Explore our series of multimedia interviews and Q&As with the contributors to this volume: 

• China Faces Tough Decisions and Stronger Headwinds
• China’s Incentives to Work Within the U.S.-led International Order Remain Compelling, Argues Thomas Fingar
• High-Speed Rail Holds Promise and Problems for China, Explains David M. Lampton
• Now It Gets Much Harder: Thomas Fingar and Jean Oi Discuss China’s Challenges in The Washington Quarterly
• Karen Eggleston Examines China’s Looming Demographic Crisis, in Fateful Decisions

China's future will be determined by how its leaders manage its myriad interconnected challenges. In Fateful Decisions, leading experts from a wide range of disciplines eschew broad predictions of success or failure in favor of close analyses of today's most critical demographic, economic, social, political, and foreign policy challenges. They expertly outline the options and opportunity costs entailed, providing a cutting-edge analytic framework for understanding the decisions that will determine China's trajectory.

Xi Jinping has articulated ambitious goals, such as the Belt and Road Initiative and massive urbanization projects, but few priorities or policies to achieve them. These goals have thrown into relief the crises facing China as the economy slows and the population ages while the demand for and costs of education, healthcare, elder care, and other social benefits are increasing. Global ambitions and a more assertive military also compete for funding and policy priority. These challenges are compounded by the size of China's population, outdated institutions, and the reluctance of powerful elites to make reforms that might threaten their positions, prerogatives, and Communist Party legitimacy. In this volume, individual chapters provide in-depth analyses of key policies relating to these challenges. Contributors illuminate what is at stake, possible choices, and subsequent outcomes. This volume equips readers with everything they need to understand these complex developments in context.

Available May 2020.

This book is part of the Stanford University Press series, "Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center"

The era of globalization saw China emerge as the world's manufacturing titan. However, the "made in China" model—with its reliance on cheap labor and thin profits—has begun to wane. Beginning in the 2000s, the Chinese state shifted from attracting foreign investment to promoting the technological competitiveness of domestic firms. This shift caused tensions between winners and losers, leading local bureaucrats to compete for resources in government budget, funding, and tax breaks. While bureaucrats successfully built coalitions to motivate businesses to upgrade in some cities, in others, vested interests within the government deprived businesses of developmental resources and left them in a desperate race to the bottom.

About the Author

A favorite icon for cigarette manufacturers across China since the mid-twentieth century has been the panda, with factories from Shanghai to Sichuan using cuddly cliché to market tobacco products. The proliferation of panda-branded cigarettes coincides with profound, yet poorly appreciated, shifts in the worldwide tobacco trade. Over the last fifty years, transnational tobacco companies and their allies have fueled a tripling of the world's annual consumption of cigarettes. At the forefront is the China National Tobacco Corporation, now producing forty percent of cigarettes sold globally. What's enabled the manufacturing of cigarettes in China to flourish since the time of Mao and to prosper even amidst public health condemnation of smoking? 

In Poisonous Pandas, an interdisciplinary group of scholars comes together to tell that story. They offer novel portraits of people within the Chinese polity—government leaders, scientists, tax officials, artists, museum curators, and soldiers—who have experimentally revamped the country's pre-Communist cigarette supply chain and fitfully expanded its political, economic, and cultural influence. These portraits cut against the grain of what contemporary tobacco-control experts typically study, opening a vital new window on tobacco—the single largest cause of preventable death worldwide today.

You can read the Introduction and Chapter 1 online.

About the editors

About the authors:

Jean C. Oi is William Haas Professor in Chinese Politics and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

Steven Goldstein is Sophia Smith Professor Emeritus of Government at Smith College, Director of the Taiwan Studies Workshop, and Associate at the Fairbank Center at Harvard University.

This book is part of the Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center series with Stanford University Press.

Uneasy Partnerships presents the analysis and insights of practitioners and scholars who have shaped and examined China's interactions with key Northeast Asian partners. Using the same empirical approach employed in the companion volume, The New Great Game (Stanford University Press, 2016), this new text analyzes the perceptions, priorities, and policies of China and its partners to explain why dyadic relationships evolved as they have during China's "rise."

Synthesizing insights from an array of research, Uneasy Partnerships traces how the relationships that formed between China and its partner states—Japan, the Koreas, and Russia—resulted from the interplay of competing and compatible objectives, as well as from the influence of third-country ties. These findings are used to identify patterns and trends and to develop a framework that can be used to illuminate and explain Beijing's engagement with the rest of the world.

This book is part of the Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center series at Stanford University Press.

Failed Democratization in Prewar Japan presents a compelling case study on change in political regimes through its exploration of Japan's transition to democracy. Within a broad-ranging examination of Japan's "semi-democratic" political system from 1918 to 1932, when political parties tended to dominate the government, the book analyzes in detail why this system collapsed in 1932 and discusses the implications of the failure.

By reference to comparable cases—prewar Argentina, prewar Germany, postwar Brazil, and 1980s Thailand—Harukata Takenaka reveals that the factors responsible for the breakdown of the Taisho democracy in Japan replicated those that precipitated the collapse of democracy in Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere in Asia.

While most literature on these transitions focuses on successful cases, Takenaka explores democratic failure to answer questions about how and why political parties and their leaders can behave in ways that undermine the democratic institutions that serve as the basis for their formal authority.

This book is part of the Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center series at Stanford University Press.

Kyai Haji Abdullah Gymnastiar, known affectionately by Indonesians as "Aa Gym" (elder brother Gym), rose to fame via nationally televised sermons, best-selling books, and corporate training seminars. In Rebranding Islam James B. Hoesterey draws on two years' study of this charismatic leader and his message of Sufi ideas blended with Western pop psychology and management theory to examine new trends in the religious and economic desires of an aspiring middle class, the political predicaments bridging self and state, and the broader themes of religious authority, economic globalization, and the end(s) of political Islam. 

At Gymnastiar's Islamic school, television studios, and MQ Training complex, Hoesterey observed this charismatic preacher developing a training regimen called Manajemen Qolbu into Indonesia's leading self-help program via nationally televised sermons, best-selling books, and corporate training seminars. Hoesterey's analysis explains how Gymnastiar articulated and mobilized Islamic idioms of ethics and affect as a way to offer self-help solutions for Indonesia's moral, economic, and political problems. Hoesterey then shows how, after Aa Gym's fall, the former celebrity guru was eclipsed by other television preachers in what is the ever-changing mosaic of Islam in Indonesia. Although Rebranding Islam tells the story of one man, it is also an anthropology of Islamic psychology.

This book is part of the Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center series at Stanford University Press.

The neighboring north Indian districts of Jaipur and Ajmer are identical in language, geography, and religious and caste demography. But when the famous Babri Mosque in Ayodhya was destroyed in 1992, Jaipur burned while Ajmer remained peaceful; when the state clashed over low-caste affirmative action quotas in 2008, Ajmer's residents rioted while Jaipur's citizens stayed calm. What explains these divergent patterns of ethnic conflict across multiethnic states? Using archival research and elite interviews in five case studies spanning north, south, and east India, as well as a quantitative analysis of 589 districts, Ajay Verghese shows that the legacies of British colonialism drive contemporary conflict.

Because India served as a model for British colonial expansion into parts of Africa and Southeast Asia, this project links Indian ethnic conflict to violent outcomes across an array of multiethnic states, including cases as diverse as Nigeria and Malaysia. The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence in Indiamakes important contributions to the study of Indian politics, ethnicity, conflict, and historical legacies.

This book is part of the Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center series at Stanford University Press.

No nation is free from the charge that it has a less-than-complete view of the past. History is not simply about recording past events—it is often contested, negotiated, and reshaped over time. The debate over the history of World War II in Asia remains surprisingly intense, and Divergent Memories examines the opinions of powerful individuals to pinpoint the sources of conflict: from Japanese colonialism in Korea and atrocities in China to the American decision to use atomic weapons against Japan.

Rather than labeling others' views as "distorted" or ignoring dissenting voices to create a monolithic historical account, Gi-Wook Shin and Daniel Sneider pursue a more fruitful approach: analyzing how historical memory has developed, been formulated, and even been challenged in each country. By identifying key factors responsible for these differences, Divergent Memories provides the tools for readers to both approach their own national histories with reflection and to be more understanding of others.

"A well-written investigation on the legacy of World War II in Asia, greatly contributes to the field of cultural and military history.” —Mel Vasquez, H-War

"This book is an important counterweight to prevailing tendencies that promote uncritical nationalism and is thus an invaluable resource for this generation’s Asian and American youth to gain a critical understanding of their national histories...[T]he authors’ non-judgmental approach, coupled with persistence in pursuing the multiple interpretations and experiences of these traumatic events, provoke a reconsideration of our notions of justice, equality, and humanity within our nationalist thinking."—Grace Huang, Journal of American-East Asian Relations, Vol. 26.2

This book is part of the Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center series at Stanford University Press.