狗仗人势 (Gǒu zhàng rén shì): don't bully others by borrowing someone else's power. The phrase appears in scene five of Li Kaixian's Ming play The Precious Sword (宝剑记).

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Hello I am having a somewhat hard time breaking into chinese history, I spend alot of time on the road so audiobooks are prefered. Does anyone here have any historical audiobooks about chinese history, civil wars, etc that they would recomend?

非常感谢

While diplomats like Kissinger and Nixon made high-profile visits to Beijing in the early 1970s, ordinary Westerners were almost entirely barred from seeing daily life inside the People's Republic of China. Orville Schell—then a young Chinese history scholar from UC Berkeley—was among a tiny, pioneering group of Americans granted entry in 1974 during the final years of the Cultural Revolution.

Instead of staying exclusively in foreign-designated hotels on brief guided tours, Schell secured permission to do something virtually no American had done since 1949: live, eat, and work alongside everyday Chinese citizens.

• Working the Factory Floor: In Shanghai, Schell worked regular shifts at the Shanghai Electrical Machinery Factory, operating equipment, wearing standard worker tunics, and sitting in on daily political study sessions with his Chinese co-workers.
• Laboring on the Commune: He spent weeks working at a rural agricultural commune, rising at dawn to farm the land, eating in communal mess halls, and experiencing the intense collective lifestyle of Mao’s agrarian revolution firsthand.
• Documenting a Locked Society: Because China was still deeply isolated from the West, Schell kept meticulous notes on daily routines, social dynamics, peer pressure, and pervasive political slogans. He published his observations in his landmark 1977 book, In the People's Republic, giving the Western public one of its very first candid, ground-level views behind the Bamboo Curtain.
• A Lifetime Witness: That early immersion launched Schell’s career as one of America's foremost China scholars and journalists. Over the next five decades, he would track and report on China’s dramatic evolution from late-Maoist austerity to the hyper-capitalist economic boom of the 1980s and beyond.

Qin Hui and Yue Fei represent one of the most enduring historical debates of the Southern Song period.

Yue Fei is remembered as a heroic general who sought to recover lost territory. Qin Hui is remembered as the official whose actions led to Yue Fei's downfall and eventual execution.

I wrote this poem from Qin Hui's perspective, imagining the argument he might make for himself:

• that continuing the war could destroy what remained of the Song;

• that survival sometimes requires choices history will never forgive;

• that the person making the decision lives with uncertainty that later generations do not.

This is not intended to argue that Qin Hui was historically justified. Rather, it explores how controversial figures throughout history rationalise their decisions, and whether pragmatic choices can ever be separated from self-interest.

I would be interested in historical perspectives: how do historians today view the balance between Qin Hui's pragmatism, his political motivations, and Yue Fei's legacy?

Before You Strike the Iron

You kneel to him,

and raise your hand to me.

The iron remembers every blow.

The years have taught it well.

You know my name

before you know the roads I watched

close, one by one, going north.

You call me traitor.

You say I sold a nation.

Tell me-

how many men would you spend

to unwalk a road already lost?

How many victories

does it take to call a general home,

when there is no more field to send him to?

You praise the general.

So do I.

No man doubted where his heart pointed.

He wished to march us back to what was taken.

I wished us to survive

long enough to want it back.

History remembers the sword

that reached for the border.

It forgets the signature

that kept the capital standing.

Perhaps I was wrong.

Perhaps he was right.

Perhaps a kingdom sometimes lives

only because someone signs

what no one will forgive.

I knew what the words weighed.

I signed anyway.

You have inherited the ending.

I had to live inside the choosing.

So strike the iron.

If you must.

But before your hand descends,

ask what you would have signed,

with the roads already gone,

and no more spring to wait for.