This book examines the political exigencies facing both the US and the Chinese Communist Party during the decisive years of the Chinese Civil War. The book offers a new and challenging perspective on America's infamous loss in China, and on the Communists' victory.

This book examines the political exigencies facing both the US and the Chinese Communist Party during the decisive years of the Chinese Civil War. The book offers a new and challenging perspective on America's infamous loss in China, and on the Communists' victory.

China is hot. The world sees a glorious future for this sleeping giant, three times larger than the United States, predicting it will blossom into the world's biggest economy by 2010. According to Chang, however, a Chinese-American lawyer and China specialist, the People's Republic is a paper dragon. Peer beneath the veneer of modernization since Mao's death, and the symptoms of decay are everywhere: Deflation grips the economy, state-owned enterprises are failing, banks are hopelessly insolvent, foreign investment continues to decline, and Communist party corruption eats away at the fabric of society. Beijing's cautious reforms have left the country stuck midway between communism and capitalism, Chang writes. With its impending World Trade Organization membership, for the first time China will be forced to open itself to foreign competition, which will shake the country to its foundations. Economic failure will be followed by government collapse. Covering subjects from party politics to the Falun Gong to the government's insupportable position on Taiwan, Chang presents a thorough and very chilling overview of China's present and not-so-distant future.

"A superb book.…Mearsheimer has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the behavior of great powers."—Barry R. Posen, The National Interest The updated edition of this classic treatise on the behavior of great powers takes a penetrating look at the question likely to dominate international relations in the twenty-first century: Can China rise peacefully? In clear, eloquent prose, John Mearsheimer explains why the answer is no: a rising China will seek to dominate Asia, while the United States, determined to remain the world's sole regional hegemon, will go to great lengths to prevent that from happening. The tragedy of great power politics is inescapable.

A history of revolutionary China in the 20th century China under XI Jingping has been experiencing unprecedented change. From the Belt and Road initiative to its involvement in Great Power struggles with the West, China is facing the world once more in the hope of reclaiming a lost Chinese greatness. But is "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" just neoliberal capitalism under another name? And, if so, how can China reclaim the heritage of the Revolution in this its 70th anniversary? In this panoramic study of Chinese history in the twentieth century, Lin Chun argues that the paradoxes of contemporary Chinese society do not merely echo the tensions of modernity or capitalist development. Instead, they are a product of both the contradictions rooted in its revolutionary history, and the social and political consequences of its post-socialist transition. Revolution and Counterrevolution in China charts China's epic revolutionary trajectory in search of a socialist alternative to the global system, and asks whether market reform must repudiate and overturn the revolution and its legacy.

After three decades of reform and opening up, China is closing its doors, clamping down on Western influence in the economy, media, and civil society. At the same time, President Xi Jinping has positioned himself as a champion of globalization, projecting Chinese power abroad and seeking toreshape the global order. Herein lies the paradox of modern China - the rise of a more insular, yet more ambitious China that will have a profound impact on both the country's domestic politics and its international relations.In The Third Revolution, eminent China scholar Elizabeth Economy provides an incisive look at the world's most populous country. Inheriting a China burdened with slowing economic growth, rampant corruption, choking pollution, and a failing social welfare system, President Xi has reversed course,rejecting the liberalizing reforms of his predecessors. At home, the Chinese leadership has reasserted the role of the state into society and enhanced Party and state control. Beyond its borders, Beijing has recast itself as a great power and has maneuvered itself to be an arbiter - not just aplayer - on the world stage. Through an exploration of Xi Jinping's efforts to address top policy priorities - fighting corruption, controlling the internet, reforming state-owned enterprises, improving the country's innovation capacity, reducing the country's air pollution, and elevating itspresence on the global stage - Economy identifies the tensions, shortcomings, and successes of Xi's first five years in office. Xi's ambition, she argues, provides new opportunities for the United States and the rest of the world to encourage greater Chinese contribution to global public goods butalso necessitates a more proactive and coordinated effort to counter the rapidly expanding influence of an illiberal power within a liberal world order. This is essential reading for anyone interested in both China under Xi and how America and the world should deal with this vast nation in thecoming years.

The Cultural Revolution was an emotionally charged political awakening for the educated youth of China. Called upon by aging revolutionary Mao Tse-tung to assume a “vanguard” role in his new revolution to eliminate bourgeois revisionist influence in education, politics, and the arts, and to help to establish proletarian culture, habits, and customs, in a new Chinese society, educated young Chinese generally accepted this opportunity for meaningful and dramatic involvement in Chinese affairs. It also gave them the opportunity to gain recognition as a viable and responsible part of the Chinese polity. In the end, these revolutionary youths were not successful in proving their reliability. Too “idealistic” to compromise with the bourgeois way, their sense of moral rectitude also made it impossible for them to submerge their factional differences with other revolutionary mass organizations to achieve unity and consolidate proletarian victories. Many young revolutionaries were bitterly disillusioned by their own failures and those of other segments of the Chinese population and by the assignment of recent graduates to labor in rural communes. Educated Youth and the Cultural Revolution in China reconstructs the events of the Cultural Revolution as they affected young people. Martin Singer integrates material from a range of factors and effects, including the characteristics of this generation of youths, the roles Mao called them to play, their resentment against the older generation, their membership in mass organizations, the educational system in which they were placed, and their perception that their skills were underutilized. To most educated young people in China, Singer concludes, the Cultural Revolution represented a traumatic and irreversible loss of political innocence, made yet more tragic by its allegiance to the unsuccessful campaign of an old revolutionary to preserve his legacy from the inevitable storms of history.