This unique book takes the reader Obeyond the headlinesO to explore a China few Westerners have seen. The authors argue that the great gap between what specialists understand and the general public believes has led to distorted and potentially dangerous misunderstandings of China. Seeking to bridge that gap, a group of prominent scholars and activists challenge readers to move past the usual images of China presented by the media and to think about the common problems shared by China and t...

The need to understand this global giant has never been more pressing: China is constantly in the news, yet conflicting impressions abound. Within one generation, China has transformed from an impoverished, repressive state into an economic and political powerhouse. In China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, Jeffrey Wasserstrom provides cogent answers to the most urgent questions regarding the newest superpower and offers a framework for understanding its meteoric rise.Focusin...

An invigorating book about the debates raging within China. We all know about the fast pace of change in this country. This book brings us the ideas being fought over in the country itself – from democracy to the idea of a ‘peaceful rise’. It challenges all of our assumptions about China.We know everything and nothing about China. We know that China is changing so fast that the maps in Shanghai need to be rewritten every two weeks. We know that China has brought 300 million people ...

The Chinese system is like no other known to man, now or in history. This book explains how the system works and where it may be moving. Drawing on Chinese and international sources, on extensive collaboration with Chinese scholars, and on the political science of state analysis, the author concludes that under the new leadership of Xi Jinping, the system of government has been transformed into a new regime radically harder and more ideological than the legacy of Deng Xiaoping. China is le...

This is a best-seller in China and a geopolitical book for our times. As a leading thinker from China, Zhang Weiwei provides an original, comprehensive and engrossing study on the rise of China and its effective yet controversial model of development, and the book has become a centerpiece of an unfolding debate within China on the nature and future of the world's most populous nation and its possible global impact. China's rise, according to Zhang, is not the rise of an ordinary country, b...

China's reform era is ending. Core factors that characterized it-political stability, ideological openness, and rapid economic growth-are unraveling. Since the 1990s, Beijing's leaders have firmly rejected any fundamental reform of their authoritarian one-party political system, and on the surface, their efforts have been a success. But as Carl Minzner shows, a closer look at China's reform era reveals a different truth. Over the past three decades, a frozen political system has fueled bot...

“Cuts through the cacophony of information, misinformation, and nonsense on China that circulates in our modern world to give us reliable answers to crucial questions… Should be on the shelf of anyone seeking to understand this fast-rising superpower.”—Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of ChinaAfter years of isolation, China is now center stage as an economic and global power, but its rise has triggered wildly divergent views. Is it a model of busine...

South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang used his 2003 work Kicking Away The Ladder to challenge the central orthodoxies of development economics, using his creative thinking skills to shine new light on an old topic.Creative thinkers are often distinguished by their willingness to challenge received ideas, and this is a central aspect of Chang’s work on development. Before Chang, the received wisdom was that developing countries needed the same kinds of economic policies and ...

Centering his analysis in the dynamic forces of modern East Asian history, Kuan-Hsing Chen recasts cultural studies as a politically urgent global endeavor. He argues that the intellectual and subjective work of decolonization begun across East Asia after the Second World War was stalled by the cold war. At the same time, the work of deimperialization became impossible to imagine in imperial centers such as Japan and the United States. Chen contends that it is now necessary to resume those...

We know everything and nothing about China. We know that China is changing so fast that the maps in Shanghai need to be redrawn every two weeks. We know that China has brought 300 million people from agricultural backwardness into modernity in just thirty years, and that its impact on the global economy is growing at unprecedented speed. We have an image of China as a dictatorship; a nationalist empire that threatens its neighbors and global peace.But how many people know about the...

This is a book of China's own political narrative written by one of China's leading and best-known thinkers. It is the last part of the author's 'China Trilogy', which is a best-seller in China, with over one million copies sold. The book in itself is a centerpiece of the unfolding debate within China on the nature and future of the country and how it compares with the West. It addresses a hugely important issue of the day, i.e., in what way China is overtaking or may overtake the United S...

Current Affairs/Asian StudiesPerhaps no nation in recent history has undergone as total a transformation as China has in the past twenty-five years. For Chinese leaders, the death of Mao Zedong, the rise of Deng Xiaoping, and unprecedented economic growth have spawned new complexities. For the country's 1.3 billion citizens, changes have been equally dramatic, from skyrocketing sales in automobiles and satellite dishes to an explosion in violent crime and drug trafficking.T...