Asia Politics

A close-up look at the Chinese generation born after 1990, exploring through personal encounters how young Chinese feel about everything from money and sex to their government, the West, and China’s shifting role in the world - not to mention their love affair with food, karaoke, and travel. Set primarily in the Eastern 2nd tier city of Suzhou and the budding Western metropolis of Chengdu, the book charts the touchstone issues this young generation faces.

Known as the twice-born - first into the flesh and again when initiated into their vocation - the Brahmins are a caste devoted to sacred learning. But what Taseer finds in Benares, the holy city of death also known as Varanasi, is a window on an India as internally fractured as his own continent-bridging identity.

The history of the Yan family is inseparable from the history of China over the last century. One of the most influential businesswomen of China today, Lan Yan grew up in the company of the country's powerful elite, including Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and other top leaders. In recounting her family history, Lan Yan brings to life a century of Chinese history from the last emperor to present day, including the Cultural Revolution which tore her childhood apart. The little girl who was crushed by the Cultural Revolution has become one of the most active businesswomen in her country.

In Bending Adversity, Financial Times Asia editor David Pilling presents a fresh vision of Japan, drawing on his own deep experience, as well as observations from a cross section of Japanese citizenry, including novelist Haruki Murakami, former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, industrialists and bankers, activists and artists, teenagers and octogenarians. Through their voices, Pilling captures the dynamism and diversity of contemporary Japan.

On the world maps common in America, the Western Hemisphere lies front and center, while the Indian Ocean region all but disappears. This convention reveals the geopolitical focus of the now-departed 20th century, but in the 21st century, that focus will fundamentally change. In this pivotal examination of the countries known as “Monsoon Asia”—which include India, Pakistan, China, Indonesia, Burma, Oman, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Tanzania—best-selling author Robert D. Kaplan explains how crucial this dynamic area has become to American power.

While Pang-Mei Natasha Chang was a Chinese Studies major at Harvard University, she stumbled across the name of her 83-year-old great aunt Chang Yu-i in a history book. Over the next several years, Pang-Mei spent long afternoons drawing forth her aunt's story. Born in Shanghai to a well-to-do family, Chang Yu-i lived a life of defiance, continually breaking class and culture barriers.

India was the jewel in the crown of the British Empire. There were vast riches to be exploited and vast numbers of people to be subjugated. How better to achieve these aims than by building a rail network that facilitated the export of raw material and made it easier for troops to travel around the country to tackle uprisings? India joined the railway age late: the first line was not completed until 1853, but, by 1929, 41,000 miles of track served the country.

Winner Take All is about the commodity dynamics that the world will face over the next several decades. In particular, it is about the implications of China’s rush for resources across all regions of the world. The scale of China’s resource campaign for hard commodities (metals and minerals) and soft commodities (timber and food) is among the largest in history.

A generation ago, Ronald Reagan mapped out and executed a strategy for taking down the last totalitarian communist regime that sought America’s destruction: the Soviet Union’s “evil empire.” We can settle for no less with respect to our time’s “existential threat to freedom.” The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can and must be thwarted in its determined bid to crush liberty, destroy our country, and institute what Xi Jinping calls “global governance, directed and enforced from Beijing."

Entre 1958 y 1962 cuarenta y cinco millones de chinos perecieron a causa de los trabajos forzados, la violencia y la hambruna a los que fueron sometidos por el gobierno de Mao Zedong. Obsesionado con la empresa frenética del Gran Salto Adelante, su iniciativa, destinada a superar el modelo económico occidental en menos de quince años, provocó una de las mayores catástrofes humanas de la historia.

Black Friday is a ghastly account of the one of the biggest terrorist attacks on Bombay, in 1993. The book chronicles the devastation caused to life and property due to the attacks and the trauma, both physical and mental, undergone by the people at large post the terrorist attacks and the consequent rift between the communities of Hindu and Muslims and hatred and clashes which often turned extremely violent.

Politics are being transformed by religion, namely in China - within the next 30 years, one-third of this potential superpower could be Christian. If this religious transformation occurs, China would be one of the largest Christian nations in the world.

There are many intellectual biographies of Dr B.R. Ambedkar, but until now none has sought to reveal the personality of the man. They will tell you what he thought or what he wrote, but remain silent about who he actually was, his inner struggles, how he felt. They give information about Ambedkar, but do not talk about his interior life, his personal growth or how he came to be the man who left such an indelible mark on modern India's constitutional, political, social and religious landscapes. The first of an ambitious two-volume biography, Becoming Babasaheb traces Ambedkar's life journey.

تعد الحضارة الهندية من أقدم الحضارات الأصيلة الحية في آسيا والتي أثبتت قدرة فائقة على الاستمرار وتجديد نفسها في مواجهة التحديات. وللحضارة الهندية سمة مميزة شأنها شأن جميع الحضارات القديمة، وهي قدرتها على الاستمرار بالتقاليد، وفي الوقت نفسه استيعاب العوامل الخارجية وخلق معادلة جديدة. ولذلك، تبدو منطقة جنوب آسيا كيانًا حضاريًا فريدًا يتضمن تعددًا في اللغات والديانات والأعراف والثقافات، لكنها لم تشهد أبدًا وحدة سياسية من النوع الذي نراه في الدول القومية بأوروبا.

Strange Burdens is not a biography but a book of political commentary. It examines and analyses Rahul Gandhi's ideas and leadership since he officially entered politics in March 2004. It journeys all the way to the conclusion of the Bharat Jodo Yatra in Srinagar on 30 January 2023 and captures the dilemmas of his disqualification a couple of months later.

An Indien scheiden sich die Geister. Obwohl oder gerade weil kaum jemand im Westen dieses widersprüchliche Land versteht. Zwischen Slums und Prunk, zwischen Yoga und Hightech, zwischen Bollywoodkultur und Kastenwesen ist uns das Land, dessen Bedeutung für die Weltgemeinschaft immer größer wird, ein Rätsel geblieben.

As you begin to listen to this book, you will become familiar with all the gods and goddesses of Chinese culture. The historical context will become clear, as well as the institutions, the law, the rules about sexuality, marriage, and children, and so much more. Understanding these aspects of their society before fully becoming engaged in the folklore that was the popular belief at the time is essential to your comprehension of the cultural anecdotes in those tales.

Blood Letters tells the astonishing tale of Lin Zhao, a poet and journalist arrested by the authorities in 1960 and executed eight years later, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. The only Chinese citizen known to have openly and steadfastly opposed communism under Mao, she rooted her dissent in her Christian faith—and expressed it in long, prophetic writings done in her own blood, and at times on her clothes and on cloth torn from her bedsheets.

A highly original, stirring book on Mahatma Gandhi that deepens our sense of his achievements and disappointments - his success in seizing India’s imagination and shaping its independence struggle as a mass movement, his recognition late in life that few of his followers paid more than lip service to his ambitious goals of social justice for the country’s minorities, outcasts, and rural poor.

In 1784, when Americans first voyaged to China, they confronted Chinese authorities who were unaware that the United States even existed. Nevertheless, a long, complicated, and fruitful trade relationship was born after American traders, missionaries, diplomats, and others sailed to China with lofty ambitions: to acquire fabulous wealth, convert China to Christianity, and even command a Chinese army. In America's First Adventure in China, John Haddad provides a colourful history of the evolving cultural exchange and interactions between these countries.