After thirty years of rapid economic growth, South Korea is widely promoted as demonstrating the superiority of free market capitalism. Along with Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, it is considered a great success story and model for third world development. | more…
In 1969, Ferdinand Marcos won a second term as president, in one of the dirtiest campaigns in Philippine history. That same year, Edgar Jopson was elected president of the National Union of Students of the Philippines, in a campaign to keep the Communists out of the student movement. Thirteen years later Jopson was gunned down by the military during a raid on an underground safe house. He was by then one of the most wanted people in the country, with a price on his head, a leading Communist Party cadre and member of the urban underground. | more…
The Great Reversal is the first critical study of the widely heralded reforms currently transforming China’s economy. From his long experience in Chinese agriculture, Hinton first examines the course of agricultural reform over the past decade, then looks at its consequences in different areas of the countryside and considers its implications for the country as a whole. He raises troubling questions about China’s capitalist future—the growing landlessness, increasing inequality, and above all, the destruction of the nation’s natural resources and the collectively built infrastructure that was the great achievement of the revolution. In so doing he sheds new light on the sources of discontent behind the demonstrations that culminated in the Tiananmen massacre of June 1989. | more…
[Britannica’s revisionist] distortions of the history of the Vietnamese struggle are just as radical and just as misleading [as those about the Soviet Union]. Here we may draw some valuable lessons about the hidden content of form: how apparently neutral principles of organization may shape meaning. | more…
Chronicles the 1975 offensive of the Vietnam Peoples Army and the uprisings that secured the liberation of South Vietnam. 1977. | more…
“Mukherjee, a painstaking scholar and himself an Indian known for his numerous serious studies of Indian society and anthropology, has written here a colorful and important work on the Company, whose rise and fall constituted a classic episode in the history of capitalism and British colonialism. His… book is distinguished from most on the subject by its richly documented focus on social forces, Indian and British, that shaped the Company’s rise — and by some vivid descriptions of the impact of the Company’s long rule on the lives of the people both in India and England.” — Publishers Weekly | more…
This collection includes the major writings of General Giap, who, on the evidence of his record as well as his theoretical work, has long been recognized as one of the military geniuses of modern times. The book includes writings from the 1940s to the end of the 1960s and is presented here with a valuable historical introduction by Russell Stetler. | more…
Chu Teh, one of the legendary figures of the Chinese Revolution, was born in 1886. He was commander in chief of the People’s Revolutionary Army, and this is the story of the first sixty years of his life. As a supreme commanding general, he was probably unique; surely there has never been another commander in chief who, during his years of service, spun, wove, set type, grew and cooked his own food, wrote poetry and lectured not only to his troops on military strategy and tactics but to women’s classes on how to preserve vegetables. Evans Carlson wrote that “Chu Teh has the kindness of a Robert E. Lee, the tenacity of a Grant, and the humility of a Lincoln.” | more…
Compelling narrative of Norman Bethune, revolutionary doctor in Mao’s China. | more…