SYNOPSIS Shadow Dancing: $elling Survival in China by Kathryn Waddell Takara, PhD Shadow Dancing is a complex personal journey about love and friendship through which the reader gains insight into the rapidly changing socio-political attitudes, policies, and economic climate of the People’s Republic of China. Through her poetic lens, Dr. Kathryn Waddell Takara, an award-winning African American scholar of eight books, provides a traveling stage to witness the waking of China, referred to as the “sleeping dragon,” which she viscerally captures. Over the course of seven summers in Northeast China as a Fulbright scholar and visiting professor, Takara broke stereotypes about African and African American people in her lectures for Chinese students and business people en route to Africa about black history and culture, ethnic women’s literature, and politics in America. Takara’s guanxi (influential connections) through universities, the government, and friends opened doors and hearts, offering her rare and timely opportunities to study and write about the subtle intimacies of daily life, beyond the lacquered façade of tourism. In addition to the diverse levels of institutional power, Takara observed the spiritual qualities revealed in ritualized reverence for ancestors, poets, an appreciation of Nature, and the legacy of mythology about the supernatural by the Chinese people. During her travels, Takara also witnessed the absence of Blacks in the new China. In this timely collection, Dr. Takara delves into startling successes and disquieting corruption. She acknowledges issues as wide ranging as labor exploitation, human rights, environmental abuse, urban and military expansion, the illegal drug trade, counterfeit products, and China’s push for global dominance fortified by (founded upon) a 5,000-year background of tradition, philosophy, culture, and politics.