The Global in the Local: A Century of War, Commerce, and Technology in China
Xin Zhang
Apr 2023 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by David Lee Huynh
headphones
Audiobook
6 hr 36 min
Unabridged
family_home
Eligible
info
reportRatings and reviews aren’t verified Learn More
Want a 39 min sample? Listen anytime, even offline.
Add
About this audiobook
Fear swept Zhenjiang as British soldiers gathered outside the city walls in the summer of 1842. Already suspicious of foreigners, locals had also heard of the suffering the British inflicted two months earlier, in Zhapu. A wave of suicides and mercy killings ensued: rather than leave their families to the invaders, hundreds of women killed themselves and their children or died at the hands of male family members. British observers decried an "Asian culture" of ritual suicide. In reality, the event was sui generis-a tragic result of colliding local and global forces in nineteenth-century China. Xin Zhang's groundbreaking history examines the intense negotiations between local societies and global changes that created modern China. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, world-historic political, economic, and technological developments transformed the textures of everyday life in places like Zhenjiang, a midsize river town in China's prosperous Lower Yangzi region. Drawing on rare primary sources, including handwritten diaries and other personal writings, Zhang offers a ground-level view of globalization in the city. Far from passive recipients, the Chinese leveraged, resisted, and made change for themselves. The Global in the Local argues that globalization is inevitably refracted through local particularities.
About the author
Xin Zhang is the author of Social Transformation in Modern China: The State and Local Elites in Henan, 1900-1937. He is professor of history at Indiana University Indianapolis and a member of the Association for Asian Studies.
David Lee Huynh is an actor based in New York City. He has appeared onstage Off-Broadway and across the country as well as on film and television.
Rate this audiobook
Tell us what you think.
Listening information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can read books purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
