"A clearheaded, multidimensional tour of China's political, economic, and social landscapes." — Current History"Packed with facts and figures, but enlivened with firsthand observations. . . . An excellent introduction to China for anyone in search of solid but concise information about that complicated country." — The New York Times Book ReviewFor more than a decade, John Bryan Starr's indispensable guide has introduced un...

Understanding China: A Guide to China's Economy, History, and Political Culture is a comprehensive and authoritative guide to one of the most influential nations shaping the modern world. Written by respected scholar John Bryan Starr, this fully revised 4****th offers readers a clear, balanced, and deeply informed exploration of China's economy, political system, history, and social transformation.Drawing on decades of aca...

Public Schools, Politics and Polarization offers a timely and deeply insightful examination of how political division shapes the governance, leadership, and daily realities of public education in the United States.Drawing on decades of academic research and real-world experience, John Bryan Starr uses a compelling case-study approach to explore how school districts function at local, state, and national levels. Through carefully documented examples-from superintend...

The turbulent and chequered past of the world's most populous country is one of the most fascinating in world history, and relatively little known in the West. From the beginnings of Chinese prehistory right through to internet censorship with the 'Great Firewall of China', Gordon Kerr offers a comprehensive introduction to the sprawling history of this enormous country. A Short History of China provides an absorbing introduction to more than 4,000 years of Chinese history, telling the sto...

THE RUNAWAY GLOBAL BESTSELLER'Gripping, enthralling - a top-notch thriller and a compulsive read.' SJ Watson, bestselling author of BEFORE I GO TO SLEEPRachel catches the same commuter train every morning. She knows it will wait at the same signal each time, overlooking a row of back gardens. She's even started to feel like she knows the people who live in one of the houses. 'Jess and Jason', she calls them. Their life - as...

The downfall of Bo Xilai in China was more than a darkly thrilling mystery. It revealed a cataclysmic internal power struggle between Communist Party factions, one that reached all the way to China's new president Xi Jinping.The scandalous story of the corruption of the Bo Xilai family -- the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood; Bo's secret lovers; the secret maneuverings of Bo's supporters; the hasty trial and sentencing of Gu Kailai, Bo's wife -- was just the first rumble ...

Finalist for the 2015 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism Longlisted for the Lionel Gelber Award for the Best Non-Fiction book in the world on Foreign Affairs An Economist Book of the Year, 2014 A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice "One of the best analyses of the impact of Tiananmen throughout China in the years since 1989." --The New York Times Book Review On June 4, 1989, People's Liberation Army soldiers opened fire on unarmed civilians in Beijing,...

In the early 1850s, during the waning years of the Qing dynasty, word spread of a major revolution brewing in the provinces. The leader of the this movement - who called themselves the Taiping - was Hong Xiuquan, a failed civil servant who claimed to be the son of God and the brother of Jesus Christ. As the revolt grew and battles raged across the empire, all signs pointed to a Taiping victory and to the inauguration of a modern, industrialized and pro-Western china.Soon, however, ...

This book offers a definitive account of the origins and events of the 2008 Tibetan uprising, which began with peaceful demonstrations by monks of Lhasa's great monasteries on the anniversary of the 1959 revolt. Noted expert Warren W. Smith Jr. argues that the uprising was a widespread response to the conditions of Chinese rule over Tibet, which revealed much about Tibetan nationalism and even more about Chinese nationalism. Interpreting the Tibetan uprising as an attempt to spoil the Beij...

Over the course of 66 days in 1967, more than 4,000 "class enemies"--including young children and the elderly--were murdered in Daoxian, a county in China's Hunan province. The killings spread to surrounding counties, resulting in a combined death toll of more than 9,000. Commonly known as the Daoxian massacre, the killings were one of many acts of so-called mass dictatorship and armed factional conflict that rocked China during the Cultural Revolution. However, in spite of the scope and b...

Deng Xiaoping joined the Chinese Communist movement as a youth and rose in its ranks to become an important lieutenant of Mao's from the 1930s onward. Two years after Mao's death in 1976, Deng became the de facto leader of the Chinese Communist Party and the prime architect of China's post-Mao reforms. Abandoning the Maoist socio-economic policies he had long fervently supported, he set in motion changes that would dramatically transform China's economy, society, and position in the world....

China’s Communist Party seized power in 1949 after a long period of guerrilla insurgency followed by full-scale war, but the Chinese revolution was just beginning. China Under Mao narrates the rise and fall of the Maoist revolutionary state from 1949 to 1976—an epoch of startling accomplishments and disastrous failures, steered by many forces but dominated above all by Mao Zedong.“Walder convincingly shows that the effect of Maoist inequalities still distorts China today…[...