Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia’s Underground Railroad by Melanie Kirkpatrick [Book Review]
For a state considered a charter member of the so-called “Axis of Evil”, North Korea never seems to remain the center of global attention for long. It is one of the places that the average person (or indeed, almost anyone) really knows nothing about: we don’t know how…
My Last Empress by Da Chen [Book Review]
Da Chen’s My Last Empress is a mixture of fable and reality, viewed through the imperfect perception of its characters rather than the crisp clear view of an omniscient narrator. While not perhaps the “hallucinatory realism” lauded by the Nobel Committee in their…
Obama’s “Creative Ambiguity” Preserves Stability in East Asia [Fair Observer]
While talk of a ‘G2’ may have been overblown, the Washington-Beijing relationship may now be the world’s most important bilateral relationship. As China continues to grow, some have called for a harsher policy; Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan told a crowd…
Winner Take All by Dambisa Moyo [Book Review]
The emergence of China as a major economic and political power is perhaps the most important development in the global system since the collapse of the Soviet Union. While this change is sometimes manifested through the launch of China’s first aircraft carrier,…
The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra by Roger Hart [Book Review]
“Tattered sandles.” This was the judgment of Xu Guangqi, the official collaborating with the Jesuit Matteo Ricci’s effort to bring Euclid’s Elements to China, on the state of contemporary Chinese mathematics. These sentiments were repeated by later academics and historians, who created…
Mission to China by Mary Laven [Book Review]
Narratives created to explain trends of national power often falter when tested against history. No sooner had the narrative of liberalism finally winning its long struggle against totalitarianism been postulated that the emergence of a successful yet authoritarian China started…
Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power by Robert Kaplan [Book Review]
For 800 years, the lines of global commerce did not lie across the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans, but between the various communities bordering the Indian Ocean. Arab sailors created a network of trade routes fanning out from the trading sultanate…
The Mao Case by Qiu Xiaolong [Book Review]
The Mao Case, the latest book in Qiu Xiaolong’s series of crime novels, gives Inspector Chen, the poetry-quoting Shanghai detective, a new case to solve, involving capitalists, traditions and the meddling of the Communist Party. Once again, Qiu uses Chen’s…
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