James Lilley's life and family have been entwined with China's fate since his father moved to the country to work for Standard Oil in 1916. Lilley spent much of his childhood in China and after a Yale professor took him aside and suggested a career in intelligence, it became clear that he would spend his adult life returning to China again and again. Lilley served for twenty-five years in the CIA in Laos, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Taiwan before moving to the State Department in the early 1980s to begin a distinguished career as the U.S.'s top-ranking diplomat in Taiwan, ambassador to South Korea, and finally, ambassador to China. From helping Laotian insurgent forces assist the American efforts in Vietnam to his posting in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square crackdown, he was in a remarkable number of crucial places during challenging times as he spent his life tending to America's interests in Asia. In China Hands, he includes three generations of stories from an American family in the Far East, all of them absorbing, some of them exciting, and one, the loss of Lilley's much loved and admired brother, Frank, unremittingly tragic. China Hands is a fascinating memoir of America in Asia, Asia itself, and one especially capable American's personal history.

Headline: The Globe and Mail: Legal challenge halts Canadian, U.S. and U.K. release of book critical of Chinese Communist Party by Robert Fife That said it all. The hands of the Chinese Communist Party were going on the offence. The 48 Group Club a China friendly group of former UK ambassadors and Prime Ministers were embarrassed by their connections to a Club founded by key members of the Chinese Communist Party of Britain who's chair Stephen Perry suggested that China's approach to world order and rule was superior to democracy and the UK should embrace them. Asked if he believed the lawsuit was an effort by the Chinese government to stop the publication of his book, Mr. Hamilton said: “I have no evidence of that, although it should be noted that the Chinese government has used lawfare in the past.” Lawfare is the use of legal action as part of a campaign against a target. Governments around the world are in the early stages of a repositioning of power, as China rises and the United States is drawn into direct competition. However, some are beginning to wonder whether, for all of the economic benefits, engaging with China carries unseen dangers. The Chinese Communist Party is now determined to reshape the world in its image. The party is not interested in democracy. It divides the world into those who can be won over and enemies. They have already lured many leaders to their corner; others are weighing up a devil's bargain. Through its exercise of ‘sharp power,’ the party is weakening global institutions, aggressively targeting individual corporations, and threatening freedom of expression from the arts to academia. At the same time, security services are increasingly worried about incursions into our communications infrastructure. Indeed, the vaunted Great Firewall is a temporary measure, only necessary until the party has transformed the global conversation. In December 2019, the CCP's obsession with social control led it to suppress expert warnings about the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. Most alarming for the West was the active collaboration of the WHO in spreading the CCP's version of events. It was a shocking example of the widespread co-optation of global institutions by the CCP, as described in Hidden Hand. As soon as Beijing thought it had the virus under control, it began a global propaganda blitz, presenting China's authoritarian system as a model for the rest of the world. Western media and pundits soon began echoing the Party line. Hidden Hand is a detailed and devastating expose of Chinese Communist Party influence in the West, including Canada. It could not arrive at a better time in Canada, with relations between Ottawa and Beijing reaching breaking point after two years of mounting tension. China's bullying behaviour, and the mobilising of people loyal to the Chinese Communist Party on the streets of Canada's cities, has caused deep disquiet among Canadians. But the government seems paralyzed. Hidden Hand shows how Canada's political, business, academic and cultural elites have over many years been co-opted by the Chinese Communist Party and its agencies. They are confused about what is in Canada's national interests and frequently do Beijing's bidding. Hidden Hand shows how the Chinese Communist Party represents a profound threat to Western democracy. It's vital reading for Canadians who want to understand what is really happening, and points to a way of carving out a new diplomatic course with China. But the question remains: Does the government have the will to stand up to Beijing and its proxies in Canada or is it too late?

The untold story of how restrictive policies are preventing China from becoming the world’s largest economy Dexter Roberts lived in Beijing for two decades working as a reporter on economics, business and politics for Bloomberg Businessweek. In The Myth of Chinese Capitalism, Roberts explores the reality behind today’s financially-ascendant China and pulls the curtain back on how the Chinese manufacturing machine is actually powered. He focuses on two places: the village of Binghuacun in the province of Guizhou, one of China’s poorest regions that sends the highest proportion of its youth away to become migrants; and Dongguan, China’s most infamous factory town located in Guangdong, home to both the largest number of migrant workers and the country’s biggest manufacturing base. Within these two towns and the people that move between them, Roberts focuses on the story of the Mo family, former farmers-turned-migrant-workers who are struggling to make a living in a fast-changing country that relegates one-half of its people to second-class status via household registration, land tenure policies and inequality in education and health care systems. In The Myth of Chinese Capitalism, Dexter Roberts brings to life the problems that China and its people face today as they attempt to overcome a divisive system that poses a serious challenge to the country’s future development. In so doing, Roberts paints a boot-on-the-ground cautionary picture of China for a world now held in its financial thrall. Dexter Roberts is an award-winning journalist and a regular commentator on the U.S.-China trade and political relationship. His prior speaking engagements include traditional news media outlets (NPR, Fox News, CNN International) as well as universities and institutes (George Washington University, Council on Foreign Relations, and the Overseas Press Club). He is available for virtual classroom visits to courses that adopt The Myth of Chinese Capitalism. Please contact [email protected] for more information.

The first memoir about the "reeducation" camps by a Uyghur woman. “I have written what I lived. The atrocious reality.” — Gulbahar Haitiwaji to Paris Match Since 2017, more than one million Uyghurs have been deported from their homes in the Xinjiang region of China to “reeducation camps.” The brutal repression of the Uyghurs, a Turkish-speaking Muslim ethnic group, has been denounced as genocide, and reported widely in media around the world. The Xinjiang Papers, revealed by the New York Times in 2019, expose the brutal repression of the Uyghur ethnicity by means of forced mass detention­—the biggest since the time of Mao. Her name is Gulbahar Haitiwaji and she is the first Uyghur woman to write a memoir about the 'reeducation' camps. For three years Haitiwaji endured hundreds of hours of interrogations, torture, hunger, police violence, brainwashing, forced sterilization, freezing cold, and nights under blinding neon light in her prison cell. These camps are to China what the Gulags were to the USSR. The Chinese government denies that they are concentration camps, seeking to legitimize their existence in the name of the “total fight against Islamic terrorism, infiltration and separatism,” and calls them “schools.” But none of this is true. Gulbahar only escaped thanks to the relentless efforts of her daughter. Her courageous memoir is a terrifying portrait of the atrocities she endured in the Chinese gulag and how the treatment of the Uyghurs at the hands of the Chinese government is just the latest example of their oppression of independent minorities within Chinese borders. The Xinjiang region where the Uyghurs live is where the Chinese government wishes there to be a new “silk route,” connecting Asia to Europe, considered to be the most important political project of president Xi Jinping.

We all ?know? that Marco Polo went to China, served Ghengis Khan for many years, and returned to Italy with the recipes for pasta and ice cream. But Frances Wood, head of the Chinese Department at the British Library, argues that Marco Polo not only never went to China, he probably never even made it past the Black Sea, where his family conducted business as merchants.Marco Polo's travels from Venice to the exotic and distant East, and his epic book describing his extraordinary adventures, A Description of the World, ranks among the most famous and influential books ever published. In this fascinating piece of historical detection, marking the 700th anniversary of Polo's journey, Frances Wood questions whether Marco Polo ever reached the country he so vividly described. Why, in his romantic and seemingly detailed account, is there no mention of such fundamentals of Chinese life as tea, foot-binding, or even the Great Wall? Did he really bring back pasta and ice cream to Italy? And why, given China's extensive and even obsessive record-keeping, is there no mention of Marco Polo anywhere in the archives?Sure to spark controversy, Did Marco Polo Go to China? tries to solve these and other inconsistencies by carefully examining the Polo family history, Marco Polo's activities as a merchant, the preparation of his book, and the imperial Chinese records. The result is a lucid and readable look at medieval European and Chinese history, and the characters and events that shaped this extraordinary and enduring myth.

The author chronicles the lives of three generations of Chinese men in America, woven from memory, myth and fact. Here's a storyteller's tale of what they endured in a strange new land.