Capitalist globalisation since the 1980s has produced immense benefits in terms of technical progress, poverty reduction and welfare improvement. However, it has been accompanied by profound contradictions, including ecological destruction, global warming, inequality, concentration of business power, and financial instability. Regulation of global political economy in the interests of the majority of the world’s population is essential if the human species is to avoid a Darwinian catastrophe. This book explores China’s rich history of regulating the market in the interests of the mass of the population. For over two thousand years the Chinese bureaucracy has sought pragmatically to find a Way in which to integrate the ‘invisible hand’ of market forces with the ‘visible hand’ of ethically guided government regulation. Instead of seeking confrontation with China, citizens and politicians in the West need to deepen their understanding of the contribution that China can make to globally sustainable development in the decades and centuries ahead.

One of the least known but culturally rich and complex regions located at the heart of Asia, Xinjiang was a hub for the Silk Roads, serving international links between cultures to the west, east, north and south. Trade, artefacts, foods, technologies, ideas, beliefs, animals and people traversed the glacier covered mountain and desert boundaries.

Presents a comprehensive study of the central Asian region of Xinjiang's history and people from antiquity to the present. Discusses Xinjiang's rich environmental, cultural and ethno-political heritage.

Thant Myint-U's Where China Meets India is a vivid, searching, timely book about the remote region that is suddenly a geopolitical center of the world. From their very beginnings, China and India have been walled off from each other: by the towering summits of the Himalayas, by a vast and impenetrable jungle, by hostile tribes and remote inland kingdoms stretching a thousand miles from Calcutta across Burma to the upper Yangtze River. Soon this last great frontier will vanish—the forests cut down, dirt roads replaced by superhighways, insurgencies crushed—leaving China and India exposed to each other as never before. This basic shift in geography—as sudden and profound as the opening of the Suez Canal—will lead to unprecedented connections among the three billion people of Southeast Asia and the Far East. What will this change mean? Thant Myint-U is in a unique position to know. Over the past few years he has traveled extensively across this vast territory, where high-speed trains and gleaming new shopping malls are now coming within striking distance of the last far-flung rebellions and impoverished mountain communities. And he has explored the new strategic centrality of Burma, where Asia's two rising, giant powers appear to be vying for supremacy. At once a travelogue, a work of history, and an informed look into the future, Where China Meets India takes us across the fast-changing Asian frontier, giving us a masterful account of the region's long and rich history and its sudden significance for the rest of the world.

Beginning with a retrospective of the past century, this book offers a panoramic picture of Chinese comparative literature, from its nascence in the early 1920s, through its evolution in the 1980s, to the new development at the turn of the century, ending with a prospective look at the future of comparative literature in the 21st century. The articles presented here reveal the author’s deep understandings of the literature and culture of her own country and those of other countries. A rich array of case studies and in-depth theorizing make it an extremely interesting and enlightening read. Prof. Daiyun Yue is a prominent professor at Peking University and a leading figure in Chinese comparative literature. She has served as Head of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, PKU (1984—1998) and the third president of the Chinese Comparative Literature Association (1989—2014). Further, she is the founder of Dialogue Transculturel, a much-acclaimed journal of comparative literature. Prof. Yue approaches outstanding literature as a bridge to link people of different cultural traditions: “The reason why interdisciplinary literary research between two alien cultures is possible is because dialog between alien cultures, along with exchange and understanding, is more readily realized through literature.” Herein lies the value of comparative literature.

A collection of essays about China in the 1990s, surveying the country's history; considering issues of the economy, demography, and environment; analyzing U.S. relations with China; examining human rights; and looking at cultural trends.

Since antiquity, the vast Central Eurasian region of Xinjiang, or Eastern Turkestan, has stood at the crossroads of China, India, the Middle East, and Europe, playing a pivotal role in the social, cultural, and political histories of Asia and the world. Today, it comprises one-sixth of the territory of the People’s Republic of China and borders India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Mongolia. Eurasian Crossroads is an engaging and comprehensive account of Xinjiang’s history and people from earliest times to the present day. Drawing on primary sources in several Asian and European languages, James A. Millward surveys Xinjiang’s rich environmental and cultural heritage as well as its historical and contemporary geopolitical significance. Xinjiang was once the hub of the Silk Road and the conduit through which Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam entered China. It was also a fulcrum where Sinic, steppe nomadic, Tibetan, and Islamic imperial realms engaged and struggled. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Han-dominated Chinese Communist Party has failed to include Xinjiang’s diverse indigenous Central Asian peoples. Its nationalistic visions have spurred domestic troubles that now affect the PRC’s foreign affairs and global ambitions. This revised and updated edition features new empirically grounded and balanced analysis of the latest developments in the region, focusing on the circumstances of the Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Xinjiang peoples in the face of policies implemented by the Chinese Communist Party.