After a century of humiliation, a century of hard work in reconstructing and modernizing an extremely poor and backward country, with a huge population and an ancient civilization, when New China was founded in October 1949. After eradicating absolute/extreme poverty in 2020, the Chinese nation of 1.4 billion has advanced further on the path to common prosperity by mid-21st century. China will complete its Four Modernizations of agriculture, industry, defense, science & technology (S&T) by 2050. A world-class military will also then protect the country’s sovereignty and integrity as well as safeguard national interests. Together with construction of ecological civilization to host and support harmonious co-existence between humanity and nature, a fully restored and rejuvenated Beautiful China will embrace the whole world with open arms in the spirit of international friendship and goodwill, and cooperate to co-develop in peace for the common good as well as a shared future for all nations. At the vanguard of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, China will further drive its own dramatic transformation at the heart of convergence of emerging and disruptive technologies ignited and sustained by AI, big data, biotechnology, etc. in the new era. In the latest round of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), China has been innovating and leading in the intelligentization of military forces. Some observers have viewed the visionary technological move as a stratagem to “capture the decisive advantage” in global geopolitical competition. Combining three volumes on China’s present and future developments, CHINA FUTURE TRILOGY comprises: (1) CHINA IN 2030, highlighting the rise to the world’s economic leadership and acceleration of military modernization; (2) CHINA TOWARDS 2035 on milestones which feature basic completion of agricultural, economic and military modernizations as well as building a Beautiful China in “a further 15 years of hard work” (to quote President Xi Jinping) from 2020 to 2035; and (3) CHINA VISION 2050, on the way to the great goal of complete and comprehensive national development, modernization and rejuvenation. The story of New China is indeed an extraordinary epic of miraculous national transformation in the most truly revolutionary period in history.

European identity - European decline - European power - Rise of Europe - Rise of the Rest - Europe and geopolitics - European Security - Global Europe - Reunification of Europe - European powers - Europe and Russia - Europe and Middle East - EU vs US - Cold War - Roots of Europe - European federation

As insightful and wise today as it was when originally published in 1954, Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society has become a classic in its field, laying the groundwork for all other studies of technology and society that have followed. Ellul offers a penetrating analysis of our technological civilization, showing how technology—which began innocuously enough as a servant of humankind—threatens to overthrow humanity itself in its ongoing creation of an environment that meets its own ends. No conversation about the dangers of technology and its unavoidable effects on society can begin without a careful reading of this book. "A magnificent book . . . He goes through one human activity after another and shows how it has been technicized, rendered efficient, and diminished in the process.”—Harper's “One of the most important books of the second half of the twentieth-century. In it, Jacques Ellul convincingly demonstrates that technology, which we continue to conceptualize as the servant of man, will overthrow everything that prevents the internal logic of its development, including humanity itself—unless we take necessary steps to move human society out of the environment that 'technique' is creating to meet its own needs.”—The Nation “A description of the way in which technology has become completely autonomous and is in the process of taking over the traditional values of every society without exception, subverting and suppressing these values to produce at last a monolithic world culture in which all non-technological difference and variety are mere appearance.”—Los Angeles Free Press

. Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action. While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows. Understanding the word "control" in this sense, it may be said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use it up. Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment.

'Natural Resources: Neither Course nor Destiny' brings together a variety of analytical perspectives, ranging from econometric analyses of economic growth to historical studies of successful development experiences in countries with abundant natural resources. The evidence suggests that natural resources are neither a curse nor destiny. Natural resources can actually spur economic development when combined with the accumulation of knowledge for economic innovation. Furthermore, natural resource abundance need not be the only determinant of the structure of trade in developing countries. In fact, the accumulation of knowledge, infrastructure, and the quality of governance all seem to determine not only what countries produce and export, but also how firms and workers produce any good.

One place where the scientific debate has been written for a broad audience is in the book review column of the international journal Artificial Intelligence, which has evolved from simple reviews to a multidisciplinary forum where reviewers and authors debate the latest, often competing, theories of human and artificial intelligence.

Why does the West rule? In this magnum opus, eminent Stanford polymath Ian Morris answers this provocative question, drawing on 50,000 years of history, archeology, and the methods of social science, to make sense of when, how, and why the paths of development differed in the East and West — and what this portends for the 21st century. There are two broad schools of thought on why the West rules. Proponents of "Long-Term Lock-In" theories such as Jared Diamond suggest that from time immemorial, some critical factor — geography, climate, or culture perhaps — made East and West unalterably different, and determined that the industrial revolution would happen in the West and push it further ahead of the East. But the East led the West between 500 and 1600, so this development can't have been inevitable; and so proponents of "Short-Term Accident" theories argue that Western rule was a temporary aberration that is now coming to an end, with Japan, China, and India resuming their rightful places on the world stage. However, as the West led for 9,000 of the previous 10,000 years, it wasn't just a temporary aberration. So, if we want to know why the West rules, we need a whole new theory. Ian Morris, boldly entering the turf of Jared Diamond and Niall Ferguson, provides the broader approach that is necessary, combining the textual historian's focus on context, the anthropological archaeologist's awareness of the deep past, and the social scientist's comparative methods to make sense of the past, present, and future — in a way no one has ever done before.