China is home to half of the world's large dams and adds dozens more each year. The benefits are considerable: dams deliver hydropower, provide reliable irrigation water, protect people and farmland against flooding, and produce hydroelectricity in a nation with a seeimingly insatiable appetite for energy. As hydropower responds to a larger share of energy demand, dams may also help to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels, welcome news in a country where air and water pollution have beco...

Though China's economy is projected to become the world's largest within the next twenty years, industrial pollution threatens both the health of the country's citizens and the natural resources on which their economy depends. Capturing the consequences of this reality, Bryan Tilt conducts an in-depth, ethnographic study of Futian Township, a rural community reeling from pollution.The industrial township is located in the populous southwestern province of Sichuan. Three local facto...

China's spectacular economic growth over the past two decades has dramatically depleted the country's natural resources and produced skyrocketing rates of pollution. Environmental degradation in China has also contributed to significant public health problems, mass migration, economic loss, and social unrest. In The River Runs Black, Elizabeth C. Economy examines China's growing environmental crisis and its implications for the country's future development.

In this timely book, a group of leading scholars provides a comprehensive assessment of China's polity, economy, and society. Taking the thirtieth anniversary of Beijing's adoption of reform and opening as an occasion to reflect on the course of development over the past three decades, the contributors consider where the country may be going in the future. Just as China has had enormous success in developing its economy, it continues to face equally enormous challenges across a wide variet...

China’s cities are home to 10 percent of the world’s population today. They display unprecedented dynamism under the country’s surging economic power. Their remarkable transformation builds on immense traditions, having lived through feudal dynasties, semicolonialism, and socialist commands. Studying them offers a lens into both the complex character of the changing city and the Chinese economy, society, and environment.This text is anchored in the spatial sciences to offer a compr...

Soft power has become a very popular concept in international affairs, appearing in government policy papers, academic discussions, and the popular media. In China, soft power has become one of the most frequently used phrases among political leaders, leading academics, and journalists. Defined against hard power, which often involves threat and coercion, soft power applies attraction, persuasion, and cooperation, finding its sources in culture, political values, and foreign policies. Chin...

Nearly everything you know about China is wrong! Yes, within a decade, China will have the world’s largest economy. But that is the least important thing to know about China. In this enlightening book , two of the world’s leading China experts turn the conventional wisdom on its head, showing why China’s economic growth will constrain rather than empower it. Pioneering political analyst Damien Ma and global economist Bill Adams reveal why, having 35 years of ferocious econ...

Confronting Discrimination and Inequality in China focuses on the most challenging areas of discrimination and inequality in China, including discrimination faced by HIV/AIDS afflicted individuals, rural populations, migrant workers, women, people with disabilities, and ethnic minorities. The Canadian contributors offer rich regional, national, and international perspectives on how constitutions, laws, policies, and practices, both in Canada and in other parts of the world, battle...

The key challenges facing China in the next two decades derive from the ongoing process of urbanization. China's urbanization rate in 2005 was about 43%. Over the next 10-15 years, it is expected to rise to well over 50%, adding an additional 200 million mainly rural migrants to the current urban population of 560 million. How China copes with such a large migration flow will strongly influence rural-urban inequality, the pace at which urban centers expand their economic performance, and...

Sixteen of the world's 20 most polluted cities are in China. A serious water pollution incident occurs once every two-to-three days. China's breakneck growth causes great concern about its global environmental impacts, as others look to China as a source for possible future solutions to climate change. But how are Chinese people really coming to grips with environmental problems? This book provides access to otherwise unknown stories of environmental activism and forms the first real-life ...

China, with its geographical, historical, cultural, and political distance from the West, long has been a black box upon which we readily paste labels—communist, non-Western, developing country—but whose internal logic remains a mystery to us. Arguing that it would be a major step forward in our genuine knowledge of China if we understood its internal dynamic, this innovative book considers China from a historical perspective to chart its current dynamic and future direction.Renown...

It is often assumed that privatization leads to profit, and that well-delineated property rights and a strong private sector will help boost an economy. This book investigates the property rights in Chinese enterprises in the reform era, finding that distinction between the public and the private are blurred, that national reform policies are implemented unevenly across the country, and that enterprises owned by local governments, in Shanghai, for example, are actually extremely profitable...