In January 2020, the COVID-19 outbreak in China was viewed as a black swan event, threatening the Communist Party's rule. Two short months later, however, China appeared to have controlled the virus, while the rest of the world struggled to respond. As country after country imposed lockdowns of varying strictness and the human cost began to rise, geopolitical frictions flared up over the origins of the virus, along with Beijing's early failures, diplomacy and discourse. Smokeless War: China's Quest for Geopolitical Dominance offers a gripping account of the Communist Party of China's political, diplomatic and narrative responses during the pandemic. Drawing on the latest academic research and Chinese language sources, it discusses the Party–State's efforts to achieve greater discourse power and political primacy, as it sought to convert a potentially existential crisis into a historic opportunity. In doing so, the author provides an insightful account of the Communist Party of China's approaches to cultivating sources of strength and exercise of power.

Part history, part biography, and part mystery story, Smokeless Sugar reveals how the concept of a national economy took shape in China by investigating the 1936 execution of Feng Rui, a provincial official who introduced modern sugar milling in Guangdong. Examining the circumstances of Feng Rui’s arrest on charges of corruption, Emily Hill traces the construction of a Chinese national economy through cross-border interactions between industry and agriculture and between China and Japan. She makes the case that Feng was, in fact, a scapegoat in a multi-sided power struggle in which political leaders vied with commercial players for access to China's markets and tax revenues. This illuminating study challenges conventional wisdom about the effectiveness of the Republican state in promoting national unity during the Nanjing decade and highlights continuities in official economic policies from the 1930s to the Communist era.

The health and economic costs of tobacco use in military and veteran populations are high. In 2007, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Department of Defense (DoD) requested that the Institute of Medicine (IOM) make recommendations on how to reduce tobacco initiation and encourage cessation in both military and veteran populations. In its 2009 report, Combating Tobacco in Military and Veteran Populations, the authoring committee concludes that to prevent tobacco initiation and encourage cessation, both DoD and VA should implement comprehensive tobacco-control programs.

"A much needed wake-up call that China assumes that it is open season on Americans." —Victor Davis Hanson "There is a Red Storm rising in the East—and America is already under assault from the Chinese Communist Party." —Lou Dobbs “THE EAST IS RISING AND THE WEST IS DECLINING” —Xi Jinping, 2020 Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, chairman of the Central Military Commission and the president of the People's Republic of China, wants to shape the world in China’s image, and in his conception of the world there is no place for the United States or even the current international order. Noted China analyst Gordon G. Chang warns that Xi Jinping believes he must destroy America to accomplish his objectives. And that Xi already has a plan to do it! Xi reveres Mao and is marching China back to Maoism. He is reinstituting totalitarian social controls, demanding absolute political obedience from everyone, and cutting foreign links. Closing China off from the world is an essential element of his plan to save the communist system. His isolationism and xenophobia evoke policies from the earliest years of the People’s Republic and during the two millennia of imperial rule. And Xi can’t stop talking about war. More significantly, he is implementing the largest military buildup since the Second World War, he is trying to sanctions-proof the Chinese regime, he is stockpiling grain and other commodities, he is surveying America for strikes and sabotage, he is mobilizing China’s civilians for battle, and he is purging China’s military of officers opposed to going to war. While America’s elite thinks their country is at peace, China’s regime is waging its brand of war. The Chinese regime has deliberately killed Americans in great numbers this century—with disease and in other ways—and it has a plan to destroy America. The communist party-state in fact believes it must eliminate the United States to ensure its own survival. And to accomplish its goals, the regime is now fast mobilizing to go to war. China is preparing to plunge the world into conflict. In PLAN RED: China's Project to Destroy America, Chang argues: China’s campaign against America excludes nothing and uses every point of contact with American society to destroy it. China has been attacking America from inside America! China’s penetration of American society has been so thorough that the Communist Party has been able to kill Americans with impunity Xi turned an in-country epidemic into a once-in-a-century pandemic. This is the first time in history that one nation has attacked all the others. The Communist Party is using all its resources to support criminal activity in America, and Americans are dying as a direct result of those activities. Xi Jinping’s China is preparing to go to war. Not just “unrestricted war” or political war but “hot war” or “kinetic war,” in other words, war as Americans see it in the movies. And China’s regime is planning to kill Americans in even greater numbers. It is marching the country to war. Americans, in the triumphalist mood after the fall of the Soviet Union, thought they should establish contacts with China. Now, the Chinese regime uses every point of contact against America, and at the moment the regime is overwhelming American institutions. The FBI is being overwhelmed, local law enforcement is being overwhelmed, governments at all levels are being overwhelmed, and private organizations are being overwhelmed. After more than three decades of intensive “engagement,” it is clear Washington’s generous approach has failed. America has not changed China, as everyone now realizes; China has changed America. Chang believes it is time to take a page from Ronald Reagan’s playbook and work to bring down the enemy: the Communist Party. The Communist Party often talks about “win-win” solutions, but as its actions make clear, it believes there can be only one survivor, either the People’s Republic of China or the United States of America. In this situation, there is only one solution: America needs to sever virtually every point of contact with the regime. As much as the United States wants to avoid war, China, for a host of internal reasons, is driving hard toward it. And should China ultimately choose war, the United States will almost certainly be in the fight. China has a plan to destroy America. Does America have a plan to defend itself?