Virtual Library

1959年3月10日，拉薩數萬民眾包圍達賴喇嘛的夏宮羅布林卡，阻止他按照原定計劃前往西藏軍區司令部觀看文藝演出。隨後民眾集會遊行，喊出了要求解放軍撤出西藏，要求西藏獨立的口號。那天在拉薩發生的事，史稱「1959年拉薩事件」。事件導致未滿24歲的西藏政教領袖，時任全國人大常委會副委員長、西藏自治區籌委會主任的第十四世達賴喇嘛丹增嘉措率家人和噶廈政府部分主要官員，於17日深夜離開羅布林卡，經過兩周跋涉，翻越喜馬拉雅山，前往印度尋求政治庇護。

本書是以 細緻入微的研究以及公正的立場揭示「1959年拉薩事件」歷史真相的開創性作品。

On March 10th, 1959, tens of thousands of people surrounded Norbulingka, the Dalai Lama's summer palace in Lhasa, preventing him from attending a prescheduled theater performance at the headquarters of the Tibetan Military Region. Soon afterwards, the people carried out a rally and demonstrations, shouting slogans calling for PLA withdrawal from Tibet and Tibetan independence. The events of that day later became known as the "1959 Lhasa Incident." The incident spurred the not yet twenty four-year-old Tibetan religious leader Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, co-chairman of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, and director of the Tibet Autonomous Region Planning Committee to flee Norbulingka late at night on the 17th. After a two-week journey across the Himalayas, the Dalai Lama, his family members, and some Kashag government officials sought political asylum in India.

The Green Movement protests that erupted in Iran in 2009 amid allegations of election fraud shook the Islamic Republic to its core. For the first time in decades, the adoption of serious liberal reforms seemed possible. But the opportunity proved short-lived, leaving Iranian activists and intellectuals to debate whether any path to democracy remained open.

Offering a new framework for understanding democratization in developing countries governed by authoritarian regimes, Democracy in Iran is a penetrating, historically informed analysis of Iran’s current and future prospects for reform. Beginning with the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Misagh Parsa traces the evolution of Iran’s theocratic regime, examining the challenges the Islamic Republic has overcome as well as those that remain: inequalities in wealth and income, corruption and cronyism, and a “brain drain” of highly educated professionals eager to escape Iran’s repressive confines. The political fortunes of Iranian reformers seeking to address these problems have been uneven over a period that has seen hopes raised during a reformist administration, setbacks under Ahmadinejad, and the birth of the Green Movement. Although pro-democracy activists have made progress by fits and starts, they have few tangible reforms to show for their efforts.

In Parsa’s view, the outlook for Iranian democracy is stark. Gradual institutional reforms will not be sufficient for real change, nor can the government be reformed without fundamentally rethinking its commitment to the role of religion in politics and civic life. For Iran to democratize, the options are narrowing to a single path: another revolution.

Finding Women in the State is a provocative hidden history of socialist state feminists maneuvering behind the scenes at the core of the Chinese Communist Party. These women worked to advance gender and class equality in the early People's Republic and fought to transform sexist norms and practices, all while facing fierce opposition from a male-dominated CCP leadership from the Party Central to the local government. Wang Zheng extends this investigation to the cultural realm, showing how feminists within China's film industry were working to actively create new cinematic heroines, and how they continued a New Culture anti-patriarchy heritage in socialist film production. This book illuminates not only the different visions of revolutionary transformation but also the dense entanglements among those in the top echelon of the party. Wang discusses the causes for failure of China's socialist revolution and raises fundamental questions about male dominance in social movements that aim to pursue social justice and equality. This is the first book engendering the PRC high politics and has important theoretical and methodological implications for scholars and students working in gender studies as well as China studies.

Here, in one volume: Marjane Satrapi's best-selling, internationally acclaimed graphic memoir.

Persepolis is the story of Satrapi's unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a large and loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private life and public life in a country plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the trials of adolescence far from her family; of her homecoming--both sweet and terrible; and, finally, of her self-imposed exile from her beloved homeland. It is the chronicle of a girlhood and adolescence at once outrageous and familiar, a young life entwined with the history of her country yet filled with the universal trials and joys of growing up.

Edgy, searingly observant, and candid, often heartbreaking but threaded throughout with raw humor and hard-earned wisdom--Persepolis is a stunning work from one of the most highly regarded, singularly talented graphic artists at work today.

Beginning with the bloody communist purges of the Jiangxi era of the late 1920s and early 1930s and moving forward to the wild excesses of the Cultural Revolution, Policing Chinese Politics explores the question of revolutionary violence and the political passion that propels it. “Who are our enemies, who are our friends, that is a question germane to the revolution,” wrote Mao Zedong in 1926. Michael Dutton shows just how powerful this one line was to become. It would establish the binary division of life in revolutionary China and lead to both passionate commitment and revolutionary excess. The political history of revolutionary China, he argues, is largely framed by the attempts of Mao and the Party to harness these passions.

The economic reform period that followed Mao Zedong’s rule contained a hint as to how the magic spell of political faith and commitment could be broken, but the cost of such disenchantment was considerable. This detailed, empirical tale of Chinese socialist policing is, therefore, more than simply a police story. It is a parable that offers a cogent analysis of Chinese politics generally while radically redrafting our understanding of what politics is all about. Breaking away from the traditional elite modes of political analysis that focus on personalities, factions, and betrayals, and from “rational” accounts of politics and government, Dutton provides a highly original understanding of the far-reaching consequences of acts of faith and commitment in the realm of politics.

This unorthodox scholarly work dissects the ghosts of history in order to analyze how the past--both recent and distant--haunts posterity, and in what ways the present disfigures the image of times gone by. The book presents a novel history of Communism from the perspective of its collapse, and inspects the world beyond the Fall in the distorting mirror of its imagined prehistory. Using a series of strange and darkly ironic stories, the subsequent chapters provide a close exploration of some of the essential objects of historical study: the name, the date, the dead, the relic, the pantheon, the court, the underworld, and the underground. The tension between vast distances, both in space and time, that Retroactive Justice covers, and the extremely focused analyses, provide an unexpected experience of writing and rewriting, visioning and revisioning history.

Originally published in 1938, this powerful, intensely dramatic book is the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution of 1794-1803, a revolution that began in the wake of the Bastille but became the model for the Third World liberation movements from Africa to Cuba. It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of master toward slave was commonplace and ingeniously refined. And it is the story of a barely literate slave named Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the black people of San Domingo in a successful struggle against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces and in the process helped form the first independent nation in the Caribbean.

The wave of uprisings and revolutions that swept the Middle East and North Africa between 2010 and 2012 were most vividly transmitted throughout the world not by television or even social media, but in short videos produced by the participants themselves and circulated anonymously on the internet.

In The People Are Not an Image, Snowdon explores this radical shift in revolutionary self-representation, showing that the political consequences of these videos cannot be located without reference to their aesthetic form. Looking at videos from Tunisia, Bahrain, Syria, Libya, and Egypt, Snowdon attends closely to the circumstances of both their production and circulation, drawing on a wide range of historical and theoretical material, to discover what they can tell us about the potential for revolution in our time and the possibilities of video as a genuinely decentralised and vernacular medium.

In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, rare-gem dealer Isaac Amin is arrested, wrongly accused of being a spy. Terrified by his disappearance, his family must reconcile a new world of cruelty and chaos with the collapse of everything they have known. As Isaac navigates the terrors of prison, and his wife feverishly searches for him, his children struggle with the realization that their family may soon be forced to embark on a journey of incalculable danger.