In this book the authors offer their unique perspectives on the important roles Chinese students and intellectuals played in the shaping of the twentieth-century China. Their answers to these pivotal questions explore new nationalistic spirit, modern world-views, and willingness of self-sacrifice, which had attributed to the spontaneous actions of the students as a "New Culture" emerged during the May Fourth Movement. These articles show how China nurtured these spontaneous student movements, even though the Nationalist Party in the Republic of China and the Communist Party in the People's Republic had exerted tight control over schools. Both governments established organizations as well as operations among students that effectively turned some of the student movements into a political instrument by the parties for their own agenda.

Eating Grass, Drinking Wine is a gripping memoir of the life of one woman and her family, which began in China under Mao Zedong in the 1950's. Surviving hardships and tribulations, she survived and made it to the United States where her life transformed for the better. This book is filled with powerful reflections of a China of the not too distant past. Survival was not necessarily a given in those very challenging years. Many people the author knew including relatives either died or disappeared in mass campaigns Mao launched, such as the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. It sheds light on a world much different than that of the West, told through the eyes of someone who lived it. This book also demonstrates the author's passion for and gratitude to her adopted homeland and the people she's met.

How did an obscure provincial teachers college produce graduates who would go on to become founders and ideologues of the Chinese Communist Party? Mao Zedong, Cai Hesen, Xiao Zisheng, and others attended the Hunan First Normal School. Focusing on their alma mater, this work explores the critical but overlooked role modern schools played in sowing the seeds of revolution in the minds of students seeking modern education in the 1910s. The Hunan First Normal School was one of many reformed schools established in China in the early twentieth century in response to the urgent need to modernize the nation. Its history is a tapestry woven of traditional Chinese and modern Western threads. Chinese tradition figured significantly in the character of the school, yet Western ideas and contemporary social, political, and intellectual circumstances strongly shaped its policies and practices. Examining the background, curriculum, and the reforms of the school, as well as its teachers and radical students, Liyan Liu argues that China s modern schools provided a venue that nurtured and spread new ideas, including Communist revolution."