Overreach: How China Derailed its Peaceful Rise [Paperback]

The award-winningOverreachcombines Susan Shirk's decades of research and analysis with her direct, hands-on experience to illuminate China's evolving role on the world's stage, and particularly the deterioration of its relations with the United States. Shirk opens the black box of China's political system, revealing what lies behind China's aim to expand both soft and hard power abroad, and how the United States might respond.Winner, The Lionel Gelber PrizeSilver Medal, Arthur Ross Book AwardFor decades, China's rise to power was characterized by its reassurance that this rise would be peaceful. Then, as Susan L. Shirk, shows in this sobering, clear-eyed account of China today, something changed.For three decades after Mao's death in 1976, China's leaders adopted a restrained approach to foreign policy. They determined that any threat to their power, and that of the Chinese Communist Party, came not from abroad but from withina conclusion cemented by the 1989 Tiananmen crisis. To facilitate the country's inexorable economic ascendence, and to prevent a backlash, they reassured the outside world of China's peaceful intentions.Then, as Susan Shirk shows in this illuminating, disturbing, and utterly persuasive new book, something changed. China went from fragile superpower to global heavyweight, threatening Taiwan as well as its neighbors in the South China Sea, tightening its grip on Hong Kong, and openly challenging the United States for preeminence not just economically and technologically but militarily. China began to overreach. Combining her decades of research and experience, Shirk, one of the world's most respected experts on Chinese politics, argues that we are now fully embroiled in a new cold war.To explain what happened, Shirk pries open the black box of China's political system and looks at what derailed its peaceful rise. As she shows, the shift toward confrontation began in the mid-2000s under the mild-mannered Hu Jintao, flƒ‘