Study Groups

Non-fiction Book Study Group

Tuesday mornings, 10:30-11:45 am, UCX room 303

China: Fragile Superpower by Susan L. Shirk

Reviewed by John Pomfret

A fictional opening frames Shirk's book, dramatizing the possibility that China's leadership could lurch into combat with Taiwan and the United States. She sets out to explain why it is not a fantasy and why we basically need to be nice to China to keep the nightmare at bay.

At a time when much writing about China presumes the rise of a global titan, it is refreshing that an academic and former government official (Shirk was the deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia during the Clinton administration) questions the notion that China is going to run the world. "China may be an emerging superpower," she writes, "but it is a fragile one."

China, she argues, is hemmed in by threats to its stability: an aging population, the rise of the Internet, privatization, a gap between urban rich and rural poor, a restive population fed up with corruption, pollution that sickens and kills, mounting unemployment in an economy that needs to grow 7% annually to provide jobs. Moreover, Shirk describes a regime -- half Mafia, half corporate board -- so obsessed with staying in power that it is ill-equipped to deal with these challenges.

Shirk's book shines when she shows how nationalism has hurt China's relations with Japan and the United States. She depicts ties with Washington as prone to troubles, partly because the government lacks a crisis-management system. She contends that the Ministry of Propaganda and the People's Liberation Army jumped to blame the United States for two recent crises where the US presented unrealistic demands that made it difficult for the Chinese government to back down.

One Chinese person is a dragon, a Chinese saying goes, but three of us are just an insect.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

The next non-fiction book will be: Fareed Zakaria: The Post-American World.

Video Study group

Tuesday mornings, 10:45 - 11:45 AM, UCX Room 304

The African Experience from "Lucy" to Mandela

The story of Africa is the oldest and most event-filled chronicle of human activity on the planet. These 36 half-hour lectures cover this great historical drama, tracing the story of the sub-Saharan region of the continent from the earliest evidence of human habitation to the latest challenges facing African nations in the 21st century.

For many, Africa is a confusing fog of names, words, and places: Mandela, Biko, Mobutu, Lumumba, Lucy, Selassie, Rhodes, Livingstone, Swahili, Bantu, Boer, Zulu, Mau Mau, Tutsi/Hutu, Lesotho, and Timbuktu, to name just a few.

These lectures are designed to lift the fog and sharpen your understanding of these terms, revealing Africa in all its complexity, grandeur, tragedy, and resilience. As the chronological narrative of this course unfolds, Africa's people, places, languages, and customs will come vividly to life, and you will be able to follow events in present-day Africa in their deep historical context.