The Writing on the Wall: Why We Must Embrace China as a Partner or Face It as an Enemy
By Will Hutton

In his latest take on global geopolitics, the economics editor of The Guardian performs an ambitious dissection of U.S. and Chinese economic policy, sounding the alarm that "the implications could not be more profound" should Western superpowers fail to shape China into a workable model of democracy and enlightenment. Delving into the 3,000 year history of the Chinese, Hutton introduces readers to Confucius and Mao, the rise of Chinese Communism and the political experiments that have left the Chinese economy "in an unstable halfway house-an economy that is neither socialist nor properly capitalist run by a party that is neither revolutionary nor subject to the normal constitutional checks and balances of even China's own Confucian past." The big questions-of how much longer the Communist party can deliver economically, of where the world will head if U.S. protectionism triumphs in painting the East as an enemy-are brilliantly analyzed, with an eye toward maximizing gain for all players: despite the fact that the U.S.'s "strategic trade policy-openness-is being exploited by a potential superpower rival," Hutton looks to the history of the [United States] to explain why, "if it can stay open, the U.S. will be rewarded by the ultimate achievement of transforming communist China and growing richer at the same time." This book pushes back from the center against those who see globalization as "a juggernaut threatening to carry us all away either to a free market nirvana-or hades" with sound historical overview and a rational call for economic pragmatism.

Source: Publishers Weekly
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Iron and Silk
By Mark Salzman

In 1982, Salzman flew off to teach English in Changsha, China. He writes of bureaucrats, students and Cultural Revolution survivors, stripping none of their complexity and humanity. He's gentle with their idiocies, saving his sharpest barbs for himself (it's his pants that split from zipper to waist whilst demonstrating martial arts in Canton). Though dribs of history and drabs of classical lore seep through, this is mostly a personal tale, noted by the Los Angeles Times for "the charmingly unpretentious manner in which it penetrates a China inaccessible to other foreigners."

Source: Amazon.com

Shadow of the Silk Road
By Colin Thubron

Shadow of the Silk Road records a journey along the greatest land route on earth. Out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran and into Kurdish Turkey, Colin Thubron covers some seven thousand miles in eight months. Making his way by local bus, truck, car, donkey cart and camel, he travels from the tomb of the Yellow Emperor, the mythic progenitor of the Chinese people, to the ancient port of Antioch—in perhaps the most difficult and ambitious journey he has undertaken in forty years of travel.

The Silk Road is a huge network of arteries splitting and converging across the breadth of Asia. To travel it is to trace the passage not only of trade and armies but also of ideas, religions and inventions. But alongside this rich and astonishing past, Shadow of the Silk Road is also about Asia today: a continent of upheaval.

One of the trademarks of Colin Thubron's travel writing is the beauty of his prose; another is his gift for talking to people and getting them to talk to him. Shadow of the Silk Road encounters Islamic countries in many forms. It is about changes in China, transformed since the Cultural Revolution. It is about false nationalisms and the world's discontented margins, where the true boundaries are not political borders but the frontiers of tribe, ethnicity, language and religion. It is a magnificent and important account of an ancient world in modern ferment.

Source: BarnesandNoble.com