Ezra Vogel
Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China
Rowman & Littlefield, 2011
Once described by Mao Zedong as a “needle inside a ball of cotton,” Deng Xiaoping was the pragmatic yet disciplined driving force behind China’s radical transformation in the late twentieth century. He confronted the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution, dissolved Mao’s cult of personality, and loosened the economic and social policies that had stunted China’s growth. Obsessed with modernization and technology, Deng opened trade relations with the West, which lifted hundreds of millions of his countrymen out of poverty. Yet at the same time he answered to his authoritarian roots, most notably when he ordered the crackdown in June 1989 at Tiananmen Square. This exhaustively researched book required over a decade of scholarship and hundreds of interviews to complete.
Shelley Rigger
Why Taiwan Matters: Small Island, Global Powerhouse
Rowman & Littlefield, 2011
Why Taiwan Matters offers a comprehensive and engaging introduction to a country that exercises a role in the world far greater than its tiny size would indicate. Shelley Rigger explains how Taiwan became a key global player, highlighting economic and political breakthroughs often referred to as 'miracles.' She links these accomplishments to Taiwan's determined society, vibrant culture, and unique history. Drawing on arts, economics, politics, and international relations, Rigger explores Taiwan's importance to China, the United States, and the world. Considering where Taiwan may be headed in its wary standoff with China, she traces how the focus of Taiwan's domestic politics has shifted to a Taiwan-centered strategy.
Mary Brown Bullock
The Oil Prince’s Legacy: Rockefeller Philanthropy in China
Stanford University Press, 2011
This book describes how Rockefeller philanthropy came to focus on elite science and medicine and ensured their ongoing importance in the American-Chinese relationship. That importance is still seen today in the ties of the two countries in natural and social sciences, the humanities, economics, and higher education. The Rockefeller family's involvement with China continues in the fourth and fifth generations, even as Rockefeller philanthropy is reshaped in response to China's rise as a global power. Understanding the origin, evolution, Cold War interregnum, and post-Mao renewal of Rockefeller philanthropy brings new clarity to the nature and tenacity of this ongoing bilateral relationship.
Michael D. Swaine
America's Challenge: Engaging a Rising China in the Twenty-First Century
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2011
The United States faces many challenges and opportunities in determining how to respond to China’s growing political, economic, and military influence. In this examination of U.S. policy towards China, Michael Swaine illustrates the fundamental assumptions and beliefs that inform U.S. foreign policy and strategy vis-à-vis Beijing. Swaine argues that three new sets of variables are reshaping U.S. policy: China’s growing power and global presence, the forces of economic and social globalization, and various nontraditional security threats, including pandemics and climate change. This volume assesses U.S. approaches to China over the past decade in seven policy arenas: relations among key Asian powers, bilateral and multilateral political and security structures, U.S. and Chinese military modernization and military-to-military activities, economic development and assistance, counterterrorism and counterproliferation, nontraditional security threats and the promotion of human rights and democracy.
Henry A. Kissinger
On China
Penguin Press, 2011
In this sweeping and insightful history, Henry Kissinger turns for the first time at book-length to a country he has known intimately for decades, and whose modern relations with the West he helped shape. Drawing on historical records as well as his conversations with Chinese leaders over the past forty years, Kissinger examines how China has approached diplomacy, strategy, and negotiation throughout its history, and reflects on the consequences for the global balance of power in the 21st century. In On China, Kissinger examines key episodes in Chinese foreign policy from the classical era to the present day, with a particular emphasis on the decades since the rise of Mao Zedong. He illuminates the inner workings of Chinese diplomacy during such pivotal events as the initial encounters between China and modern European powers, the formation and breakdown of the Sino-Soviet alliance, the Korean War, Richard Nixon's historic trip to Beijing, and three crises in the Taiwan Straits. Drawing on his extensive personal experience with four generation of Chinese leaders, he brings to life towering figures such as Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping, revealing how their different visions have shaped China's modern destiny.
William Rhodes
Banker to the World: Leadership Lessons From the Front Lines of Global Finance
McGraw-Hill, 2011
In more than five decades with Citi, William "Bill" Rhodes, the firm's former senior vice chairman and senior international officer, has worked with senior business leaders, statesmen, and strongmen and brokered immense financial deals while looking across the table at finance ministers. He has earned the cooperation of Fidel Castro over cigars and the admiration of Rupert Murdoch, who said of Rhodes, "By dogged hard work, Bill forms important and great relationships. Everyone knows Bill. Everyone trusts Bill." From these and other experiences, Rhodes has learned a lifetime of lessons about managing amid crises—and, more important, how to lead prudently, decisively, and effectively to prevent crises from ever happening in the first place. In Banker to the World, Rhodes presents his collected wisdom, best-practices, analysis, and anecdotes in one essential volume on the creation of value through leadership—and on the importance of leading by one's values.
Kenneth G. Lieberthal
Managing the China Challenge: How to Achieve Corporate Success in the People's Republic
Brookings Institution Press, 2011
How can companies successfully do business in China? What factors weigh into this success, and what will China's future mean for international business? Multinational corporations now look toward China with both trepidation and anticipation. The speed and scope of Chinese economic growth is changing the global distribution of power and resources, possibly to the detriment of the major industrial powers. But this same transformation presents tremendous opportunities for companies who understand China well enough to leverage both its accomplishments and its deep-seated problems for corporate benefit. Longtime China scholar Kenneth Lieberthal brings to bear a unique combination of experiences as former top government official, political scientist, professor of international corporate strategy, and consultant. In Managing the China Challenge, he draws on his deep understanding of China’s political and economic systems and the priorities of local and national leaders to illuminate the strategies foreign companies must master to succeed in the Middle Kingdom.
Edward J. M. Rhoads
Stepping Forth into the World: The Chinese Educational Mission to the United States, 1872-81
Hong Kong University Press, 2011
Some 130,000 students from China now study a variety of fields in colleges and universities around the United States. What about the first Chinese students in this country? A project of the self-strengthening movement during the late Qing dynasty, the Chinese Education Mission dispatched 120 students – some as young as 11 years old – to gain technological expertise in the American education system. They served as early ambassadors to the United States, lived with host families throughout New England, and many attended college at some of the nation’s most elite universities. The program was abruptly ended in 1881, sending most of the scholars into positions in the Chinese civil service. Though some of the “CEM boys” had difficulty reintegrating into Chinese society and earning professional advancement, they remain pioneers that paved the way for the many Chinese students in the United States today. This fascinating tale of one of the first meetings between East and West presents not only Chinese history, but also the history of U.S.-China relations and of Chinese in America. It documents the struggle the students faced to preserve their culture, heritage, values and beliefs while attempting to integrate into their adoptive homeland.
Susan L. Shirk (Editor)
Changing Media, Changing China
Oxford University Press, USA, 2010
Thirty years ago, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) made a fateful decision: to allow newspapers, magazines, television, and radio stations to compete in the marketplace instead of being financed exclusively by the government. The political and social implications of that decision are still unfolding as the Chinese government, media, and public adapt to the new information environment. This collection of essays brings together Chinese and American experts writing about all aspects of the changing media landscape in China. In detailed case studies, the authors describe how the media is reshaping itself from a propaganda mouthpiece into an agent of watchdog journalism, how politicians are reacting to increased scrutiny from the media, and how television, newspapers, magazines, and Web-based news sites navigate the cross-currents between the open marketplace and the CCP censors. China has over 360 million Internet users, more than any other country, and an astounding 162 million bloggers. The growth of Internet access has dramatically increased the information available, the variety and timeliness of the news, and its national and international reach.
Edward S. Steinfeld
Playing Our Game: Why China's Rise Doesn't Threaten the West
Oxford University Press, 2010
Playing Our Game explores the monumental economic and political ramifications of China’s integration into global production. By examining how contemporary Chinese enterprises actually engage the global economy and participate in a global division of labor, the book challenges the idea that Chinese firms are rising at their Western counterparts’ expense. It also challenges the notion that on China’s domestic scene, political change has lagged behind economic transformation. The book argues instead that the Chinese growth story is fundamentally about China’s internalization of the rules and practices of advanced industrial nations. China has grown not by conjuring up its own unique political-economic institutions, Steinfeld argues, but instead by increasingly harmonizing with our own. The results within China – on not just the economic front, but also the political – have been nothing short of revolutionary.
Nicholas Platt
China Boys: How U.S. Relations with the PRC Began and Grew. A Personal Memoir
Vellum, 2010
In China Boys, Ambassador Nicholas Platt discusses the resumption of U.S.-China relations in the 1960s and 1970s. The memoir chronicles the preparations and negotiations that went into Nixon’s 1972 trip; fourteen months later setting up the first American diplomatic office in the People’s Republic, in which he served; and some of the first exchanges between Americans and Chinese. He explains how National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and President Nixon saw the relationship as an international balancing act among the United States, China and the Soviet Union, delegating the “nuts and bolts” to then mid-level foreign service officer Platt and his colleagues. Over the years these “nuts and bolts” fastened together the United States-China relationship.
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know
Oxford University Press, 2010
The need to understand China 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, Wasserstrom provides answers to the most urgent questions regarding the world’s newest superpower and offers a framework for understanding its meteoric rise. Focusing his answers through historical legacies – Western and Japanese imperialism, the Mao era, and the crackdown in Tiananmen Square – that largely define China's present-day trajectory, Wasserstrom introduces readers to the Chinese Communist Party, the building boom in Shanghai, and the environmental fallout of rapid Chinese industrialization. He also explains unique aspects of Chinese culture such as the one-child policy, and provides insight into how Chinese view Americans. Wasserstrom reveals that China today shares many traits with other industrialized nations during their periods of development, in particular the United States during its rapid industrialization in the 19th century.
William A. Joseph, ed.
Politics in China: An Introduction
Oxford University Press, 2010
Sixty years ago, China was one of the poorest countries in the world, populated mostly by rural peasants, and still suffering from more than a century of internal turmoil and international humiliation. Today, China is a rapidly modernizing economic dynamo with growing global influence. Politics in China is an authoritative introduction to how this transformation occurred, and how China is governed today. The opening section provides readers with a firm grounding in China's modern political history; the next section covers the political system. The book then focuses on several major issues in China today: politics in the countryside and the cities; the arts; the environment; public health; and population policy. The final chapters cover politics in four important areas located on China's geographic periphery: Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
Richard Baum
China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom
University of Washington Press, 2010
This audacious and illuminating memoir by Richard Baum, a senior China scholar and sometime policy advisor, reflects on forty years of learning about and interacting with the People's Republic of China, from the height of Maoism during the author's UC Berkeley student days in the volatile 1960s through globalization. Anecdotes from Baum's professional life illustrate the alternately peculiar, frustrating, fascinating, and risky activity of China watching - the process by which outsiders gather and decipher official and unofficial information to figure out what's really going on behind China's veil of political secrecy and propaganda. Baum writes entertainingly, telling his narrative with witty stories about people, places, and eras.
Seymour Topping
On the Front Lines of the Cold War: An American Correspondent’s Journal from the Chinese Civil War to the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam
Louisiana State University Press, 2010
In the years following World War II, the United States suffered its most severe military and diplomatic reverses in Asia while Mao Zedong laid the foundation for the emergence of China as a major economic and military world power. As a correspondent for the International News Service, the Associated Press, and later for the New York Times, Seymour Topping documented on the ground the tumultuous events during the Chinese Civil War, the French Indochina War, and the American retreat from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. In this riveting narrative, Topping chronicles his extraordinary experiences covering the East-West struggle in Asia and Eastern Europe from 1946 into the 1980s, taking us beyond conventional historical accounts to provide a fresh, first-hand perspective on American triumphs and defeats during the Cold War era.
Mark W. Frazier
Socialist Insecurity: Pensions and the Politics of Uneven Development in China
Cornell University Press, 2010
Over the past two decades, China has rapidly increased its spending on its public pension programs, to the point that pension funding is one of the government's largest expenditures. Despite this, only about fifty million citizens—one-third of the country's population above the age of sixty—receive pensions. Combined with the growing and increasingly violent unrest over inequalities brought about by China's reform model, the escalating costs of an aging society have brought the Chinese political leadership to a critical juncture in its economic and social policies.
In Socialist Insecurity, Mark W. Frazier explores pension policy in the People's Republic of China, arguing that the government's push to expand pension and health insurance coverage to urban residents and rural migrants has not reduced, but rather reproduced, economic inequalities. He explains this apparent paradox by analyzing the decisions of the political actors responsible for pension reform: urban officials and state-owned enterprise managers. Frazier shows that China's highly decentralized pension administration both encourages the "grabbing hand" of local officials to collect large amounts of pension and other social insurance revenue and compels redistribution of these revenues to urban pensioners, a crucial political constituency.