by Maurice Meisner (1996)
In the past decade, the world has become familiar with the image of Communist powers struggling in economic and political crisis. The crisis in China, whose economy is now the world's second largest and fastest growing, is perhaps the most serious of all, and Maurice Meisner's important new book shows how it stems from a deep spiritual and political dispute between capitalist realities and lingering socialist values and ideas. The Deng Xiaoping Era is Meisner's analysis of that crisis and of how Deng Xiaoping's promise of socialist democracy degenerated into bureaucratic capitalism. He shows the ways in which the Deng regime grossly violated the social contract between the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese people, and how capitalism emerged as the dynamic force in today's socioeconomic and cultural life. Now, Meisner argues, after more than a decade of capitalist reforms, the Chinese spiritual malaise is deepening with the brutal suppression of the 1989 Democracy Movement and its politically repressive aftermath. This indispensable study of contemporary Chinese politics - from the 1949 Revolution and the founding of the Maoist state to the establishment of Deng's regime and the social consequences of his reforms - is, as well, a formidable analysis of the failure of the world's greatest socialist experiment.
[John Kerry, John Edwards
"Our Plan for America presents, in full scope, Kerry and Edwards' map for the next four years and beyond. Here, in thorough detail and accessible language, Kerry and Edwards delineate point-by-point the most urgent challenges facing America today, and their plans to redress these."--BOOK JACKET.
Marc Edelman and Joanne Kenen
Contains primary source material. "The wide range of materials in this volume includes many original contributions, essays by Costa Ricans published for the first time in English, and secret memos by Oliver North's operatives. These readings provide a full, perceptive, and otherwise unavailable perspective of this diminutive but important Central American democracy."--Back cover.
R.W. Johnson
In 1977, RW Johnson's best-selling How Long Will South Africa Survive? provided a controversial and highly original analysis of the survival prospects of the apartheid regime. Now, after more than twenty years of ANC rule, he believes the situation has become so critical that the question must be posed again. He moves from an analysis of Jacob Zuma's rule to the increasingly dire state of the South African economy, concluding that the country is heading towards a likely International Monetary Fund bail-out which will in turn lead to a regime change of some kind.
Elizabeth York Enstam
Throughout the history of Dallas, women have worked both alongside and apart from the men now remembered as the city's founders and builders. In truth, women helped to create the definitive forms of urban life by establishing organizations and agencies that altered the responsibilities and functions of local government, amended the public conception of political issues, changed the city's physical structure, and affected the day-to-day lives of thousands of people. In Women and the Creation of Urban Life, Elizabeth York Enstam examines how women stretched, redefined, and at times erased the essentially artificial boundaries between female and male, between "the private" and "the public" as aspects of human endeavor. Enstam traces the ways national trends were expressed at the local level and analyzes women's accomplishments and the importance of their work as they assumed community leadership in perpetuating the traditions, education, fine arts, and customs of the larger culture, and in implementing Progressive principles in a specific community.