What
Everyone Needs to Know
by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom & Maura Elizabeth
Cunningham
Is China bent on world domination?
What big issues relating to the environment and energy does China
face? How powerful is Chinese
nationalism? What is the most common
thing Americans get wrong about China, and vice versa? These are just a few of the questions
Wasserstrom and Cunningham seek to address in the 3rd edition of China in the 21st Century.
Fully revised and updated to include perspectives on Hong Kong’s sifting
political status, as well as an expanded discussion of President Xi Jinping’s time
in office, this concise and insightful guide provides cogent answers to the
most urgent questions regarding the newest superpower and offers a framework
for understanding China’s meteoric rise on the world stage.
Focusing their answers through the historical legacies—Confucian thought, Western and Japanese imperialism, the Mao era, and the massacre near Tiananmen Square—that largely define China's present-day trajectory, Wasserstrom and Cunningham introduce readers to the Chinese Communist Party, the building boom in Shanghai, and the environmental fall-out of rapid Chinese industrialization. They explain unique aspects of Chinese culture such as the one-child policy, and provide insight into Chinese-American relations, a subject that has become increasingly fraught during the Trump era. Drawing parallels between China and other industrialized nations during their periods of development, they also provide guidance on the ways we might expect China to act in the future vis-à-vis the United States, Russia, India, and its East Asian neighbours.
“Essential reading for scholars
and general readers alike seeking to understand China’s past, present and
future. Indispensable.” Professor Peter Frankopan, University of
Oxford
“This slim volume does the impossible:
it provides the essential knowledge that intelligent readers need to have about
China historically and today and it can be read in less time than it takes to
fly from the U.S. to China!” Susan Shirk, author of China: Fragile Superpower
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Global Shanghai professor of History at
the University of California, Irvine.
His previous books include China’s
Brave New World, and Twentieth-Century
China. Maura Elizabeth Cunningham is
an Associate at the University of Michigan’s Lieberthal-Rogel Center for
Chinese Studies. She has written on
modern Chinese history for the Wall
Street Journal and the LA Review of Books.
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