Obama to Visit China

After meeting today with Hu Jintao in advance of the G20 in London, Obama accepted an invitation to visit China later this year:

The leaders agreed to "strengthen ties at all levels" ranging from the economy to fighting terrorism, and would expand consultations on "non-proliferation and other international security topics," the White House said.

"The two sides agreed to resume the human rights dialogue as soon as possible," the statement said.

In January and February, China Beat ran a series of reading (and sometimes viewing) recommendations for the new president. [See installments 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.] Now that a trip is in the offing, perhaps someone who knows the president could bring the lists to his attention?

Time Machine: Dear US Presidential Candidates…

By Robert A. Kapp

February, 2009: we are in the early days of a new Administration, and the Internet and print media bulge with messages of advice to the new President and the new Secretary of State about how to deal with China. Some of the missives are Olympian. Others are avuncular. They serve multiple purposes, and seek to reach multiple audiences.

Reading them, I was reminded of one of my own exercises of a similar nature, in the fall of the year 2000. Eight long years; so much has happened. Then, we were only a couple of months beyond the huge political battle over extending Permanent Normal Trade Relations to China – a Hill struggle brought the most strident arguments over China to the forefront of American attention.

Before that, in reverse chronological order, lay the Lee Wen Ho case; the Cox Commission and its allegations of Chinese nuclear theft; the Hughes-Loral furor over alleged transfer of military rocketry knowledge to China; Johnny Chung, John Huang, Charlie Trie and the scandal over “campaign finance.” Amid all that had come the Belgrade Embassy bombing and the siege of the Sasser embassy. Only a couple of years earlier had occurred the PRC missile tests off northern Taiwan and the sending of the Seventh Fleet to waters off Taiwan. Among the colorful Congressional comments along the way, in 1999, came the denunciation of the PRC leadership as a bunch of “child molesters.” One very well known Member of Congress, in a speech to members of his own party the same year, referred to the “big wet kissup” of the Clinton regime to Beijing as nothing short of “the full Lewinsky.”

Thus the immediate background to my open-letter message to our presidential candidates at the time, George W. Bush and Al Gore. China Beat readers can form their own judgments, eight-plus long years later, as to where the U.S. and China have been and where we have come, and whether this particular “advice” from a receding moment in time still burns, or whether it merely flickers feebly in the cooling embers of another era.

This piece was originally published in the September-October 2000 issue of China Business Review.

Dear US Presidential Candidates…

Congratulations on securing your parties' nominations for the presidency. You have embarked on a deeply personal journey in which hundreds of millions have a vital stake. We wish you health and fulfillment in the campaign and, to the winner, we wish success in a tough job with unequalled potential for enhancing the well-being of all Americans…

…As you conduct your campaigns and prepare to serve the nation, I hope you don't mind my offering a few personal thoughts on America's future with China and the critical role of the president in shaping that future.

1. The United States and China must work at building a world system in which China is, for the first time in our 225-year history, a force to be reckoned with. Even if we wanted to, it is now impossible to shunt China back into its nineteenth- and twentieth-century identity: impoverished, self-isolated, riven by civil war, assaulted by more powerful states, or imprisoned in Marxist-Leninist doctrinarism. Those days are over. There is no going back. The United States and China must either find the means to maintain a civil and respectful bilateral relationship in a shrinking and perilous world, or face the consequences of their failure.

2. China must not be an American afterthought. Maintaining a productive relationship with China should rank high on the American agenda. Leaving US-China relations far down on the totem pole of US concerns will not serve our national interest well.

3. The greatest danger we face in our relations with China is the danger of unfamiliarity and of its partners, fear of the unknown and unwarranted casualness. Engagement with China is demanding, but it's not extraterrestrial. We must grapple with a deeply ingrained habit of relegating China to the periphery of our national consciousness, except in moments of crisis; of assuming that China (or for that matter Asia as a whole) is somehow so exotic (or, as one Cabinet member once put it to me, "so darned far away") that we need not place a priority on engaging with it day in and day out. Paying attention to relations with China only when something bad happens, or only when a domestic political storm breaks out, is a recipe for unnecessary tensions.

4. The president must frame American relations with China. There is simply no substitute for presidential energy on this. If he does not lead, others will fill the void: elected figures of more limited constituency, for whom China sometimes represents opportunity without responsibility; members of the media, who provide Americans with a fraction of one minute's worth of information about China on any given day and who thrive on pungent momentary "news"; interest groups--business, labor, the non-governmental community--all of which have a role to play, but none of which can substitute fully for presidential leadership in the making of sensitive and far-reaching American policy decisions.

5. Presidential leadership on China requires hard work. The president must communicate to the American people about our relations with China, even when there is no crisis and no triumph. He must also communicate successfully with the Chinese, a very different audience. But before he communicates, the president must "know himself and know the other side," as an old Chinese saying goes. It is not impossible, but it takes time and care. It takes meeting the Chinese. It takes seeing China. It takes consensus-building. It requires allocation of precious talent and time within an administration inevitably beset by limitless demands for both.

6. Far-reaching affinity will not come easily to nations as different as the United States and China. Happily, the world has created a number of structures and systems, including the World Trade Organization, to maintain predictable and stable relations among vastly different nations. China in the past 20 years has committed itself increasingly to participation in the world's principal economic and political regimes. Wherever possible, the president should position the United States to encourage China's growing commitment to multilateral regimes and norms. He should both ensure that the United States accords China the respect that full participation in international regimes entails, and do his utmost to ensure that China reciprocally displays the same respect and lives up to its own responsibilities.

7. At home, the president must not allow himself to be drawn politically on China. This is perhaps the hardest domestic challenge of all.For reasons too long to describe here--including real events in China--China sound bites sometimes have special pungency in the American public consciousness. Some will paint a simplistic picture of China--a single memorable phrase, a brilliant moral call to arms, a single riveting photo--and demand that the president "take sides." They will present China as a morality play, a test of the president's fidelity to elemental values pure and simple. They will suggest that a nuanced and carefully balanced US posture with regard to China is nothing short of "appeasement" or "kowtowing to Beijing." China's political radioactivity in the United States feeds on itself. If the president is to lead on China, he must stay out of the China trap at home. But presidential leadership is itself the best way out of the China trap.

8. In guiding American relations with China, the president should understand and draw upon the skills and insights of people of Chinese descent in the United States. People have come to the United States from China for a century and a half--first as exploited coolie labor, later as refugees from war and political convulsion, more recently as students and businesspeople. Some are now tenth-generation Americans. Others are new citizens. Some know their ancestral homeland well; others are total strangers to it. Some are brilliant, others are dull. Some vote one way, others vote another. But they are Americans of Chinese heritage, and even as they contribute to America's strength, many cherish their roots and their relationships in China. Their position on the cusp of China-US cultural contact is an underutilized American asset. There is a misguided suggestion afoot in the land that Americans of Chinese origin are somehow vulnerable to the influence of a malevolent oriental despotism. The president should leave no doubt about where the nation stands on this, and should enhance our nation's ability to manage its relations with China by drawing upon our country's Chinese-American resources.

9. The president needs to lead the nation in recognizing that China, more than most countries, is a work in progress. China is in constant motion. Unchanging first principles are few, apart from an abiding sense of historical identity and a deep-seated determination to be respected by others. It is not easy, but the president must anticipate the certainty of uncertainty, the permanence of impermanence, the constancy of inconstancy, in US relations with China. That does not require suspension of ethical standards or of plain common sense. It does demand both strategic long-term vision and short-term flexibility.

10. The president must understand both the power of American example and the limits of American influence. "Sending China a Message" has proven rhetorically popular but substantively unproductive. Telling China to do as we say, on pain of economic punishment, is a fond fantasy. The American president should not take on the impossible burden of remaking China in America's image, whether from the pulpit or the cockpit. He can, though, strengthen America's influence with China. Many in China study the United States. They look for the sources of this nation's vitality and productivity. Their search has century-old roots. China's willingness to learn from American experience, and the desire to assimilate in some way America's (and other countries') strengths into China's difficult environment, is genuine. It is both a reflection and a source of American strength.

No matter which of you attains the presidency this winter, we wish you well, and we hope that that the lessons American business has learned over nearly three decades of work with China may be of service to you and your nation al leadership.

Clinton Plans Visit to China

In just a week, Hilary Clinton will be in China for her first visit as U.S. Secretary of State. What will inform the visit? Here are a few readings that discuss it…

1. Surprise! Many China watchers were caught short by the news that Clinton is headed to China for a visit. The tour has been put together at the last moment, with an as-yet unclear agenda, as discussed by Ian Johnson at WSJ…

2. For an updated analysis of Clinton’s likely goals during her Asia stops, see FEER’s report. One highlight from their analysis of the China visit:

The final stop in China will combine personal and policy tests for Secretary Clinton. Personal, because she has long been critical of China for human rights abuses and trade issues, and Beijing has been trying to puzzle her out. Policy, because President Obama has set high goals for additional cooperation with China, beyond what President Bush achieved.

3. On Friday, Clinton gave a speech at the Asia Society that indicated the direction her visit might take:

Secretary Clinton also said she will "press the case" for greater energy efficiency and clean energy, stating that climate change also has implications on global health care and economy.

4. Clinton has made several high-profile visits to China already. Here is a report on her 1995 visit during the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women.

5. In case you’d like a day-by-day accounting of the Clinton 1998 visit to China (really perhaps more than most of us need to know), here is that detailed account.

6. As some will remember, China was a punching bag for Clinton and Obama during the primaries. If you need a refresher, check out this story from AFP.

7. Back in January 2008, Sufei of Sexy Beijing pondered how she should make a decision between Obama and Clinton…revealing Clinton’s widespread familiarity and popularity on the streets of Beijing.

Obama Recommendations: VI

Paul French is the Shanghai-based author of Carl Crow, a Tough Old China Hand and keeps the blog China Rhyming, as well as acting as publishing and marketing director at Access Asia. French's next book, Through the Looking Glass: China's Foreign Journalists from the Opium Wars to Mao, will be published June 1 by Hong Kong University Press.

Obama claims to be a break with the past by which, in a very American way of defining the past, he seems to mean the last few years. Instructive as some recent China books may be, perhaps the President would care to go back a bit further and consider the opinions of some older Americans and one Brit with plenty of China experience.

The revival of American extraterritoriality (extrality) in Iraq does not appear to have spurred much interest in historians to go back and look at previous examples of the practise. But in pre-revolution Shanghai, Americans were at the forefront of the debate and history has a tendency to echo. So he might benefit from ploughing through the great American journalist in Shanghai Thomas Fairfax Millard’s The End of Extraterritoriality in China (1931). Millard’s book influenced a whole gang of Americans in Shanghai to oppose extrality – China Weekly Review editor JB Powell did and he was drummed out of the right wing American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai (some things never change!) for his position. A more recent examination of the failings of America’s attempts at extrality in China, Ellen P. Scully’s Bargaining With the State from Afar: American Citizenship in Treaty Port China 1844-1942 (2001), might also prove useful.

Obama is about to get bombarded by a thousand and one industry lobby groups and the US-China Business Council about how he must adopt a “trade first” policy towards China as there are millions to be made over there. Hopefully the expensive suits and lavish PowerPoints won’t faze him. To help, he might like to read Carl Crow’s 1937 classic 400 Million Customers: The Experiences – Some Happy, Some Sad of an American in China, and What They Taught Him. It should at least remind the Commander-in-Chief that there’s very little new under the sun – in 1937 Crow could confidently write - “China is a market of long receivables, rigid markets, structural inefficiency, impossible logistics and relentless brazen copying and substitution of imported goods with fakes” and conclude that a lot of those PowerPoint projections may not come to pass now as they didn’t back then – “No matter what you may be selling, your business in China should be enormous, if the Chinese who should buy your goods would only do so.”

The President is presumably a rather busy chap at the moment and doesn’t have much time for reading so there’s no need to overburden him. Perhaps the most instructive read to prepare him for the “experts” that will inundate him is a book that might or might not have ever existed – Tony Keswick’s Everything I Know About China which has become an old Shanghai legend. Keswick was the taipan of Jardine Matheson in Shanghai up until WW2. He rarely gave interviews and when he did would sit opposite the eager journalist with a coffee table between them upon which was a leather-bound and beautifully embossed copy of Everything I Know About China. Half way through the interview he would excuse himself from the room, go next door and peep through a spy hole in the wall to watch the journalist, knowing they wouldn’t be able to resist opening the book for a peek. Inside were 200 completely empty pages. You get the point hopefully?

Recommendations for Obama: V

We asked China watchers from a variety of backgrounds to answer the question "What should Obama be reading about China?" While we've already run four installments (I, II, III, and IV), new suggestions continue to arrive. For a few of the cinematic variety, read on...

Jan Berris is Vice-President of the National Committee on United States-China Relations and has worked with the committee since 1971.

I suggest that President Obama recover from the lousy week he just had by chilling out in his private movie theater and watching the following movies. None will give him a complete, or even, necessarily, contemporary perspective, but each will give him a piece of the complex, diverse puzzle that is China, and help him understand that there are no easy answers – for the Chinese or for us.

1. Irv Drasnin’s “Misunderstanding China,” a cinematic companion to Harold Isaac’s classic Scratches on Our Minds (which would have been on my list if I were suggesting books instead of films), provides a look at ourselves and how and why we think about China the way we do.

2. Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon’s trilogy of one hour films on Long Bow, which update the village her father, William Hinton, made famous in Fanshen and Shenfan. “A Small Happiness,” focuses on the plight of rural women and has one of the most emotionally wrenching scenes I’ve ever seen: Richard, the cameraman of the talented husband and wife team, says that it was all he could do to hold on to the camera while a woman described smothering her own child because there was not enough food to feed whole family.

3. “To Live” -- Zhang Yimou’s panoramic portrait of one family’s struggle to make it through four decades (the 40s through the 80s) of roiling turmoil in China. .

4. The wonderfully comic, yet profoundly sad “Shower,” shows the confusion and angst that the passing of an era instills in the inhabitants of Beijing hutongs.

5. “Young and the Restless in China” is the latest of Sue William’s many excellent documentaries on China. This one vividly portrays how nine very different young men and women handle their personal and professional lives in a rapidly changing society.

Obama Recommendations: IV

By Kate Merkel-Hess

The search terms “Obama China” have brought a lot of readers to China Beat over the past two months. We are by no means the only ones experiencing an Obama-related reader boost (though we are the second hit on Google, right behind the BBC for a search of "Obama China"!), nor the only ones getting an Obama-related content surge. If you are looking for smart commentary on the recent Obama administration's China snafus, for instance, check out James Fallows’s analysis from last week (hat tip: kuluyi). Those interested in live (as in right now) discussion of Sino-American relations under Obama may want to listen in to the Japan Society's panel (including Howard French, who weighed in on our last recommendation list) on "The U.S. & East Asia Under the Obama Administration" (it will be webcast live at 6:30 p.m. EST). 

Below, our fourth installment of reading recommendations for Obama (though this time with a little twist in answers to our "what should the President be reading" question).  Feel that you've got too much to read already? If so, you may want to bop over to Huffington Post where Jeff Wasserstrom has posted a list of recommendations for Obama, in which he admittedly offers up titles of yet five more books, but he pairs each one with a relevant, China-related film or video that you might have missed.

French Sinologist Marie-Claire Bergere is professor emerita at INALCO (Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales) and author of, among many other books, the recent Capitalismes et capitalistes en Chine, XIXe - XXIe siècle (Paris: Perrin, 2007).

Thank you for asking, but I mostly follow the writings on China in French, and I would hate to think of suggesting that a busy President learn a new language. But if in an alternative universe the Francophone John Kerry had been elected instead of Bush in 2004 and was now starting a second term, here’s what I would advise him to read about China.

1) Les origines de la révolution chinoise 1915-1949, by Lucien Bianco , Paris, Gallimard, 2007 (This recent French edition was thoroughly revised and completed by a one-hundred-page essay entitled:"La révolution chinoise: une interprétation.")

2 et 3) In Mireille Delmas-Marty & Peirre-Etienne Will, La Chine et la démocratie, Paris,Fayard, 2007 , two contributions:
"Principe de légalité et règle de droit dans la tradition juridique chinoise" by Jerome Bourgon, and
"L'accession de la Chine à l'OMC et la réforme juridique: vers un État de droit par l'internationalisation sans la démocratie? " by Leila Choucroune.

4) Jean-Pierre Cabestan et Benoit Vermander, La Chine en quête de ses frontières: la confrontation Chine Taiwan, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 2005.

5) Comprendre la Chine aujourd'hui, by Jean Luc Domenach, Paris, Perrin, 2007.

Daniel A. Bell is professor of political theory at Tsinghua University (Beijing) and his latest book is China's New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society (Princeton University Press, 2008).

1) Sidney Rittenberg and Amanda Bennet, The Man Who Stayed Behind (Duke University Press, 2001). A gripping read by an American who spent decades in China, including sixteen years in solitary confinement. Rittenberg has somehow emerged from his experience with unparalleled understanding and balance. In his late 80s, as lucid as ever, he would also make an excellent ambassador to China.

2) James Fallows, Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China (Vintage, 2008). Clear and insightful writing from different parts of China. Shows the good and the bad and anybody reading the book cannot but be impressed by the diversity and complexity of the country. Fallows is a sensitive and reliable observer who somehow managed to write an in-depth and accessible account of major developments after only two years in China. Obviously a sign of great intelligence!

3) Randall Peerenboom, China's Long March to the Rule of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2002). The book provides an empirically grounded and comparative perspective of legal developments in China. Points to the possibility of different models of law and human rights appropriate at different levels of economic development. This book should be read in conjunction with Susan Shirk's China: Fragile Superpower (Oxford University Press, 2007) – a reliable guide to the key political challenges in China and how the US should respond to them – but I would guess the President already knows about this book so there is no need to mention it.

4) Guy Alitto, The Last Confucian: Liang Shu-ming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity (University of California Press, 1986). A fascinating account about a Confucian-inspired thinker who also tried to implement educational and agricultural reforms intended to benefit the poor. Had Mao taken his views more seriously, China would have been better off today. I would suggest reading this book in conjunction with Gloria Davies' Worrying about China (Harvard University Press, 2007), a reliable guide to the latest intellectual debates in China which also shows how age-old concerns about moral improvement and public-spiritedness still animate those debates. Ideally, the President should also read the works of influential Chinese intellectuals, but most remain untranslated into English. One exception is Wang Hui's China's New Order (Harvard University Press, 2006).

5) Tim Clissold, Mr. China (Collins, 2004). An intelligent and often hilarious account of what can go wrong when doing business in China. Yet Clissold never loses his sympathy for the people at the source of his troubles.

Obama Recommendations: III

By Kate Merkel-Hess

We aren’t the only ones with advice in regards to China for President Obama of late. For instance, Rebecca MacKinnon recently recommended to the President that he make sure to communicate with regular Chinese folks, as well as government leaders.

Meanwhile, book recommendations to kick off the new year are cropping up elsewhere as well — Jeff Wasserstrom, for instance, listed some of his favorites at Far Eastern Economic Review.

Here are a few more responses to our question, “What Should Obama Be Reading About China?” If you haven’t been following this feature, check out the first and second installments.


Howard French is an assistant professor of journalism at Columbia University and formerly Shanghai (and Tokyo) bureau chief for The New York Times.

Africa’s World War, by Gerard Prunier
Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil, by Nicholas Shaxson

Why two books that are nominally about Africa for a conversation about China? Because unheralded though it is, Africa will be the great economic and political frontier of the next quarter century, and China, which has understood this far better than the United States and Europe, is building an immense lead in terms of its relations with the continent.

The first book paints a compelling picture of how badly the U.S. has gotten Africa policy since the Clinton Administration, reaping death and destruction through reckless policies in Central Africa, and helping create the big openings China enjoys today.

The second book explains the pitfalls of the African oil sector, which has been America’s principal draw to the continent, and could help reinvent policies in ways that help African countries to use their very real wealth for development.

China: Fragile Superpower, by Susan L. Shirk
China's Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation, by David Shambaugh

Neither Obama nor any of his top advisors seem to have any deep history of involvement with China. Shirk and Shambaugh’s books are as good a primer on the way the country’s politics work as any I’ve seen recently, and would be a very solid starting point for understanding the country.

Struggling Giant, China in the 21st Century, by Kerry Brown

In the same vein of advice, this slim volume provides a very good feel for the upside potential of China as a fast-rising world power, but also of just how creaky the whole enterprise remains.

Beijing Coma, by Ma Jian
The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up, by Liao Yiwu

When the “other half” amounts to 650-800 million people, depending on who is doing the counting, it pays to have a sense for how they live. Ma Jian, the novelist, and Liao Yiwu, the New Journalist, will place you firmly in their midst, and give you some real and unforgettable people’s history along the way.


Dorothy J. Solinger is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine and author of Contesting Citizenship in Urban China.

1. David M. Lamptom: The Three Faces of Chinese Power: Might, Money and Minds. This book gives a great assessment of just how much miliary power, financial capacity and intellectual resources China actually has and gives a very balanced view of things from the Chinese side.

2. Andrew Mertha, The Politics of Piracy. Shows how the central government has really attempted to bring intellectual property rights under control and just how complex it is.

3. Kellee Tsai, Capitalism without Democracy. Explains how basically satisfied the new capitalists are with the Chinese state as it is now and why.

4. Susan Shirk, Fragile Superpower. Analyzes the domestic weaknesses of China, despite the external strength.

5. Dorothy J. Solinger, "The Plight of the Laid-off Proletariat," The China Quarterly, June 2002. [Link may only be available with a library subscription.] Reveals the difficulties of the unemployed in China and the inadequacy of the unfinished social security net there to assist them.


Merle Goldman is professor emerita of history at Boston University and author of numerous books and articles.

John K. Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History. It is a big book, but the last section deals with the post-Mao regime and might be a way for Obama to catch up on what has happened to China since Mao's death in 1976. This section views the post-Mao period in an historical context.


Sara L.M. Davis is the executive director of Asia Catalyst, and author of Song and Silence: Ethnic Revival on China's Southwest Borders. Asia Catalyst keeps a blog on human rights in China.

President Obama is more than just a sophisticated politician – he’s also an excellent writer. I doubt he’ll have much patience with some of the overhyped books on China currently weighing down the shelves at Borders. Instead, I’d recommend readings that will give the president insight into the people of China while making his long flight to Beijing pass a bit more quickly.

1. It’s hard to accomplish much in China without understanding Chinese tradition. Patricia Ebrey’s Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook is full of excellent, readable snippets from primary sources – everything from the Confucian classics to household handbooks to diaries by pilgrims on the Silk Road. Best of all, each text is only a few pages long, so the president can dip into it in between global crises.

2. If he enjoys Ebrey, the president might be ready to tackle Burton Watson’s translation of the Tso Chuan, an ancient collection of anecdotes about wars and allegiances between Chinese warlords. The Tso Chuan is a little stodgy, but is frequently enlivened with harrowing acts of violence. And it might give the president some useful ideas about how to conduct trade negotiations.

3. President Obama will want some insight into China’s troubled relations with the Uighurs and Tibetans. I'd suggest starting with Stevan Harrell’s wonderful essay, “Civilizing Projects and the Reaction to Them,” from Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers, then moving on to Robbie Barnett’s The Tibetans. (In return, Chinese leaders could spend a useful hour listening to Obama’s famous speech on race.)

4. Minky Worden’s edited volume, China's Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges, is an excellent overview of human rights issues in China.

5. As a former community activist, President Obama may be curious about the view in China from the bottom up. To help him understand the lives of working people, I suggest spending a few hours on the plane with some of the films at which China excels. One of my favorites is Woman Sesame Oil Maker, which shows China’s tumultuous economic changes through the tragic lives of two rural women. Beijing Bicycle and Not One Less are also tremendous. If President Obama just watches these three films, he'll know almost everything he needs to know about life in China.

Presidential Reading Recommendations: II

By Kate Merkel-Hess

A few days ago, we ran the first installment in a feature that posed the question “What Should Obama Be Reading About China?” to prominent China watchers. While Evan Osnos at the New Yorker pondered Chinese responses to Obama’s inauguration, our contributors mulled over which five readings on China would give the new president the essential knowledge he will need to navigate one of the U.S.’s most critical relationships. Here are few more of the recommendations we’ve received this week…

Pankaj Mishra is the author of, most recently, Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.

Obama will be given plenty of briefing papers to prepare him for meetings with Chinese leaders. As a sensitive and unusually perceptive writer, who seems to possess a great deal of negative capability, he would, I suspect, enjoy reading more general and literary books about Chinese history and culture. Here is my list.

1. The Gate of Heavenly Peace, Jonathan Spence. An elegant account of the passionate and tormented men and women who made China's modern history, more accessible—for the busy president at least—than Spence's comprehensive but mammoth The Search for Modern China.

2. China Hands, James Lilley. This rather rambling and self-important memoir may seem a curious selection, but Obama ought to read at least one book that covers the history of US-China relations before and during the Cold War and, furthermore, amplifies the kind of American attitudes—personal as well as official—toward China that have no place in the twenty-first century.

3. China’s New Order, Wang Hui. In the wake of the financial collapse, the New Left’s critique of China’s uneven growth resonates more strongly than before, and reading Wang Hui’s book, the President would learn a bit about the crisis at home as well as the problems in China. He may also want to look into Wang Hui’s forthcoming collection of articles, The End of the Revolution.

4. I Love Dollars, Zhu Wen. Notwithstanding the libraries devoted to China in the West today, literary fiction by Chinese writers still offers the most penetrating insight into Chinese society's self- perceptions, and Obama could enjoyably and profitably spend some of the many hours on the flight to Beijing by reading a few stories in this excellent collection.

5. China Beat. The assortment of lucidly written and interesting articles at this website could provide the cyber-savvy Obama with a swift and painless introduction to contemporary China.

Warren I. Cohen is Emeritus Professor of History at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, an expert in U.S.-China relations, and author of East Asia at the Center and America’s Failing Empire: U.S. Foreign Relations Since the Cold War.

1. Read Warren I. Cohen's America's Response to China (4th ed.) for an overview of Chinese-American relations from colonial times to 2000 (If he can wait, the fifth edition will go to press next week).

2. Read Nancy Bernkopf Tucker’s Strait Talk (out officially next month) for a comprehensive review of the Taiwan issue since 1969—essential for understanding why the Taiwan Strait is so dangerous and what mistakes the U.S. has made in past

3. Robert Suettinger’s Beyond Tiananmen for a close analysis of U.S. policymaking from 1989 to 2000. Suettinger was on the National Security Council and gives insight into how and why the U.S. did what it did (it will be a few years before Dennis Wilder provides the equivalent for the Bush years).

4. James Mann’s China Fantasy to get past all the nonsense we've been told about the benefits of engagement.

5. Philip Pan’s Out of Mao’s Shadow for an understanding of what life in China is really like today.

Bruce Cumings is Department Chair and a Professor in the History Department at the University of Chicago. His book, Korea’s Place in the Sun (1997), remains the foremost textbook on Korean history and he is the co-author, most recently, of Inventing the Axis of Evil, as well as contributing regularly to a variety of publications.

If he just read Lin Chun's The Transformation of Chinese Socialism, I would be happy. I think it's the best book on contemporary China in many years, but some American scholars don't like it because her orientation is social democratic rather than liberal.

Presidential Reading Recommendations

By Kate Merkel-Hess

There are many people just now wondering what Barack Obama’s China policy will look like, and many eager to advise him. For instance, the National Bureau of Asian Research’s journal, Asia Policy, has published a lengthy roundtable that does just that. I was curious too—what would a learned group of distinguished China watchers, including academics, journalists, and public intellectuals, propose as the new President’s information sources? Here was the note I sent out:

The United States has a new President who seems intellectually curious, will definitely have to deal with many issues relating to China, and is likely to take a trip to Beijing before too long. Imagine that you have just been told that he wants you to send him (via his Blackberry, of course) a list of five things you think he should read to help him formulate policies relating to China and/or prepare to go there on a state visit. He'd also like you to give just a sentence or two of explanation for each item, justifying its inclusion on your list, and he wants you to be clear that you can choose books, articles or online pieces as readings, and that they can be old or new. What would you write?

Over the next few weeks, I'll be running the answers China Beat receives. I hope some of them will be inspirations for further inquiry and reading, for you and for (fingers crossed) President Obama. Here is the first installment…

Ezra Vogel is Henry Ford II Research Professor of the Social Sciences, Emeritus at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1964. From 1993 to 1995, Vogel served as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia at the National Intelligence Council. His publications include Japan as Number One: Lessons for America as well as numerous other books and articles on China, Japan, and East Asia.

1. Qian Qichen, Ten Episodes in China's Diplomacy. A readable authoritative account by China's leading diplomat of recent decades of China's diplomacy.

2. Bob Suettinger, Beyond Tiananmen: The Politics of US-China Relations, 1989-2000. Authoritative account by leading U.S. government official.

3. Patrick Tyler, A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China.

4. Bill Overholt, The Rise of China. Instructive account of China's economic rise, though outdated.

5. Sections in books by Jimmy Carter, Kissinger, Zbrezinski on their contacts with China.

6. Recent speeches by Stapleton Roy, former ambassador to China (whose brother David Roy is a professor at U of Chicago). [Editor’s Note. Here are few links to recent speeches by Stapleton Roy: At National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, 2005; At Center for American Progress, 2008; and see video below.]

Edward Friedman is professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His publications include Chinese Village, Socialist State and What If China Doesn’t Democratize?

1. I would want the new president to understand how the CCP regime has taken on the role of enemy of the spread of human rights and therefore urge him to read Ann Kent's new book on the topic [Ed note: Beyond Compliance: China, International Organizations, and Global Security]. But I'd also want the new president to reverse the Bush policy of walking away from the U.N. Human Rights Council which now highlights social and economic rights rather than civil, political and religious rights. The U.S. should be a leader of the cause of all of these rights treated as part of a single agenda, including labor rights, women, indigenous people, and development. This would be change the world could believe in.

2. Second, I would want the president to understand the dog-eat-dog nature of Chinese life combined with the great broadening of personal freedom within an unaccountable, corrupt and cruel party-state. There are numerous books which could clarify these domestic Chinese realities, including novels. I prefer John Pomfret's Chinese Lessons. It makes vivid the entrepreneurial frenzy that creates the China price which facilitates China's global competitiveness.

3, 4. Third, I want the new president to cooperate with, deeply engage and even accommodate China (e.g. welcome it to rule-making bodies such as the G-8 in return for China bearing more of the global economic burden) but to do so understanding how Chinese politics infuses Chinese foreign policy with explosive possibilities since the traumas of 1989-91 which led to the purge of liberal reformers and the entrenchment of dangerous left conservatives, the military and security forces. Two books which capture this politics are Susan Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower, and Robert Suettinger, Beyond Tiananmen. These books also reveal how Chinese domestic political forces contain nasty tendencies which can be dangerous to peace and to fundamental American interests and values. There is too much wishful thinking by analysts who are predicting China's democratization tomorrow and its peaceful integration with the norms of the industrialized democracies globally the day before that. This is silly. Chinese leaders see China as a moral pole which has as much right as America to be its own global superpower, but serving Chinese interests.

5. Finally, for a president who cares about energy and the environment, I'd have him read, as a fifth book, Elizabeth Economy, The River Runs Black, which makes clear the ecological degradation and human cost of the CCP's growth path. In short, I would want the president to have a positive agenda in approaching China, but to be without illusions about the nature of the Chinese system because the Beijing-Washington relationship decisively impacts what kind of a world will be left to future generations.

Dr. Kerry Brown is a senior fellow on the Asia Programme at Chatham House (the Royal Institute of Institutional Affairs, an international affairs think-tank). Brown writes widely on China, from briefing papers published by Chatham House (such as “Thirty Years On – China Celebrates the Reform Process”) to regular pieces for openDemocracy (such as his recent “China in 2009: a year for surprise”) and book reviews at Asian Review of Books.

1. The River Runs Black, by Elizabeth Economy. It sets out, in the starkest terms, the environmental price China has paid for its economic model, the mess it is in dealing with this, and why this is not now just China's problem – but the world's too.

2. Will the Boat Sink the Water: The Life of China's Peasants, by Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao – banned in China, a no-holds barred account of the suffering of China's 750 million farmers at the hands of corrupt officials and central government policy making. A reminder of how China still relies on its agriculture sector, and of how much poverty there is in this new superpower

3. China Into the Future, edited by John Hoffman and Michael Enright – Excellent collection of essays on every aspect of China as it moves into the next decade. Tony Saitch's piece on the demographic time bomb (ageing, and gender imbalance) is particularly sobering. As he said, “China will be the first country in history to grow old before it grows rich, and poison itself before it gets rich.”

4. China at the Crossroads by Peter Nolan - a brilliant account, by one of the most knowledgeable economists now operating in the UK, on the key issues facing China in the next decades – from its economic challenges, to its problematic integration into the global economy.

5. Struggling Giant: China in the 21st Century, by, alas, me! Very brief book, which sets out the characteristics of China now, and looks at the options for what it might be, negative and positive, by 2028.

I'll keep posting recommendations as they arrive...