Chinese entrepreneurs are flooding into the continent, investing in long-term assets such as factories and heavy equipment.Considering Africa's difficult history of colonialism, one might suspect that China's activity there is another instance of a foreign power exploiting resources. But as author Irene Yuan Sun vividly shows in this remarkable book, it is really a story about resilient Chinese entrepreneurs building in Africa what they so recently learned to build in China--a global manufacturing powerhouse.The fact that China sees Africa not for its poverty but for its potential wealth is a striking departure from the attitude of the West, particularly that of the United States. Despite fifty years of Western aid programs, Africa still has more people living in extreme poverty than any other region in the world. Those who are serious about raising living standards across the continent know that another strategy is needed.Chinese investment gives rise to a tantalizing possibility: that Africa can industrialize in the coming generation. With a manufacturing-led transformation, Africa would be following in the footsteps of the United States in the nineteenth century, Japan in the early twentieth, and the Asian Tigers in the late twentieth. Many may consider this an old-fashioned way to develop, but as Sun argues, it's the only one that's proven to raise living standards across entire societies in a lasting way. And with every new Chinese factory boss setting up machinery and hiring African workers--and managers--that possibility becomes more real for Africa.With fascinating and moving human stories along with incisive business and economic analysis, The Next Factory of the World will make you rethink both China's role in the world and Africa's future in the globalized economy.

    Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford University, Archie Brown examines the origins of the most important political ideology of the 20th century, its development in different nations, its collapse in the Soviet Union following perestroika, and its current incarnations around the globe. Fans of John Lewis Gaddis, Samuel Huntington, and avid students of history will appreciate the sweep and insight of this epic and astonishing work.

    It is many years since Benedict, then still a child, set out with the famous scholar Antioch on a mission to find and collect the mysterious beasts of the East. In all those years there has been no word, and the expedition is assumed lost. But the boy's father is not the only person asking questions on the harbourside that summer, and as he learns more about his son's companions, he comes to realise that the fate of the expedition has implications for people far richer and more powerful than himself. The Unicorn Road tells of a journey into the unknown and of the secret motives and hidden passions of those it brings together. When Benedict is befriended by the interpreter, Venn, he becomes embroiled in an exotic, dangerous adventure. It is a story of love and honour, greed and cruelty and, ultimately, about the power of words themselves. As magically evocative as an ancient silk painting, The Unicorn Road is a novel of the medieval world which vividly and tenderly illuminates our own.

    Almost every day, newspaper headlines and media commentators scream warnings of impending doom--shortages of arable land, clashes over water, and political conflict as global demand for fossil fuels outstrips supply. The picture is bleak, but our grasp of the details and the macro shifts in commodities markets remain blurry.Winner Take All is about the commodity dynamics that the world will face over the next several decades. In particular, it is about the implications of China's rush for resources across all regions of the world. The scale of China's resource campaign for hard commodities (metals and minerals) and soft commodities (timber and food) is among the largest in history. To be sure, China is not the first country to launch a global crusade to secure resources. From Britain's transcontinental operations dating back to the end of the 16th century, to the rise of modern European and American transnational corporations between the mid 1860's and 1870's, the industrial revolution that powered these economies created a voracious demand for raw materials and created the need to go far beyond their native countries.So too is China's resource rush today. Although still in its early stages, already the breadth of China's operation is awesome, and seemingly unstoppable. China's global charge for commodities is a story of China's quest to secure its claims on resource assets, and to guarantee the flow of inputs needed to continue to drive economic development. Moyo, an expert in global commodities markets, explains the implications of China's resource grab in a world of diminishing resources.

    Opium entered China during the Middle Ages when Arab traders brought it into China for medicinal purposes. As it took hold as a recreational drug, opium wrought havoc on Chinese society. By the early nineteenth century, 90 percent of the Emperor's court and the majority of the army were opium addicts. Britain was also a nation addicted-to tea, grown in China, and paid for with profits made from the opium trade. When China tried to ban the use of the drug and bar its Western smugglers from it gates, England decided to fight to keep open China's ports for its importation. England, the superpower of its time, managed to do so in two wars, resulting in a drug-induced devastation of the Chinese people that would last 150 years. In this page-turning, dramatic and colorful history, The Opium Wars responds to past, biased Western accounts by representing the neglected Chinese version of the story and showing how the wars stand as one of the monumental clashes between the cultures of East and West. "A fine popular account."-Publishers Weekly "Their account of the causes, military campaigns and tragic effects of these wars is absorbing, frequently macabre and deeply unsettling."-Booklist

    On a winter's day, some twenty years after the end of the Second World War, a huge, smiling fat man wearing a black bowler hat and a military greatcoat and known as Geraty walked into a bar in the Bronx bearing his name and picked the pocket of a young man named Quin, thereby setting in motion a series of events that was to culminate in the largest funeral procession held in Asia since the thirteenth century.

    Divorced and alone he headed to Bangkok in search of something, anything. Ting, shy and innocent caught his eye. She smiled at him. For the first time in his life Marshall left his inhibitions to one side and dived in to an exciting new life. But was the delectable Ting all that she seemed? On his journey he meets the affable but hopeless Bob Lowe; economically trapped in Thailand and addicted to the sex and booze so readily available on the streets of the Big Mango. With equal amounts of joy, despair and even at times hope Zach J Brodsky takes us on a tour of an array of absurd characters all milling around a small area of Bangkok. Laugh out loud humour interspersed with tragedy.

     A deadly game of cat and mouse — but who has the upper hand? Eastern Europe, 1964 Three men and a woman are seated in a train carriage travelling from Istanbul to Vienna. As they cross the Bulgarian border, a fourth man enters and joins them. That man ends up dead. The other passengers get to work transforming a British agent into a Soviet spy – taking the dead man’s clothes and stealing his identity. Under hypnosis, the British agent must forget all memories of his past. That life is gone, and he is now Comrade Dimitri Nickovitch. But will the months of training be enough? Can the British agent infiltrate the Soviet camp? Or could this foray through the Iron Curtain be his last…? THE SPY WHO SWAPPED SHOES is the first classic international Cold War mystery in the Stephen Fletcher espionage thrillers series: intriguing political double-dealing spread over Europe and the Middle East. THE STEPHEN FLETCHER ESPIONAGE THRILLER SERIES: Book One: The Spy Who Swapped Shoes Book Two: Nest of Spies Book Three: The Chessboard Spies

    Porritt has no leads until Jane, a young British translator, unwittingly gets caught up with a German spy trying to flee the country. Can Porritt use his Special Branch teams in Glasgow, Yorkshire, London and Belfast to rescue Jane and smash the undercover spy organisation before Churchill’s invasion plans get leaked? This deftly plotted, action-packed spy thriller is full of twists and turns. Carefully weaving fact and fiction, it provides powerful and intriguing lessons that still apply in today’s changing world.

    It is the late 1960s and the family enjoy an idyllic life in the Vale of Kashmir, despite the area being riddled with conflict and poverty. But after a devastating earthquake wipes out her entire family, Jaya is taken into the care of relatives in Delhi, who attempt to marry her off and keep secret from her the possibility that Tahir, her younger brother, has survived the earthquake. After escaping from the arranged marriage Jaya is put through medical training in Scotland, as she had always dreamed, and where she develops feelings for her foster family’s eldest son, Alastair, who is engaged to someone else. In the meantime, Tahir has been abducted by a band of Kashmiri freedom fighters, who have made him one of their own. Jaya finally returns to her troubled homeland to find him and come to terms with the loss of her family. Alastair, who arrives in Kashmir to announce his love for Jaya, is kidnapped by the freedom fighters, forcing her to risk everything to get him back.

    There, he met his future wife, the equally ambitious Whitney Duan who was determined to make her mark within China’s male-dominated society. Whitney and Desmond formed an effective team and, aided by relationships they formed with top members of China’s Communist Party, the so-called Red Aristocracy, he vaulted into China’s billionaire class.Soon they were developing the massive air cargo facility at Beijing International Airport, and they followed that feat with the creation of one of Beijing’s premier hotels. But in 2017, their fates diverged irrevocably when Desmond, while living overseas with his son, learned that his now ex-wife Whitney had vanished along with three co-workers.Red Roulette Desmond Shum pulls back the curtain on China’s ruling elite and reveals the real truth of what is happening inside China’s wealth-making machine. This is both Desmond’s story and Whitney’s, because she has not been able to tell it herself.

    It was a visionary policy that, as Boot reveals, was ultimately crushed by America’s giant military bureaucracy, steered by elitist generals and blueblood diplomats who favored troop build-ups and napalm bombs over winning the trust of the people. Through dozens of interviews and access to neverbefore-seen documents―including long-hidden love letters―Boot recasts this cautionary American story, tracing the bold rise and the crashing fall of the roguish “T. E. Lawrence of Asia” from the battle of Dien Bien Phu to the humiliating American evacuation in 1975. Bringing a tragic complexity to this so-called “ugly American,” this “engrossing biography” (Karl Marlantes) rescues Lansdale from historical ignominy and suggests that Vietnam could have been different had we only listened. With reverberations that continue to play out in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Road Not Taken is a biography of profound historical consequence.

    Should anyone insult you, tell yourself this: I am a child of destiny who will unite East and West and change the world.After enduring abuse at the hands of her cruel stepmother, Chinese Cinderella (CC) seeks refuge at a martial-arts school and joins a secret dragon society.Under the guidance of Grandma Wu, CC is introduced to the exciting world of espionage as a part of the Chinese Resistance movement. And when CC and her new comrades take on a daring mission to rescue a crew of WWII American airmen, they prove that true bravery knows no age barrier.

    Economy provides an incisive look at the transformative changes underway in China today. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has unleashed a powerful set of political and economic reforms: the centralization of power under Xi, himself, the expansion of the Communist Party's role in Chinese political, social, and economic life, and the construction of a virtual wall of regulations to control more closely the exchange of ideas and capital between China and the outside world. Beyond its borders, Beijing has recast itself as a great power, seeking to reclaim its past glory and to create a system of international norms that better serves its more ambitious geostrategic objectives. In so doing, the Chinese leadership is reversing the trends toward greater political and economic opening, as well as the low-profile foreign policy, that had been put in motion by Deng Xiaoping's "Second Revolution" thirty years earlier.Through a wide-ranging exploration of Xi Jinping's top political, economic and foreign policy priorities-fighting corruption, managing the Internet, reforming the state-owned enterprise sector, improving the country's innovation capacity, enhancing air quality, and elevating China's presence on the global stage-Economy identifies the tensions, shortcomings, and successes of Xi's reform efforts over the course of his first five years in office. She also assesses their implications for the rest of the world, and provides recommendations for how the United States and others should navigate their relationship with this vast nation in the coming years.

    In China, men in Mao jackets pedal bicycles along newly built highways, past skyscrapers sprouting like bamboo. Yet exotic India is as near as the voice answering an 800 number for one dollar an hour. Communist China is as close as the nearest Wal-Mart, its shelves full of goods made in Chinese factories.Not since the United States rose to prominence a century ago have we seen such tectonic shifts in global power; but India and China are vastly different nations, with opposing economic and political strategiesstrategies we must understand in order to survive in the new global economy. The Elephant and the Dragon tells how these two Asian nations, each with more than a billion people, have spurred a new "gold rush," and what this will mean for the rest of the world.