China Politics

The definitive biography of Henry Kissinger - at least for those who neither revere nor revile him.

Since the founding of the People's Republic of China over seventy years ago, five paramount leaders have shaped the fates and fortunes of the nation and the ruling Chinese Communist Party: Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping. Under their leaderships, China has undergone an extraordinary transformation from an undeveloped and insular country to a comprehensive world power. In this definitive study, renowned Sinologist David Shambaugh offers a refreshing account of China's dramatic post-revolutionary history through the prism of those who ruled it.

Chinese society has been shaped by the interplay of the EAST—exams, autocracy, stability, and technology—from ancient times through the present. Beginning with the Sui dynasty's introduction of the civil service exam, known as Keju, in 587 CE—and continuing through the personnel management system used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—Chinese autocracies have developed exceptional tools for homogenizing ideas, norms, and practices. But this uniformity came with a huge downside: stifled creativity.

En los últimos años China se ha convertido en una verdadera superpotencia de la IA y el único verdadero contrapeso nacional a Estados Unidos en esta tecnología emergente. Por ello, la forma en que estos dos países decidan competir y cooperar podría llegar a tener consecuencias dramáticas para la economía y la gobernabilidad mundial.

Conflicts over specific rules lie at the heart of the disputes, which are about much more than sovereignty over islands and rocks in the South and East China Seas. Instead, the main contests concern the strategic maritime space associated with those islands. To consolidate control over this vital maritime space, China's leaders have begun to implement "China's law of the sea": building domestic legal institutions, bureaucratic organizations, and a naval and maritime law enforcement apparatus to establish China's preferred maritime rules on the water and in the diplomatic arena.

China's strategic capabilities and doctrine have historically differed from the United States' and Russia's. China has continued to modernize and expand its arsenal despite its policy of no first use, while the United States and Russia have decreased deployed weapons stocks. This volume brings together an international group of distinguished scholars to provide a fresh assessment of China's strategic military capabilities, doctrines, and political perceptions in light of rapidly advancing technologies.

In The Devil and Communist China, Steven Mosher lays out in great detail the diabolical self-aggrandizement with deep roots in Chinese ancient political theory, called Legalism, which established the prototype for the totalitarian rule that the Chinese people suffer under today.

For the first time in any modern language, a female scholar and translator reimagines The Art of War. Sun Tzu’s ancient book of strategy and psychology has as much to tell us today as when it was first written 2,500 years ago. In a world forever at odds, his rules for anticipating the motivations and strategies of our competitors never cease to inspire leaders of all kinds.

China's Belt and Road Initiative is the world's most ambitious and misunderstood geoeconomic vision. To carry out President Xi's flagship foreign-policy effort, China promises to spend more than one trillion dollars for new ports, railways, fiber-optic cables, power plants, and other connections. It touches more than 130 countries and has expanded into the Arctic, cyberspace, and even outer space. Beijing promises that it is promoting global development, but Washington warns that it is charting a path to global dominance.

Julian Gewirtz recovers the debates of the 1980s, tracing the Communist Party's diverse attitudes toward markets, state control, and sweeping technological change, as well as freewheeling public argument over political liberalization. After Tiananmen, however, Beijing systematically erased these discussions of alternative directions. Using newly available Chinese sources, Gewirtz details how the leadership purged the key reformist politician Zhao Ziyang and indoctrinated China and the international community in the new official narrative.

Our relationship with China remains one of the most complex and rapidly evolving and is perhaps one of the most important to our nation's future. Here, John Pomfret, the author of the best-selling Chinese Lessons, takes us deep into these two countries' shared history and illuminates in vibrant, stunning detail every major event, relationship, and ongoing development that has affected diplomacy between these two booming, influential nations.

The West's strategy of engagement with China has failed. More than three decades of trade and investment with the advanced democracies have left that country far richer and stronger than it would otherwise have been. But growth and development have not caused China's rulers to relax their grip on political power, abandon their mercantilist economic policies, or accept the rules and norms of the existing international system.

One of the most talented and creative authors working today, Neal Stephenson is renowned for his exceptional novels - works colossal in vision and mind-boggling in complexity. Exploring and blending a diversity of topics, including technology, economics, history, science, pop culture, and philosophy, his books are the products of a keen and adventurous intellect. Stephenson ponders a wealth of subjects, from movies and politics to David Foster Wallace and the Midwestern American College Town; and more.

Will there be war with China? This book provides the most complete and accurate assessment of the probability of conflict between the United States and the rising Asian superpower. Equally important, it lays out an in-depth analysis of the possible pathways to peace. Written like a geopolitical detective story, the narrative encourages listener interaction by starting each chapter with an intriguing question that often challenges conventional wisdom.

Throughout this lively and concise historical account of Mao Zedong's life and thought, Rebecca E. Karl places the revolutionary leader's personal experiences, social visions and theory, military strategies, and developmental and foreign policies in a dynamic narrative of the Chinese revolution. She situates Mao and the revolution in a global setting informed by imperialism, decolonization, and third worldism, and discusses worldwide trends in politics, the economy, military power, and territorial sovereignty.

To write The China Price, Alexandra Harney has penetrated further and deeper into China's enormous ecosystem of export-oriented industry than any outsider before her. She uncover the disturbing truth about how China is able to offer such amazingly low prices to the rest of the world.

Esta obra es el resultado de años de investigación periodística y académica sobre los extraordinarios esfuerzos de la República Popular China para erradicar la pobreza extrema en su territorio. Entre 2015 y 2023, los autores visitaron proyectos de reducción de la pobreza en las provincias de Guangdong, Sichuan, Gansu, Qinghai, Shanxi y Jiangsu, así como en las regiones autónomas de Xinjiang, Tíbet y Guangxi. También realizaron entrevistas con funcionarios gubernamentales e investigadores en Beijing, Shanghái y otras ciudades chinas.

Ancient China collides with newfangled America in this epic tale of opium smugglers, sea pirates, and dueling clipper ships. Brilliantly illuminating one of the least-understood areas of American history, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin now traces our fraught relationship with China back to its roots: the unforgiving nineteenth-century seas that separated a brash, rising naval power from a battered ancient empire. It is a prescient fable for our time, one that surprisingly continues to shed light on our modern relationship with China.

A timely look at the impact of China's booming emergence on the countries of Southeast Asia.

Born in China’s northwestern province, Sayragul Sauytbay trained as a doctor before being appointed a senior civil servant. But her life was upended when the Chinese authorities incarcerated her. Her crime? Being Kazakh, one of China’s ethnic minorities. The northwestern province borders the largest number of foreign nations and is the point in China that is the closest to Europe. In recent years, it has become home to more than 1,200 penal camps - modern-day gulags that are estimated to house three million members of the Kazakh and Uyghur minorities.