IN THIS “ASIAN CENTURY,” much global intellectual space is devoted to showering China and India, the region’s haute emerging nations, with breathless superlatives that reference their epic demographics and vast geographic spread. There is, however, another nation on the same continent that, despite its size, economic heft, social complexity, and strategic importance, remains what is,…
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Leftover Women by Leta Hong Fincher
I lived in China for seven years between 2002 and 2009. My first impressions of the capital city, Beijing, were a mosaic of images and scents: dazzling sheaths of glass and chrome that reared up into the sky; the whiff of jasmine rising from steaming cups of tea; old men in Mao jackets taking caged…
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Strange Stones by Peter Hessler
THE CHINESE LANGUAGE has a way of transforming the familiar into the off-kilter. A location like Wyoming, for example, mutates into Wai Er Ming. The line between the uncommon and the mundane is easily breached when languages, cultures, and peoples collide. And it is these transgressions that tie together the wide-ranging chapters of Strange Stones:…
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Super Power? The Amazing Race Between China’s Hare And India’s Tortoise By Raghav Bahl
The one constant in the surfeit of recent India-China comparisons is the abundant use of animal-related cliches—tigers, dragons, elephants and peacocks, dancing, lumbering or prancing about. Media guru Raghav Bahl’s debut book, Super Power?, adds to this pantheon by framing his analysis as a race between China’s hare and India’s tortoise. The purpose of Bahl’s…
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When a Billion Chinese Jump by Jonathan Watts
One way of framing the complexity of China’s long history is to understand it as the interplay of ideas between the pragmatic, human-centric precepts of Confucianism and the nature-worshipping, harmony-seeking philosophy of Daoism. This dichotomy between values that stress conquering nature for human benefit and those that emphasise the importance of seeking a sustainable balance…
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