Mark Clifford
Mark Clifford is Executive Director of the Asia Business Council and has authored or co-authored four books on Asia, including Building Energy Efficiency: Why Green Buildings Are Key to Asia's Future, 'Troubled Tiger: Businessmen, Bureaucrats and Generals in South Korea' and, with Supachai Panithcpakdi, 'China and the WTO: Changing China, Changing World Trade'.
Asia, America, and the Transformation of Geopolitics by William H. Overholt
MARK CLIFFORD | 18 February 2010Asia is changing. But the U.S. is stuck seeing the world through an outdated Cold War lens. Most important, the U.S. must recognize that the rise of China is not a threat. In fact, China's success as a peaceful, unified and increasingly prosperous and free nation is unambiguously good thing.
That's WILLIAM H. OVERHOLT's basic message. There's more, much more. But Overholt's recurrent message is that the U.S. must... [ more ]
Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang
MARK CLIFFORD | 29 March 2009Life in a Chinese factory is nasty, brutal, usually short and all too often ends badly. That's the conventional view of life in the workplaces that are at the heart of China's manufacturing muscle. But LESLIE T. CHANG says that there is more to the story. Her factory girls are pioneers, young women who are re-shaping not only their own lives but, just possibly, the face of Chinese society. A former reporter for the Wall Street... [ more ]
Chinese Art: A Guide to Motifs and Visual Imagery by Patricia Bjaaland Welch
MARK CLIFFORD | 22 March 2009Instantly familiar and endlessly varied, Chinese paintings and ceramics have, for anyone with an interest in visual art, gone from being considered exotic to comfortably mainstream in the past several decades.
Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China by Philip Pan
MARK CLIFFORD | 14 September 2008After the first few pages of PHILIP PAN's book, I worried it had been a mistake to agree to read it. Pan begins with the death and funeral of Zhao Ziyang, the premier who was ousted in the coup d'etat that took place as the Tiananmen protests swirled through the capital during the spring of 1989 and who spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
Elegantly written though it was, the chapter seemed all... [ more ]
One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War by Michael Dobbs
MARK CLIFFORD | 03 September 2008Leaders matter. Never was that more important than during the Cuban missile crisis, the 1962 stand-off between Washington and Moscow that brought the two superpowers closer to nuclear war than ever before, or since. That millions of people didn't die came down to U.S. President John Kennedy and his counterpart in the Kremlin,... [ more ]
Descent into Chaos by Ahmed Rashid
MARK CLIFFORD | 09 August 2008AHMED RASHID has written an extraordinary, compelling and courageous book. One of the world's foremost experts on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia, Rashid details the multitude of missteps that have characterized U.S. policy in the region since the September 11th, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. This is a book written in anger and steeped in sorrow.
It is a common sentiment that the Bush... [ more ]
Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century by Tony Judt
MARK CLIFFORD | 28 July 2008Already, the twentieth century is receding to a distance that allows historians to see its contours in a way that those in the midst of events never can. And few see the ripples of history with more clarity than TONY JUDT.
This series of collected essays written over the past decade, mostly for the New York Review of Books,buttresses Judt's reputation as one of the pre-eminent... [ more ]
The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations by Brian M. Fagan
MARK CLIFFORD | 22 May 2008"It's May and it's cold in Hong Kong. What would Al Gore say?" mockingly asked an SMS text I recently received.
This fascinating book isn't trying to convince skeptics that human activity is responsible for climate change. But it is a powerful argument about the far-reaching affects of climate change, whether caused by humans or not, and a reminder of how costly adaptation is likely to be.
