Book picks similar to
Human Rights and Asian Values: Contesting National Identities and Cultural Representations in Asia by Michael Jacobsen
japanese-studies
asia
chinese-studies
moral-anthropology
Claws of the Panda: Beijing's Campaign of Influence and Intimidation in Canada
Jonathan Manthorpe - 2019
In particular the book tells of Ottawa’s failure to recognize and confront the efforts by the Chinese Communist Party to infiltrate and influence Canadian politics, academia, and media, and to exert control over Canadians of Chinese heritage.Claws of the Panda gives a detailed description of the CCP’s campaign to embed agents of influence in Canadian business, politics, media and academia. The party’s aims are to be able to turn Canadian public policy to China’s advantage, to acquire useful technology and intellectual property, to influence Canada’s international diplomacy, and, most important, to be able to monitor and intimidate Chinese Canadians and others it considers dissidents.The book traces the evolution of the Canada-China relationship over nearly 150 years. It shows how Canadian leaders have constantly misjudged the reality and potential of the relationship while the CCP and its agents have benefited from Canadian naivete.
Belt and Road: The Sinews of Chinese Power
Bruno Maçães - 2018
Covering almost seventy countries by land and sea, it will affect every element of global society, from shipping to agriculture, digital economy to tourism, politics to culture. Most importantly, it symbolizes a new phase in China's ambitions as a superpower: to remake the world economy and crown Beijing as the new center of capitalism and globalization.Bruno Maçães traces this extraordinary initiative's history, highlighting its achievements to date, and its staggering complexity. He asks whether Belt and Road is about more than power projection and profit. Might it herald a new set of universal political values, to rival those of the West? Is it, in fact, the story of the century?
Mao: The Real Story
Alexander Pantsov - 2012
Mao Zedong was one of the most important figures of the twentieth century, the most important in the history of modern China. A complex figure, he was champion of the poor and brutal tyrant, poet and despot. Pantsov and Levine show Mao’s relentless drive to succeed, vividly describing his growing role in the nascent Communist Party of China. They disclose startling facts about his personal life, particularly regarding his health and his lifelong serial affairs with young women. They portray him as the loyal Stalinist that he was, who never broke with the Soviet Union until after Stalin’s death. Mao brought his country from poverty and economic backwardness into the modern age and onto the world stage. But he was also responsible for an unprecedented loss of life. The disastrous Great Leap Forward with its accompanying famine and the bloody Cultural Revolution were Mao’s creations. Internationally Mao began to distance China from the USSR under Khrushchev and shrewdly renewed relations with the U.S. as a counter to the Soviets. He lived and behaved as China’s last emperor.
The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet
James Griffiths - 2019
Even as the Chinese internet grows and online businesses thrive, speech is controlled, dissent quashed, and any attempts to organise outside the official Communist Party are quickly stamped out. But the effects of the Great Firewall are not confined to China itself. More and more, China is threatening global internet freedoms as it seeks to shore up its censorship regime, with methods that are providing inspiration for aspiring autocrats the world over.As censorship, distortion and fake news gain traction around the world, and internet giants such as Facebook show ever greater willingness to compromise internet freedoms in pursuit of the Chinese market, James Griffiths takes a look inside the Great Firewall and explores just how far it has spread, arguing that its influence can only be countered by initiating a radical new vision of online liberty.
China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World
Ted C. Fishman - 2005
Fishman's bestselling explanation of how China is rapidly becoming a global industrial superpower and how the American economy is challenged by this new reality.China today is visible everywhere -- in the news, in the economic pressures battering the globe, in our workplaces, and in every trip to the store. Provocative, timely, and essential -- and updated with new statistics and information -- this dramatic account of China's growing dominance as an industrial superpower by journalist Ted C. Fishman explains how the profound shift in the world economic order has occurred -- and why it already affects us all. How has an enormous country once hobbled by poverty and Communist ideology come to be the supercharged center of global capitalism? What does it mean that China now grows three times faster than the United States? Why do nearly all of the world's biggest companies have large operations in China? What does the corporate march into China mean for workers left behind in America, Europe, and the rest of the world? Meanwhile, what makes China's emerging corporations so dangerously competitive? What will happen when China manufactures nearly everything -- computers, cars, jumbo jets, and pharmaceuticals -- that the United States and Europe can, at perhaps half the cost? How do these developments reach around the world and straight into all of our lives? These are ground-shaking questions, and China, Inc. provides answers. Veteran journalist Ted C. Fishman shows how China will force all of us to make big changes in how we think about ourselves as consumers, workers, citizens, and even as parents. The result is a richly engaging work of penetrating, up-to-the-minute reportage and brilliant analysis that will forever change how readers think about America's future.
Jack Ma: A Biography of the Alibaba Billionaire
Ryan Gardner - 2017
He is one of China's richest men, as well as one of the wealthiest people in Asia. He has become a global icon in business and entrepreneurship, one of the world's most influential businessmen, and a philanthropist known for expounding his philosophy of business. Ma is one of the world's most powerful people, and has been a global inspirer and role model to many, he also gave numerous lectures, enlightenments and advices throughout his life career.
Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong
Gordon Mathews - 2011
A remarkably motley group of people call the building home; Pakistani phone stall operators, Chinese guesthouse workers, Nepalese heroin addicts, Indonesian sex workers, and traders and asylum seekers from all over Asia and Africa live and work there—even backpacking tourists rent rooms. In short, it is possibly the most globalized spot on the planet. But as Ghetto at the Center of the World shows us, a trip to Chungking Mansions reveals a far less glamorous side of globalization. A world away from the gleaming headquarters of multinational corporations, Chungking Mansions is emblematic of the way globalization actually works for most of the world’s people. Gordon Mathews’s intimate portrayal of the building’s polyethnic residents lays bare their intricate connections to the international circulation of goods, money, and ideas. We come to understand the day-to-day realities of globalization through the stories of entrepreneurs from Africa carting cell phones in their luggage to sell back home and temporary workers from South Asia struggling to earn money to bring to their families. And we see that this so-called ghetto—which inspires fear in many of Hong Kong’s other residents, despite its low crime rate—is not a place of darkness and desperation but a beacon of hope. Gordon Mathews’s compendium of riveting stories enthralls and instructs in equal measure, making Ghetto at the Center of the World not just a fascinating tour of a singular place but also a peek into the future of life on our shrinking planet.
Understanding China: A Guide to China's Economy, History, and Political Culture
John Bryan Starr - 1997
In this revised edition of his essential book, Starr focuses his shrewd attention on them all. He furnishes additional material on China's relations with Taiwan and Tibet, the transfer of Hong Kong to Chinese rule, China's nuclear weapons program, and its environmental and human rights records.
The Waiting Child: How the Faith and Love of One Orphan Saved the Life of Another
Cindy Champnella - 2003
Adopted by an American family at age four, Jaclyn goes to her new home with a great burden. Her new family had to leave behind a little boy who had been under her charge at the Chinese orphanage. Jaclyn inspires two families, several agencies, and two governments to cooperate to reunite her with her baby. Everyone who reads this story will believe in the power of love to change the world.
Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling: Career Strategies for Asians
Jane Hyun - 2005
However, many of them seem to stall in their careers and never make it to the corner offices.Leading executive coach Jane Hyun explores how traditional Asian values can be at odds with Western corporate culture. By using anecdotes, case studies, and exercises, Hyun offers practical solutions for resolving misunderstandings and overcoming challenges in an increasingly multicultural workplace. This timely book explains how companies will benefit from discovering and supporting the talents of their Asian employees and shows Asians how to leverage their strengths to break through the bamboo ceiling.
The Search For Modern China
Jonathan D. Spence - 1990
Praised as "a miracle of readability and scholarly authority," (Jonathan Mirsky) The Search for Modern China offers a matchless introduction to China's history.
Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World
Graham Allison - 2013
Lee, the founding father of modern Singapore and its prime minister from 1959 to 1990, has honed his wisdom during more than fifty years on the world stage. Almost single-handedly responsible for transforming Singapore into a Western-style economic success, he offers a unique perspective on the geopolitics of East and West. American presidents from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama have welcomed him to the White House; British prime ministers from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair have recognized his wisdom; and business leaders from Rupert Murdoch to Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, have praised his accomplishments. This book gathers key insights from interviews, speeches, and Lee's voluminous published writings and presents them in an engaging question and answer format.Lee offers his assessment of China's future, asserting, among other things, that "China will want to share this century as co-equals with the U.S." He affirms the United States' position as the world's sole superpower but expresses dismay at the vagaries of its political system. He offers strategic advice for dealing with China and goes on to discuss India's future, Islamic terrorism, economic growth, geopolitics and globalization, and democracy. Lee does not pull his punches, offering his unvarnished opinions on multiculturalism, the welfare state, education, and the free market. This little book belongs on the reading list of every world leader--including the one who takes the oath of office on January 20, 2013.
Water Margin, Volume 1
Shi Nai'an - 1963
Considered one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, the novel is written in vernacular Chinese rather than Classical Chinese.The story, set in the Song Dynasty, tells of how a group of 108 outlaws gathers at Mount Liang (or Liangshan Marsh) to form a sizable army before they are eventually granted amnesty by the government and sent on campaigns to resist foreign invaders and suppress rebel forces. It has introduced to readers many of the most well known characters in Chinese literature, such as Wu Song, Lin Chong and Lu Zhishen.
Maonomics: Why Chinese Communists Make Better Capitalists Than We Do
Loretta Napoleoni - 2010
In Maonomics: Why Chinese Communists Make Better Capitalists than We Do, Napoleoni argues just the opposite: what we are witnessing instead is the beginning of the collapse of capitalism and the victory of "communism with a profit motive." Maonomics charts the prodigious ascent of the Chinese economic miracle and the parallel course of the West’s ongoing insistence on misconstruing China and its economy even as we acknowledge its growing influence and importance. Maonomics is a warning call whereby Western governments can avoid economic collapse by learning how to understand more clearly what the lessons of the Chinese economy really are. Based on first-hand reporting from China during frequent visits in the last several years, Maonomics lends credence to the Chinese view and translates it for Western readers. For example, the Chinese too are attached to their vision of democracy, but it is different from ours. It isn’t focused as much on voting as it is economic opportunity and the fair distribution of wealth and prosperity. Napoleoni also separates failed Leninist political ideology from true Marxist theory, showing that Marx’s writings do not reject profit so long as it is used to benefit the people. Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat is being realized in China, she argues, where giant steps forward are being made in the name of progress and the wellbeing and prosperity of the Chinese people. Looking at the Chinese economy up close, any economist would be hard pressed to say that they are not on the right track. Here Loretta Napoleoni offers a front row seat on the greatest show on earth: the peaceful economic revolution that is shifting the balance of power in the world from West to East.
Mao's Last Revolution
Roderick MacFarquhar - 2006
In this book, the authors explain Mao's Machiavellian role in masterminding it, documenting the Hobbesian state which ensued.