Asia Politics

In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, the world turned to the question of how to move on from years of carnage and destruction. For Harry Truman, Douglas MacArthur, Chiang Kai-shek, and their fellow victors, the question of justice seemed clear: Japan’s militaristic leaders needed to be tried and punished for the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor; shocking atrocities against civilians in China, the Philippines, and elsewhere; and rampant abuses of prisoners of war in notorious incidents such as the Bataan death march.

Charlie Wilson's War is the untold story behind the last battle of the Cold War and how it fueled the rise of militant Islam. George Crile tells how Charlie Wilson, a maverick congressman from east Texas, conspired with a rogue CIA operative to launch the biggest, meanest, and most successful covert operation in the agency's history.

At once provocative and laugh-out-loud funny, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother ignited a global parenting debate with its story of one mother’s journey in strict parenting. Amy Chua argues that Western parenting tries to respect and nurture children’s individuality, while Chinese parents typically believe that arming children with skills, strong work habits, and inner confidence prepares them best for the future.

Why are activists in Thailand, Hong Kong, and Burma willing to court danger to help one another?

At the age of 16, in a nationwide selection for royal consorts, Cixi was chosen as one of the emperor's numerous concubines. When he died in 1861, their five-year-old son succeeded to the throne. Cixi at once launched a palace coup against the regents appointed by her husband and made herself the real ruler of China - behind the throne, literally, with a silk screen separating her from her officials who were all male.

From the time of the ancient Greeks onwards the West's relationship with Asia consisted for the most part in outrageous tales of monsters and giants, of silk and spices trans-shipped over vast distances and an uneasy sense of unknowable empires fantastically far away. By the 20th century much of Asia may have come under Western rule after centuries of warfare, but its intellectual, artistic and spiritual influence was fighting back. The Light of Asia is a wonderfully varied and entertaining history of this vexed, confused but centrally important relationship.

The Mao Zedong Reader: How to Understand Chinese Ideology to Improve Foreign Policy and Relations with China Edited by Eric Engle For the first time, a comprehensive collection of Mao Zedong's most important writings is available in a single volume. The Mao Zedong Reader is the definitive guide to understanding the ideology that shaped modern China and continues to influence its foreign policy today. With a wide-ranging selection of Mao's writings, from his early revolutionary days to his later years as China's leader, this book provides a nuanced and balanced view of his thought. Dr. Eric ...

Since 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has maintained unrivalled control over the country, persisting even in the face of economic calamity, widespread social upheaval, and violence against its own people. Yet the party does not sustain dominance through repressive tactics alone - it pairs this with surprising responsiveness to the public. The Party and the People explores how this paradox has helped the CCP endure for decades, and how this balance has shifted increasingly toward repression under the rule of President Xi Jinping.

China's economy has been booming for decades now. A formidable and emerging power on the world stage, the China that most Americans picture is only a rough sketch, based on American news coverage, policy, and ways of understanding. Enter Keyu Jin: a world-renowned economist and a professor at the London School of Economics. A person fluent in both Eastern and Western cultures, and a voice of the new generation of Chinese who represent a radical break from the past, Jin is uniquely poised to explain how China became the most successful economic story of our time.

The army does not want you to listen to this book. It does not want to advertise its detention system that coddles enemy fighters while putting American soldiers at risk. It does not want to reveal the new lawyered-up Pentagon war ethic that prosecutes US soldiers and marines while setting free spies who kill Americans. This very system ambushed Captain Roger Hill and his men.

Xi Jinping rules over 1.4 billion people and the second biggest economy on earth. He commands huge armed forces and runs a technology programme meant to dominate the globe. His ambition is to take the place of the United States and to change the world order. Xi's life story is full of drama: plots, purges, murders, a power struggle and a pandemic. The book, based on new sources, leads the listener from the poor, isolated China of the 1950s to the modern economic and military juggernaut of today.

The relationship between the US and China, the world’s two superpowers, is peculiarly volatile. Their militaries play a dangerous game of chicken, corporations steal intellectual property, intelligence satellites peer, and AI technicians plot. The capacity for either country to cross a fatal line grows daily. Kevin Rudd, a former Australian prime minister who has studied, lived in, and worked with China for more than forty years, is one of the very few people who can offer real insight into the mindsets of the leadership whose judgment will determine if a war will be fought.

When Julia Lee was fifteen, her hometown went up in smoke during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The daughter of Korean immigrant store owners in a predominantly Black neighborhood, Julia was taught to be grateful for the privilege afforded to her. However, the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King, following the murder of Latasha Harlins by a Korean shopkeeper, forced Julia to question her racial identity and complicity. She was neither Black nor white. So who was she?

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.

As a major political event and a crucial turning point in the history of the People's Republic of China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) marked the zenith as well as the nadir of Mao Zedong's ultra-leftist politics. Reacting in part to the Soviet Union's "revisionism" that he regarded as a threat to the future of socialism, Mao mobilized the masses in a battle against what he called "bourgeois" forces within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This 10-year-long class struggle on a massive scale devastated traditional Chinese culture as well as the nation's economy.

Over the course of the last half dozen years, China's supreme leader Xi Jinping has made extraordinary changes which have profound implications not only for the Chinese people but nations throughout the world. Given how swiftly and fundamentally China's relations with the rest of the world are changing under Xi's rule, it is imperative that we know what Xi Jinping Thought is, how it evolved, and why it is so important.

On March 11, 2011, a powerful earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of northeast Japan. By the time the sea retreated, more than eighteen thousand people had been crushed, burned to death, or drowned. It was Japan’s greatest single loss of life since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. It set off a national crisis and the meltdown of a nuclear power plant. And even after the immediate emergency had abated, the trauma of the disaster continued to express itself in bizarre and mysterious ways.

The legendary annihilation in 1883 of the volcano-island of Krakatoa - the name has since become a byword for a cataclysmic disaster - was followed by an immense tsunami that killed nearly 40,000 people. Beyond the purely physical horrors of an event that has only very recently been properly understood, the eruption changed the world in more ways than could possibly be imagined. Dust swirled round die planet for years, causing temperatures to plummet and sunsets to turn vivid with lurid and unsettling displays of light.

Resuming the narrative of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars, best-selling author Steve Coll tells for the first time the epic and enthralling story of America's intelligence, military, and diplomatic efforts to defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 9/11.

In yet another superb historical work, Harold Lamb brings the mighty Tatar leader to vivid life and shows how this ruthless commander used his superior intellect and magnetic leadership to overcome one obstacle after another. Tamerlane was truly one of the most remarkable personalities ever to emerge from the steppes of Central Asia.