Year of the Earth Serpent Changing Colors. A Novel.

The whole Communist world is in the middle of a democratic revolution. Hall Gardner’s novel depicts the protests taking place prior to the June 1989 Tiananmen Square repression—a subject still taboo in China. Hired to teach English, Mylex H. Galvin records his experience in his “Anti-Marco Polo” journal after he meets expats from around the world, while trying to come to grips with the Chinese language, history, and politics. Galvin becomes disillusioned with the poverty and environmental destruction that he finds in China; his barefoot doctor heroes are not capable of treating AIDS; Chinese and African students clash in Nanjing—with no sense of international solidarity. As the democracy movement heats up, he is torn between the love of Tao Baiqing, a Daoist, and Mo Li, a student of English Lit, and unwittingly betrays the ties between the journalist, Hayford, and the democracy activist, Chia Pao-yu—accused of leaking “top secrets” to Hayford. As Galvin studies China’s relations with the Western world since Marco Polo, with emphasis on the “hundred years of humiliation,” he becomes haunted by nightmares of a “clash of civilizations” and warns against a coming Apocalyptic Color War between the Balding Eagle and the Chinese Dragon—as the latter transmogrifies from Red into shades of Red-Brown-Black.

Hall Gardner is Full Professor in the Department of History and Politics and former Chair of the Department of International Politics from Spring 1992 to Spring 2019 at the American University of Paris, France. His publications include: Toward an Alternative Transatlantic Strategy: Biden, the EU, and the ‘new’ Multilateralism (2022); IR Theory, Historical Analogy, and Major Power War (2019); World War Trump: The Risks of America’s New Nationalism (2018); American Global Strategy and the "War on Terrorism" (2005/2013); and The Wake-Up Blast: Thirty Years of Poetic Protest (2008).

"Hall Gardner has given us a timely and compelling narrative of two civilizations as the world witnesses rising Chinese power. A magnificent achievement." - Matthew Fraser, author of In Truth: A History of Lies from Ancient Rome to Modern America

Hall Gardner’s wonderful Year of the Earth Serpent Changing Colors offers an extraordinary illustration of the dynamics of humiliation and delivers a lesson the world would needs to learn. Research shows that humiliation is the most intense human emotion — it leads to the mobilisation of more processing power and a greater consumption of mental resources than any other emotion. Victims of humiliation never forget. Humiliators, on the other hand, are often oblivious of their deeds or they justify them (even while being silently consumed by their own deeds from inside). Therefore, humiliators are often shocked when confronted with the consequences of their deeds, be it revenge coming their way or attempts of peace making. Evelin Lindner, Dr. med., Dr. psychol., founding president of Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies and co-founder of the World Dignity University initiative

Hall Gardner's Year of the Earth Serpent Changing Colors is an engrossing and inventive contribution to what might be called the literature of human understanding. One of the book's messages, that, "individuals and governments rarely think about the fact that the very manner and means in which one seeks to change the world— and the very colors that one chooses— could actually make things turn for the worse" is needed, in this, an age of great power rivalry, now more than ever.----James W. Carden, Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy.

How much do we know about China? Year of the Earth Serpent Changing Colors is filled with the history, politics, religion and culture of this nation. Gardner's book is a balance between an encyclopedia and a novel... A big country demands a big book. E. Ethelbert Miller Writer and literary activist Host of On The Margin (WPFW 89.3 FM) Winner Howard Zinn Life Achievement Award 2022