A thoughtful reconsideration of China's actual place in the new world order, based on reality rather than fanciful...
A Hong Kong–based executive suggests that the dreaded Chinese juggernaut has a few cracks in its armor.
Some doubting Thomases of late have begun to wonder if China really has the stuff to run the world, and Beardson thinks they may have a point. He constructs a concise, readable, albeit finance-heavy roundup of Chinese successes and failures in order to assess its future potential. One important point he emphasizes is China’s habit of reverting to old models. From the Ming dynasty to Mao Zedong, he notes, rulers have responded to outside pressures by turning inward rather than opening to new currents, and any stress prompts reversion to the top-down method of control, extending to the most local level. Beardson examines the Chinese political, financial and social structures, backing up his determinations of their good and bad aspects with impressive research and analysis. The rapid growth of the Chinese economy over the last 30 years, he finds, has been dogged by such systemic problems as unemployment, currency snags, massive environmental degradation and an inability to sustain the old cheap-export/fixed-investment model. While a new, innovative model is urgently needed, bureaucratic inertia and lack of integrity inhibit Chinese institutions in nearly every field, most notably science, education and research. Plagiarism, corruption, a vulnerable financial system, income inequality, gender disparities, organized crime, military aggression against its neighbors and cyberaggression against the U.S. all undermine Chinese stability. The nation needs to step up responsibly to its world role and defuse the instinct among many wary countries to “check” it, but ultimately, Beardson concludes, “China is weak where it should be strong and strong where it should be weak.”
A thoughtful reconsideration of China's actual place in the new world order, based on reality rather than fanciful speculation.Pub Date: May 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-300-16542-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
A moving essay that should find its way into the hands of all students and teachers to provoke new conversation and...
An enchanting plea by the award-winning Nigerian novelist to channel anger about gender inequality into positive change.
Employing personal experience in her examination of “the specific and particular problem of gender,” National Book Critics Circle winner Adichie (Americanah, 2013, etc.) gently and effectively brings the argument about whether feminism is still relevant to an accessible level for all readers. An edited version of a 2012 TEDxEuston talk she delivered, this brief essay moves from the personal to the general. The author discusses how she was treated as a second-class citizen back home in Nigeria (walking into a hotel and being taken for a sex worker; shut out of even family meetings, in which only the male members participate) and suggests new ways of socialization for both girls and boys (e.g., teaching both to cook). Adichie assumes most of her readers are like her “brilliant, progressive” friend Louis, who insists that women were discriminated against in the past but that “[e]verything is fine now for women.” Yet when actively confronted by an instance of gender bias—the parking attendant thanked Louis for the tip, although Adichie had been the one to give it—Louis had to recognize that men still don’t recognize a woman’s full equality in society. The example from her childhood at school in Nigeria is perhaps the most poignant, demonstrating how insidious and entrenched gender bias is and how damaging it is to the tender psyches of young people: The primary teacher enforced an arbitrary rule (“she assumed it was obvious”) that the class monitor had to be a boy, even though the then-9-year-old author had earned the privilege by winning the highest grade in the class. Adichie makes her arguments quietly but skillfully.
A moving essay that should find its way into the hands of all students and teachers to provoke new conversation and awareness.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-91176-1
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Readers would do well to heed the dark warning that this book conveys.
The nameless resister inside the White House speaks.
“The character of one man has widened the chasms of American political division,” writes Anonymous. Indeed. The Trump years will not be remembered well—not by voters, not by history since the man in charge “couldn’t focus on governing, and he was prone to abuses of power, from ill-conceived schemes to punish his political rivals to a propensity for undermining vital American institutions.” Given all that, writes the author, and given Trump’s bizarre behavior and well-known grudges—e.g., he ordered that federal flags be raised to full staff only a day after John McCain died, an act that insiders warned him would be construed as petty—it was only patriotic to try to save the country from the man even as the resistance movement within the West Wing simultaneously tried to save Trump’s presidency. However, that they tried did not mean they succeeded: The warning of the title consists in large part of an extended observation that Trump has removed the very people most capable of guiding him to correct action, and the “reasonable professionals” are becoming ever fewer in the absence of John Kelly and others. So unwilling are those professionals to taint their reputations by serving Trump, in fact, that many critical government posts are filled by “acting” secretaries, directors, and so forth. And those insiders abetting Trump are shrinking in number even as Trump stumbles from point to point, declaring victory over the Islamic State group (“People are going to fucking die because of this,” said one top aide) and denouncing the legitimacy of the process that is now grinding toward impeachment. However, writes the author, removal from office is not the answer, not least because Trump may not leave without trying to stir up a civil war. Voting him out is the only solution, writes Anonymous; meanwhile, we’re stuck with a president whose acts, by the resisters’ reckoning, are equal parts stupid, illegal, or impossible to enact.
Readers would do well to heed the dark warning that this book conveys.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1846-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
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