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China in the 21st Century by Maura  Elizabeth Cunningham & Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
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China in the 21st Century

What Everyone Needs to Know, 3rd Edition

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Narrator Joe Barrett

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Length 5 hours 33 minutes
Language English
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In this fully revised and updated third edition of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know®, Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Maura Elizabeth Cunningham provide cogent answers to urgent questions regarding the world's newest superpower and offer a framework for understanding China's meteoric rise from developing country to superpower. Framing their answers through the historical legacies—Confucian thought, Western and Japanese imperialism, the Mao era, and the Tiananmen Square massacre—that largely define China's present-day trajectory, Wasserstrom and Cunningham introduce listeners to the Chinese Communist Party, the building boom in Shanghai, and the environmental fallout of rapid Chinese industrialization. They also explain unique aspects of Chinese culture, such as the one-child policy, and provide insight into Chinese-American relations, a subject that has become increasingly fraught during the Trump era. As Wasserstrom and Cunningham draw parallels between China and other industrialized nations during their periods of development, in particular the United States during its rapid industrialization in the 19th century, they also predict how we might expect China to act in the future vis-à-vis the United States, Russia, India, and its East Asian neighbors.

Maura Elizabeth Cunningham is an Associate at the University of Michigan's Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies. She has written on modern Chinese history for the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. His books include Global Shanghai, China's Brave New World, and Twentieth-Century China.

Joe Barrett began his acting career at the age of five in the basement of his family's home in upstate New York. He has gone on to play many stage roles, both on and off-Broadway, and in regional theaters from Los Angeles, Houston, and St. Louis to Washington DC, San Francisco, and Portland, Maine. He has appeared in films and television, both prime time and late night, and in hundreds of television and radio commercials. Joe has narrated over two hundred audiobooks. He has been an Audie Award finalist eight times, and his narration of Gun Church by Reed Farrel Coleman won the 2013 Audie Award for Original Work. AudioFile magazine has granted Joe fourteen Earphones Awards, including for James Salter's All That Is and Donald Katz's Home Fires. Regarding Joe's narration of John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany, AudioFile said, "This moving book comes across like a concerto . . . with a soloist-Owen's voice-rising from the background of an orchestral narration." Joe is married to actor Andrea Wright, and together they have four very grown children.

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