Here are 100 books that The Long Game fans have personally recommended if you like
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I became interested in China-Africa relations fifteen years ago when I realised that the rise of the former was going to have major and long-lasting effects on the politics and economics of the continent. In a sense, the rising role of China in Africa foretold its rise to global power and influence. Since then I have been fascinated by the ways in which China has restructured, or been involved in the restructuring, of African economies and politics and the ways in which that country’s global strategies and roles have continued to evolve and their impacts. I have written several books on the impacts of emerging powers in Africa.
This is a fascinating book by a long-time Washington insider on the reasons for, and strategy behind, China’s rise. He details the crucial geopolitics behind America and China’s changing positionality. He argues that China’s rise was facilitated by common animosity towards the Soviet Union and fundamental misunderstandings by the American policy elite of the Chinese system. It is packed full of interesting insight and details, including that the Chinese Communist Party does not legally exist, so can never be held to account.
An authority on Asia and globalization identifies the challenges China's growing power poses and how it must be confronted
"Timely and thought-provoking. . . . An unsparing analysis of how Washington's elite fell into the grip of their China delusion."-James Kynge, Financial Times
"Prestowitz doesn't just point out problems; he offers a detailed, 25-page 'Plan for America.' An excellent comprehensive study from an expert on the subject."-Kirkus, Starred Review
When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, most experts expected the WTO rules and procedures to liberalize China and make it "a responsible stakeholder in the liberal world order."…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I became interested in China-Africa relations fifteen years ago when I realised that the rise of the former was going to have major and long-lasting effects on the politics and economics of the continent. In a sense, the rising role of China in Africa foretold its rise to global power and influence. Since then I have been fascinated by the ways in which China has restructured, or been involved in the restructuring, of African economies and politics and the ways in which that country’s global strategies and roles have continued to evolve and their impacts. I have written several books on the impacts of emerging powers in Africa.
Many analysts have noted a more aggressive or assertive international posture by China in recent years, sometimes termed “Wolf Warrior Diplomacy” after a Chinese action movie from 2017 where a Chinese former special forces soldier defeats an American adversary. This book explains the origins and evolution of China’s diplomatic corp and how it has always been run on military lines, including having a twinning arrangement for diplomats where they are required to report on their partner if they become “ideologically impure.” Martin explains the reasons for China’s more assertive foreign policy in recent years, including through the weaponisation of trade and tourism and in one case the beating up of Taiwanese diplomats.
The untold story of China's rise as a global superpower, chronicled through the diplomatic shock troops that connect Beijing to the world.
China's Civilian Army charts China's transformation from an isolated and impoverished communist state to a global superpower from the perspective of those on the front line: China's diplomats. They give a rare perspective on the greatest geopolitical drama of the last half century.
In the early days of the People's Republic, diplomats were highly-disciplined, committed communists who feared revealing any weakness to the threatening capitalist world. Remarkably, the model that revolutionary leader Zhou Enlai established continues to this…
I became interested in China-Africa relations fifteen years ago when I realised that the rise of the former was going to have major and long-lasting effects on the politics and economics of the continent. In a sense, the rising role of China in Africa foretold its rise to global power and influence. Since then I have been fascinated by the ways in which China has restructured, or been involved in the restructuring, of African economies and politics and the ways in which that country’s global strategies and roles have continued to evolve and their impacts. I have written several books on the impacts of emerging powers in Africa.
Africa has been a test-bed for China’s new foreign economic policy since the early 2000s. This is the seminal, and at the time definitive, treatment of Chinese engagement on the continent. Brautigam’s knowledge of Sino-African relations is unrivalled and her myth-busting approach makes for compelling and enlightening reading. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand the nature of Sino-African relations.
Is China a rogue donor, as some media pundits suggest? Or is China helping the developing world pave a pathway out of poverty, as the Chinese claim? In the last few years, China's aid program has leapt out of the shadows. Media reports about huge aid packages, support for pariah regimes, regiments of Chinese labor, and the ruthless exploitation of workers and natural resources in some of the poorest countries in the world sparked fierce debates. These debates, however, took place with very few hard facts. China's tradition of secrecy about its aid fueled rumors and speculation, making it difficult…
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
I became interested in China-Africa relations fifteen years ago when I realised that the rise of the former was going to have major and long-lasting effects on the politics and economics of the continent. In a sense, the rising role of China in Africa foretold its rise to global power and influence. Since then I have been fascinated by the ways in which China has restructured, or been involved in the restructuring, of African economies and politics and the ways in which that country’s global strategies and roles have continued to evolve and their impacts. I have written several books on the impacts of emerging powers in Africa.
The ascent to power of Xi Jinxing in China in 2013 heralded a new era in China’s overseas engagements and in its domestic politics and economic policy; what Elizabeth Economy has called the “third revolution.” This fascinating book by Large brings the story of China’s engagements in Africa up to date. It is packed with fascinating details and analysis and shows how China’s interests on the continent are shifting from being primarily economic to being more geopolitical. It is a detailed and nuanced analysis of the changed nature of relations.
China has gone from being a marginal to a leading power in Africa in just over two decades. Its striking ascendancy in the continent is commonly thought to have been primarily driven by economic interests, especially resources like oil. This book argues instead that politics defines the 'new era' of China-Africa relations, and examines the importance of politics across a range of areas, from foreign policy to debt, development and the Xi Jinping incarnation of the China model.
Going beyond superficial depictions of China's engagement as predatory or benign, this book explores how Africa is - and isn't -…
At first glance, the Cold War in the Third World can seem like a mess of disjointed, misbegotten tragedies. My goal, though, is to understand the systemic conditions that not only link seemingly disparate cases together, but also help explain why they happened and what legacies they have left behind. The trick is to do that without privileging perspectives from the Global North, flattening historical complexities, and overlooking the unique nature of individual conflicts. This type of work, hard and imperfect as it may be, is essential to understanding the world we have inherited, and might just help us fix it. Making the effort makes me feel like a better human.
At long last, Jeremy Friedman has given us a cogent, succinct book about Sino-Soviet competition for the Third World.
Readers need not have any deep background in the topic to make sense of Friedman’s work, which lays out a clear explanation of how the Soviet Union’s quest for anti-capitalist revolution butted up against China’s pursuit of anti-imperialism. Shadow Cold War argues that the Sino-Soviet rivalry was rooted in ideological competition, adding another “revolutionary paradigm” to those detailed in Odd Arne Westad’s Total Cold War.
The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War has long been understood in a global context, but Jeremy Friedman's Shadow Cold War delves deeper into the era to examine the competition between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China for the leadership of the world revolution. When a world of newly independent states emerged from decolonization desperately poor and politically disorganized, Moscow and Beijing turned their focus to attracting these new entities, setting the stage for Sino-Soviet competition.
Based on archival research from ten countries, including new materials from Russia and China,…
I started a serious study of world history in the early 2000s when the United States-led wave of globalization reshaped the world order. The topic of Russia in world history became especially important under the Vladimir Putin Presidency. Since the 2010s, Russia has made a concerted attempt to revitalize Soviet-era links with countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, many of which are former colonies of Europe. Putin's administration is promoting the geopolitics of a "New World Order," a paradigm they believe will challenge global Western dominance. If we are to craft a coherent Western response and a strong foreign policy, we must understand Russian outreach and relationships in the world.
Did young communists fall in love, conduct passionate affairs under the noses of disapproving commissars, and break every revolutionary rule in the book?
The topic seemed so fascinating that I read Elizabeth McGuire’s book in one sitting. She took me on an exciting journey with a generation of young Chinese revolutionaries who were swept up in the maelstrom of the Russian revolution. I learned how they were seduced by the Russian language, how they devoured great works of Russian literature, and the writings of revolutionaries, terrorists, and anarchists.
The stories of Chinese students as translators, educators, and aspiring revolutionaries, as well as their experiences, love affairs, and adventures in the Soviet Union, really gripped my imagination. This was a novel way of understanding Russia's special friendship and enmity with China.
Beginning in the 1920s thousands of Chinese revolutionaries set out for Soviet Russia. Once there, they studied Russian language and experienced Soviet communism, but many also fell in love, got married, or had children. In this they were similar to other people from all over the world who were enchanted by the Russian Revolution and lured to Moscow by it.
The Chinese who traveled to live and study in Moscow in a steady stream over the course of decades were a key human interface between the two revolutions, and their stories show the emotional investment backing ideological, economic, and political…
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
Growing up during the Cold War, I wondered how the United States and the Soviet Union became locked into an existential struggle that threatened to vaporize the planet. So, I studied Russian, Chinese, and Japanese (along with French, Spanish, and German) to learn more. At issue was the global order and the outcome of this struggle depended on the balance of power—not only military power that consumed Soviet attention but also economic power and standards of living that Western voters emphasized. Yet it was Japan that had the workable development model as proven by the Four Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan) during the 1960s to 1990s.
Western commentators still try to analyze East Asian politics without reference to Russia as if countries ignore bordering great powers. For this obvious reason, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Russian leaders pay careful attention to each other because they share crucial borders. There are hardly any books on Russia’s pivotal role in Asia and most authors who try read none of the relevant languages. Rosemary Quested packed a lot into her concise book highlighting Russia’s role in the evolution of the Asian balance of power.
This book provides a systematic history of Sino-Russian relations, a history which is invaluable in forming an understanding of relations between the two nations today. Becoming neighbours in the seventeenth century, their changing relations in peace and war, in isolation, cooperation and confrontation have steadily assumed a greater importance in world politics and become increasingly important to the stability of international relations.
I’ve been fascinated by China since 2000, when, as Silicon Valley Bank’s chief banking officer, I led a group of U.S. venture capitalists on a tour of that country. Since then, I’ve read everything I could about it. It’s a country of such contrasts and energy, and we in the West have misread it woefully. The Chinese people are funny, smart, driven, and delightful, while their rulers are bent on making the world safe for autocracy. These books help me understand the differences between these two groups and how they arose.
I really like this one (even though I can’t seem to get the author to return my emails). In fact, it was my number one pick for 2025.
Professor Friedberg, from Princeton, has studied and written about China for a very long time. I was fascinated by how his book traced the ups and downs of our relationship with China since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took over in 1949.
I believe Friedberg does a terrific job of not just describing the vicissitudes of our relationship with China, but also explaining the reasons behind those ups and downs. Furthermore, my own experiences and observations over the years are consistent with his explanations, which is also comforting.
The West's strategy of engagement with China has failed. More than three decades of trade and investment with the advanced democracies have left that country far richer and stronger than it would otherwise have been. But growth and development have not caused China's rulers to relax their grip on political power, abandon their mercantilist economic policies, or accept the rules and norms of the existing international system. To the contrary: China today is more repressive at home, more aggressive abroad, and more obviously intent on establishing itself as the world's preponderant power than at any time since the death of…
I grew up in Massachusetts, which produced four presidents and untold presidential candidates including Mitt Romney, Mike Dukakis, John Kerry, Elizabeth Warren, and Gov. William Butler, who ran in 1884. My first career was as a newspaper reporter and editor, and I worked for papers in Massachusetts, New York, Colorado, and Washington state. I’ve dabbled in politics myself, working as a campaign press secretary for the late Washington Gov. Booth Gardner. Newspapers gave me an abiding hatred for adverbs, the passive voice, and bias in word selection. (No, historians shouldn’t use “patriot” in describing the Revolution’s American rebels, because loyalists and Indian nations were just as patriotic in their own minds.)
General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, the American liaison to Chiang Kai-Shek’s China during World War II, was the opposite of a politician. Blunt, profane, disrespectful, and sarcastic—he called Chiang the “peanut”—Stilwell was incapable of being politic, which makes Tuchman’s book the ultimate political biography. Like many great biographers, including three of the five authors on this list, Tuchman came to history from journalism or publishing, not from academia, something she felt was an asset in helping her write in a style that produced both a Pulitzer and best sellers.
'Vinegar Joe' Stilwell, the general who was the American commander in the China-Burma-India theatre of World War II, had a deep love of China. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman, combines a fascinating narrative of America's relationship with China from the fall of the Manchu Dynasty through to the rise of Mao Tse-Tung with an intimate biography of Vinegar Joe. Stilwell loved China deeply, spoke its languages and understood its people as few Westerners have. Tuchman traces his life from his first visit during the 1911 Revolution through the Second World War to his confrontation with…
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
I have been addicted to Asia ever since serving in Tokyo for three marvelous years as The Economist’s correspondent in 1983-86 and since watching the rise of China, India, and South-East Asia from my privileged perch as editor-in-chief of The Economist in 1993-2006. For much of those years I have been writing about politics and economics rather than war and peace, but two key events recently convinced me to study something new. These were Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and then my beloved Japan’s decision to shake off its post-war shackles and build up its own defense forces in order to help prevent something like that from happening in Asia, too.
The chaos of the Trump foreign policy in 2016-20 always brings a mix of horror and entertainment, but Josh Rogin’s book also gave me an especially revealing quotation from Trump; when in 2019, he said to an unnamed senator, “Taiwan is like two feet from China. We are eight thousand miles away. If they invade there isn’t a fucking thing we can do about it”. That statement is certainly wrong, but it illustrates perfectly that the key dangers arise from political will and political inconsistency.
The explosive, behind-the-scenes story of Donald Trump's high-stakes confrontation with Beijing, from an award-winning Washington Post columnist and peerless observer of the U.S.-China relationship
There was no calm before the storm. Donald Trump's surprise electoral victory shattered the fragile understanding between Washington and Beijing, putting the most important relationship of the twenty-first century in the hands of a novice who had bitterly attacked China from the campaign trail. Almost as soon as he entered office, Trump brought to a boil the long-simmering rivalry between the two countries, while also striking up a "friendship" with Chinese president Xi Jinping - whose…
