China Science

What does contemporary China's diverse and exciting fiction tell us about its culture, and the relationship between art and politics? The Subplot takes us on a lively journey through a literary landscape like you’ve never seen before: a vast migrant-worker poetry movement, homoerotic romances by “rotten girls,” swaggering literary popstars, millionaire e-writers churning out the longest-ever novels, underground comics, the surreal works of Yu Hua, Yan Lianke, and Nobel laureate Mo Yan, and what is widely hailed as a golden age of Chinese science fiction.

In the past 30 years, China has transformed from an impoverished country where peasants comprised the largest portion of the populace to an economic power with an expanding middle class and more megacities than anywhere else on Earth. This remarkable transformation has required, and will continue to demand, massive quantities of resources. Like every other major power in modern history, China is looking outward to find them.

From the first moments of his presidency, Donald J. Trump put US economic revival at the top of his agenda. Cutting red tape and slashing business tax rates made companies eager to locate in America again. A surge in corporate investment led to record numbers of US job openings. But there was also another force at work at the start of the Trump era, and it’s impossible to provide a fair accounting of Trump’s governance without noting the unique obstacles he’s faced.

Wer wissen möchte, wie wir und vor allem unsere Kinder bald schon leben, welche Technologien sie und die Welt prägen werden, muss durch Shenzhen streifen. Die 12-Millionen-Metropole in Südchina gehört zu den innovativsten Städten der Welt. Eine Megacity, die quasi aus dem Nichts entstand, wo Nachhaltigkeit und moderne Lebensqualität selbstverständlich sind, aber eben auch Gesichtserkennung und der gläserne Mensch. Die Cloud in Shenzhen weiß alles. Die Shenzhener Techies stellen inzwischen das Silicon Valley in den Schatten, ihre Start-ups zählen zu den wertvollsten der Welt.

In Trafficking Data, Aynne Kokas looks at how technology firms in the two largest economies in the world, the United States and China, have exploited government policy (and the lack thereof) to gather information on citizens, putting US national security at risk. Kokas argues that US government leadership failures, Silicon Valley's disruption fetish, and Wall Street's addiction to growth have fueled China's technological goldrush.

The British government has embarked on an ambitious and legally-binding climate change target: reduce the country's greenhouse gas emissions to Net Zero by 2050. The Net Zero policy was subject to almost no parliamentary or public scrutiny, and is universally approved by our political class. But what will its consequences be?

In the winter of 1952, at the height of the Korean War, the CIA flew a covert mission into China to pick up an agent. Trained on a remote Pacific island, the agent belonged to an obscure anti-communist group known as the Third Force based out of Hong Kong. The exfiltration would fail disastrously, and one of the Americans on the mission ended up a prisoner of Mao Zedong's government for the next twenty years. Unraveling the truth behind decades of Cold War intrigue, John Delury documents the damage that this hidden foreign policy did to American political life.

History didn't end. Democracy didn't triumph. America’s leading role in the world is no longer assured. Instead, authoritarian rule is on the rise, and the global order established after 1945 is under attack. This is the phenomenon Katie Stallard tackles in Dancing on Bones as she examines how the leaders of China, Russia, and North Korea manipulate the past to serve the present and secure the future of authoritarian rule.

America Second exposes a deep network of Beijing’s influence in America, built quietly over the years through prominent figures like former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright, Disney Chairman Bob Iger, and members of the Bush family. And it shows how to fight that influence - without being paranoid, xenophobic, or racist.

A late-night visit to his Shanghai laneway house by China’s notorious secret police triggered a diplomatic storm which abruptly ended Michael Smith’s stint as one of Australia’s last foreign correspondents in China. After five days under consular protection, Smith was evacuated from a very different China to the country he first visited 25 years earlier.

Jack Flashhardt is back! Still a Captain in the Marine Corps, he has been classified as a deserter and wants to sneak across the Mexican border into America to fight his criminal status. But after Jack makes it to America, he is arrested and told by a General of a secret government entity that they want him to fake a climb of Mt Elbrus of the Caucasus Mountains, where he and his team will eliminate a Chinese hacking gang that is stealing American technology. Jack is offered freedom from his deserter status if he completes the mission. Jack forms a combat team and the adventure begins.

On a warm day in September 2000, a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Zanhua gave birth to twin girls in a small hut nestled in bamboo behind her brother's rural home in China's Hunan province. The twins, Fangfang and Shuangjie, were welcome additions to her young family but also not her first children. Hidden in the hut, they were born under the shadow of China's notorious one-child policy. Fearing the ire of family planning officials, Zanhua and her husband decided to leave one twin in the care of relatives, hoping each toddler on their own might stay under the radar.

Nach 40 Jahren enthüllt die chinesische Regierung ihre unglaubliche Entdeckung. Die Reptilien-Expertin CJ Cameron wird nach China eingeladen. Sie soll den größten Zoo, der jemals gebaut wurde, begutachten. Und sie darf sie mit eigenen Augen sehen: gewaltige, Feuer speiende Drachen. Es gibt diese Fabelwesen wirklich.

Many studies of China's relations with and influence on Southeast Asia tend to focus on how Beijing has used its power asymmetry to achieve regional influence. Yet, scholars and pundits often fail to appreciate the complexity of the contemporary Chinese state and society, and just how fragmented, decentralized, and internationalized China is today. In The Ripple Effect, Enze Han argues that a focus on the Chinese state alone is not sufficient for a comprehensive understanding of China's influence in Southeast Asia. Instead, we must look beyond the Chinese state, to non-state actors from China.

Not since the modern liberal order was born in the 1940s has the world had to grapple with the possibility of its demise, at the hand of a rising China. Just at a time when the world is in need of the stability and governance it has had the luxury of relying upon for decades, it must contemplate transitioning to a world order not of the West’s choosing. If the era of US hegemony is coming to an end, will the global institutions it was so instrumental in creating become less relevant and forceful with time?

A groundbreaking review of China's historic urbanization and an analysis of the opportunities and hazards ahead for the world's most populous nation. China's accelerating urbanisation is approaching a critical stage, and how this is managed will have wide ramifications for the outcomes of many of China's present development challenges, according to United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in China's 2013 National Human Development Report (NHDR).

Autokratische Herrschaft besteht im 21. Jahrhundert nicht länger nur aus einem Tyrannen an der Spitze, der mit Gewalt sein Volk unterdrückt: Heute werden Autokratien durch ausgeklügelte Netzwerke geführt, es hat sich eine neue internationale autokratische Allianz gebildet, wie Bestsellerautorin Anne Applebaum in ihrem neuen Buch zeigt. Von China bis Weißrussland, von Syrien bis Russland unterstützen sich Autokraten von heute gegenseitig mit Ressourcen und Equipment made in Iran, Myanmar oder Venezuela.

In China's Next Act, Scott M. Moore re-envisions China's role in the world, with a focus on sustainability and technology. Moore argues that these increasingly pressing, shared global challenges are reshaping China's economy and foreign policy, and consequently, cannot be tackled without China.

The international media has been predicting the 21st Century as China's century. This book explains why. Subjects include international relations, the economy, trade, government, technology, and media.

National Public Radio's Beijing correspondent Rob Gifford recounts his travels along Route 312, the Chinese Mother Road, the longest route in the world's most populous nation. Based on his successful NPR radio series, China Road draws on Gifford's 20 years of observing first-hand this rapidly transforming country, as he travels east to west, from Shanghai to China's border with Kazakhstan. As he takes listeners on this journey, he also takes them through China's past and present while he tries to make sense of this complex nation's potential future.