China Watcher The Dragon has awakened! Read this scholarly insiders look at China . . . its customs, history, politics, cuisine, love life, literature and art, philosophy, and much more. Witty and informative, this unique book explains aspects of Chinese culture and history often confusing to natives and foreigners alike. All the characters described in this work are real and all the events true. Each chapter offers a vignette of Chinese life and these chapters form, in toto, a kaleidoscope of Chinas past and present. The author includes his translations of some of Chinas greatest poetry.

This audacious and illuminating memoir by Richard Baum, a senior China scholar and sometime policy advisor, reflects on forty years of learning about and interacting with the People’s Republic of China, from the height of Maoism during the author’s UC Berkeley student days in the volatile 1960s through globalization. Anecdotes from Baum’s professional life illustrate the alternately peculiar, frustrating, fascinating, and risky activity of China watching — the process by which outsiders gather and decipher official and unofficial information to figure out what’s really going on behind China’s veil of political secrecy and propaganda. Baum writes entertainingly, telling his narrative with witty stories about people, places, and eras. China Watcher will appeal to scholars and followers of international events who lived through the era of profound political and academic change described in the book, as well as to younger, post-Mao generations, who will enjoy its descriptions of the personalities and political forces that shaped the modern field of China studies.

America’s top China–watcher, the renowned pandit of modern Chinese history, here provides an unrivaled overview of revolutionary China and Chinese–American relations. His reviews and critical commentary scrutinize our always fascinated, often puzzled attitude toward this newly emergent superpower. John Fairbank distinguishes two major motifs in recent Chinese–American connections: the American expectation of highly profitable trade and investment, which so far have not materialized, and the deep–rooted missionary impulse to give the Chinese the best of our culture, which includes our efforts to promote human rights. The possibility of grafting our ideas of individual endeavor and God–given prerogatives onto two thousand years of Confucianism with its emphasis on duty and collective harmony seems remote. In contrast, the outlook for mutually enriching economic dealings is much brighter. Yet Fairbank cautions that we are dealing with a huge and disoriented nation struggling to enter the modern world with its own cultural identity intact, and (at least in the current period) with its Communist Party in power. Confucian tenets still prevail: theory and practice are a unity policies are a form of conduct manifesting one’s character, and attacks on policy equal attacks on the ruling party. These writings concern China in the mind’s eye of America—as it is interpreted though the works of American merchants, diplomats, missionaries, and reporters observing China’s travail of revolution. For generalist, scholar, and sage alike, China Watch offers many insights.

"No matter what you may be selling, your business in China should be enormous, if the Chinese who should buy your goods would only do so." But will they? Carl Crow opened the first western advertising agency in Shanghai and ran it for twenty-five years, promoting everything from American lipsticks and moisturizers to French brandy and pharmaceuticals, and nothing was straightforward. In this highly readable account of his work in Shanghai, illustrated with delightful line drawings, Crow uses anecdotes and examples to illustrate the particular challenges of doing business in China.

A timely, vital account of California’s unique relationship with China, told through the exploits of the entrepreneurs, activists, and politicians driving transformations with international implications. Tensions between the world’s superpowers are mounting in Washington, D.C., and Beijing. Yet, the People's Republic of China and the state of California have built deep and interdependent socioeconomic exchanges that reverberate across the globe, making California and China a microcosm of the most important international relationship of the twenty–first century. In The Transpacific Experiment, journalist and China analyst Matt Sheehan chronicles the real people who are making these connections. Sheehan tells the story of a Southern Californian mayor who believes a Chinese electric bus factory will save his town from meth labs and skinheads. He follows a Chinese AI researcher who leaves Google to compete with his former employer from behind the Great Firewall. Sheehan joins a tour bus of wealthy Chinese families shopping for homes in the Bay Area, revealing disgruntled neighbors and raising important questions about California’s own narratives around immigration and the American Dream. Sheehan’s on–the–ground reporting reveals movie sets in the “Hollywood of China,” Chinese–funded housing projects in San Francisco, Chinese immigrants who support Donald Trump, and more. Each of these stories lays bare the new reality of twenty–first–century superpowers: the closer they get to one another, the more personal their frictions become. “Cuts right to the heart of the relationship between Silicon Valley and China: the tangled history, the current tensions, and the uncertain future . . . a must–read.”—Kai–Fu Lee, former president of Google China and founder of Sinovation Ventures

"As a twenty-two-year-old exchange student at Nanjing University in 1981, John Pomfret was one of the first American students to be admitted to China after the Communist Revolution of 1949. Living in a cramped dorm room, Pomfret was exposed to a country few outsiders had ever experienced, one fresh from the twin tragedies of Mao's rule - the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution." "Twenty years after first leaving China, Pomfret returned to the university for a class reunion. Once again, he immersed himself in the lives of his classmates, especially the one woman and four men whose stories make up Chinese Lessons, an intimate and revealing portrait of the Chinese people." "Beginning with Pomfret's first day in China, Chinese Lessons takes us back to the often torturous paths that brought together the Nanjing University History Class of 1982. We learn that Old Wu's father was killed during the Cultural Revolution for the crime of being an intellectual; Book Idiot Zhou labored in the fields for years rather than agree to a Party-arranged marriage; Little Guan was forced to publicly denounce and humiliate her father." "As we follow Pomfret's classmates from childhood to university and on to adulthood, we see the effect that the country's transition from near-feudal communism to First World capitalism has had on his classmates. This riveting portrait of the Chinese people will not only change your understanding of China but also challenge your perception of the way fate can shape the course of nations as surely as it has the extraordinary lives of these five classmates."--BOOK JACKET.