In China, the "Black Hands" are those people considered the principal threats to China's totalitarian regime. In the most vivid and revealing book yet on the Chinese democracy movement, the personal stories of three of the main leaders of the movement cast a glaring light on the nature of the Communist regime and the consequences of open protet against it.

Three decades after 1989, historical materials are now available for understanding the Tiananmen protests in a new light. In a play-by-play account of the elite politics that led to the military crackdown, Yang Su addresses the repression of the protest in the context of political leadership succession. He challenges conventional views that see the military intervention as a necessary measure against a revolutionary mobilization. Beneath the political drama, Deadly Decision in Beijing explores the authoritarian regime's perpetual crisis of leadership transition and its impact on popular movements.

This book investigates the expanding involvement of China in security cooperation in Africa. Drawing on leading and emerging scholars in the field, the volume uses a combination of analytical insights and case studies to unpack the complexity of security challenges confronting China and the continent. It interrogates how security considerations impact upon the growing economic and social links China has developed with African states.

In the spring of 1989, Chinese workers and students captured global attention as they occupied Tiananmen Square, demanded political change, and were tragically suppressed by the Chinese army. Months later, East German civilians rose up nonviolently, brought down the Berlin Wall, and dismantled their regime. Although both movements used tactics of civil resistance, their outcomes were different. Why? In Nonviolent Revolutions, Sharon Erickson Nepstad examines these and other uprisings in Panama, Chile, Kenya, and the Philippines. Taking a comparative approach that includes both successful and failed cases of nonviolent resistance, Nepstad analyzes the effects of movements' strategies along with the counter-strategies regimes developed to retain power. She shows that a significant influence on revolutionary outcomes is security force defections, and explores the reasons why soldiers defect or remain loyal and the conditions that increase the likelihood of mutiny. She then examines the impact of international sanctions, finding that they can at times harm movements by generating new allies for authoritarian leaders or by shifting the locus of power from local civil resisters to international actors. Nonviolent Revolutions offers essential insights into the challenges that civil resisters face and elucidates why some of these movements failed. With a recent surge of popular uprisings across the Middle East, this book provides a valuable new understanding of the dynamics and potency of civil resistance and nonviolent revolt.

The concluding volume--following Mao's Great Famine and The Tragedy of Liberation--in Frank Dikötter's award-winning trilogy chronicling the Communist revolution in China. After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives from 1958–1962, an aging Mao Zedong launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The stated goal of the Cultural Revolution was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalistic elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. Young students formed the Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semiautomatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people. The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976 draws for the first time on hundreds of previously classified party documents, from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches. Frank Dikötter uses this wealth of material to undermine the picture of complete conformity that is often supposed to have characterized the last years of the Mao era. After the army itself fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, ordinary people used the political chaos to resurrect the market and hollow out the party's ideology. In short, they buried Maoism. By showing how economic reform from below was an unintended consequence of a decade of violent purges and entrenched fear, The Cultural Revolution casts China's most tumultuous era in a wholly new light.

Describes the growing economic relationship between China and developing African nations, claiming that the nation's lack of colonial past and political preconditions provides China a unique opportunity to help Africa direct its own fate.