Results for “china book” 662 found
Shanghai Book Fair fact of the day
To some analysts’ surprise, books from Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Hegel, Confucius and many other philosophers are more popular than before.
There is more here about some other aspects of the Fair.
China facts of the day
Greece is small, China is large:
The Shanghai Composite has now fallen 12.1 per cent since Monday, its third consecutive week of double-digit losses since hitting a seven-year high on June 12.
The Shanghai index is firmly in bear market territory, down 28.6 per cent since the June peak, while the tech-heavy Shenzhen Composite has fallen 33.2 per cent.
There were also signs on Friday that the stock market turmoil is beginning to reverberate beyond China. The Australian dollar, often traded as a proxy for China growth, is down 1.2 per cent to a six-year low of US$0.7539.
The 21st Century Business Herald, a Chinese daily newspaper, on Friday quoted multiple futures traders as saying they had received phone calls from the China Financial Futures Exchange instructing them not to short the market.
That is from Gabriel Wildau at the FT. China’s brokerages have pledged over $19 billion to help “stabilize” the market, not usually a good sign.
That said, flights into Greece for July-September seem to be down by up to fifty percent.
China fact of the day
Qing Dynasty measured some 14.7 million square kilometers in 1790…The two biggest countries in western Europe were under 0.7 million in the late eighteenth century.
That is from Philip T. Hoffman’s new and interesting Why Did Europe Conquer the World?, here is the book’s home page. Hoffman does note, however, that if we count empires the Spanish empire was during that time larger than China.
Daniel A. Bell on the China model and political meritocracy
Stein Ringen reviews The China Model, here is Gideon Rachmann. He writes:
Daniel Bell, a Canadian political philosopher who has taught at Tsinghua University in Beijing for many years, is deeply influenced by this Chinese tradition. In his new book, he has set himself the ambitious task of making the case that Chinese-style meritocracy is, in important respects, a better system of governance than western liberal democracy.
I’ve been seeing a lot of emotional reactions to this book, here are a few points:
1. The United States probably should have less democracy along some margins, if only fewer referenda in California and no state and local elections of judges, dog catchers, and the like. If a writer cites “democracy” as obviously and always good for all choices, that writer isn’t thinking clearly.
2. More generally, the Western nations are relying on democracy less, as evidenced by the growing roles for central banks and also the European Union. That may or may not be desirable, but it’s worth considering our own trends before putting the high hat on.
2. The key to long-term living standards is stability of growth, just look at Denmark. There was never a heralded “Danish economic miracle,” but the country still has finished close to the top in terms of human welfare. Whether ostensibly meritocratic non-democratic systems can deliver such outcomes remains very much up for grabs, and Bell’s book hasn’t convinced me any that they can.
3. Arguably a country’s best chance of achieving meritocracy is to have many smart individuals who are culturally central. No system of government is going to overcome the lack of that.
4. Most humans in history seem to have favored meritocratic rule over democracy, and before the 19th century democracy was rare, even in the limited form of male-dominated or property owner-dominated republics. It is possible that the current advantage of democracy is rooted in technology, or some other time-specific factor, which ultimately may prove temporary. That said, I still observe plenty of democracies producing relatively well-run countries, so I don’t see significant evidence that a turning point against democracy has been reached.
5. To consider comparisons which hold a greater number of factors constant, I haven’t seen many (any?) serious people argue that Taiwan or South Korea would have done better to resist their processes of democratization.
Here you can buy The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy.
Did 19th century China have betting markets on individual performance?
I ran across this intriguing passage:
The Chinese also rejected the telegraph at first, partly because of similar feng shui concerns, but mostly because they didn’t believe such an invention had any real benefits. But once they learned that some wily Cantonese (a persistent regional Chinese stereotype) had enriched themselves by hearing the results of the triennial imperial exam in Beijing via telegraph weeks before everyone else, and then buying all the lottery tickets with the names of the top graduates, opposition to the telegraph crumbled.
No further information on those markets is offered, do any of you know more about this? The passage is from Huan Hsu’s new and noteworthy The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China. It’s not so much a book about porcelain, rather it is an excellent look at China and also the idea of a quest to discover one’s family history, recommended.
China’s ideological spectrum
It is basically statist vs. classical liberal, and it is strongly uni-dimensional. Those are the main lessons from a new and interesting paper by Jennifer Pan and Yiqing Xu:
We offer the first large scale empirical analysis of ideology in contemporary China to determine whether individuals fall along a discernible and coherent ideological spectrum, and whether there are regional and inter-group variations in ideological orientation. Using principal component analysis (PCA) on a survey of 171,830 individuals, we identify one dominant ideological dimension in China. Individuals who are politically conservative, who emphasize the supremacy of the state and nationalism, are also likely to be economically conservative, supporting a return to socialism and state-control of the economy, and culturally conservative, supporting traditional, Confucian values. In contrast, political liberals, supportive of constitutional democracy and individual liberty, are also likely to be economic liberals who support market-oriented reform and social liberals who support modern science and values such as sexual freedom. This uni-dimensionality of ideology is robust to a wide variety of diagnostics and checks. Using post-stratification based on census data, we find a strong relationship between liberal orientation and modernization — provinces with higher levels of economic development, trade openness, urbanization are more liberal than their poor, rural counterparts, and individuals with higher levels of education and income and more liberal than their less educated and lower-income peers.
Here is some NYT coverage of the piece. Here is some good Foreign Policy coverage. Currently this is the most downloaded piece on SSRN.
Two new and excellent short e-Books
Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy. The tag “self-recommending” was made for books like this one. According to Rauch, transparency is overrated and politics should be more transactional.
Jeffrey Towson and Jonathan Woetzel, The One Hour China Consumer Book: Five Short Stories That Explain the Brutal Fight for One Billion Customers. The short tale of why the most successful beer companies are the state-owned enterprises is alone worth the price of this book.
And I just downloaded Hugo Dixon’s The In/Out Question, which argues the UK should try to stay in the European Union…
Education in Mao’s China
Advancement in China’s school system was highly competitive, and the odds of reaching the top of the educational ladder were very steep. Of the 32.9 million children who entered primary school in 1965, only 9 percent could expect to enter junior high school. Only 15 percent of junior high school entrants, in turn, could expect to graduate and enter high school. Among the highly selected groups that graduated from academic high schools, only 36 percent could expect to enroll in a university. Of those who entered primary school in 1965, only 1.3 percent could expect to attend an academic high school, and only one-half of 1 percent could expect to attend university.
Of course the Caplanian point is that China managed a lot of post-1979 economic growth with what was fundamentally a not very educated generation.
That excerpt is from Andrew G. Walder’s China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed, my previous post on this excellent book is here.
China under Mao
That is the new and excellent book by Andrew G. Walder. Here is one excerpt:
The Communists’ contribution to the war effort was extremely modest. According to a December 1944 Soviet Comintern report, a total of more than 1 million Nationalist troops had been killed in battle, compared to 103,186 in the CCP’s Eighth Route Army and another several thousand in the New Fourth Army. The Communists suffered only 10 percent of total Chinese military casualties. One author has called Mao’s famous doctrine of people’s war one of the “great myths” about the period: “people’s war was hardly used in the conflict against the Japanese.”
Definitely recommended.
The endgame of Communist rule in China?
China expert David Shambaugh is claiming exactly that in a bold argument. Here is a summary of his brief:
He points to “five telling indications of the regime’s vulnerability”: an apparent lack of confidence among the country’s wealthy; intensified political repression, betraying insecurity among the leadership itself; a sense that “even many regime loyalists are just going through the motions”; corruption too pervasive and deep-rooted for Xi’s ongoing crackdown to fully address; and an economy “stuck in a series of systemic traps from which there is no easy exit.”
Shambaugh also argues “Communist rule in China is unlikely to end quietly.”
That’s pretty heady stuff and I am happy to link to material I disagree with, but disagree I do. My reasons are simple:
1. There are internal coups, which are more or less invisible to most of the world, and external coups, where a visible overthrow of a government makes the front page and is accompanied by violent conflict in public places and a change in the labeling of the regime. China already has shown its system can accommodate internal coups, for better or worse. You can argue they have such internal coups (on average) every ten to twelve years.
2. It is entirely reasonable (though very hard to call) to expect another internal coup in China.
3. Does any coup in China prefer to a) jettison the Communist brand?, or b) refurbish the Communist brand? I say b), by a long mile. The Communists drove the foreigners out of the country, built the modern nation, and delivered close to ten percent growth for almost thirty-five years running. Most of the time the Communist Party has been pretty popular, in spite of all the (justified) cynicism about the corruption.
4. Once you accept #3, and work back to rethink #1, you expect at most an internal coup in China, with external continuity and a maintenance of the Communist party brand, albeit in refurbished form.
5. The strongest version of Shambaugh’s argument is that there is no “core” to the internal coups, a’ la Gordon Tullock’s book Autocracy. You get too many internal coups, or too many incipient internal coups, and the public square is required to impose structural equilibrium on the problem. Maybe so, but that requires lots of claims about the internal dynamics of Chinese politics, and the lack of internal coup stability mechanisms. The cited evidence by Shambaugh does not seem to bear directly on this question, and so I am back to having no strong reason to expect an external coup, much less a chaotic and bloody one.
Best non-fiction books of 2014
First there are the economics books, including books by people I know, including Piketty, The Second Machine Age, Tim Harford’s wonderful macro explainer, Megan McArdle’s The Up Side of Down, Lane Kenworthy on social democracy, The Fourth Revolution by John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge, Daniel Drezner The System Worked, and Frank Buckley on why the Canadian system of government is better. And Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness. We’ve already talked, written, and thought about those plenty, and they are not what this list is about, so I will set them aside. Most of you are looking for excellent new books in addition to these, books you might not have heard about.
Here are the other non-fiction books of the year which took my fancy, mostly in the order I read them, noting that the link usually leads you to my previous review or comments:
Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Long, exhausting, and wonderful.
Christopher Hale, Massacre in Malaya, a broader history than it at first sounds, fascinating from beginning to end.
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life.
The Very Revd John Drury, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert.
John Keay, Midnight’s Descendants: A History of South Asia since Partition. An excellent treatment of how much work remains to be done in the “nation building” enterprise in South Asia.
Alice Goffman, On the Run: Fugutive Life in an American City. A sociology graduate student hangs out with lawbreakers and learns about police oppression, an excellent micro-study. My column on her book is here.
Gendun Chopel, Grains of Gold: Tales of a Cosmopolitan Traveler, Tibetan scholar goes to India and records his impressions, unusual.
George Prochnik, The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of His World. I loved this one.
I’ve only read the first half of the new Tom Holland translation of Herdotus’s Histories (I will get to the rest), but surely it deserves note.
Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China. This book won the National Book Award for non-fiction.
David Eimer, The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China. A look at China’s outermost regions and their ethnic minorities. Just imagine that, we had two excellent popular China books in the same year.
The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, by Davi Kopenawa. Repetitious in parts, sometimes incoherent too, but it offers a smart and unique perspective you won’t get from any of the other books on this list or any other.
Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic. This treatment stresses the (partial) cognitive advantages of having a tendency toward depression.
Edward Hirsch, A Poet’s Glossary, assorted facts and insights about the English language, you don’t have to feel like reading a book about poetry to find this worthwhile.
David Sterling, Yucatán: Recipes from a Culinary Expedition, huge, expensive, wonderful, more than just a cookbook though it is that too. I’ve spent some of the last few weeks learning these recipes and what makes them tick.
Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. A good overview of how some of the main pieces of today’s information technology world fell into place, starting with the invention of the computer and running up through the end of the 1990s.
Arthur M. Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing.
Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life.
Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph. As good or better than the classic biographies of the composer.
Stephen Kotkin, Stalin, vol. 1. This one I have only read a part of (maybe 150 pp.?), it is very long and does not fit my current reading interests, but it seems very good and impressive and also has received strong reviews. So I feel I should include it.
Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins.
So who wins? If I had to pick a #1, it would be The Very Revd John Drury, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert, not the kind of book I would be expecting to coronate, which is a testament to the magnetic force it has exercised over my imagination.
Then I would pick Alice Goffman, On the Run: Fugutive Life in an American City and David Sterling, Yucatán: Recipes from a Culinary Expedition as the runners-up.
My fiction picks were here. There are still some wonderful books to come out this year, and already-published books I will still read, especially after mining other “best of” lists, so around Dec.31 or so I’ll post an updated account of what I would add to this list.
Evan Osnos wins the National Book Award for non-fiction
The story is here, his book is Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China. Previous MR coverage is here, it was one of my favorite non-fiction books of the year.
China fact of the day
…the size of the Chinese government and party bureaucracy is surprisingly modest…In this respect, the Chinese communist Party is similar to previous Chinese dynasties as far back as the Han, which ruled the vast Chinese empire with a modestly sized civil service.
…China has only 31 government and party employees per thousand residents. The number of civil servants per thousand residents in France is 95, in the United States, 75, and in Germany 53.
You will note that these numbers exclude state-owned enterprises, which in China are extensive although shrinking in relative terms.
That is from the new and excellent Nicholas Lardy book Markets Over Mao: The Rise of Private Business in China. In my view the truth lies somewhere between the arguments of Lardy and the thesis of Joe Zhang, see the first Amazon review for Zhang’s critique of Lardy, plus Zhang’s comments here. Here is Scott Sumner criticizing Zhang.
China fact and product placement of the day
Transformers: Age of Extinction opened this weekend with $100 million in America and $92 million in China (with $22 million in Russia).
Here is more, mostly a series of broader points about China, many of which I do not agree with but interesting nonetheless. Here is my previous review of Transformers.
Here is a bit on Chinese product placement in the movie:
…everyone in the audience was puzzled as to why Jack Reynor was drinking Chinese Red Bull in Texas. Is it even available there?
Culturally, some aspects did not translate. There was puzzlement in the audience when Reynor pulled out a laminated photocopy of a Texas legal loophole that meant his relationship with Nicola Peltz, who is 17 years old in the film while he is supposedly 20, does not come under statutory rape laws.
The article has a variety of points of interest. There is also this:
One Chinese man who was dumped by his girlfriend seven years ago for being too poor spent $40,000 booking four whole IMAX cinemas for the first-day showings of Age of Extinction.
He then posted the receipts on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, which is banned, presumably in case the Decepticons plan to try and attack China.
Best non-fiction books of 2013
There were more strong candidates this year than usual. The order here is more or less the order I read them in, not the order of preference:
Jeremy Adelman, Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschmann.
Daniel Brook, A History of Future Cities.
Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief.
I liked Neil Powell, Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music and also Paul Kildea, Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century.
M.E. Thomas, Confessions of a Sociopath.
Rana Mitter, China’s War With Japan 1937-1945, the US edition has the sillier title Forgotten Ally. The return to knowing some background on this conflict is rising.
Emile Simpson, War from the Ground Up: Twenty-First Century Combat as Politics.
William Haseltine, Affordable Excellence: The Singapore Health System.
Clare Jacobson, New Museums in China. Good text but mostly a picture book, stunning architecture, no art, full of lessons.
Mark Lawrence Schrad, Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State.
Paul Sabin, The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and our Gamble Over Earth’s Future.
Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: An Authorized Biography, from Grantham to the Falklands.
From books “close at hand,” I very much liked John List and Uri Gneezy, Virginia Postrel on glamour, Lant Pritchett, The Rebirth of Education, and Tim Harford on macroeconomics.
Scott Anderson’s Lawrence in Arabia gets rave reviews, although I have not yet read my copy. From the UK I’ve ordered the new Holland translation of Herodotus and Richard Overy’s The Bombing War and have high expectations for both.
If I had to offer my very top picks for the year, they would all be books I didn’t expect to like nearly as much as I did:
Joe Studwell, How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region.
Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy, Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832.
Mark Lewisohn, Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years, volume I.
Peter Baker, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House.
Apologies to those I left out or forgot, I am sure there were more.