This book skillfully weaves together four stories: Chinese views of technology during the Communist era; the role of the military in Chinese political and economic life; the evolution of open and flexible conceptions of public management in China; and the technological dimensions of the rise of Chinese power.

"With the goal of understanding China's future in a changing international landscape, this book offers a new picture of China's rise since the Age of Exploration and its historical impact on the modern world. The establishment of the Great Ming dynasty in 1368 was a monumental event in world history. A century before Columbus, Beijing sent a series of diplomatic missions across the South China Sea and Indian Ocean that paved the way for China's first modern global era. In 1368, Ali Humayun Akhtar maps China's ascendance from the embassies of Admiral Zheng He to the arrival of European mariners and the shock of the Opium Wars. In Akhtar's new picture of world history, China's current rise evokes an earlier epoch, one that sheds light on where Beijing is heading today. Spectacular accounts in Persian and Ottoman Turkish describe palaces of silk and jade in Beijing's Forbidden City. Malay legends recount stories of Chinese princesses in Melaka with gifts of porcelain and gold. During Europe's Age of Exploration, Iberian mariners charted new passages to China that the Dutch and British East India Companies transformed into lucrative tea routes. Among the ships' passengers were Italian Jesuits, whose linguistic skills facilitated book projects with local mapmakers and botanists published in Amsterdam. But there was a shift during the British Industrial Revolution, one that pointed to Europe's high-tech future. Across the British Empire, the rise of steam engines and factories allowed the export of the very commodities once imported from China. By the end of the Opium Wars and the arrival of Commodore Perry in Japan, Chinese and Japanese reformers called for their own industrial revolutions, one that would accelerate in the twentieth century. What has the world learned from China since the Ming, and how did China reemerge in the 1970s as a manufacturing superpower? Akhtar's book provides much-needed context for understanding China's rise today and the future of its connections with the West and a resurgent Asia"--

As China and the U.S. increasingly compete for power in key areas of U.S. influence, great power conflict looms. Yet few studies have looked to the Middle East and Africa, regions of major political, economic, and military importance for both China and the U.S., to theorize how China competes in a changing world system. China's Rise in the Global South examines China's behavior as a rising power in two key Global South regions, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. Dawn C. Murphy, drawing on extensive fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, compares and analyzes thirty years of China's interactions with these regions across a range of functional areas: political, economic, foreign aid, and military. From the Belt and Road initiative to the founding of new cooperation forums and special envoys, China's Rise in the Global South offers an in-depth look at China's foreign policy approach to the countries it considers its partners in South-South cooperation. Intervening in the emerging debate between liberals and realists about China's future as a great power, Murphy contends that China is constructing an alternate international order to interact with these regions, and this book provides policymakers and scholars of international relations with the tools to analyze it.

Rise of the Red Engineers explains the tumultuous origins of the class of technocratic officials who rule China today. In a fascinating account, author Joel Andreas chronicles how two mutually hostile groups—the poorly educated peasant revolutionaries who seized power in 1949 and China's old educated elite—coalesced to form a new dominant class. After dispossessing the country's propertied classes, Mao and the Communist Party took radical measures to eliminate class distinctions based on education, aggravating antagonisms between the new political and old cultural elites. Ultimately, however, Mao's attacks on both groups during the Cultural Revolution spurred inter-elite unity, paving the way—after his death—for the consolidation of a new class that combined their political and cultural resources. This story is told through a case study of Tsinghua University, which—as China's premier school of technology—was at the epicenter of these conflicts and became the party's preferred training ground for technocrats, including many of China's current leaders.

Reluctant Pioneers describes the migration of Chinese to Manchuria, their settlement there, and the incorporation of Manchuria into an expanding China, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. The expansion of Chinese state and society from the agrarian and urban core of China proper to the territories north and west of the Great Wall doubled the size of the empire, forming the "China" now so prominent on the map of Asia. The movement and settlement of people, clearing and cultivation of land, invasions of soldiers, circulation of merchants, and establishment of government offices extended the boundaries of China at the same time that the American expansion westward and the Russian expansion eastward created the other great landed empires that dominated the twentieth century and persist today. The chief purpose of this book is to describe the Chinese experience and what it tells us about the expansion of states and societies, drawing comparisons with Russia and America, and reflecting on the nature of what scholars since Frederick Jackson Turner have called "frontiers" and what Turner's critics now call "borderlands" or "middle ground." In addition, the book touches on several other issues central to our understanding of modern China, such as the development of the Chinese economy and the nature of Chinese migration.

From Iron Fist to Invisible Hand uses telecommunications policy as a window to examine major contradictions in China's growth as an economic and political superpower. While China policy analysts wonder why the government occasionally restrains growth and raises prices, technologists marvel at how the telecommunications industry continues to grow enormously despite constraints and unpredictability in the market. Frustration is pervasive in the business environment, where regulations are constantly changing. This book provides six policy-focused case studies, each centered on a question with implications for telecome stakeholders, such as: Who is the regulator?Who are the regulated? Which foreigners can enter China, thereby regulating wholesale prices, setting consumer prices, and introducing Internet and innovative technologies? These cases explain the government's liberal and conservative approach toward reform, the policies that both promote and constrain business, and the major hurdles that lie ahead in telecommunications reform.