By All Means Necessary

By Elizabeth C. Economy and Michael Levi on February 5, 2014

In the past thirty years, China has transformed from an impoverished country where peasants comprised the largest portion of the populace to an economic power with an expanding middle class and more megacities than anywhere else on earth. This remarkable transformation has required, and will continue to demand, massive quantities of resources. Like every other major power in modern history, China is looking outward to find them.

In By All Means Necessary, Elizabeth C. Economy and Michael Levi explore the unrivaled expansion of the Chinese economy and the global effects of its meteoric growth. China is now engaged in a far-flung quest, hunting around the world for fuel, ores, water, and land for farming, and deploying whatever it needs in the economic, political, and military spheres to secure the resources it requires. Chinese traders and investors buy commodities, with consequences for economies, people, and the environment around the world. Meanwhile the Chinese military aspires to secure sea lanes, and Chinese diplomats struggle to protect the country’s interests abroad. And just as surely as China’s pursuit of natural resources is changing the world—restructuring markets, pushing up commodity prices, transforming resource-rich economies through investment and trade—it is also changing China itself. As Chinese corporations increasingly venture abroad, they must navigate various political regimes, participate in international markets, and adopt foreign standards and practices, which can lead to wide-reaching social and political ramifications at home.

Clear, authoritative, and provocative, By All Means Necessary is a sweeping account of where China’s pursuit of raw materials may take the country in the coming years and what the consequences will be—not just for China, but for the whole world. —Oxford University Press

Andrew Jacobs

on February 5, 2014

Andrew Jacobs is a foreign correspondent for The New York Times who has been based in Beijing since 2008. Taking a year off from studying Chinese at New York University, Jacobs first stepped foot in China in 1985 and then returned after graduation in 1988 to teach English at Hubei University in Wuhan. He left China abruptly after the campus was shuttered in the wake of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

In the ensuing two decades, he made two visits to China, including a 1997 reporting trip to Hong Kong during the former British colony’s official handover to China. His most recent return coincided with a few minor news events: the devastating earthquake in Sichuan, the ethnic rioting in Tibet, and the Olympic Games in Beijing. Since then, he has written about the troubled relations between Uighurs and Han Chinese, the audacious escape of blind legal dissident Chen Guangcheng, and the dramatic downfall of Bo Xilai and his wife. Over the years, he has also ventured outside the mainland to cover presidential elections in Taiwan, the travails faced by Mongolian nomads, and the Chinese media’s growing influence in Africa.

Ana Fuentes

on February 5, 2014

Ana Fuentes is a Spanish journalist, author, and speaker based in Madrid. A former Beijing correspondent from 2007 to 2011, her reports have been broadcast on three continents by Radio Netherland, Prisa Radio, CNN en Español, and others. Ana holds a degree in Journalism from the Complutense University in Madrid and the Sorbonne University in Paris, and a Master’s in Journalism from El Pais and the University Autónoma in Madrid.

Amartya Sen

on February 5, 2014

Amartya Sen is Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, at Harvard University and was until recently the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He has served as President of the Econometric Society, the Indian Economic Association, the American Economic Association and the International Economic Association. He was formerly Honorary President of OXFAM and is now its Honorary Advisor.  Born in Santiniketan, India, Amartya Sen studied at Presidency College in Calcutta, India, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is an Indian citizen. He was Lamont University Professor at Harvard also earlier, from 1988 – 1998, and previous to that he was the Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford University, and a Fellow of All Souls College (he is now a Distinguished Fellow of All Souls). Prior to that he was Professor of Economics at Delhi University and at the London School of Economics.

Amartya Sen’s books have been translated into more than thirty languages, and include Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970), On Economic Inequality (1973, 1997), Poverty and Famines (1981), Choice, Welfare and Measurement (1982), Resources, Values and Development (1984), On Ethics and Economics (1987), The Standard of Living (1987), Inequality Reexamined (1992), Development as Freedom (1999), and Rationality and Freedom (2002), The Argumentative Indian (2005), Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (2006), and The Idea of Justice (2009), among others. His research has ranged over a number of fields in economics, philosophy, and decision theory, including social choice theory, welfare economics, theory of measurement, development economics, public health, gender studies, moral and political philosophy, and the economics of peace and war.

Amartya Sen has received honorary doctorates from major universities in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Philosophical Society. Among the awards he has received are the “Bharat Ratna” (the highest honor awarded by the President of India); the Senator Giovanni Agnelli International Prize in Ethics; the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Award; the Edinburgh Medal; the Brazilian Ordem do Merito Cientifico (Grã-Cruz); the Presidency of the Italian Republic Medal; the Eisenhower Medal; Honorary Companion of Honour (U.K.); The George C. Marshall Award, and the Nobel Prize in Economics (1998).

Alexa Olesen

on February 5, 2014

Alexa Olesen is a Brooklyn-based writer who focuses mainly on China, particularly on politics, culture, and the one-child policy. She covered China for eight years as a correspondent for The Associated Press and has spent more than a decade living in Beijing, on and off, since 1993. She recently collaborated with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists on its Offshore Leaks China project.

Alex Wang

on February 5, 2014

Alex Wang is a Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, and a leading expert on environmental governance and Chinese legal reform. He was previously a Senior Attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) based in Beijing and the founding director of NRDC’s China Environmental Law & Governance Project. In this capacity, he worked with China’s government agencies, legal community, and environmental groups to improve environmental rule of law and strengthen the role of the public in environmental protection. He helped to establish NRDC’s Beijing office in 2006. He has been a visiting faculty member at the UC, Berkeley School of Law.

Wang was a Fulbright Fellow to China from 2004-2005. Before this, he was an attorney at the law firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP in New York City, where he worked on mergers and acquisitions, securities matters, and pro bono Endangered Species Act litigation.He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as a member and former fellow (2008-10) of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.

Agnès Varda

on February 5, 2014

Agnès Varda is a filmmaker and photographer. She is a Professor of Film and Documentaries at the European Graduate School. She studied at the École du Louvre with a focus on art history and photography at the École des Beaux-Arts. She then went on to work as a photographer at the Théâtre National Populaire in Paris.

Varda’s first feature-length film, La Pointe Courte (1954), was an early anticipation of the French New Wave and was well-received by the French cinema community. Her other major films include Cleo From 5 to 7 (1962), Vagabond (1985), The Gleaners & I (2000), and The Beaches of Agnès (2008), among others.

Varda received the 2002 French Academy prize, Prix René Clair, for her overall cinematographic work. In 2009, she was given the highest French decoration: the National Order of the Legion of Honour. Varda is the author of several books and a contributor to LEAP magazine.

Aaron Deemer

on February 5, 2014

Aaron Deemer lived in Beijing from 2004 to 2010. Previously a San Francisco-based photographer, he has worked for the last fifteen years photographing for editorial and advertising clients, as well as filming short documentaries, mostly for U.S.-based NGOs. Born in Nashville, Tennessee and raised in London, Aaron returned to London where he now lives.

Nicholas Lemann

on February 4, 2014

Nicholas Lemann began his journalism career at seventeen as a writer for an alternative weekly newspaper in New Orleans, the Vieux Carre Courier. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1976, where he concentrated in American history and literature and was President of the Harvard Crimson. After graduation, he worked at The Washington Monthly as an Associate Editor and then Managing Editor, at Texas Monthly as an Associate Editor and then Executive Editor, at The Washington Post as a member of the national staff, at The Atlantic Monthly as a national correspondent, and at The New Yorker as staff writer and then Washington correspondent.

In 2003, he became dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. He stepped down in 2013 and returned to the Journalism School’s faculty. Lemann continues to contribute to The New Yorker as a staff writer. He has published five books, most recently Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), which helped lead to a major reform of the SAT; and The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (Vintage, 1992), which won several book prizes. He has written widely for such publications as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and Slate; worked in documentary television with Blackside, Inc., FRONTLINE, the Discovery Channel, and the BBC; and lectured at many universities. He delivered the Joanna Jackson Goldman Lectures in American Civilization and Government at the New York Public Library in 2004 and the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford University in 2014. Lemann has served on the boards of the Authors Guild, the National Academy of Sciences’ Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, and the Academy of Political Science, the Society of American Historians, and the Russell Sage Foundation, and is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010.