Will the Boat Sink the Water
The Life of China's Peasants
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Narrated by:
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James Chen
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By:
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Chen Guidi
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Wu Chuntao
About this listen
The Chinese Economic miracle is happening despite, not because of, China's 900 million peasants. They are missing from the portraits of booming Shanghai, or Beijing. Many of China's underclass live under a feudalistic system unchanged since the 15th century.
Wu Chuntao and Chen Guidi undertook a three-year survey of what had happened to the peasants in one of the poorest provinces, Anhui, asking the question: have the peasants been betrayed by the revolution undertaken in their name by Mao and his successors?
The result is a brilliant narrative of life among the poor, a vivid portrait of the petty dictators that run China's villages and counties, and the consequences of their bullying despotism on the people they administer.Told principally through four dramatic narratives, Will the Boat Sink the Water? gives voice to the unheard masses and looks beneath the gloss of the new China to find the truth about its vast population of rural poor.
©2007 Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao (P)2009 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Things you'd never imagine
- By LEE on 12-27-19
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Age of Ambition
- Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
- By: Evan Osnos
- Narrated by: Evan Osnos, George Backman
- Length: 16 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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As the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, Evan Osnos was on the ground in China for years, witness to profound political, economic, and cultural upheaval. In Age of Ambition, he describes the greatest collision taking place in that country: the clash between the rise of the individual and the Communist Party’s struggle to retain control.
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Come back when you have a warrant!
- By Neuron on 11-06-15
By: Evan Osnos
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Nemesis
- One Man and the Battle for Rio
- By: Misha Glenny
- Narrated by: Zach Villa
- Length: 9 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Nemesis is the story of an ordinary man who became the king of the largest slum in Rio, the head of a drug cartel, and perhaps Brazil's most wanted criminal. It's a gripping tale of gold hunters and evangelical pastors, bent police and rich-kid addicts, quixotic politicians and drug lords with math degrees. Traversing through rain forests and high-security prisons, filthy slums and glittering shopping malls, this is also the story of how change came to Brazil.
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Amazing sobriety
- By Fabio Azeredo on 04-29-16
By: Misha Glenny
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Mao
- The Unknown Story
- By: Jung Chang, Jon Halliday
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 29 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Based on a decade of research and on interviews with many of Mao's close circle in China who have never talked before, and with virtually everyone outside China who had significant dealings with him, this is the most authoritative biography of Mao ever written.
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Fills many gaps! Very good..but!
- By Jene on 08-07-06
By: Jung Chang, and others
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The Chain
- Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food
- By: Ted Genoways
- Narrated by: Michael Kramer
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Interviewing scores of line workers, union leaders, hog farmers, and local politicians and activists, Genoways reveals an industry pushed to its breaking point. Along the way, he exposes alarming new trends: sick or permanently disabled workers, abused animals, water and soil pollution, and mounting conflict between small towns and immigrant labor.
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Great Writing, Performance and Content
- By Kevin S. Grail on 09-29-19
By: Ted Genoways
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No Escape
- The True Story of China's Genocide of the Uyghurs
- By: Nury Turkel
- Narrated by: Stewart Lang
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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A powerful memoir by Nury Turkel lays bare China’s repression of the Uyghur people. Turkel is cofounder and board chair of the Uyghur Human Rights Project and a commissioner for the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.
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Powerfully Provocative
- By Amazon Customer on 06-01-22
By: Nury Turkel
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India
- A Portrait
- By: Patrick French
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 17 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Second only to China in the magnitude of its economic miracle and second to none in its potential to shape the new century, India is fast undergoing one of the most momentous transformations the world has ever seen. In this dazzlingly panoramic book, Patrick French chronicles that epic change, telling human stories to explain a larger national narrative. Melding on-the-ground reports with a deep knowledge of history, French exposes the cultural foundations of India’s political, economic and social complexities.
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An Epic Book by Award-Winning Author
- By morton on 10-31-11
By: Patrick French
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The Big Truck That Went By
- How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster
- By: Jonathan M. Katz
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Jonathan M. Katz
- Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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On January 12, 2010, the deadliest earthquake in the history of the Western Hemisphere struck the nation least prepared to handle one. Jonathan M. Katz, the only full-time American news correspondent in Haiti, was inside his house when it buckled along with hundreds of thousands of others. In this visceral first-hand account, Katz takes readers inside the terror of that day, the devastation visited on ordinary Haitians, and through the monumental--yet misbegotten--rescue effort that followed.
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This story angered and cheered inside me
- By rifenbc on 03-01-19
By: Jonathan M. Katz
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Neighbors
- The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland
- By: Jan T. Gross
- Narrated by: Rory Barnett
- Length: 3 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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One summer day in 1941, half of the Polish town of Jedwabne murdered the other half, 1,600 men, women, and children, all but seven of the town's Jews. Neighbors tells their story. This is a shocking, brutal story that has never before been told. It is the most important study of Polish-Jewish relations to be published in decades and should become a classic of Holocaust literature. Jan Gross pieces together eyewitness accounts and other evidence into an engulfing reconstruction of the horrific July day remembered well by locals but forgotten by history.
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interesting
- By A. Adams on 10-11-20
By: Jan T. Gross
What listeners say about Will the Boat Sink the Water
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Delano
- 02-02-10
Essential
I travel to China often, and the original Chinese version of this book is incredibly influential there. Even though it's been banned, illegal copies of it are sold all over and practically everyone has read it or at least knows it. Too many books in English on China just tell Americans what they want to hear, and this is a rare chance to hear what people there really think is going wrong. Most American listeners will find that it's not to their taste. . . but that's exactly the point. It's not written for you. By listening to this book, you're eavesdropping on what people in China are saying to each other.
It's also one of the few audiobooks where the reader pronounces Chinese names and words correctly. Usually.
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7 people found this helpful
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- Sparkly
- 08-08-13
Shines Light on the Powerless
Corruption and extortion run amok, and as is customary, the poorest people are the most frequent victims. The individual stories in this book are similar enough to make a credible argument, yet each has detail and tragedy of its own. The majority of China's population still live in the countryside right now, and are subject to completely different rules, tax law, social services, and mobility restrictions than folks in cities. There is such a paucity of this kind of material in English right now, yet it is so important. While much of the book has to do with extortion, there are glimpses of other issues (like population policy abuse and repercussions) that appear as well, and point to more questions, more to explore.
I echo reviewer Delano: "by listening to this book, you're eavesdropping on what people in China are saying to each other." This book is essential reading for the informed global citizen.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Walter
- 10-24-11
The Elephant in the Living Room
The untold story of China's destitute rural peasant majority. The part of China remains the unacknowledged elephant-in-the-living-room in too many discussions of the Chinese economy, which tend to focus exclusively on the urban industrial sector with which the West trades. This book helps to complete the picture of what is happening in China.
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1 person found this helpful
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- matthew
- 05-31-13
Some perspective on a growing nation
This story follows the injustices committed against some of the innocent farmers in China.It tracks the corruption from a city called Bengbu to Beijing.There was a surprising amount of savagery and inequality in this rising power.The biggest take away for me was that there are five levels of government and not three like in America,so with such a system and some people with poor education the conditions are ripe for exploitation by the landed gentry.The fact that the book was banned in China really made me want to listen,but it was spectacular.I also realize if the poor in this country ever get organized they will easily overrun the wealthy.There are far more of them.Hence the title the boat is the mass majority may sink the water,which is the controlling politburo.
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Overall
- Alexandra
- 02-26-10
What is really going in China
I'd have to concur with the other reviewer that if you want to really understand how people in China perceive their situation, this is the best book out there. But be forewarned that although there is some adaptation for an American audience (mostly footnotes that I found disrupt the narrative), it was written for a domestic Chinese audience. If you know little of Chinese history and government, this book will be difficult to follow. Nonetheless, its incredibly rewarding.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Max Osterhaus
- 08-03-13
Painful life of Peasants
I was expecting a more broad-based look at rural peasant life in China (cultural practices, traditions, habits, etc.), so was a bit surprised by this very particular set of accounts of corruption and abuse and the stories that went along with that. As a bold account of those incidents, this book is incredible and I was shocked to hear how little has changed from the Maoist years of peasant abuse. The later chapters do a good job of describing a "split China" with rural and urban populations that follow very different rules, taxes, etc.
I recommend this to anyone who wants a close look act some of the abuses at the ground level in rural China and an interesting description of how individuals tried to work through the bureaucracy with varied results.
Note: it's very short and I got through it in about two days. Am eager to know more. Also, the reading out of URL addresses (even wikipedia articles) was a bit annoying...
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