Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

Cohen, Warren I. America’s Response to China: A History of Sino-American Relations.

New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Paperbound.

The best short history of America’s relations with China from the Opium War to the present.

http://www.huaren.org/

The Web site of Huaren, an indispensable source of information on overseas Chinese and a compilation of worldwide articles on attacks against people of Chinese ancestry.

Li, Cheng. Rediscovering China: Dynamics and Dilemmas of Reform. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997. Paperbound.

The most insightful analysis available, put in personal terms, of the meaning of “reform” in China and why it is anything but threatening to the United States.

Mann, James. About Face: A History of America’s Curious Relationship with China, from Nixon to Clinton. New York: Knopf, 1999.

A Los Angeles Times former Beijing correspondent offers new information and insights into official American thinking on China, from Nixon and Kissinger through the Tiananmen repression and down to Clinton’s inconsistent efforts.

McBeath, Gerald A. Wealth and Freedom: Taiwan’s New Political Economy. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1998.

Comprehensive analysis of Taiwan today, including its state-owned enterprises, democracy, and foreign policy after the loss in 1971 of its seat in the United Nations.

Nathan, Andrew J., and Robert S. Ross. The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress: China’s Search for Security. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

An analysis by two writers who have studied China about why it is not a threat to other countries but often appears to be.

Economic Meltdown and How to Analyze It

The Asian Crisis. Special issue of Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol. 22, no. 6 (November 1998).

A collection of essays on the causes and consequences of the “globalization crisis” that started in East Asia in 1997. Not the usual Washington consensus.

Fingleton, Eamonn. In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.

A seasoned observer of the Japanese economy explains why it is not in the deep trouble that American theorists and triumphalists say it is.

Gray, John. False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism. New York: New Press, 1999.

A historian demonstrates that global, unregulated markets are inherently unstable. America’s experiment in imperial laissez-faire was the geopolitical expression of a Wall Street bubble.

Greider, William. One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

This is the primer for all who want to understand global capitalism and why it is coming unglued at the end of the twentieth century. Mandatory reading.

Longworth, Richard C. Global Squeeze: The Coming Crisis for First-World Nations. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1998.

A veteran economics correspondent points out the many ways in which globalization could go wrong.

Weiss, Linda. The Myth of the Powerless State. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Paperbound.

A powerful political rejoinder to American economic ideology. Includes chapters on economic growth in postwar Germany and on the limits of globalization.

Woo-Cumings, Meredith, ed. The Developmental State. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Paperbound.

The most thorough investigation of the state-guided capitalist systems that were the vehicles for the enrichment of East Asia.

Illegal Activities of the C.I.A. and Other American Police and Intelligence Agencies

Brodeur, Paul. Secrets: A Writer in the Cold War. Boston and London: Faber & Faber, 1997.

Essays by a former staff writer for the New Yorker, focusing on environmental hazards but also on the roles of the C.I.A., the F.B.I., and the State Department in supporting capitalism over communism and in other unauthorized activities during the Cold War.

Cockburn, Alexander, and Jeffrey St. Clair. Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press. London: Verso, 1998.

The cover-up of the C.I.A.’s support for the Nicaraguan Contras through drug sales in the United States.