MAO AND CHINA: FROM REVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION by STANLEY KARNOW 592 pages. Viking. $15. One of the best-known characters of Chinese folklore is Monkey, who is forever running amuck and terrorizing celestial Establishment figures like the Jade Emperor. As Stanley Karnow notes in his account of the Cultural Revolution, Monkey also happens to be one of Mao Tse-tung's favorite characters. He has even likened himself to Monkey in a poem, wielding the great cudgel of "class struggle" against his enemies ...

In 2005, Penguin paid $100,000 for the English-language rights to Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem, a coming-of-age tale set in Inner Mongolia. It was a record sum for a Chinese novel. In 2008, the same publishing house issued, amid much brouhaha, Zhu Wen's I Love Dollars, a lively look at the dark side of China's boom. And it has just announced plans to bring more Chinese writers to the attention of international readers by expanding its Beijing operations. Clearly, Penguin ...

Hundreds of residents of the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou took to the streets on Monday to protest plans to build a trash incinerator in their neighborhood. In front of the municipal headquarters for one of China's largest cities, it was an unusually prominent place for a civic demonstration. And rarely has a local Chinese demonstration been so conspicuous online, where activists posted photos and comments about events as they unfolded. Those messages were then relayed to a broader audience on social networking sites like ...

On Oct. 20, China announced, almost casually, that it was canceling 150 items of maturing government debt owed to it by 32 African countries. The announcement came a few days before a meeting between China's top legislator Wu Bangguo and Kenneth Marende, the Speaker of Kenya's National Assembly, to discuss cooperation between the two countries. Further, on Nov. 8, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao was to attend the opening ceremony of the 4th Ministerial Conference of the Forum on China-Africa ...

China and the US resolved several thorny trade disputes on Thursday even as Beijing confirmed it was investigating potential dumping of US-made cars in the Chinese market.

In some of the photos, the young children are wearing bibs and slight smiles can be seen on their chubby faces.International military forces have been treating the case as a "potential hijacking," Lt. Ian Jones of Britain's Royal Navy told CNN Tuesday. "We have no confirmation that anything has been pirated," he added. There are many possibilities, he said, adding he was aware of the reports of piracy but that hijacking was "far from certain." Britain's Foreign Office issued ...

Champions Barcelona bounced back from a dismal week to return to the top of the Spanish league with a 6-1 crushing of Real Zaragoza on Sunday night.There they may be free from the hunter's rifle, but they are not completely free from human contact or immune to the conflict between the two sides. Wild boar that have lost legs to landmines can be seen hobbling out from the forests, and when two gorals face each other from either side of ...

Chinese authorities arrested dozens in an alleged child trafficking ring that sold at least 52 babies nationwide, state media said.

Several armed men Thursday abducted a French national working for the Red Cross in Sudan's volatile Darfur region, the agency said. China has also become the biggest vehicle market in the world this year and car sales expanded an extraordinary 78 per cent last month from a year ago. Over the National Day holiday in early October, retailers say large flat-screen TVs flew off the shelves. Throughout the biggest external crisis to hit the Chinese economy in at least a ...

China's long simmering battle against corruption has come to a boil, this time in Chongqing, the largest megalopolis in the world. A massive crackdown has implicated millionaires, gangsters, and even police officers. Known as "dahei" (combat triads), the campaign has put the spotlight on organized crime and how it has infested local bureaucracy and businesses through bribery, extortion, blackmail and violence. Criminal trials are underway following months of police investigation. Details of murky cases are trickling out. Among those ...