Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China

Julian Gewirtz

“Gewirtz takes us on a grand tour of the historic efforts made by Chinese leaders to confect a new economic model, reminding us also of the critical role played by foreign ideas and advisors. If you are confused by the complicated evolution of China’s economy, this wonderfully meaty book will serve as a fascinating road map.”—Orville Schell, Director, Center on U.S.–China Relations, Asia Society

China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay

Minxin Pei

“Pei makes a powerful and convincing assertion that China’s party-state is both predatory and decaying as he analyzes the nature of destructive collusive behavior. An important book by one of our leading analysts of Chinese politics.”—Joseph Fewsmith, author of China since Tiananmen

Tibet in Agony: Lhasa 1959

Jianglin Li, translated by Susan Wilf

“This remarkable book is told with the narrative force of a compelling novel. Exposing the violence of the ‘peaceful liberation’ and the myth of ‘democratic reform,’ Li’s excavation of Tibet’s agony in the 1950s reveals that Mao hoped for the Tibetans to rise up in order to crush them and bring Tibet under Communist control. This pathbreaking book involved not only painstaking research into sources that have not been made public in English before, but also personal sacrifice by the author, who now lives in exile.”—Kate Saunders, Director of Communications, International Campaign for Tibet

China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed

Andrew G. Walder

“Andrew Walder’s account of Mao’s time in power is detailed, sophisticated and powerful… Walder takes on many pieces of conventional wisdom about Mao’s China and pulls them apart… What was it that led so much of China’s population to follow Mao’s orders, in effect to launch a civil war against his own party? There is still much more to understand about the bond between Mao and the wider population. As we try to understand that bond, there will be few better guides than Andrew Walder’s book. Sober, measured, meticulous in every deadly detail, it is an essential assessment of one of the world’s most important revolutions.”—Rana Mitter, The Times Literary Supplement

The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History

Rian Thum

2015 John K. Fairbank Prize, American Historical Association

“In The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History, [Thum] documents how the Muslims of the region now called Xinjiang understood their past in the three centuries before the Cultural Revolution. Then he explains how that historical identity was torn apart, by inside and outside forces, in the course of the 20th century… What makes Sacred Routes so valuable is its coverage of both the modern and pre-modern periods, taking us back before the Chinese conquest of Altishahr. This enables Thum to show what happened to the older cultural technologies of manuscript, shrine, and pilgrimage in the age of mass printing, competing nationalisms, and commercial tourism… Refusing to reduce his ‘biography of history’ in Altishahr to a simplistic binary of oppression and opposition, Thum instead leads readers beyond the familiar ideologies of modern times toward older ways of knowing and belonging. The empathy and magnitude of this humanist project show the experience of the past in a society few have tried to understand in its own terms… This is Uyghur history as everyman’s history.”—Nile Green, The Los Angeles Review of Books

China from Empire to Nation-State

Wang Hui, translated by Michael Gibbs Hill

“[This translation of the introduction to Wang Hui’s Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (2004)] is continually rewarding, offering up new avenues of inquiry and revisiting links between Chinese modernity and the country’s imperial history. Three centuries on from Kangxi, there are still plenty of blanks in the map of modem China. For anglophone readers, this very overdue translation helps us see the lie of the land.”—Alex Monro, The Times Literary Supplement

The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis

Yiching Wu

2013 President’s Book Award, Social Science History Association

“The Cultural Revolution at the Margins is a carefully researched and equally carefully thought-out account of the ideological struggles of the Cultural Revolution and its eventual suppression by a restored Party apparatus between 1966 and 1968. Using a sophisticated theoretical methodology, Wu makes a case for a compelling reinterpretation of the import of the familiar events of the CR. This book will eventually take its place as an important new analysis of the CR, and of how events of the time continue to resonate in Chinese political discourse.”—Ted Huters, author of Bringing the World Home

Emperor Huizong

Patricia Buckley Ebrey

Ebrey, a master historian of this period with an acute sense of the poignant and tragic, shows us, in this first English-language biography of Huizong, one of the most brilliantly cultured monarchs ever to have lived, and recounts his miserable end… Patricia Ebrey’s scholarly powers are amazing. I can think of few historians—Chinese or Western—of traditional China who could exceed or even match her knowledge of the arts so widely patronized and practiced by Huizong, from poetry and brushwork to music and gardening. Her ability to evaluate Song and later sources is a model for all scholars. Such books are an intense pleasure to read.”—Jonathan Mirsky, Literary Review

Lu Xun’s Revolution: Writing in a Time of Violence

Gloria Davies

A Times Higher Education Best Book of 2013

“In Lu Xun’s Revolution, Davies has created a fascinating account of the final years of the writer’s life and the beginning of his literary afterlife.”—Julia Lovell, The Wall Street Journal

“A groundbreaking work.”—Eva Shan Chou, Times Higher Education

Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China

Ezra F. Vogel

2012 Lionel Gelber Prize, Lionel Gelber Foundation, Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, and Foreign Policy • Honorable Mention, 2012 Bernard Schwartz Book Award, Asia Society • An Esquire China Book of the Year, 2012 • A Gates Notes Top Read of 2012 • Finalist, 2011 National Book Critics Circle Awards, Biography Category • Honorable Mention, 2011 Association of American Publishers PROSE Award, European and World History Category • An Economist Best Book of 2011 • A Financial Times Best Book of 2011 • A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, 2011 • A Wall Street Journal Book of the Year, 2011 • A Washington Post Best Book of 2011

“A masterful new history of China’s reform era. It pieces together from interviews and memoirs perhaps the clearest account so far of the revolution that turned China from a totalitarian backwater led by one of the monsters of the 20th century into the power it has become today… Vogel has a monumental story to tell. His main argument is that Deng deserves a central place in the pantheon of 20th-century leaders. For he not only launched China’s market-oriented economic reforms but also accomplished something that had eluded Chinese leaders for almost two centuries: the transformation of the world’s oldest civilization into a modern nation… [An] illuminating book.”
—John Pomfret, The Washington Post

No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems

Liu Xiaobo, edited by Perry Link, Tienchi Martin-Liao, and Liu Xia, with a foreword by Václav Havel

A Wall Street Journal Book of the Year, 2011

“Freedom of expression may be irritating to some, but its absence is harmful to all. Without the freedom of expression there can be no lasting progress because without critical voices in the society there is no protection against error and abuse in the exercise of power. Liu Xiaobo is paying a harsh price for speaking out. I invite you to read his work, as a tribute to his courage, and as an inspiration for your own.”—Thorbjørn Jagland, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee