The 100 Best Chinese, Japanese and Korean History and Politics Books
Image by Hokusai
The 100 Best Chinese, Japanese and Korean History and Politics Books list covers ancient and modern East Asian. The list has a focus on imperialism in history and in current political developments.
Shortcuts
-
Shortcut to the Chinese History and Politics Books
- Shortcut to the Japanese History and Politics Books
1. A Concise History of Korea: From Antiquity to the Present
By Michael J. Seth | Used Price: 50% Off
Now in a fully revised and updated edition, this comprehensive book surveys Korean history from Neolithic times to the present. Michael J. Seth explores the origins and development of Korean society, politics, and still little-known cultural heritage from their inception to the two Korean states of today. Telling ... More »
2. North Korea: A History
In this key textbook, Michael J. Seth offers an excellent synthesis of existing scholarship, including a thorough examination of contemporary sources. Seth masterfully traces how North Korea gradually transformed itself from a Soviet-style socialist state to an ultra-nationalist, dynastic one, illuminating this journey with an engaging understanding of ... More »
3. North Korea and the Geopolitics of Development
Kevin Gray and Jong-Woon Lee focus on three geopolitical 'moments' that have been crucial to the shaping of the North Korean system: colonialism, the Cold War, and the rise of China, to demonstrate how broader processes of geopolitical contestation have fundamentally shaped the emergence and subsequent development of ... More »
4. North Korea: What Everyone Needs to Know
By Patrick McEachern | Used Price: 80% Off
After a year of trading colorful barbs with the American president and significant achievements in North Korea's decades-long nuclear and missile development programs, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un declared mission accomplished in November 2017. Though Kim's pronouncement appears premature, North Korea is on the verge of being ... More »
5. The Imjin War: Japan's Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China
"Magnificent!" (South China Morning Post) "A wonderful read!" (JoongAng Daily News) "The scope is truly vast!" (Seoul Magazine) "Like a prelude to Shogun!"(StrategyPage.com) "A feast!" (Shogun-ki) In May of 1592, Japanese dictator Toyotomi Hideyoshi sent a 158,800-man army of invasion from Kyushu to Pusan on Korea's southern tip. ... More »
6. A Dragon's Head and a Serpent's Tail: Ming China and the First Great East Asian War, 1592-1598
The invasion of Korea by Japanese troops in May of 1592 was no ordinary military expedition: it was one of the decisive events in Asian history and the most tragic for the Korean peninsula until the mid-twentieth century. Japanese overlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi envisioned conquering Korea, Ming China, and ... More »
7. Developmental Liberalism in South Korea: Formation, Degeneration, and Transnationalization
This book characterizes South Korea's pre-neoliberal regime of social governance as developmental liberalism and analyzes the turbulent processes and complex outcomes of its neoliberal degeneration since the mid-1990s. Instead of repeating the politically charged critical view on South Korea's failure in socially inclusionary and sustainable development, the author ... More »
8. Korea: Where the American Century Began
By Michael Pembroke | Used Price: 70% Off
Unless you know the history, you cannot see the future. In late 1950, the US-led invasion of North Korea failed, and for the next three years ,the United States relentlessly bombed the North's cities, towns and villages. Pyongyang has been determined to develop a credible nuclear deterrent ever ... More »
9. Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History
By Bruce Cumings | Used Price: 90% Off
"Passionate, cantankerous, and fascinating. Rather like Korea itself."--Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times Book Review Korea has endured a "fractured, shattered twentieth century," and this updated edition brings Bruce Cumings's leading history of the modern era into the present. The small country, overshadowed in the imperial era, crammed ... More »
10. North Korea: Another Country
By Bruce Cumings | Used Price: 80% Off
Depicted as an insular and forbidding police state with an "insane" dictator at its helm, North Korea—charter member of Bush's "Axis of Evil"—is a country the U.S. loves to hate. Now the CIA says it possesses nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, as well as long-range missiles capable ... More »
11. Bipolar Orders: The Two Koreas since 1989
By Hyung Gu Lynn | Used Price: 80% Off
North Korea and South Korea are never far from the news headlines - one for the alleged danger it poses to the world, the other for its apparent capitalist success story. In Bipolar Orders, Hyung Gu Lynn analyzes the processes driving both countries since the 1980s. North Korea ... More »
12. A Troubled Peace: U.S. Policy and the Two Koreas
By Chae-Jin Lee | Used Price: 90% Off
In A Troubled Peace, Professor Chae-Jin Lee reviews the vicissitudes of U.S. policy toward South and North Korea since 1948 when rival regimes were installed on the Korean peninsula. He explains the continuously changing nature of U.S.-Korea relations by discussing the goals the United States has sought for ... More »
13. North Korea / South Korea: U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis
By John Feffer | Used Price: 80% Off
The Korean peninsula, divided for more than fifty years, is stuck in a time warp. Millions of troops face one another along the Demilitarized Zone separating communist North Korea and capitalist South Korea. In the early 1990s and again in 2002-2003, the United States and its allies have ... More »
14. Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis
By Mike Chinoy | Used Price: 90% Off
When George W. Bush took office in 2001, North Korea's nuclear program was frozen and Kim Jong Il had signaled he was ready to negotiate. Today, North Korea possesses as many as ten nuclear warheads, and possibly the means to provide nuclear material to rogue states or terrorist ... More »
15. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
By Barbara Demick | Used Price: 90% Off
An eye-opening account of life inside North Korea—a closed world of increasing global importance—hailed as a "tour de force of meticulous reporting" (The New York Review of Books) NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST In this landmark addition to the literature ... More »
16. North Korea Confidential: Private Markets, Fashion Trends, Prison Camps, Dissenters and Defectors
By Daniel Tudor; James Pearson | 70% Off
**Named one of the best books of 2015 by The Economist** Private Markets, Fashion Trends, Prison Camps, Dissenters and Defectors. North Korea is one of the most troubled societies on earth. The country's 24 million people live under a violent dictatorship led by a single family, which relentlessly ... More »
17. North Korea: Markets and Military Rule
By Hazel Smith | Used Price: 70% Off
In this historically grounded, richly empirical study of social and economic transformation in North Korea, Hazel Smith evaluates the 'marketization from below' that followed the devastating famine of the early 1990s, estimated to be the cause of nearly one million fatalities. Smith shows how the end of the ... More »
18. A Most Enterprising Country: North Korea in the Global Economy
North Korea has survived the end of the Cold War, massive famine, numerous regional crises, punishing sanctions, and international stigma. In A Most Enterprising Country, Justin V. Hastings explores the puzzle of how the most politically isolated state in the world nonetheless sustains itself in large part by ... More »
19. South Korea's 70-Year Endeavor for Foreign Policy, National Defense, and Unification
By Sung-Wook Nam; Sang-Woo Rhee; Myongsob Kim
This book brings Korea's finest foreign policy minds together in contemplating the risks and rewards of finally ending the 70 year stalemate between North and South Korea through reunification. While North Korea is in conflict with the United States over denuclearization and regime security, the South Korean government ... More »
20. Korea: Division, Reunification, and U.S. Foreign Policy
By Martin Hart-Landsberg | 50% Off
"Korean unification is one of the most important issues on the international agenda today. Hart-Landsberg's broad-ranging inquiry develops a perspective that is rarely heard, and that merits careful attention. It is a valuable contribution to a debate that should not be delayed."--Noam Chomsky More »
21. The Massacres at Mt. Halla: Sixty Years of Truth Seeking in South Korea
By Hun Joon Kim
In The Massacres at Mt. Halla, Hun Joon Kim presents a compelling story of state violence, human rights advocacy, and transitional justice in South Korea since 1947. The "Jeju 4.3 events" were a series of armed uprisings and counterinsurgency actions that occurred between 1947 and 1954 in the ... More »
22. Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy
By Gregg A. Brazinsky | Used Price: 80% Off
In this ambitious and innovative study Gregg Brazinsky examines American nation building in South Korea during the Cold War. Marshaling a vast array of new American and Korean sources, he explains why South Korea was one of the few postcolonial nations that achieved rapid economic development and democratization ... More »
23. Asia's Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization
By Alice Amsden | Used Price: 80% Off
South Korea has been quietly growing into a major economic force that is even challenging some Japanese industries. This timely book examines South Korean growth as an example of "late industrialization," a process in which a nation's industries learn from earlier innovator nations, rather than innovate themselves. ... More »
24. Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization
By Robert Wade | Used Price: 50% Off
Published originally in 1990 to critical acclaim, Robert Wade's Governing the Market quickly established itself as a standard in contemporary political economy. In it, Wade challenged claims both of those who saw the East Asian story as a vindication of free market principles and of those who attributed ... More »
25. The Park Chung Hee Era: The Transformation of South Korea
By Byung-Kook Kim; Ezra F. Vogel; Chang Jae Baik
In 1961 South Korea was mired in poverty. By 1979 it had a powerful industrial economy and a vibrant civil society in the making, which would lead to a democratic breakthrough eight years later. The transformation took place during the years of Park Chung Hee's presidency. Park seized ... More »
26. Kwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyong the Darkness of the Age
By Jae-Eui Lee; Nick Mamatas; Kap Su Seol
First publication in English of this eyewitness account of the 1980 civilian uprising against Chun Doo Hwan's military coup. First published in Korean in 1985 under the name of dissident novelist Hwang Sog-yong, this revised edition includes an introduction by Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago, and an essay ... More »
27. Korean Workers: The Culture and Politics of Class Formation
By Hagen Koo | Used Price: 90% Off
Forty years of rapid industrialization have transformed millions of South Korean peasants and their sons and daughters into urban factory workers. Hagen Koo explores the experiences of this first generation of industrial workers and describes its struggles to improve working conditions in the factory and to search for ... More »
28. South Koreans in the Debt Crisis: The Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare Society
By Jesook Song | Used Price: 90% Off
South Koreans in the Debt Crisis is a detailed examination of the logic underlying the neoliberal welfare state that South Korea created in response to the devastating Asian Debt Crisis (1997-2001). Jesook Song argues that while the government proclaimed that it would guarantee all South Koreans a minimum ... More »
29. Education Fever: Society, Politics, and the Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea
By Michael J. Seth | Used Price: 70% Off
In the half century after 1945, South Korea went from an impoverished, largely rural nation ruled by a succession of authoritarian regimes to a prosperous, democratic industrial society. No less impressive was the country's transformation from a nation where a majority of the population had no formal education ... More »
30. Challenges of Modernization and Governance in South Korea: The Sinking of the Sewol and Its Causes
Focusing on the sinking of the Sewol, a commercial ferry which capsized off the South Korean coast in April 2014, this book considers key issues of disaster, governance, civil society and the ideational transformation of human agents and their empowerment. Providing a lens through which to re-examine South ... More »
31. South Korea's Candlelight Revolution. The Power of Plaza Democracy
By Mi Park
Between October 2016 and April 2017, more than 17 million South Koreans took to the streets to demand the resignation of their President over a corruption scandal. Without a single arrest or casualty, the 2016-2017 candlelight protests paved the way for a peaceful regime change in South Korea. ... More »
32. A History of Japan
By Conrad Totman | Used Price: 70% Off
This is an updated edition of Conrad Totman's authoritative history of Japan from c.8000 BC to the present day. The first edition was widely praised for combining sophistication and accessibility. Covers a wide range of subjects, including geology, climate, agriculture, government and ... More »
33. A Concise History of Japan
By Brett L. Walker | Used Price: 80% Off
To this day, Japan's modern ascendancy challenges many assumptions about world history, particularly theories regarding the rise of the west and why the modern world looks the way it does. In this engaging new history, Brett L. Walker tackles key themes regarding Japan's relationships with its minorities, state ... More »
34. A History of Japan to 1334
By George Sansom | Used Price: 80% Off
This is a straightforward narrative of the development of Japanese civilization to 1334 by the author of Japan: A Short Cultural History. While complete in itself, it is also the first volume of a three-volume work which will be the first large-scale, comprehensive history of Japan. Taken as ... More »
35. Rethinking Japanese History
By Yoshihiko Amino; Hitomi Tonomura | 50% Off
In this fascinating journey across centuries, Amino Yoshihiko, the premier historian of medieval Japan, invites us to rethink everything we thought we knew about Japanese history. From reconsidering the roles of outcastes and outlaws, to the provenance of "Japan (Nihon)," to the very meaning of writing, Amino offers ... More »
36. The Making of Modern Japan
Magisterial in vision, sweeping in scope, this monumental work presents a seamless account of Japanese society during the modern era, from 1600 to the present. A distillation of more than fifty years' engagement with Japan and its history, it is the crowning work of our leading interpreter of ... More »
37. Critical Issues in Contemporary Japan
This new and fully updated second edition of Critical Issues in Contemporary Japan provides undergraduate and graduate students with an interdisciplinary textbook written by leading specialists on contemporary Japan. Students will gain the analytical insights and information necessary to assess the challenges that confront the Japanese people, policymakers and ... More »
38. Press Freedom in Contemporary Japan
In twenty-first century Japan there are numerous instances of media harassment, intimidation, censorship and self-censorship that undermine the freedom of the press and influence how the news is reported. Since Abe returned to power in 2012, the recrudescence of nationalism under his leadership has emboldened right-wing activists and ... More »
39. The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence
By Gavan Mccormack; Norma Field | 80% Off
This work aims to show that Japan even at it's height of success, while the successful version of capitalism was blighted at it's core, being unsustainable. This revised edition features n introduction which gives an analysis of Japan's contemporary crisis. More »
40. Japan and the War on Terror: Military Force and Political Pressure in the US-Japanese Alliance
By Michael Penn
The role of the Far East is becoming increasingly important in global geopolitics. Japan's economic might and sphere of geographical influence, between China, North Korea and the US, means it has the potential to be a major ally in the war on terror. While Japan's constitution does not ... More »
41. Client State: Japan in the American Embrace
By Gavan Mccormack | Used Price: 60% Off
Japan is the world's No. 2 economy, greater in GDP than Britain and France together and almost double that of China. It is also the most durable, generous, and unquestioning ally of the US, attaching priority to its Washington ties over all else. In Client State, Gavan McCormack ... More »
42. Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States
By Gavan Mccormack; Satoko Oka Norimatsu
Now in a thoroughly updated edition, Resistant Islands offers the first comprehensive overview of Okinawan history from earliest times to the present, focusing especially on the recent period of colonization by Japan, its disastrous fate during World War II, and its current status as a glorified US ... More »
43. The Enigma of Japanese Power
By Karel Van Wolferen | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
A full-scale examination of the inner workings of Japan's political and industrial system. More »
44. Japan and the Shackles of the Past
By R. Taggart Murphy | Used Price: 80% Off
Japan is one of the world's wealthiest and most technologically advanced nations, and its rapid ascent to global power status after 1853 remains one of the most remarkable stories in modern world history. Yet it has not been an easy path; military catastrophe, political atrophy, and economic upheavals ... More »
45. Showa 1926-1939: A History of Japan
By Shigeru Mizuki; Zack Davisson | 50% Off
A fascinating period in Japanese history explored by a master of mangaShowa 1926-1939: A History of Japan is the first volume of Shigeru Mizuki's meticulously researched historical portrait of twentieth-century Japan. This volume deals with the period leading up to World War II, a time of high unemployment ... More »
46. The Wars for Asia, 1911-1949
By S. C. M. Paine | Used Price: 70% Off
The Wars for Asia, 1911-1949 shows that the Western treatment of World War II, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the Chinese Civil War as separate events misrepresents their overlapping connections and causes. The long Chinese Civil War precipitated a long regional war between China and Japan that went ... More »
47. Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan's Imperialism, 1895-1945
By Mark Driscoll | Used Price: 60% Off
In this major reassessment of Japanese imperialism in Asia, Mark Driscoll foregrounds the role of human life and labor. Drawing on subaltern postcolonial studies and Marxism, he directs critical attention to the peripheries, where figures including Chinese coolies, Japanese pimps, trafficked Japanese women, and Korean tenant farmers supplied ... More »
48. Imperial Japan's World War Two: 1931-1945
By Werner Gruhl | Used Price: 70% Off
Gruhl's narrative makes clear why Japan's World War II aggression still touches deep emotions with East Asians and Western ex-prisoners of war, and why there is justifiable sensitivity to the way modern Japan has dealt with this legacy. Knowledge of the enormity of Japan's total war is also ... More »
49. Grassroots Fascism: The War Experience of the Japanese People
By Yoshiaki Yoshimi; Ethan Mark
Grassroots Fascism profiles the Asia Pacific War (1937-1945)-the most important though least understood experience of Japan's modern history-through the lens of ordinary Japanese life. Moving deftly from the struggles of the home front to the occupied territories to the ravages of the front line, the book offers rare ... More »
50. Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II
By Yuki Tanaka; John W. Dower | 50% Off
This landmark book documents little-known wartime Japanese atrocities during World War II. Yuki Tanaka's case studies, still remarkably original and significant, include cannibalism; the slaughter and starvation of prisoners of war; the rape, enforced prostitution, and murder of noncombatants; and biological warfare experiments. The author describes how desperate ... More »
51. Censoring History: Perspectives on Nationalism and War in the Twentieth Century
By Laura Elizabeth Hein; Mark Selden | 90% Off
Considering the great influence textbooks have as interpreters of history, politics and culture to future generations of citizens, it is no surprise that they generate considerable controversy. Focusing largely on textbook treatment of lingering - and sometimes explosive - tensions originating in World War II, "Censoring History" addresses ... More »
52. Monster of the Twentieth Century: Kotoku Shusui and Japan's First Anti-Imperialist Movement
By Robert Thomas Tierney; Kotoku Shusui
This extended monograph examines the work of the radical journalist Kotoku Shusui and Japan’s anti-imperialist movement of the early twentieth century. It includes the first English translation of Imperialism (Teikokushugi), Kotoku’s classic 1901 work. Kotoku Shusui was a Japanese socialist, anarchist, and critic of Japan’s ... More »
53. Japan in the World
By Masao Miyoshi; Harry Harootunian | 90% Off
Since the end of World War II, Japan has determinately remained outside the current of world events and uninvolved in the processes determining global history and politics. In Japan and the World, distinguished scholars, novelists, and intellectuals articulate how Japan—despite unprecedented economic prowess in securing dominance in the ... More »
54. Japan to 1600: A Social and Economic History
By William Wayne Farris | 90% Off
Japan to 1600 surveys Japanese historical development from the first evidence of human habitation in the archipelago to the consolidation of political power under the Tokugawa shogunate at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It is unique among introductory texts for its focus on developments that impacted all ... More »
55. Peasant protest in Japan, 1590-1884
Looks at Japan's rural and urban uprisings during its transition from late feudal to early capitalist society. Bix's analysis seeks to deepen the reader's understanding of the nature of Japanese feudalism and pre-war capitalism. More »
56. Servants, Shophands, and Laborers in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan
By Gary P. Leupp | Used Price: 70% Off
In this analysis of lower-class life in Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868), Gary Leupp vividly portrays the emergence of an urban proletariat during a time of extraordinary economic change. With the rapid increase in commercial activity, products previously restricted to use by the elite became commodities for mass consumption. Likewise, ... More »
57. The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion,1590-1800
By Brett L. Walker | Used Price: 50% Off
This model monograph is the first scholarly study to put the Ainu-the native people living in Ezo, the northernmost island of the Japanese archipelago-at the center of an exploration of Japanese expansion during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the height of the Tokugawa shogunal era. Inspired by "new ... More »
58. Scream from the Shadows: The Women's Liberation Movement in Japan
By Setsu Shigematsu | Used Price: 90% Off
More than forty years ago a women's liberation movement called uman ribu was born in Japan amid conditions of radicalism, violence, and imperialist aggression. Setsu Shigematsu's book is the first to present a sustained history of uman ribu's formation, its political philosophy, and its contributions to feminist politics ... More »
59. Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo
By Nick Kapur
In spring of 1960, Japan's government passed Anpo, a revision of the postwar treaty that allows the United States to maintain a military presence in Japan. This move triggered the largest popular backlash in the nation's modern history. These protests, Nick Kapur argues in Japan at the Crossroads, ... More »
60. The Japanese Mafia: Yakuza, Law, and the State
By Peter B. E. Hill | Used Price: 50% Off
The Japanese mafia - known collectively as yakuza - has had an extensive influence on Japanese society over the past fifty years. Based on extensive interviews with criminals, police officers, lawyers, journalists, and academics, this is the first academic analysis in English of Japan's criminal syndicates. Peter Hill ... More »
61. Empire of Hope: The Sentimental Politics of Japanese Decline
By David Leheny
Empire of Hope asks how emotions become meaningful in political life. In a diverse array of cases from recent Japanese history, David Leheny shows how sentimental portrayals of the nation and its global role reflect a durable story of hopefulness about the country's postwar path. From the medical ... More »
62. The Abe Experiment and the Future of Japan: Don't Repeat History
By Junji Banno; Jiro Yamaguchi; Arthur Stockwin
With an author's Foreword written on the day that the Abe cabinet decided to 'revise the Japanese Constitution by reinterpretation' (Tuesday, 1 July 2014), this timely examination of Japan's post-war history by two leading historians committed to democratic politics is highly challenging and prompts serious reflection by anyone ... More »
63. The Search for Modern China
By Jonathan Spence | Used Price: 90% Off
Jonathan Spence offers a comprehensive history of modern China from the Ming dynasty onwards. A leading scholar of Chinese history Spences text The Search for Modern China was ground-breaking for a popular work as it did not take a Eurocentric approach: modern Chinese history was taken from the ... More »
64. The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han
By Mark Edward Lewis | Used Price: 90% Off
In 221 bc the First Emperor of Qin unified the lands that would become the heart of a Chinese empire. Though forged by conquest, this vast domain depended for its political survival on a fundamental reshaping of Chinese culture. With this informative book, we are present at the ... More »
65. Imperial China 900-1800
By F. W. Mote
F. W. Mote's book on Imperial China covers almost one thousand years of history. It is a political history of China but along the way it also describes how the Chinese economy and government institutions developed along a different path from those in Europe. Mote was a professor ... More »
66. Modern China: A History
By Edwin E. Moise | Used Price: 80% Off
The past hundred years in China have seen almost continuous transformation and upheaval. From Confucianist monarchy to warlordism, from fanatically doctrinaire socialist tyranny to almost doctrineless social-capitalism, China has experienced political, cultural and economic disintegration, reunion, and revolution on an unprecedented scale. Beginning with the overthrow of the Emperor in ... More »
67. English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China
By James L. Hevia | Used Price: 80% Off
Inserting China into the history of nineteenth-century colonialism, English Lessons explores the ways that Euroamerican imperial powers humiliated the Qing monarchy and disciplined the Qing polity in the wake of multipower invasions of China in 1860 and 1900. Focusing on the processes by which Great Britain enacted a ... More »
68. East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute
By David C. Kang | Used Price: 80% Off
From the founding of the Ming dynasty in 1368 to the start of the Opium Wars in 1841, China has engaged in only two large-scale conflicts with its principal neighbors, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. These four territorial and centralized states have otherwise fostered peaceful and long-lasting relationships with ... More »
69. China Rising: Peace, Power, and Order in East Asia
By David C. Kang | Used Price: 90% Off
Throughout the past three decades East Asia has seen more peace and stability than at any time since the Opium Wars of 1839-1841. During this period China has rapidly emerged as a major regional power, averaging over nine percent economic growth per year since the introduction of its ... More »
70. Meeting China Halfway: How to Defuse the Emerging US-China Rivalry
By Lyle J. Goldstein | Used Price: 70% Off
Though a US-China conflict is far from inevitable, major tensions are building in the Asia-Pacific region. These strains are the result of historical enmity, cultural divergence, and deep ideological estrangement, not to mention apprehensions fueled by geopolitical competition and the closely related "security dilemma." Despite worrying signs of ... More »
71. 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline
By Ray Huang | Used Price: 70% Off
In 1587, the Year of the Pig, nothing very special happened in China. Yet in the seemingly unspectacular events of this ordinary year, Ray Huang finds exemplified the roots of China's perennial inability to adapt to change. With fascinating accounts of the lives of seven prominent officials, he ... More »
72. China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia
By Peter C. Perdue | Used Price: 60% Off
From about 1600 to 1800, the Qing empire of China expanded to unprecedented size. Through astute diplomacy, economic investment, and a series of ambitious military campaigns into the heart of Central Eurasia, the Manchu rulers defeated the Zunghar Mongols, and brought all of modern Xinjiang and Mongolia under ... More »
73. China's Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination
By Ji-young Lee | Used Price: 70% Off
Many have viewed the tribute system as China's tool for projecting its power and influence in East Asia, treating other actors as passive recipients of Chinese domination. China's Hegemony sheds new light on this system and shows that the international order of Asia's past was not as Sinocentric ... More »
74. Winning the Third World: Sino-American Rivalry during the Cold War
By Gregg A. Brazinsky | Used Price: 50% Off
Winning the Third World examines afresh the intense and enduring rivalry between the United States and China during the Cold War. Gregg A. Brazinsky shows how both nations fought vigorously to establish their influence in newly independent African and Asian countries. By playing a leadership role in Asia ... More »
75. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War
By Stephen R. Platt | Used Price: 50% Off
Winner of the 2012 Cundill Prize in HistoryA gripping account of China's nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion, one of the largest civil wars in history. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom brims with unforgettable characters and vivid re-creations of massive and often gruesome battles—a sweeping yet intimate portrait of the conflict ... More »
76. The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams, and the Making of Modern China
By Julia Lovell
In October 1839, a Windsor cabinet meeting votes to begin the first Opium War against China. Bureaucratic fumbling, military missteps, and a healthy dose of political opportunism and collaboration followed. Rich in tragicomedy, The Opium War explores the disastrous British foreign-relations move that became a founding myth of ... More »
77. The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China: A History
By David J. Silbey | Used Price: 60% Off
A concise history of an uprising that took down a three-hundred-year-old dynasty and united the great powersThe year is 1900, and Western empires are locked in entanglements across the globe. The British are losing a bitter war against the Boers while the German kaiser is busy building a ... More »
78. China's Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism
By Hill Gates | Used Price: 80% Off
"Gates is a Marxist anthropologist with chutzpah. Best known for her compelling portrayal of contemporary working-class Taiwanese, she considerably broadens and deepens her analysis of China's socioeconomy in this work."-ChoiceThis monumental work reveals the continuities that underlie the changing surface of Chinese life from late imperial days to ... More »
79. The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution
The story of contemporary China typically dates back to Mao's 1949 revolution. But in this classic work of Marxist scholarship, historian Harold Isaacs uncovers how workers and peasants struggled for a different kind of revolution, one built from the bottom up, in the 1920s. The defeat of their ... More »
80. Mao's China and After: A History of the People's Republic
By Maurice Meisner | Used Price: 80% Off
In this much-anticipated revision, Maurice Meisner again provides piercing insight and comprehensive coverage of China's fascinating and turbulent modern history. In addition to new information provided throughout this classic study, the new Part Six, "Deng Xiaoping and the Origins of Chinese Capitalism: 1976-1998," analyzes the country's uneasy relationships ... More »
81. Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village
More than forty years after its initial publication, William Hinton’s Fanshen continues to be the essential volume for those fascinated with China’s revolutionary process of rural reform and social change. A pioneering work, Fanshan is a marvelous and revealing look into life in the Chinese countryside, where tradition ... More »
82. The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village
By Dongping Han
The Unknown Cultural Revolution challenges the established narrative of China's Cultural Revolution, which assumes that this period of great social upheaval led to economic disaster, the persecution of intellectuals, and senseless violence. Dongping Han offers a powerful account of the dramatic improvements in the living conditions, infrastructure, and ... More »
83. The Mandate of Heaven: Marx and Mao in modern China
By Nigel Harris | Used Price: 50% Off
For radicals in Europe and North America, the anti-imperialist-and Chinese-revolutions continued the great task of 1789, 1848, and 1870, the "bourgeois revolution" in Marx's terms, and the creation of nations that would release the energies and unity of purpose to create new worlds of prosperity and freedom. The ... More »
84. The Transformation of Chinese Socialism
By Lin Chun | Used Price: 90% Off
In this significant contribution to both political theory and China studies, Lin Chun provides a critical assessment of the scope and limits of socialist experiments in China, analyzing their development since the victory of the Chinese communist revolution in 1949 and reflecting on the country’s likely paths into ... More »
85. How China Escaped the Poverty Trap
Before markets opened in 1978, China was an impoverished planned economy governed by a Maoist bureaucracy. In just three decades it evolved into the world's second-largest economy and is today guided by highly entrepreneurial bureaucrats. In How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, Yuen Yuen Ang explains this astonishing ... More »
86. The Power of Tiananmen: State-Society Relations and the 1989 Beijing Student Movement
By Dingxin Zhao | Used Price: 60% Off
In the spring of 1989 over 100,000 students in Beijing initiated the largest student revolt in human history. Television screens across the world filled with searing images from Tiananmen Square of protesters thronging the streets, massive hunger strikes, tanks set ablaze, and survivors tending to the dead and ... More »
87. China's Environmental Challenges
By Judith Shapiro | Used Price: 60% Off
Chinas huge environmental challenges are significant for us all. They affect not only the health and well-being of China but the very future of the planet. In the second edition of this acclaimed, trailblazing book, noted China specialist and environmentalist Judith Shapiro investigates Chinas struggle to achieve sustainable ... More »
88. Media Transparency in China: Rethinking Rhetoric and Reality
By Baohui Xie; Mobo Gao
This book argues that the gap between the official transparency rhetoric and the censorship reality has demonstrated the discrepancy between what the Party is and what it claims to be. Such a discrepancy is manifested by the reality that the reformed news industry, a hybrid of market-oriented commercialization ... More »
89. China in the Xi Jinping Era
This book examines the driving forces behind national-level politics, changes to the judiciary, social control, economic reform, environmental protection, urban development, the management of ethnic relations, as well as foreign and security policy orientation in China under Xi Jinping. It explains Xi's ambition, examines the limitations he has ... More »
90. Cracking the China Conundrum: Why Conventional Economic Wisdom Is Wrong
By Yukon Huang
China's rise is altering global power relations, reshaping economic debates, and commanding tremendous public attention. Despite extensive media and academic scrutiny, the conventional wisdom about China's economy is often wrong. Cracking the China Conundrum provides a holistic and contrarian view of China's major economic, political, and foreign policy ... More »
91. Chinese Economic Development
This book outlines and analyzes the economic development of China between 1949 and 2007. Rather than being narrowly economic, the book addresses many of the broader aspects of development, including literacy, morality, demographics and the environment. The distinctive features of this book are its sweep ... More »
92. How China Escaped Shock Therapy
China has become deeply integrated into the world economy. Yet, gradual marketization has facilitated the country's rise without leading to its wholesale assimilation to global neoliberalism. This book uncovers the fierce contest about economic reforms that shaped China's path. In the first post-Mao decade, China's reformers were sharply ... More »
93. China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle
By Martin Hart-Landsberg; Paul Burkett
China is the fastest-growing economy in the world today. For many on the left, the Chinese economy seems to provide an alternative model of development to that of neoliberal globalization. Although it is a disputed question whether the Chinese economy can be still described as socialist, there is ... More »
94. China on Strike: Narratives of Workers' Resistance
By Zhongjin Li; Eli Friedman; Hao Ren | 60% Off
China has been the fastest growing major economy in the world for three decades. It is also home to some of the largest, most incendiary, and most underreported labor struggles of our time. China on Strike, the first English-language book of its kind, provides an intimate and revealing ... More »
95. How China Grows: Investment, Finance, and Reform
By James Riedel; Jing Jin; Jian Gao
Although China's economy has grown spectacularly over the last twenty-five years, economists disagree about how the Chinese economy is likely to fare in the short- and long-term future. Is China's growth sustainable, or has China relied too much on investment, which is subject to diminishing returns, and not ... More »
96. Enterprise Reform in China: Ownership, Transition,and Performance
By Inderji Singh; Gary Jefferson
The transformation and growth of China's economy stands among the most significant economic developments of the late 20th century. It raised the living standards for one-fifth of the world's population and provided indirect benefits for many more. This book rests on two premises: 1. the key to ... More »
97. The Disempowered Development of Tibet in China: A Study in the Economics of Marginalization
Since the central government of China started major campaigns for western development in the mid-1990s, the economies of the Tibetan areas in Western China have grown rapidly and living standards have improved. However, grievances and protests have also intensified, as dramatically evidenced by the protests that spread across ... More »
98. Taiwan: A New History
This book explores Taiwan's development from its formal beginnings as a political entity to a home for a Ming-loyalist regime, to a Ch'ing prefecture and province, to its half-century as a Japanese possession, and to fifty years as the home of the Kuomintang-controlled Republic of China. More »
99. Maritime Taiwan: Historical Encounters with the East and the West
By Shih-Shan Henry Tsai | 90% Off
For centuries the island of Taiwan, 100 miles off the Asian mainland, has been a crossroads for traders and settlers, pirates and military schemers from around the world. Unlike China, with its long tradition of keeping foreigners out, Taiwan has a long history of interaction, both hostile and ... More »
100. China and the Taiwan Issue: Impending War at Taiwan Strait
By Gabe Wang
With comprehensive historical, political, socioeconomic, and cultural data, this book offers a timely examination of the developments in mainland China, Taiwan, and U.S. involvement in the region as they relate to the ongoing Taiwan Strait dilemma. While many books approach this issue primarily from the viewpoint of Taiwan, ... More »
 |
 |
 |