'Importantly, China's Change: The Greatest Show on Earth provides a welcome contrast to such fashionable pessimism … demolishes a series of popular urban myths … and a very convincing case he makes. This, to my mind, is a wholly original approach to understanding present-day China and the book is well worth reading for this alone. … readers are likely to end up considerably wiser about how the Chinese economy has developed and how it currently works. It's difficult to do justice to the exceptionally wide-ranging scope of the book. It is, furthermore, well-written (as befits a former journalist) and highly readable. … a useful corrective for the innate pessimism which has pervaded so much Western economic and financial commentary in recent years.'The Society of Professional Economists (SPE)China's Change injects timely, original ideas into the world's most important, if confused, debate over how to manage the twin challenges of anaemic economic growth and accelerating global disruption. Change is the cry from the US to Europe, Asia to Australasia. The snag is the West has no playbook to help. China however, to regain control of its future, has regularly reinvented itself by understanding change's nature through traditional philosophy.This is not idle conjecture. It is what China has done time and again, including most recently with COVID-19 where it identified clear goals, priorities and means to bring the coronavirus under control.This book argues it is time to 'Look at China' but stresses China's approach to managing change only supplies the process not individual policies: the how not the what. Policies have to be created locally. In managing change, traditional thought is China's X-Factor, the key to China's record-breaking economic transformation. To grasp this, China's Change provides an understanding of China's past, present and future through its philosophy, history, economics, business, politics, prospects and impact in a way that no other book has done.Two big global questions are answered. Can other countries, firms and individuals find paths out of their dim twilight by adapting China's change process? Can China continue to create one-third of world growth, more than the US, EU and Japan combined, to help cure the last decade's global economic malaise?China's roadmap for change enables anyone to navigate growing global disruption. Ironically China's process is built on such ignored-in-the-West ideas as long-term thinking, clear priorities, gradualism and non-ideological pragmatism that earlier powered two centuries of Western economic dominance. If the West and rest of Asia learn from China to manage change, the next global surprise could be another turning of the tables. There is no end to history, only more turns of the wheel: for now China's Change is again the Greatest Show on Earth.Related Link(s)

This deeply informed and beautifully written book provides a comprehensive and comprehensible history of China from prehistory to the present. Focusing on the interaction of humans and their environment, Robert B. Marks traces changes in the physical and cultural world that is home to a quarter of humankind. Through both word and image, this work illuminates the chaos and paradox inherent in China's environmental narrative, demonstrating how historically sustainable practices can, in fact, be profoundly ecologically unsound. The author also reevaluates China's traditional "he.

A Clash of Civilisations is not inevitable, yet danger mounts the longer the West ignores its top forecaster. In 2023, the OECD sees China's economy as 27% bigger than the US: by mid-century 70%. India too will be larger, leaving America as No.3. Time to Get Real: listen to economists, especially development economists, and those in business who know China.Three giant shocks lurk right ahead for the West: economic, demographic and competence. 90% of the world's population will soon be non-Western: no more accepting exclusion from global decision making. After COVID, Afghanistan and domestic turmoil, many question Western competence to get things right, let alone avoid nuclear destruction.Economic size, not military might, is what counts among Great Powers. As leading military historian Paul Kennedy wrote, military strength is, 'inextricably intertwined with economic power and technological progress'. This need not threaten the West if understood and managed properly. Indeed, it would mitigate the real existential threats, from the environment to war. Otherwise nuclear conflict, Kissinger's 'Armageddon-like clash', is ever more likely.A New New World with growing muscle and some different ideas is emerging. How can the West best respond? The book proposes a Biden-Xi Grand Bargain, as Nixon struck with Mao. Grasp what Yin and Yang offer, as opposites can support each other for lasting mutual benefit.

The Jews first arrived in China during the Tang dynasty (618-907 AD) and settled as businessmen, civil servants and professionals. They assimilated into Chinese society and lost their Jewish character. The next wave came in the mid-19th century with the opening of the treaty ports and settled in Shanghai. They went into trading, especially opium, and diversified into property, manufacturing, finance, public transport and retail. Another Jewish community settled in Harbin after the opening of the China Eastern Railway in 1903. They also prospered in trading and business. Both communities built synagogues, schools, social clubs and welfare institutions. During World War Two, 25,000 Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe took refuge in Shanghai, one of the few cities in the world open to them. Many received visas from Asian diplomats who defied their governments to issue them. The Japanese military refused the Nazi demand to carry out ‘the final solution’ of the Jews in Shanghai. After 1945, inflation, civil war and Communist rule made most Jews leave China for new homes in Israel, North America, Australia and elsewhere. The new state of Israel worked hard to establish diplomatic ties with the People’s Republic; it became an important supplier of weapons in the 1980s. But it took 42 years for the two countries to sign the ties, in 1992. Since then, relations have blossomed and China has become one of Israel’s biggest foreign investors. In the reform and open-door era, Jewish people have returned to China and form important communities in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other cities. Part of this narrative are remarkable individuals who have left a deep imprint on China – Karl Marx, Sir Victor Sassoon, Silas Hardoon, the Kadoorie family, Henry Kissinger and Sigmund Freud. To tell this extraordinary story, Mark O’Neill conducted many interviews with rabbis, businessmen, entrepreneurs, professors and journalists in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Israel. It is, largely, a joyful page in Jewish history.

China's Belt and Road strategy is acknowledged to be the most ambitious geopolitical initiative of the age. Covering almost seventy countries by land and sea, it will affect every element of global society, from shipping to agriculture, digital economy to tourism, politics to culture. Most importantly, it symbolizes a new phase in China's ambitions as a superpower: to remake the world economy and crown Beijing as the new center of capitalism and globalization. Bruno Maçães traces this extraordinary initiative's history, highlighting its achievements to date, and its staggering complexity. He asks whether Belt and Road is about more than power projection and profit. Might it herald a new set of universal political values, to rival those of the West? Is it, in fact, the story of the century?

Marxist ideology is the only fully scientific ideology, the only one able to guide mankind toward the settlement of fundamental social problems and to point out the royal road for the proletariat to take in its march toward socialism and communism. Without Marxism, modern people cannot establish true social ideals, nor can they engage in the rational pursuit of values. Without Marxism, modern people cannot choose the correct path of development, nor can they build up new forms of civilizations. Without Marxism, modern people would never base their commitments to schedule the consensus-building effort and support the consensus-building process on any irrefutably and sufficiently sound theoretical foundations.

China is intensely conscious of its status, both at home and abroad. This concern is often interpreted as an undivided desire for higher standing as a global leader. Yet, Chinese political elites heatedly debate the nation's role as it becomes an increasingly important player in international affairs. At times, China positions itself not as a nascent global power but as a fragile developing country. Contradictory posturing makes decoding China's foreign policy a challenge, generating anxiety and uncertainty in many parts of the world. Using the metaphor of rebranding to understand China's varying displays of status, Xiaoyu Pu analyzes a rising China's challenges and dilemmas on the global stage. As competing pressures mount across domestic, regional, and international audiences, China must pivot between different representational tactics. Rebranding China demystifies how the state represents its global position by analyzing recent military transformations, regional diplomacy, and international financial negotiations. Drawing on a sweeping body of research, including original Chinese sources and interdisciplinary ideas from sociology, psychology, and international relations, this book puts forward an innovative framework for interpreting China's foreign policy.

A kimono-clad Tamil woman greets Japanese soldiers at the door while her Anglophile husband cowers in his Jaguar. Two sisters share a husband when one fails to produce a child for the longest time. An American diplomat's urgent inquires about the Malaysian treasury’s facilities are hilariously misunderstood. A daring civil servant proposes to a Ceylonese lady in his hometown mere minutes after meeting her, breaking a thousand years of marriage protocol. M. Shanmughalingam's debut collection paints, with gentle wit and humour, the concerns and intrigues of the Jaffna Tamil community in Malaya. At turns satirical, empathetic and insightful, these fifteen stories explore what happens when we hold on to—and choose to leave behind—our traditions and identities in a changing world.

The spectacle of major cultural and sporting events can preoccupy modern societies. This book is concerned with contemporary mega-events, like the Olympics and Expos. Using a sociological perspective Roche argues that mega-events reflect the major social changes which now influence our societies, particularly in the West, and that these amount to a new ‘second phase’ of the modernization process. Changes are particularly visible in the media, urban and global locational aspects of mega-events. Thus he suggests that contemporary mega-events, both in their achievements and their vulnerabilities, reflect, in the media sphere, the rise of the internet; in the urban sphere, de-industrialisation and the growing ecological crisis; and in the global sphere, the relative decline of the West and the rise of China and other ‘emerging’ countries.

This is an imaginative evocation and analysis—through the medium of translations (the author’s own) of once popular but now forgotten literature—of the variety of “stories” in terms of which the Chinese have interpreted their lives since the early years of the 19th century.