Asia
China :: India
The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan by Yasmin Khan
At least 12 million people were displaced and 1 million or more died as a result of the Partition of India. A U-London post-doc fellow recounts the horrible prices paid when British imperialists failed to make serious plans for their casual but cataclysmic redrawing of the subcontinent's maps. It's a story that merits revisiting now, particularly given ongoing calls from the West for a three-way partition of Iraq. Says Khan,
The Partition of 1947 is ... a loud reminder, should we care to listen, of the dangers of colonial interventions and the profound difficulties that dog regime change. It stands testament to the follies of empire, which ruptures community evolution, distorts historical trajectories and forces violent state formation from societies that would otherwise have taken different -- and unknowable -- paths. Partition is a lasting lesson of both the dangers of imperial hubris and the reactions of extreme nationalism.
The Great Partition ... published September 18, 2007 by Yale University Press
The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What It Means for All of Us by Robyn Meredith
A Forbes magazine Asia correspondent provides a clear-eyed, data- laden and highly readable look at China's and India's booming economies. Meredith chronicles not only the financial benefits to those nations -- and the rest of us -- but also the severe growing pains they and we must face. The world will continue to change swiftly and dramatically as a result of the explosive growth, but Meredith concludes,
The United States is the world's largest, strongest, most resilient economy by a good measure. Americans must embrace that and walk tall into the ways of a new world shaped by the rise of India and China. [ ¶ ] Let the rise of India and China be a catalyst to reestablish America's competitiveness. Let it be this generation's space race. If inward-facing India and communist China can transform themselves and face the world, so can the United States of America.
Meredith spoke with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air; also with PBS's Charlie Rose.
*Also available on Audio and mp3 CD.
The Elephant and the Dragon ... published July 16, 2007 by W. W. Norton
China
Dragon Rising: An Inside Look at China Today by Jasper Becker
One of the West's top reporters and authors in East Asia serves up a concise but thorough introduction to 21st-century China. While he does so via a glossy National Geographic coffee table book with dozens of well chosen photos, unlike many such volumes this one's manageable size and weight make it comfortable to read. Becker skillfully weaves broad strands of recent Chinese history, economic and social development, environmental problems, politics and international relations into one coherent and enlightening tapestry. He does so by focusing on seven different cities, provinces or regions: Beijing, Shanghai, the Pearl River Delta, Yunnan Province, south of Shanghai, the northeast, and central China. He concludes with a chapter titled "China and the World." Like the rest of the book, it offers a concise but smooth and interesting presentation of many salient features of contemporary China.
Dragon Rising ... published October 17, 2006 by National Geographic
China Shakes the World: A Titan's Rise and Troubled
Future -- and the Challenge for America by James Kynge
The subtitle's both unwieldy and misleading; only one chapter focuses specifically on Sino-American issues. But other than that, this wide ranging and highly accessible volume provides a vivid and detailed portrait of China's recent economic and social development, and a well-informed assessment of what it all means for the rest of us. Kynge, for seven years the Beijing bureau chief of the Financial Times, says China's vast appetites for jobs and resources and its citizens' willingness to work for Dickensian wages are profoundly reshaping the world at unprecedented speed. As China remakes the global economy, however, the accompanying environmental destruction is mind-numbingly vast, and the nation's social contract is in tatters. The central government is too weak to rein in rampant corruption at the local and regional levels. And though the resource-poor nation's continued development depends on the West, conflicts therewith are likely to grow.
WAMU's Susan Page spoke with Kynge and James Pomfret about China.
China Shakes the World ... published October 3, 2006 by Houghton Mifflin
Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and
The Story of the New China by John Pomfret
In 1980, Pomfret was an exchange student in a newly opening China. Nine years later, he reported on the Tiananmen Square uprising, and he served as the Washington Post's Beijing bureau chief from 1998 to 2005. Now he explores China's recent history through the lives of five of his Chinese classmates from a quarter-century ago. Before their paths crossed Pomfret's, they'd been obliged to navigate Mao's Great Leap Forward and his Cultural Revolution. Having survived those cataclysms, they've gone on to pursue careers that each in its own way helps to illustrate the making, and many salient features, of contemporary China. Unfortunately, we see, an authoritarian nation that's reinvented itself at least five times in the last century is in many ways civically and ethically empty. Serious public discussion of such basic questions as what constitutes a good person or good citizen have long been prohibited, and the author says it's "unclear whether the country has the ability to revive the traditions of asking these timeless questions."
Chinese Lessons ... published August 8, 2006 by Henry Holt and Co.
Will the Boat Sink the Water?
The Life of China's Peasants by Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao
While China boasts a robust economy in a few of its cities (the "boat" of the proverb-inspired title), the lot of 900 million peasants (the "water" -- 90 percent of China's population) is very different. The nation's highly touted economic growth has meant very little to its peasantry, whose lives haven't changed much in 500 years. A husband-wife team spent two years traveling China's impoverished Anhui province, interviewing thousands of peasants about the rampant government corruption they face. They found instance after instance of local tyrants using extortive taxation to line their pockets, enforcing their feudal despotism with torture and murder. Written in a literary-journalistic style, the book was published in China two years ago, became an immediate bestseller, was pulled from the shelves by authorities -- and has since sold over 7 million copies in pirated editions. This is the first English translation.
Will the Boat Sink the Water? ... published June 26, 2006 by PublicAffairs
Fast Boat to China by Andrew Ross
America's sending up to 100,000 jobs to China every year, reports an NYU American studies prof, and they're not only low-wage, low-skill manufacturing jobs, but also many white-collar positions. Ross's interviews with unhappily underpaid Chinese workers illustrate some of the problems associated with "offshoring" American jobs -- which is partly the doing, says Ross, of corporate consultanting firms that have
played both sides of the issue. They advised their client firms to move offshore whatever assets they could, as soon as they could, while also issuing publicity-conscious reports that were guaranteed to scare the living daylights out of Americans who still had jobs in vulnerable sectors. The mainstream press followed the same schizophrenic path. Alarmist human-interest stories about jobs lost alternated with reassurances, often directly from the mouths of business economists, about the beneficial impact of outsourcing "in the long run."
Fast Boat to China ... published April 4, 2006 by Pantheon
Power Shift edited by David Shambaugh
A senior Brookings fellow marshals the expertise of 16 Sinologists from around the globe in a multi-faceted consideration of the world's most populous nation and its rapidly changing regional and global roles. Shambaugh's and the other essays show how very different a regional and international player China's become in the last generation, and suggest what those changes might portend. Says Shambaugh,
[T]he future of international politics in the Asian region will rest on the relationship between United States and China. ... And although some neoconservative observers in the United States believe that there is an inherent and inevitable structural conflict between United States and China in the region, and even globally, this is not necessarily the case. ... China's integration into the region will condition Sino-American relations and lend powerful forces for stability in that relationship. In short, the relationship between China, the United States, and other states of the Asian region is a positive-sum development.
Power Shift ... published January 17, 2005 by University of California Press
China Candid by Sang Ye
One of China's leading journalists (who now lives in Australia) was inspired by Studs Terkel's oral histories to devote much of his career to traveling throughout China in order to interview "normal, everyday, uncelebrated individuals." His latest is a collection of life stories that's a boon to Western readers looking for a very preliminary, very partial sense of what life's actually been like in the PRC during the first half-century of its existence. Translator Geremie R. Barmé has risen admirably to his task. For example, layers of transcription, editing, and translation notwithstanding, it's still easy to spot a few childish lies, presumably told for the benefit of watchful Chinese officials. (Says Sang Ye, "I daresay there were some who weren't always truthful, but they too have their place in my work. ... I leave it to you, the reader, to make of things what you will.") Also retained is more than a little black humor -- as in the book's final few pages, devoted to a charmingly sardonic crematorium worker who advises, "You shouldn't make too much of yourself, that's what I say. Don't think you're such a big deal when you're alive, and don't expect people to make a fuss over you when you're dead."
China Candid ... published January 4, 2005 by University of California Press
Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
Published in the UK this June, but only now in America, This definitive Great Helmsman bio comes to us from Jung Chang and her British historian-husband. The ground covered is vast but the prose is fluid and the pace necessarily swift, so even at 814 pages it's an accessible, often gripping read. Chang's very personal history of 20th-century China, Wild Swans, met with spectacular success in the early '90s, which may explain how it was that two first-rate writers could spend an entire decade doing the meticulous -- and in some cases groundbreaking -- research that went into this important volume.
Mao: The Unknown Story ... first published October 18, 2005 by Knopf
India
The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone: Reflections on India, The Emerging 21st-Century Power by Shashi Tharoor
A popular newspaper columnist for The Hindu and the Times of India, Tharoor's op-eds and book reviews have also appeared in many major American newspapers. He's also an award-winning novelist (for The Great Indian Novel, 1989). More impressive still, perhaps, he served as a UN under-secretary general from 2002-07 and was runner-up (to Ban Ki-moon) to fill Kofi Annan's job when Annan's term expired.
Tharoor's been described as a pop-culture junkie and a "Brand India" booster; those inclinations are evident throughout his current work. It's an eclectic collection of essays that paints an impressionistic portrait of 21st-century India. Some of his musings can be overly poetic, a bit too cute and somewhat superficial, but they're simultaneously so wide-ranging and well-informed that it's impossible to go cover-to-cover without gleaning extensive insights into contemporary Indian life and prospects.
The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone ... published Sept. 19, 2007 by Arcade
India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guha
It's hard to imagine a more comprehensive or readable single-volume history of the soon to be 60-year-old state of India. Here is an incisive chronology of the world's largest democracy, with attention not only to major social, political and military trends and events, but also to some colorful anecdotes and personalities that help bring the tale to life. Guha begins with the advent of Indian independence (Aug. 15, 1947) and the assassination of Gandhi less than six months later, and proceeds thereafter at a generally brisk pace, wrapping things up -- with an epilogue titled "Why India Survives" -- fewer than 750 text pages later. The question of how India has managed to remain both unified and democratic, given its many, deep and often bloodily antagonistic diversities, unifies the work. It also facilitates explorations of some of the nation's culturally and politically distinct regions and the leaders who helped shape them.
India After Gandhi ... published July 24, 2007 by Ecco
The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen
The world's largest democracy has a caricature problem. A centuries-long pigeonholing of India by the West as a "wondrous land" of "exotic religions" distorts the nation's historical realities and its self-image. Amartya Sen shows that vigorous argumentation between and within India's diverse peoples is integral to the nation's history, tracing the Indian penchant for lively debating to, among other sources, ancient Hindu scripture. Further demolishing the notion that India is, at its core, necessarily Hindu but not necessarily rational, Sen also cites many fascinating examples of India's long history of mathematical and scientific achievement. He's not at all sanguine, though, about India's Hinduvta movement(s), and he presents compelling evidence that such militant, nationalist ideologies are based on "history" that's absurdly revisionist. Even thinking of India as a Hindu state is erroneous, since Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, and others have played such key roles in India's development, and at times even constituted the country's majority or dominant perspectives.
The Argumentative Indian ... first pub'd October 5, 2005 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Untouchables by Narendra Jadhav (September 2005)
Every sixth human being in the world today is an Indian, and every sixth Indian is an erstwhile untouchable, a Dalit. Today there are 165 million Dalits (equal to more than half the population of the United States) and they continue to suffer under India's 3,500-year-old caste system, which remains a stigma on humanity. However, Dalits are awakening.
So begins the chief economist of the Reserve Bank of India, himself a Dalit. Jadhav's stories of his family's struggles to overcome caste discrimination began with the memoirs he urged his father to write. Editing those and adding his mother's oral histories after his father died, Jadhav produced Our Father and Us, a bestseller in India both in 1993 when it was published in the Marathi language of the Mumbai area and again in 2003 when an English edition was issued in Southwest Asia. In addition to telling his parents' and his own stories, Jadhav tells those of the brilliant human rights champion Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, the 20th century's most prominent untouchable. This edition also includes an addendum by Jadhav's 20-year-old daughter, who concludes,
I have no reminders of being a Dalit, or any reasons to think I am different from my peers. My ancestors worked hard to make my life just like that of any other girl in the world. I have the torch they have lit for me and nothing can stop me now.
Untouchables ... first published September 27, 2005 by Scribner
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