Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang

Reviewed by Willy Lam

The publication of Zhao Ziyang’s secret memoirs on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the June 4, 1989 massacre has consolidated the late liberal party chief’s reputation as the Chinese Communist Party’s most committed—and resolute—reformer. The tome, based on some 30 tapes clandestinely recorded during Zhao’s 16 years of house arrest, examines issues ranging from factors behind the Tiananmen bloodbath to the future of the world’s largest political party. Its disquieting conclusion is that the CCP lost a golden opportunity for bloodless, far-reaching liberalization in 1989, and that the prospects for reform are now dismal.
Posted June 5, 2009

The New Silk Road: How a Rising Arab World is Turning Away from the West and Rediscovering China

Watch a special REVIEW video that interviews the author of this book (here).

The rise of the developing economies is clearly one of the great stories of our time. It has changed how we think about the balance of the world economy—the nexus between the United States and China is widely recognized as the single most important bilateral relationship in the world today. But there’s a less-noticed corollary to the growing weight of Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. Links among emerging nations themselves are increasingly important and will only become more so with time. Yet since these exchanges of money, goods, ideas and people largely bypass America and Europe, they are in turn little noticed and poorly understood in the West.
Posted June 5, 2009

Power and Restraint: For the U.S.-China Relationship

Reviewed by John Frankenstein

The idea behind this collection of 16 short essays on United States-China relations is promising: Get prominent U.S. and Chinese international-relations experts to write joint essays about key issues in the relationship with the hopes that new common ground might be found. But edited volumes are problematic. It’s hard to ensure consistency of theme and timeliness.
Posted June 5, 2009

The Last Eunuch of China: The Life of Sun Yaoting

Reviewed by Peter Neville-Hadley

If Sun Yaoting’s story was on offer today it would have the editors of British “red top” tabloids and American supermarket-checkout scandal magazines reaching for their check books and then adding a zero or two to any bid in order to ensure exclusive rights. “Palace insider reveals royal perversions!” the headlines might scream, introducing a series of lurid exposés of the late eunuch’s mutilation at the hands of his father, and his periods of service for assorted members of the Qing imperial family, including the neglected last empress Wan Rong.
Posted June 5, 2009

The Golden Triangle: Inside Southeast Asia's Drug Trade

Reviewed by Sebastian Strangio

Burma’s United Wa State Army is seen by many Western law enforcement agencies as one of the most powerful drug-trafficking organizations in the world. Since signing a cease-fire agreement with the Burmese government in 1989, the 20,000-strong UWSA has been granted control of Wa Special State—an isolated and mountainous region of Shan State in Burma’s northeast that produces the lion’s share of the heroin and methamphetamines in today’s Golden Triangle.
Posted June 5, 2009

Dragon Fighter: One Woman's Epic Struggle for Peace with China

Reviewed by Paul Mooney

As her story opens, Rebiya Kadeer has sunk to a low that she could never have imagined. Her rags to riches story from starving refugee child to the wealthiest woman in China and membership in the National People’s Congress has already ended as she sits on death row in one of the China’s grimmest prisons. Ms. Kadeer prepares for her execution later that morning, telling her guards which dress and hat she wants to wear. Her request to see her children one last time is rejected. Led into the court by a phalanx of soldiers, she is shocked when at the end of her 15-minute trial the judge announces she will serve an eight-year prison sentence. Dazed, Ms. Kadeer is returned to her prison cell.
Posted June 5, 2009

Japan's Cold War: Media, Literature and the Law

Reviewed by Martin Laflamme

Following its surrender to the allied powers in 1945, Japan faced a very unsettling future. Old imperial certainties had been shattered, quite literally, by the flattening of Japan’s major cities and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A new legal and political framework, most conspicuously embodied in the new Constitution and its war-renouncing Article 9, was being thrust upon Japan by its American overlord. An initial period characterized by restored political and social freedoms, was soon followed by a purge of citizens with leftist sympathies, the rehabilitation of sections of the right-wing establishment and, partly as a result, deepening uncertainty among the general public about the future. Conflict erupted on the Korean peninsula; hydrogen bombs were tested in the South Pacific; radioactive rain fell over Japan. All this in less than a decade.
Posted June 5, 2009

The Lure of China: Writers from Marco Polo to J.G. Ballard

Reviewed by Hugo Restall

It’s hard to think of a more suitable person than Frances Wood to lead a tour through the stacks of books Westerners have written based on their experiences in China. As the curator of the British Library’s Chinese collections, she is familiar with both the classic and the obscure, and has written an exegesis of Marco Polo and history of treaty port life. She even contributed to the genre with a memoir of her own time as a student in Beijing, Hand Grenade Practice in Peking: My Part in the Cultural Revolution (John Murray, 2000).
Posted June 5, 2009