Showing titles in Asia

There is an ancient Chinese proverb that states, "Two tigers cannot share the same mountain." However, in East Asia, there are three tigers on that mountain: China, Japan, and Korea, and they have a long history of turmoil and tension with each other. In his latest entertaining and thought-provoking narrative travelogue, Michael Booth sets out to discover how deep, really, the enmity is between these three "tiger" nations and what prevents them from making peace.

The Sino-American contest is driven by clashing geopolitical interests and a stark ideological dispute over whether authoritarianism or democracy will dominate the twenty-first century. But both history and China's current trajectory suggest that this rivalry will reach its moment of maximum danger in the 2020s. The Chinese challenge will most likely prove more manageable than many pessimists currently believe—but during the 2020s, the pace of Sino-American conflict will accelerate, and the prospect of war will be frighteningly real.

Forged during the tumultuous aftermath of Partition in 1947, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) has grown to become the preeminent intelligence service in Pakistan. Its capabilities are comprehensive, its remit covers both foreign and domestic intelligence, and it is one of the most feared and respected agencies of the Global South. Pakistan's ISI provides an up-to-date and detailed introduction to the ISI and its historical evolution.

More than twenty years after teaching English to China's first boom generation at a small college in Sichuan Province, Peter Hessler returned to teach the next generation. At the same time, Hessler's twin daughters became the only Westerners in a student body of about two thousand in their local primary school.

Hello, Shadowlands takes a deep plunge into crime rings both large and small. It also examines how China’s rise and America’s decline are creating new opportunities for transnational syndicates to thrive. Focusing on human stories on both sides of this crime wave, the acclaimed Bangkok-based broadcaster and journalist Patrick Winn intimately profiles the men and women of the region who are forced to make agonizing choices in the absence of law.

In this book, former North Korea lead foreign service officer at the US embassy in Seoul, Patrick McEachern, unpacks the contentious and tangled relationship between the Koreas in an approachable question-and-answer format. Why have the two Koreas developed politically and economically in such radically different ways? What are the origins of a divided Korean Peninsula? Who rules the two Koreas? How have three generations of the authoritarian Kim dictatorship shaped North Korea?

The Great Successor is an irreverent yet insightful quest to understand the life of Kim Jong Un, one of the world's most secretive dictators. Kim's life is swathed in myth and propaganda, from the plainly silly - he supposedly ate so much Swiss cheese that his ankles gave way - to the grimly bloody stories of the ways his enemies and rival family members have perished at his command.

Thought-provoking and eye-opening, Blood and Silk is an accessible, personal look at modern Southeast Asia, written by one of the region's most experienced outside observers. This is a first-hand account of what it's like to sit at the table with deadly Thai Muslim insurgents, mediate between warring clans in the Southern Philippines and console the victims of political violence in Indonesia - all in an effort to negotiate peace and understand the reasons behind endemic violence.

The relationship between the US and China, the world’s two superpowers, is peculiarly volatile. Their militaries play a dangerous game of chicken, corporations steal intellectual property, intelligence satellites peer, and AI technicians plot. The capacity for either country to cross a fatal line grows daily. Kevin Rudd, a former Australian prime minister who has studied, lived in, and worked with China for more than forty years, is one of the very few people who can offer real insight into the mindsets of the leadership whose judgment will determine if a war will be fought.

Andrei Lankov has gone where few outsiders have ever been. A native of the former Soviet Union, he lived as an exchange student in North Korea in the 1980s. He has studied it for his entire career, using his fluency in Korean and personal contacts to build a rich, nuanced understanding. In The Real North Korea, Lankov substitutes cold, clear analysis for the overheated rhetoric surrounding this opaque police state.

Weak, corrupt, and politically unstable, the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan are dismissed as isolated and irrelevant to the outside world. But are they? This hard-hitting book argues that Central Asia is in reality a globalization leader with more extensive involvement in economics, politics, and security dynamics beyond its borders than any other world region. Yet Central Asia's international activities are mostly hidden from view, with disturbing implications for world security.

Over the past four decades, China's remarkable transformation has garnered admiration but also sparked concern. George Magnus draws on his intimate knowledge of this dynamic nation to uncover the origins of its ascent and show why the economic traps it faces at home and the political challenges it faces abroad pose a serious threat to its continued rise.

Zen, haiku, martial arts, sushi, anime, manga, film, video games . . . Japanese culture has long enriched our Western way of life. Yet from a Western perspective, Japan remains a remote island country that has long had a complicated relationship with the outside world. Japan—an archipelago strung like a necklace around the Asian mainland—is considerably farther from Asia than Britain is from Europe. The sea has provided an effective barrier against invasion and enabled the culture to develop in unique ways.

China and America are world powers without serious rivals. They eye each other warily across the Pacific; they communicate poorly; there seems little natural empathy. A massive geopolitical contest has begun. America prizes freedom; China values freedom from chaos. America values strategic decisiveness; China values patience.America is becoming society of lasting inequality; China a meritocracy. America has abandoned multilateralism; China welcomes it.

China and Japan have cultural and political connections that stretch back 1,500 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, less than 10 percent of each population had positive feelings toward the other, and both countries insist that the other side must deal openly with its history before relations can improve. Ezra Vogel's China and Japan examines key turning points in Sino-Japanese history.

From terrifying missile tests, its unmissable Olympic cheering squad, and the war of words between President Trump and Kim Jong Un - not to mention stranger-than-fiction stories of purges and assassinations - news from North Korea has dominated global headlines. But what is life there actually like? In See You Again in Pyongyang, Travis Jeppesen, the first American to complete a university program in North Korea, culls from his experiences living, traveling, and studying in the country to create a multifaceted portrait of the country and its idiosyncratic capital city.

This is a book about the coming of age of four women born in China in the 1980s and 1990s, in a society about to change beyond recognition. It is about Leiya, who wants to escape the fate of the women in her village. Still underage, she bluffs her way on to the factory floor. It is about June, who at fifteen sets what her family thinks is an impossible goal: to attend university rather than raise pigs. It is about Siyue, ranked second-to-bottom of her English class, who decides to prove her teachers wrong.

One by one, Tahir Hamut Izgil's friends disappeared. The Chinese government's brutal persecution of the Uyghur people had continued for years, but in 2017 it assumed a terrifying new scale. The Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority group in western China, were experiencing an echo of the worst horrors of the twentieth century. Over a million people have vanished into China's internment camps for Muslim minorities. Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is the story of the political, social, and cultural destruction of Tahir Hamut Izgil's homeland.

Hong Kong is known as a place of extremes: a former colony of the United Kingdom that now exists at the margins of an ascendant China; a city rocked by mass protests, where residents rally—often in vain—against threats to their fundamental freedoms. But it is also misunderstood, and often romanticized.

Declan Walsh is one of the New York Times's most distinguished international correspondents. His electrifying portrait of Pakistan over a tumultuous decade captures the sweep of this strange, wondrous, and benighted country through the dramatic lives of nine fascinating individuals.