Tide Players - by Jianying Zha (Paperback)

About the Book

In "Tide Players," acclaimed author Jianying Zha depicts a new generation of movers and shakers who are transforming today's China. In a half-dozen sharply etched and nuanced profiles, "Tide Players" captures both the concrete detail and the epic dimension of life in the world's fastest-growing economy.
Zha's vivid cast of characters includes an unlikely couple who teamed up to become the country's leading real-estate moguls; a gifted chameleon who transformed himself from Mao's favorite "barefoot doctor" during the Cultural Revolution to a publishing maverick; and a tycoon of home-electronic chain stores who insisted on avenging his mother, who had been executed as "a counterrevolutionary criminal." Alongside these entrepreneurs, Zha also brings us the intellectuals: a cantankerous professor at China's top university; a former cultural minister turned prolific writer; and Zha's own brother, a dissident who served a nine-year prison term for helping to found the China Democracy Party.
Zha's insightful insider-outsider portraits garnered nationwide acclaim, as they offer a picture of a China that few Western readers have seen before.

Book Synopsis

In Tide Players, acclaimed author Jianying Zha depicts a new generation of movers and shakers who are transforming today's China. In a half-dozen sharply etched and nuanced profiles, Tide Players captures both the concrete detail and the epic dimension of life in the world's fastest-growing economy.

Zha's vivid cast of characters includes an unlikely couple who teamed up to become the country's leading real-estate moguls; a gifted chameleon who transformed himself from Mao's favorite "barefoot doctor" during the Cultural Revolution to a publishing maverick; and a tycoon of home-electronic chain stores who insisted on avenging his mother, who had been executed as "a counterrevolutionary criminal." Alongside these entrepreneurs, Zha also brings us the intellectuals: a cantankerous professor at China's top university; a former cultural minister turned prolific writer; and Zha's own brother, a dissident who served a nine-year prison term for helping to found the China Democracy Party.

Zha's insightful insider-outsider portraits garnered nationwide acclaim, as they offer a picture of a China that few Western readers have seen before.

Review Quotes

A Best Book of 2011
--The Economist

"Remarkable and fast paced."
--Financial Times

"Zha beautifully combines the hard-earned expertise of an insider with the moral candor of an outsider. In exploring China's defining struggles . . . [she] illuminate[s] the shadows in between, with empathy and courage."
--Evan Osnos, The New Yorker

"If you want to understand the astonishing developments in China's contemporary cultural life . . . there could be no surer or more entertaining guide than Zha."
--K. Anthony Appiah, Princeton University

"An engaging, comprehensible cross-section of the personalities and cultural concerns rising with China's ascent."
--Kirkus

"No one who writes in English about contemporary China is more thoroughly bilingual and bicultural than Jianying Zha. She truly 'gets it.'"
--Perry Link, author of Evening Chats in Beijing

About the Author

Jianying Zha is a writer, media critic, and China representative of the India China Institute at The New School. She is the author of "China Pop" and three collections of fiction and two nonfiction books in Chinese, including "The Eighties," an award-winning cultural retrospective of the 1980s in China. She has published widely in both Chinese and English for a variety of publications, including the "New Yorker," the "New York Times," "Dushu," and "Wanxiang." She lives in Beijing and New York.