Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China, Stephen Roach
China forecasting is a mug’s game. The terrible example before us all is Gordon Chang, who in 2001 published a book titled The Coming Collapse of China, which predicted that within five to ten years the Communist Party would be chased out of power amid social and economic breakdown. (I reviewed the book here.) As...
Read MoreI was slow on the uptake in understanding Chinese communism’s awfulness. I’d been a lefty in my student days without knowing anything much about China. Toward the end of those days, female Chinese author Han Suyin published A Crippled Tree, an account of her parents’ lives in early 20th-century China written from a standpoint of...
Read MoreAmerica Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, by Mark Steyn
Is the world of today a better or a worse place than the world of 100 years ago? On all the ordinary indices of human felicity — health, longevity, security, hygiene, comfort, prosperity, equality, dentistry — the answer is of course that we live much better lives than our grandfathers did. That is not the...
Read MoreLosing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire, and Betrayal, by Ethan Gutmann
Ethan Gutmann lived in China for three years, from late 1998 to late 2001. He went there with the hope of making a TV documentary about how capitalism and globalization were going to democratize China. He came back much wiser and sadder. InLosing the New China he presents a cold-eyed look at the Beijing expat...
Read MoreChina's New Nationalism: Pride, Politics and Diplomacy, by Peter Hays Gries
It is an item of current conventional wisdom that the Chinese Communist Party, confronted with a population to whom communism no longer has any appeal, has resorted to an extreme form of nationalism to justify its rule over China. The principal message of Peter Hays Gries's fascinating book is that while this is true, it...
Read MoreFriendly Fire, by Elizabeth Pond
Wars, of course, unify us in a common purpose, and this was no less true of the Cold War than of any other. There were differences of opinion within the Western alliance throughout the Cold War period, but the common threat from the Soviet Union, formidable in armaments and subversive in intent, kept those differences...
Read MoreChina's New Order, by Wang Hui
Americans are usually a bit surprised to hear that mainland China has a vigorous culture of political and social critique. The dictatorship imposes some constraints, of course, and the political weather blows cold now and then, but tianxia da shi — the large matters of the world — are keenly discussed among Chinese intellectuals, and,...
Read MoreTibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land, by Patrick French
I met the Dalai Lama once. This was at Central Hall, Westminster, close to the Abbey, in the summer of 1984. I was doing freelance hack work for the London newspapers, and had reviewed Heinrich Harrer's recent book Return to Tibet for the Daily Telegraph a few weeks before. My review had been sympathetic to...
Read MoreThe New Chinese Empire: And What It Means for the United States, by Ross Terrill
Thirty years ago — at about the time, in fact, that Ross Terrill published his first book about China — the catch-phrase in political science circles was that people who studied the Soviet Union hated the object of their studies, while people specializing in modern China loved the object of theirs. There was truth in...
Read MoreThe China Dream by Joe Studwell
The dream of Joe Studwell's title is the dream of the China market: of 1.3 billion consumers just waiting to be sold clothes, medicine, cars, toothpaste, or whatever else the dreamer has to offer. As an English writer of the 1840s put it: "If we could only persuade every person in China to lengthen his...
Read MoreBad Elements: Chinese Rebels, from Los Angeles to Beijing, by Ian Buruma
The nail that sticks up gets hammered down, the Chinese teach their children. They further instruct them that the rock that stands out from the river bank gets worn away by the current. In case the child still hasn't got the point, he will then be told that the tallest tree is the first to...
Read MoreTreason by the Book, by Jonathan D. Spence
Western enthusiasm for China waxes and wanes on long cycles. In the early 18th century it was waxing strong. "The constitution of their empire is the most excellent the world has ever seen," burbled Voltaire. The unfoxable Samuel Johnson scoffed at widespread popular conceptions of the "Chinese perfectly polite, and compleatly skill'd in all sciences."...
Read MoreThe China Threat, by Bill Gertz
In the middle 1930s, as Hitler consolidated his power in Germany and began re-arming that country in earnest, the facts of the situation were duly reported back to the British foreign secretary, Sir John Simon. However, Sir John, as one of his underlings later remarked, did not want to know "uncomfortable things." Still less did...
Read MoreHegemon, by Steven Mosher
Steven Mosher is a hero to those of us who hate and fear the current Chinese government. He has the honor of having been persona non grata in the People's Republic for twenty years — longer, I think, than any other American scholar. Mosher was the first social scientist from this country invited to do...
Read MoreStrategy for Survival, by Chiao Chiao Hsieh
An acquaintance of mine arrived in Taiwan (alias the "republic of China") in 1971, the week after Nixon announced his intention to visit Peking. The air was thick with anxiety. Those who had somewhere to go were preparing to leave, considering that, with the collapse of American support and the anticipated expulsion from the U.N.,...
Read MoreStones of the Wall, by Dai Houying
To Get Rich is Glorious, by Orville Schell
Since 1978 China has been settling down into an easy-going style of traditional oriental despotism, a re-tread of the old imperial order. For 30 years before that date, however, the country was a laboratory for experiments in chiliastic socialism. All the experiments were failures, of course; each one left behind a desert of abandoned marriages,...
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