James Carter

In the golden age of the Tang Dynasty, court machinations saw at least two women reach the very cusp of supreme power in two coups in the imperial palace, taking place on consecutive weeks, three years apart.

Princess Taiping wielded all but ultimate power in the Tang court. It appeared that it was only a matter of time before she might succeed to the throne itself. As extraordinary as that feat would have been, it was a very ordinary miscalculation that led to her downfall.

On August 18, 1966, in front of a million supporters at Tiananmen, a symbolic gesture from Mao Zedong made it clear that the Red Guards had his official endorsement to continue enacting, with violence, their rebellion against authority figures.

A French sneak in 1884 attack led to a fundamental misunderstanding of Qing technological prowess. It’s time to reexamine the popular — but simplistic, if not outright wrong — idea that China’s military losses to Europe (and, later, Japan) owed to its inability to modernize.

The Treaty of Nerchinsk established a border between Manchu China and Romanov Russia. It was negotiated in a remote region between two sides that distrusted each other and with deeply different conceptions of both diplomacy and politics — and somehow withstood the test of time.

Tracing isotopes of carbon inside amino acid molecules has revealed the ‘metabolic fingerprints’ of how different animals store and use energy.

All animals carry out this dance of metabolism, and it turns out none of them does it quite the same way. different creatures meet the demands of survival, growth and reproduction – and offer a...

Lin Biao was a principal architect of the cult of Mao Zedong. But by the summer of 1971, Mao was publicly identifying Lin as someone who had committed political errors, and seemed on the verge of removing Lin from his position.

The Mukden Incident — when explosives detonated along the route of the South Manchurian Railway near Shenyang — was a pretext for Japanese aggression in Asia. The events of that Friday night are underwhelming, almost ridiculous, in the context of what they sparked.

China enacted its one-child policy in 1980. It was met with wildly divergent opinions, and resulted in suffering and trauma on a scale that family planners never anticipated.