and adaptations across cultures, time, geography, and media, transforming from demoness to goddess, and continues the circle all over again, her story bending and twisting in meaning, always on the move and in mediation. It implies that culture itself is that which appropriates. Culture is on the move; its artifacts are always in the process of transformation, and this ability to travel and transform is what keeps them alive as they shed skin after skin to reach new stages of life and afterlife.

The Avant-Garde and the Popular in China examines avant-garde performance as an important political force shaping popular culture in modern China, focusing on artist and activist Tian Han. This is the first book to analyze Han's art and activism and to explore how an important group of Chinese performing artists invested in politics and the pursuit of the avant-garde came to terms with different ways of being "popular" in modern times. The book traces Han's trajectory through key moments in the evolution of twentieth-century Chinese national culture, from the Christian socialist cosmopolitanism of post-WWI Tokyo to the urban modernism of Shanghai in 1920s and 1930s, then into the Chinese hinterland during the late 1930s and 40s, and finally to the Communist Beijing of the 1950s, revealing the dynamic interplay of art and politicsthroughout this period. The figure of Tian Han exemplifies the instability of conventional delineations between the avant-garde, popular culture, and political propaganda. Understanding Tian Han in his time sheds light upon a new generation of contemporary Chinese avant-gardists (Ai Wei Wei being the best known), who, half a century later, are similarly engaging national politics and popular culture. Luo shows how, rather than a landscape of alienated avant-gardists resisting institutional control on the one hand and a top-down, monolithic Socialist culture on the other, we find a cultural milieu where the avant-garde engaged creatively with popular forms and where both the avant-garde and the popular converged upon political engagement.

This brief introduces the classification and mechanism of density gradient ultracentrifugation (DGUC) method with rich examples showing the versatility of such an efficient separation technique. It also gives a strict mathematical description and a computational optimization model to predict the best separation parameters for a given colloidal system. The concept of "Lab in a tube" is proposed in the last chapter, which allows the size-property relationship investigation, synthetic optimization and reaction/assembly mechanism exploration etc.