China since Tiananmen: the politics of transition

Joseph Fewsmith9780521001052, 0521001056

China Since Tiananmen is the first book to evaluate the intellectual and political trends and to assess how China has changed since the Tiananmen Incident in 1989. Fewsmith looks at intellectual trends to capture the way China’s elite has assessed the social, political, economic, and intellectual trends of the past decade. Similarly, he examines the conduct of elite politics to see how the political system has, and has not, evolved over the past decade. Fewsmith puts the rise of neo-conservatism and nationalism into historical context, evaluating the changes of the past decade to the changes after the May Fourth Movement of 1919. This more comprehensive and realistic assessment of the forces that drive China today is of critical importance to anyone trying to understand Sino-U.S. relations, for those relations are themselves intrinsic to the story of China’s evolution. Joseph Fewsmith is Professor of International Relations at Boston University and Director of the East Asian Interdisciplinary Studies Program. He is the author of Elite Politics in Contemporary China (M.E. Sharpe, 2001) and The Dilemmas of Reform in CHina: Political Conflict and Economic Debate (M.E. Sharpe, 1994). He has written extensively on contemporary politics in China, with articles appearing in such journals as Asian Survey, Current History, The Journal of Contemporary China, Problems of Communism, Modern China, and Comparative Studies in Society and History. He is the editor of The Chinese Economy and serves on the editorial board of The Journal of Contemporary China.