Michael R. Auslin, The End of the Asian Century: War, Stagnation, and the Risks to the World's Most Dynamic Region (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2017) (This is important background reading for those who appreciate that we all live in a highly interconnected, global community. The book might be better subtitled, "War, Stagnation, and the Risks to--and from--the World's Most Dynamic Region.").
Philip Ball, The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2016, 2017) ("Water . . . is one of the most powerful vehicles for Chinese thought. At the same time, and for the same reasons, it has been one of the key determinants of Chinese civilization. It has governed the fates of emperors, shaped the contours of Chinese philosophy, and left its mark, quite literally, throughout the Chinese language. It is with water that heaven communicates its judgements to earth. Water pronounces on the right to govern. For these reasons, there is no better medium for conveying to the barbarians beyond the Wall what is special, astonishing, beautiful, and at time terrifying and maddening, about the land its inhabitants call Zhongguo, the 'Middle Kingdom'--which is in the end the Water Kingdom, too." Id. at 3-4. "What's more, the mammoth constructions and schemes of a hydraulic state are inclined to demand suppression of any disrupting influence. No institutions or organizations can be allowed to grow strong enough to rival the governmental body politics; no checks to power can be tolerated. When the infrastructure of the state is so dependent on government support and control, property rights are weak at best--which meant that a mercantile class like that which eventually came to challenge (and in some cases to replace) the monarchies and aristocracies of Europe could never arise in imperial China. Merchants certainly existed, and they could get rich--but they did so by adapting to a situation in which power was acquired through the state machinery of the civil service. There were . . . power struggles in the Chinese empires, but they did not have the same anatomy as those that evolved in the West. We can see the legacy of this tradition today, whether in the piratical attitude that, with eh state's tacit approval, has long existed to intellectual and material copyright, or in the ruthless expulsion of people from their homes and lands, without right of appeal, in the name of progress. Id. at 201-202.).
Robert Bickers, Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Nationalism matters in China, and what matters in China matters to everyone. China's new nationalism . . . is rooted not in its present power but in shameful memories of its former weaknesses. Invaded, humiliated, and looted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by foreign powers, China looks out at the twenty-first century through the lens of the past. History natters deeply to Beijing's current rulers, and Out of China explains why.").
Frank Dikotter, The Age of Openness: China Before Mao (Berkeley & Los Angles: U. of California Press, 2008) (From the back cover: "The era between empire and communism is routinely portrayed as a catastrophic interlude in China's modern history. But . . . Frank Dikotter instead shows that the first half of the twentieth century was characterized by unprecedented openness. He argue that from 1900 to 1949, all levels of Chinese society were seeking engagement with the rest of he world and that pursuit of openness was particularly evident in four areas: governance, including advances liberties and the rule of law; greater freedom of movement within the country and outside it; the spirited exchange of ideas in the humanities and sciences; and thriving and open markets and the resulting sustained growth in China's economy. [] China was at its most diverse on the eve of World War II.")
Frank Dikotter, The Cultural Revolution: A People's History 1962-1976 (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2016) (From the book jacket: "After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward claimed tens of millions of lives from 1958-1962, an aging Mao Zedong launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The stated goal of the Cultural Revolution was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalist elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. Young students formed the Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semiautomatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people.").
Frank Dikotter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, 2d. ed. (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2015) (From the book jacket: "First published in 1992, The Discourse of Rave in Modern China rapidly became a classic, showing for the first time on the basis of detailed evidence how and why racial categorization became so widespread in China. After the country's devastating defeat against Japan in 1895, leading reformers like Yan Fu, Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei turned away from the Confucian classics to seek enlightenment abroad, hoping to find the keys to wealth and power on the distant shores of Europe. Instead, they discovered the notion of 'race,' and used new evolutionary theories from Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer to present a universes red in tooth and claw in which 'yellows' competed with 'whites' in a deadly struggle for survival. After the fall of the empire in 1911, prominent politicians and writers in republican China continued to measure, classify and rank people from around the world according to their supposed biological features, all in the name of science. Racial thinking remains popular in the People's Republic of China, as serologists, geneticists and anthropometrists continue to interpret human variation in terms of 'race.' This new edition has been revised and expanded to include a new chapter taking the reader up to the twenty-first century.").
Frank Dikotter, Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe,1958-1962 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010) ("What comes out of this massive and detailed dossier transforms our understanding of the Great Leap Forward. When it comes to the overall death toll, for instance, researchers so far have had to extrapolate from official population statistics, including the census figures of 1953, 1964 and 1982. Their estimates range from 15 to 32 million excess deaths. But the public security reports complied at the time, as well as the voluminous secret reports collated by party committees in the last months of the Great Leap Forward, show how inadequate these calculations are, pointing instead at a catastrophe of a much greater magnitude: this book shows that at least 45 million people died unnecessarily between 1958 and 1962." Id. at xii.).
Frank Dikotter, The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013) ("[T]the first decade of Maoism was one of the worst tyrannies in the history of the twentieth century, sending to an early grave at least 5 million civilians and bringing misery to countless more." Id. at xiii. "But by all accounts the most dreaded aspect of incarceration was not the frequent beatings, the hard about or even the grinding hunger. It was the thought reform, referred to by one victim as a 'carefully cultivated Auschwitz of the mind.' As Robert Ford, an English radio operator, put it after a four-year spell in prison, 'When you're being beaten up, you can turn into yourself and find a corner of your mind in which to fight the pain. But when you're being spiritual tortured by thought reform, there's nowhere you can go. It affects you at the most profound, deepest levels and attacks your very identity.' The self-criticism and indoctrination meetings lasted for hours on end, day in, day out, year after year. And unlike those on the outside, once the group discussions were over, the others were still in the same cell. They were encouraged to examine, question and denounce each other. Sometimes they had to take part in brutal struggle meetings, proving on whose side they stood by beating a suspect. 'By the time you got through such a meeting you would, if you were a conscientious person at all, suffer terribly mentally and groan for days. Silence and distress were the outcome.' Every bit of human dignity was stripped away as victims tried to survive by killing their former selves. Wang Tsunming, a nationalist officer captured in 1949, came to the conclusion that thought reform was nothing less than the 'physical and mental liquidation of oneself by oneself.' Those who resisted the process committed suicide. This who survived it renounced being themselves." Id. at 248.).
Frank Dikotter, Lars Laamann, & Zhou Xun, Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2004) (From the book jacket: "To this day, the perception persists that China was a civilization defeated by imperialist Britain's most desirable trade commodity, opium--a drug that turned the Chinese into cadaverous addicts in the iron grip off dependence. Britain, in an effort to reverse the damage caused by opium addiction, launched its own version of the 'war on drug.,' which lasted roughly sixty years, from 1880 to World War II and the beginning of communism. But, as Narcotic Culture brilliantly shows, the real scandal in Chinese history was not the expansion of the drug trade by Britain in the early nineteenth century, but rather the failure of the British to grasp the consequences of prohibition.").
Elizabeth C. Economy, The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China's Future, 2d edition (Ithaca & London: Cornell U. Press, 2004, 2010).
Elizabeth C. Economy & Michael Levi, By All Means Necessary: How China's Resource Quest Is Changing the World (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2014) ("Perhaps the biggest question mark looming over the future is the course that the Chinese economy will take. Economic activity can be broken down into investment, consumption, and export. The typical large economy gets the bulk of its economic activity from consumption, with smaller fractions coming from investment and export. For example, almost 70 percent of the U.S. economy is personal consumption, and and even higher fraction is attribute to consumption once consumption by government is factored in. Private investment makes up another 15 percent of the economy. Net exports for the United States have, for many years, been negative." "Chinese economic activity looks very different. It has long been heavily weighted toward investment, a trend that has only intensified in recent years. [] High investment and exports have been accompanied by low personal consumption, which remains stuck at around 35 percent of the economy." Id. at 32-33, citations omitted. "In the middle f the 2000s, a new security threat appeared to emerge. With resource prices rising rapidly, and shortages seemingly imminent, scholars and pundits began to warn of 'resource wars.' [] Indeed, one camp of analysts now argue that, with global resources insufficient to meet growing world demand, countries may be destined to go to war over control of available supplies. An opposing camp, however, insists that the prospect of resource wars is largely if not entirely nonsense. They argue that modern history shows few instances of war over resources. Moreover, they note, since most resources are now traded on world markets, ownership is far less important than one might assume. Countries can secure resources simply by paying the market price, leaving no need for them to go to war in order to acquire them." "The market-based critique of the resource wars warning is powerful. So long as resource prices do not rise astronomically (and few analysts foresee such a development), it will be far cheaper to acquire resources by paying market rates than by engaging in armed conflict. And even strong price rises compared to what prevailed a decade ago leave resource costs relatively modest relative to the overall size of big economies, including those of the United States and Chine. To the extent that China is afraid prices will rise intolerably, it can hedge its exposure by buying access to deposits on commercial terms, precisely the approach many Chinese companies have taken in recent years. Unless the world changes radically, it will not pay to invade foreign lands in order to win their natural resources." Id. at 138-139, citations omitted,).
Julian Gewirtz, Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Unlikely Partners recounts the story of how Chinese politicians and intellectuals looked beyond their country's borders for economic guidance at a key crossroads in the nation's tumultuous twentieth century. Julian Gewirtz offers a dramatic tale of competition for influence between reformers and hardline conservatives during the Deng Xiaoping era, bringing to light China's productive exchanges with the West. [] Nevertheless, the push from China' senior leadership to implement economic reforms did not go unchallenged, nor has the Chinese government been eager to publicize its engagement with Western-style innovation. Even today, Chinese Communists decry dangerous Western influences and officially maintain that China's economic reinvention was the party's achievement alone, Unlikely Partners sets forth the truer story, which has continuing relevance for China's complexioned far-reaching relationship with the West." From the text: "The scope of China's transformation over the past forty years staggers the mind. China is now the world's largest economy by purchasing power parity and is expected to overtake the United States as the largest economy by gross domestic product (GDP) by 2015." Id. at 1. "The episodes in this book are seldom discussed in the West, which also deserves explanation. One reason may be that they call into question the received assumptions about how Western countries influence the developing world--and, indeed, how economic development occurs. Instead of an inevitable teleology toward Western-defined 'development,' these stories show the negotiated acceptance of market ideas and global norms--by Chinese leaders, on Chinese terms. As countries around the world from Hungary to Cuba to South Africa openly praise the Chinese system as a seemingly viable alternative to the liberal capitalist model of many Western countries--and as China 'goes global' and attempts to spread its influence--it is critical for our policy makers and opinion leaders to rethink what they take for granted about what 'Western influence' can and cannot do in other countries. It is especially important that they do so when, as in China's case, the country in question rejects the wholesale importation of foreign proposals and sees itself as an equal partner in interpreting and implementing economic ideas from abroad and in shaping new ones." Id. at 274-275. Do you think anyone in the Trump administration will have read this book, or similar books and articles? Probably not.).
Joshua Kurlantzick, Charm Offensive: How China's Soft Power Is Transforming the World (New Haven & London: A New Republic Book/Yale U. Press, 2007).
Richard McGregor, Asia's Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century (New York: Viking, 2017).
Minxin Pei, China's Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Beginning in the 1990s, changes in the control and ownership rights of state-owned assets allowed well-connected government officials and businessmen to amass huge fortunes through the systematic looting of state-owned property--in particular land, natural resources, and assets in state-run enterprises. Mustering compelling evidence from over two hundred corruption cases involving government and law enforcement officials, private businessmen, and organized crime members, Minxin Pei shows how collision among elites has spawned an illicit market for power inside the party-state, in which bribes and official appointments are surreptitiously but routinely traded. This system of crony capitalism has created a legacy of criminality and entrenched privilege that will make any movement toward democracy difficult and disorderly." Well worth readings, as it may provide insight as how the United States's own growing version of crony capitalism is undermining American representative democracy.).
David Der-Wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2017) (From the "Introduction": "A New Literary History of Modern China is a collective project that introduces the 'long' modern period of Chinese literature from the lat eighteenth century to the new millennium. The volume, with 161 essays contributed by 143 authors on a wide spectrum of topics, is intended for readers who are interested in understanding modern China through its literary and cultural dynamics. At the same time it takes up the challenge of rethinking the conceptual framework and pedagogical assumptions that underlie the extant paradigm of writing and reading literary history." Id. at 1.).
