Showing titles in Asia

As tensions over Taiwan escalate, the United States and China stand on the brink of a catastrophic war. Resolving the impasse demands we understand how it began. In 1943, the Allies declared that Japanese-held Taiwan would return to China at the conclusion of World War II. The Chinese civil war led to a change of plans. The Communist Party came to power in China and the defeated Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, fled to Taiwan, where he was afforded US protection. The specter of conflict has loomed ever since.

A leading national security expert, who publicly predicted Vladimir Putin's intention to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine months before it took place, lays out the case for why China's Xi Jinping is preparing to conquer Taiwan in the coming years and the dire stakes for America and the whole world if he is not deterred.

The Mountains Are High is a beautifully written, candid memoir about how reevaluating what is really important and taking a leap of faith to reach it can genuinely transform your life. As one of the ‘new migrants' tells Alec when he arrives: it is easy to change your environment, far more difficult to change your mind.

Journalist Patricia Evangelista came of age in the aftermath of a street revolution that forged a new future for the Philippines. Three decades later, in the face of mounting inequality, the nation discovered the fragility of its democratic institutions under the regime of strongman Rodrigo Duterte.

A thrilling firsthand account by husband-and-wife ex-CIA operatives.

One of the US government's leading China experts reveals the hidden strategy fueling that country's rise - and how Americans have been seduced into helping China overtake us as the world's leading superpower.

As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee was one of millions trapped by a secretive and brutal communist regime. Her home on the border with China gave her some exposure to the world beyond the confines of the Hermit Kingdom and, as the famine of the 1990s struck, she began to wonder, question and realise that she had been brainwashed her entire life. Given the repression, poverty and starvation she witnessed surely her country could not be, as she had been told, 'the best on the planet'?

China and Japan have cultural and political connections that stretch back 1,500 years. But today, their relationship is strained. China's military buildup deeply worries Japan, while Japan's brutal occupation of China in World War II remains an open wound. In recent years, less than 10 percent of each population had positive feelings toward the other, and both countries insist that the other side must deal openly with its history before relations can improve. Ezra Vogel's China and Japan examines key turning points in Sino-Japanese history.

Over the course of the last half dozen years, China's supreme leader Xi Jinping has made extraordinary changes which have profound implications not only for the Chinese people but nations throughout the world. Given how swiftly and fundamentally China's relations with the rest of the world are changing under Xi's rule, it is imperative that we know what Xi Jinping Thought is, how it evolved, and why it is so important.

On 24 May 1971, based on a telephone call purportedly from Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her secretary P.N. Haksar, the chief cashier at the Parliament Street branch of the State Bank of India handed over Rs 60 lakh to a stranger posing as the PM's courier. The money was supposedly meant for secret operations in East Pakistan. When the chief cashier approached the PMO for a receipt, he was told that neither Haksar nor the PM had given any such instructions. He had been duped.

More than two decades after teaching English during the early part of China’s economic boom, an experience chronicled in his book River Town, Peter Hessler returned to Sichuan Province to instruct students from the next generation. At the same time, Hessler and his wife enrolled their twin daughters in a local state-run elementary school, where they were the only Westerners. Over the years, Hessler had kept in close contact with many of the people he had taught in the 1990s.

For a brief moment on December 27, 2007, life came to a standstill in Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto, the country's former prime minister and the first woman ever to lead a Muslim country, had been assassinated at a political rally just outside Islamabad. Back in Karachi--Bhutto's birthplace and Pakistan's other great metropolis--Rafia Zakaria's family was suffering through a crisis of its own: her uncle Sohail, the man who had brought shame upon the family, was near death.

Michael Wood has travelled the length and breadth of China, the world's oldest civilization and longest lasting state, to tell a thrilling story of intense drama, fabulous creativity, and deep humanity that stretches back thousands of years.

Since the founding of the People's Republic of China over seventy years ago, five paramount leaders have shaped the fates and fortunes of the nation and the ruling Chinese Communist Party: Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping. Under their leaderships, China has undergone an extraordinary transformation from an undeveloped and insular country to a comprehensive world power. In this definitive study, renowned Sinologist David Shambaugh offers a refreshing account of China's dramatic post-revolutionary history through the prism of those who ruled it.

Hong Kong is known as a place of extremes: a former colony of the United Kingdom that now exists at the margins of an ascendant China; a city rocked by mass protests, where residents rally—often in vain—against threats to their fundamental freedoms. But it is also misunderstood, and often romanticized. Drawing from her own experience reporting on the politics and culture of her hometown, as well as interviews with musicians, protesters, and writers who have watched their home transform, Karen Cheung gives us a rare insider’s view of this remarkable city at a pivotal moment.

Weak, corrupt, and politically unstable, the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan are dismissed as isolated and irrelevant to the outside world. But are they? This hard-hitting book argues that Central Asia is in reality a globalization leader with more extensive involvement in economics, politics, and security dynamics beyond its borders than any other world region. Yet Central Asia's international activities are mostly hidden from view, with disturbing implications for world security.

In The Cold War, Odd Arne Westad offers a new perspective on a century when a superpower rivalry and an ideological war transformed every corner of our globe. We traditionally think of the Cold War as a post-World War II diplomatic and military conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. But in this major new work, Westad argues that the conflict must be understood as a global ideological confrontation with roots in the industrial revolution and with continuing implications for the world today.

A deeply personal and shocking look at how China is coming to terms with its conflicted past as it emerges into a modern, cutting-edge superpower.

In his critically acclaimed Armageddon, Hastings detailed the last twelve months of the struggle for Germany. Here, in what can be considered a companion volume, he covers the horrific story of the war against Japan. By the summer of 1944 it was clear that Japan’s defeat was inevitable, but how the drive to victory would be achieved remained to be seen. The ensuing drama–that ended in Japan’s utter devastation–was acted out across the vast stage of Asia.

In this fully revised and updated third edition, Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Maura Elizabeth Cunningham provide cogent answers to urgent questions regarding the world's newest superpower and offer a framework for understanding China's meteoric rise from developing country to superpower. Framing their answers through the historical legacies that largely define China's present-day trajectory, Wasserstrom and Cunningham introduce listeners to the Chinese Communist Party, the building boom in Shanghai, and the environmental fallout of rapid Chinese industrialization.