Tide Players
The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
Tide Players depicts a new generation of entrepreneurs and intellectuals in a rapidly transforming China through six sharply etched and nuanced profiles which capture both the concrete detail and the epic dimension of life in contemporary Beijing.
The cast of characters includes: an unlikely couple who teamed up to become the country’s leading real estate mogul; a gifted chameleon who transformed himself from Mao’s favorite “barefoot doctor” during the Cultural Revolution to a publishing maverick; a tycoon of home electronic chain stores who insisted on avenging his mother, “a counter-revolutionary criminal” executed in the most brutal manner. Zha also brings us to the intellectuals: the cantankerous professors at Beida, China’s number-one university; a famous, prolific writer who, after stepping down as the cultural minister, kept people divided about whether he is an apologist for the Chinese Communist Party or a great author that might one day win a Nobel Prize in literature. Then there is the heart-rending story of Zha’s own brother, a dissident who served a nine-year prison term for helping to found the China Democracy Party, yet remains an unrepentant idealist.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
China powerful, expanding, and evolving remains inscrutable to Westerners confounded by its contradictions, as well as the rapidity of its growth and the intensity of its repressive government. A child of the Cultural Revolution, Zha (China Pop) offers a nuanced and textured picture of a country constrained by totalitarianism but buoyed by the pioneering spirit and resilience of its people. The author observes a shift from a post-Tiananmen political idealism to a steely but hopeful pragmatism among many of her compatriots. It's a conflict that exists at the heart of Chinese contemporary culture, and one Zha illuminates through interviews with writers and academics dodging or suffering censorship, her own political dissident brother languishing in jail, or Zhang Dazhong, who, motivated by the political imprisonment of his mother, built a fortune and spent his life attempting to clear her name. Zha's effort is an honest and thoughtful portrait that forces outsiders to check their preconceptions at the door and see China as a convergence of passion and trauma, memory and hope.
