One Step Ahead in China is a groundbreaking book, unique in its detailed coverage of Guangdong, the first socialist dragon to follow in the path of South Korea and Taiwan. 6 maps, 7 tables.

Winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist An Economist Best Book of the Year | A Financial Times Book of the Year | A Wall Street Journal Book of the Year | A Washington Post Book of the Year | A Bloomberg News Book of the Year | An Esquire China Book of the Year | A Gates Notes Top Read of the Year Perhaps no one in the twentieth century had a greater long-term impact on world history than Deng Xiaoping. And no scholar of contemporary East Asian history and culture is better qualified than Ezra Vogel to disentangle the many contradictions embodied in the life and legacy of China’s boldest strategist. Once described by Mao Zedong as a “needle inside a ball of cotton,” Deng was the pragmatic yet disciplined driving force behind China’s radical transformation in the late twentieth century. He confronted the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution, dissolved Mao’s cult of personality, and loosened the economic and social policies that had stunted China’s growth. Obsessed with modernization and technology, Deng opened trade relations with the West, which lifted hundreds of millions of his countrymen out of poverty. Yet at the same time he answered to his authoritarian roots, most notably when he ordered the crackdown in June 1989 at Tiananmen Square. Deng’s youthful commitment to the Communist Party was cemented in Paris in the early 1920s, among a group of Chinese student-workers that also included Zhou Enlai. Deng returned home in 1927 to join the Chinese Revolution on the ground floor. In the fifty years of his tumultuous rise to power, he endured accusations, purges, and even exile before becoming China’s preeminent leader from 1978 to 1989 and again in 1992. When he reached the top, Deng saw an opportunity to creatively destroy much of the economic system he had helped build for five decades as a loyal follower of Mao—and he did not hesitate.

A Financial Times “Summer Books” Selection “Will become required reading.” —Times Literary Supplement “Elegantly written...with a confidence that comes from decades of deep research on the topic, illustrating how influence and power have waxed and waned between the two countries.” —Rana Mitter, Financial Times China and Japan have cultural and political connections that stretch back fifteen hundred years, but today their relationship is strained. China’s military buildup deeply worries Japan, while Japan’s brutal occupation of China in World War II remains an open wound. In recent years both countries have insisted that the other side must openly address the flashpoints of the past before relations can improve. Boldly tackling the most contentious chapters in this long and tangled relationship, Ezra Vogel uses the tools of a master historian to examine key turning points in Sino–Japanese history. Gracefully pivoting from past to present, he argues that for the sake of a stable world order, these two Asian giants must reset their relationship. “A sweeping, often fascinating, account...Impressively researched and smoothly written.” —Japan Times “Vogel uses the powerful lens of the past to frame contemporary Chinese–Japanese relations...[He] suggests that over the centuries—across both the imperial and the modern eras—friction has always dominated their relations.” —Sheila A. Smith, Foreign Affairs

Vogel brings masterly insight to the underlying question of why Japan and the little dragons--Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore--have been so extraordinarily successful in industrializing while other developing countries have not.

A jargon-free guide to how investment funds operate and have broken free of the financial crises to grow and prosper In One Step Ahead, Timothy Spangler – author of the award-winning Forbes.com blog “Law of the Market” – provides a compelling account of how flexible and entrepreneurial investment firms can prosper in a volatile and rapidly changing financial world. From the Occupy Movement to the purchase of well-known household brands by private equity firms, Spangler investigates how the structures of alternative investment funds enable them to adapt and react nimbly and effectively to today’s shifting economic and financial landscape. Unpicking the debates and putting disputes in context, Spangler answers the difficult questions: Are new regulations sufficient to prevent another global financial crash? Have regulators got to grips with the institutional failings that allowed Bernie Madoff to fleece investors? Instead of a hedge fund problem or even a private equity problem do we simply have a public pension plan problem? One Step Ahead is the essential, jargon-free guide to understanding how private equity and hedge funds drive financial markets and how they have become vital wealth creation vehicles for both private and public investors in the global economy.

There’s been a revolution in negotiating tactics. The world’s best negotiators have moved beyond How to Win Friends & Influence People and Getting to Yes. For over twenty years. David Sally has been teaching the art of negotiation at leading business schools and to executives at top companies. Now, he delivers the proven, clear, actionable insights you need to stay competitive in an ever-changing marketplace. One Step Ahead offers the fundamental wisdom that elevates the sophisticated negotiator above everyone else. Readers will gain the advantage in everything from determining when to negotiate and deciphering a game strategically, to understanding which personality traits matter, why emotions are not necessarily to be avoided, and how to be tough and fair. You’ll learn to be round on the outside and square on the inside, how to command the idiom, why to avoid bumping into the furniture, and how to achieve mastery of the word and the number. While all of life is not a negotiation, Sally says, a negotiation incorporates all of life—One Step Ahead is for anyone and everyone who bargains, parents, manages, buys, sells, emotes, and engages. Based on cutting-edge studies and real-world results, and drawing parallels to everything from the NBA to the corner con game to Machiavelli, Xi Jinping, and Barack Obama, One Step Ahead upends conventional wisdom to make sure that you have what it takes to stay one step ahead—no matter whom you are facing across the table.

An “immensely readable” journey through modern Chinese history told through the experiences of the author’s extended family (Christian Science Monitor). When journalist Scott Tong moved to Shanghai, his assignment was to start the first full-time China bureau for “Marketplace,” the daily business and economics program on public radio stations across the US. But for Tong the move became much more: an opportunity to reconnect with members of his extended family who’d remained there after his parents fled the communists six decades prior. Uncovering their stories gave him a new way to understand modern China’s defining moments and its long, interrupted quest to go global. A Village with My Name offers a unique perspective on China’s transitions through the eyes of regular people who witnessed such epochal events as the toppling of the Qing monarchy, Japan’s occupation during WWII, exile of political prisoners to forced labor camps, mass death and famine during the Great Leap Forward, market reforms under Deng Xiaoping, and the dawn of the One Child Policy. Tong focuses on five members of his family, who each offer a specific window on a changing country: a rare American-educated girl born in the closing days of the Qing Dynasty, a pioneer exchange student, a toddler abandoned in wartime who later rides the wave of China’s global export boom, a young professional climbing the ladder at a multinational company, and an orphan (the author’s daughter) adopted in the middle of a baby-selling scandal fueled by foreign money. Through their stories, Tong shows us China anew, visiting former prison labor camps on the Tibetan plateau and rural outposts along the Yangtze, exploring the Shanghai of the 1930s, and touring factories across the mainland—providing a compelling and deeply personal take on how China became what it is today. “Vivid and readable . . . The book’s focus on ordinary people makes it refreshingly accessible.” —Financial Times “Tong tells his story with humor, a little snark, [and] lots of love . . . Highly recommended, especially for those interested in Chinese history and family journeys.” —Library Journal (starred review)