On March 28, German Chancellor Angela Merkel hosted visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping at a dinner where they exchanged gifts. Merkel presented to Xi a 1735 map of China made by prolific French cartographer Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville and printed by a German publishing house.
Steve Hansen is one of the two founders of Phonemica, a project dedicated to archiving the numerous Sinitic dialects and their inseparable cultural traditions. Hansen also teaches entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship in the Guanghua MBA program at Peking University. His Sinonym consultancy provides product naming services to foreign companies in the Chinese marketplace. He resides in Beijing.
A village head and the boss of a building company were among the seven people arrested over an arson attack on a protest against a land seizure in Shandong Province in which one man died and three others were hurt.
The government of Pingdu, a county in the eastern province of Shandong, said on March 26 that seven people have been arrested over the attack that occurred five days earlier.
From the former Financial Times Beijing bureau chief, a balanced and far-seeing analysis of the emerging competition between China and the United States that will dominate twenty-first-century world affairs—an inside account of Beijing’s quest for influence and an explanation of how America can come out on top.
The structure of global politics is shifting rapidly. After decades of rising, China has entered a new and critical phase where it seeks to turn its economic heft into global power. In this deeply informed book, Geoff Dyer makes a lucid and convincing argument that China and the United States are now embarking on a great power–style competition that will dominate the century. This contest will take place in every arena: from control of the seas, where China’s new navy is trying to ease the United States out of Asia and reassert its traditional leadership, to rewriting the rules of the global economy, with attempts to turn the renminbi into the predominant international currency, toppling the dominance of the U.S. dollar. And by investing billions to send its media groups overseas, Beijing hopes to shift the global debate about democracy and individual rights. Eyeing the high ground of international politics, China is taking the first steps in an ambitious global agenda.
Yet Dyer explains how China will struggle to unseat the United States. China’s new ambitions are provoking intense anxiety, especially in Asia, while America’s global influence has deep roots. If Washington can adjust to a world in which it is no longer dominant but still immensely powerful, it can withstand China’s challenge. With keen insight based on a deep local knowledge—offering the reader visions of coastal Chinese beauty pageants and secret submarine bases, lockstep Beijing military parades and the neon media screens of Xinhua exported to New York City’s Times Square—The Contest of the Century is essential reading at a time of great uncertainty about America’s future, a road map for retaining a central role in the world. —Knopf
Mark O'Neill, South China Morning Post (March 23, 2014)
Minxin Pei, SFGate (February 14, 2014)
Ali Wyne, Wall Street Journal (February 10, 2014)
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Financial Times (February 7, 2014)
Born and raised in Canada, Mark Rowswell began studying Chinese in the mid 1980s, first at the University of Toronto and later at Beijing University. Shortly after arriving in Beijing, a chance opportunity to appear on television unexpectedly gave him national exposure under the stage name “Dashan” and an entrance into the world of xiangsheng, a traditional form of Chinese comedic dialogue. Repeated appearances on programs with audiences in the hundreds of millions gradually turned Dashan into a household name across China and a cultural icon as “a foreigner but not an outsider.”
As an active participant in the Chinese media landscape, he has had a front-row seat to witness the massive changes in Chinese society over the past twenty-five years. His media work has included comedic performance, television hosting, dramatic acting, educational programming, commercial endorsement, and a broad range of cultural exchange.
Rowswell was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2006, served as Canada’s Commissioner General to Expo 2010 in Shanghai, and was named “Canada’s Goodwill Ambassador to China” by Prime Minister Steven Harper in 2012.
Linda Jaivin is the author of eleven books, including The Monkey and the Dragon (Text Publishing 2001), Beijing (Reaktion Press, UK 2014) and Found in Translation: In Praise of a Plural World (a Quarterly Essay, published by Black Inc 2013). She is also an essayist and cultural commentator, literary and film translator from Chinese, co-editor with Geremie Barmé of New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices, and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University.
David Rutstein, MD, MPH is the Vice President for Medical Affairs for United Family Healthcare (UFH). As such, he is responsible for leading and developing the medical staff throughout the UFH system. As a senior health executive, public health expert, and clinician, he has created and led innovative clinical, administrative, management, emergency response, and executive level teams and organizations during a twenty-four-year career in the United States government.
Prior to joining UFH in 2011, Rutstein retired from the United States government where he held the rank of Rear Admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service and served as the Deputy Surgeon General of the United States.
Rutstein received a medical degree from Brown University and a Master of Public Health degree from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, is certified by the American Board of Family Medicine and has received numerous honors and awards from both the public and private sectors.
Peter Ford is currently the Beijing bureau chief for The Christian Science Monitor. Over a thirty-year career in journalism, he has lived in and reported from Central and South America, the Middle East, Russia, Europe, and China for a variety of publications, including The Financial Times, The Independent, The Economist, and The Christian Science Monitor.
As an Englishman married to a Frenchwoman working for an American newspaper in different parts of the world, he has cultivated an international outlook on current events. He hopes that helps put them into a useful perspective for his readers.
Ford is the author of Around the Edge, an account of a journey he made on foot and by small boat down the Caribbean coast of Central America. He is currently the President of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China.
Benjamin Shobert is the Founder and Managing Director of Seattle-based Rubicon Strategy Group, a boutique consulting firm specialized in market access work in China's healthcare, life science, and senior care industries. Rubicon also provides market entry and project management services for healthcare companies across Southeast Asia. In 2013, Rubicon completed the first syndicated research report on Myanmar's healthcare system. In September 2013, Ben became affiliated with the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR) to advise on aging, healthcare reforms, and the pharmaceutical industry in China and Southeast Asia.
Shobert is a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and holds advisory board seats at Indiana University’s Research Center on Chinese Politics and Business as well as IAHSA-China. In 2012, he became a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy. For six years, he wrote a column for the Asia Times on U.S.-China trade and economic policy matters, with a particular focus on how relations between the two countries are being impacted post the 2008 financial crisis. Shobert's work has been featured at CNBC, China Business Review, Fortune Magazine (China), Harvard Asia Quarterly, and others. In late 2012, he became a new columnist at Forbes China and in 2013 began writing on aging and healthcare issues at Forbes. He is a contributor to the new book The Global Obama: Crossroads of Leadership in the 21st Century.
Raymond Zhou is a Beijing-based bilingual writer. He is known mostly as a film, theater, and cultural critic. On top of being the author of nineteen books, he also makes hundreds of media and other public appearances every year, such as serving as a juror for festivals and awards.
Zhou’s stature as a film critic and film industry expert is acknowledged by regulators, academia, grassroots and the mainstream press in China. His Chinese-language book Hollywood Revealed is the first study in China of the mechanisms of America’s movie industry that influenced both industry insiders and the general reading public. His three-volume film guide covers 5,500 movies from all over the world, cementing his reputation among China’s cinephiles.
Some of his English-language writing is collected in X-Ray: Examining the China Enigma, a collection of his best op-ed columns from 2005 to 2008; and China the Beautiful, a collection of his investigative reports, profiles, and travelogues. In 2013, he came out with A Practical Guide to Chinese Cinema 2002-2012, the first English-language book on China’s film industry of the new century.
Zhou’s column for “Movie View,” the country’s highest circulated film magazine, is the longest-running film column in the whole country and has gathered a large following. The Los Angeles Times calls him “China’s most famous film critic” and “Beijing’s answer to Roger Ebert.”
In 1998, he produced and directed the Broadway musical The Sound of Music in Beijing. He still dabbles in theatrical art, but consults mostly for film organizations.
In his capacity as a senior writer for China Daily, Zhou is mainly positioned as a specialist of cross-cultural interpretations. He writes the X-Ray column for China Daily. Zhou is a graduate from the MBA program of the University of California at Berkeley.
