China Politics

Hundreds die in a fiery train crash in northern China. A cargo ship smuggling refugees is lost to calm seas off the Libyan coast. Entire villages in Ghana are abandoned overnight.

By the time one finishes reading this penetrating book of history, politics, and public health, the very real COVID-19 crisis of 2020 becomes a metaphor for China’s quest for hegemony. Helen Raleigh shows how Communist China, like the virus that began there, has spread its influence aggressively around the world. She begins with China's suppression of people within its own borders.

How China Loses tells the story of China's struggles to overcome new risks and endure the global backlash against its assertive reach. Combining on-the-ground reportage with incisive analysis, Luke Patey argues that China's predatory economic agenda, headstrong diplomacy, and military expansion undermine its global ambitions to dominate the global economy and world affairs.

Mao Zedong was a Marxist revolutionary wishing to overthrow regimes he viewed as imperialist, and yet Mao, often referred to as the Red Emperor, behaved much like totalitarian emperors of China’s medieval past. Mao was a man of intriguing contradiction. This audiobook takes the time to explore them all.

How Pragmatism Destroyed a World is a powerful book about how ideas influence the most tragic events of history. It holds that everyone in the world has the same disease – and we are all dying from it. This is because much of man’s institutional knowledge descended from myths that ignored reality and existence. This so-called knowledge led to pragmatism and existential incompetence and this led to the brainwashing of the human mind. Since pragmatism is incapable of leading to understanding, and most of our leaders are educated in today’s universities, they are, almost as a group, ...

Winner of the National Book Award 2014 A young army captain who risked execution to swim from free-market Taiwan to Communist China. A barber who made $150 million in the gambling dens of Macau. The richest woman in China, a recycling tycoon known as the 'Wastepaper Queen'. Age of Ambition describes some of the billion individual lives that make up China's story - one that unfolds on remote farms, in glittering mansions, and in the halls of power of the world’s largest authoritarian regime.

In 1784, when Americans first voyaged to China, they confronted Chinese authorities who were unaware that the United States even existed. Nevertheless, a long, complicated, and fruitful trade relationship was born after American traders, missionaries, diplomats, and others sailed to China with lofty ambitions: to acquire fabulous wealth, convert China to Christianity, and even command a Chinese army. In America's First Adventure in China, John Haddad provides a colourful history of the evolving cultural exchange and interactions between these countries.

China is one of the oldest states in the world. But, despite the desires of some of the most powerful people in the Great State through the ages, China has never been alone in the world. It has had to contend with invaders from the steppe and the challenges posed by foreign traders and imperialists. Indeed, its rulers for the majority of the last eight centuries have not been Chinese. Timothy Brook examines China's relationship with the world from the Yuan through to the present by following the stories of people navigating the spaces where China met and meets the world.

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 1970s, Peter Maas stunned the American public with Serpico. Now this best-selling author has created a brilliant fictional thriller that uncovers a new underworld of international crime—ruled by the Chinese. Y.K. Deng, the ruthless mastermind of an international heroin ring, is poised to shatter the Mafia with a daring maneuver: transfer all of the assets his crime syndicate’s to the United States in one shipment of pure heroin.

Ryan Hass charts a path forward in America's relationship and rivalry with China rooted in the relative advantages America already possesses. Hass argues that while competition will remain the defining trait of the relationship, both countries will continue to be impacted - for good or ill - by their capacity to coordinate on common challenges that neither can solve on its own, such as pandemic disease, global economic recession, climate change, and nuclear nonproliferation.

A fascist administration rounds up undesirables. Terrorist groups strike governmental and religious targets. The constitution is under assault. Erec Stebbins’s China Girl is a controversial look at an America that is all too close to reality, radioactive in its timely examination of extremism in the nation.

The downfall of Bo Xilai in China was more than a darkly thrilling mystery. It revealed a cataclysmic internal power struggle between Communist Party factions, one that reached all the way to China’s new president Xi Jinping. The scandalous story of the corruption of the Bo Xilai family - the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood; Bo’s secret lovers; the secret maneuverings of Bo’s supporters; the hasty trial and sentencing of Gu Kailai, Bo’s wife - was just the first rumble of a seismic power struggle that continues to rock the very foundation of China’s all-powerful Communist Party.

In the classic tradition of Sun Tzu's The Art of War, here for the first time in English is the timeless wisdom of China's greatest emperor, Tang Taizong (AD 598-649), which will show anyone who leads or manages how to achieve unparalleled results and an enduring legacy.

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.

How did China transform itself from basket case to world leadership in two generations? The short answer: They hired geniuses to run their government (talent at the top); they used data to create policies (data in the middle); and they gave the last word on all appointments and legislation to 3,000 representatives (democracy at the bottom).

Beijing presents a clear and gathering threat to Washington, but not for the reasons you think. China's challenge to the West stems from its transformative brand of capitalism and an entirely different conception of the international community.

War-game simulation specialists James F. Dunnigan and Austin Bay have revised their highly regarded analyses, bringing up to date not only the many conventional conflicts around the world today but the new battlegrounds that have emerged since the previous edition was published more than a decade ago - the Global War on Terror, counterinsurgency struggles around the world and the latest frontier of modern combat: cyber war.

The world changed dramatically as the Berlin Wall fell and protest turned to massacre in Tiananmen Square. Now, with deft analysis and a wealth of newly declassified archival sources, historian Kristina Spohr offers a bold and novel interpretation of the revolutionary upheaval of 1989 and, how in its aftermath, a new world order was forged without major conflict. The Post-Wall world, Spohr argues, was brought about in significant measure through the determined diplomacy of a small cohort of international leaders.

Throughout the post-Mao reform era, China has championed the principle of sovereign state control, which holds that states should not intervene in the affairs of other states. Yet, as Tim Nicholas Rühlig argues in China's Foreign Policy Contradictions, in recent years they have not actually acted this way. Chinese foreign policy actions fail to match up with official rhetoric, and these inconsistencies - in combination with China's growing power - will have dramatic effects on the future shape of international order.