Richard Baum - Böcker

This audacious and illuminating memoir by Richard Baum, a senior China scholar and sometime policy advisor, reflects on forty years of learning about and interacting with the People’s Republic of China, from the height of Maoism during the author’s UC Berkeley student days in the volatile 1960s through globalization. Anecdotes from Baum’s professional life illustrate the alternately peculiar, frustrating, fascinating, and risky activity of China watching — the process by which outsiders gather and decipher official and unofficial information to figure out what’s really going on behind China’s veil of political secrecy and propaganda. Baum writes entertainingly, telling his narrative with witty stories about people, places, and eras.China Watcher will appeal to scholars and followers of international events who lived through the era of profound political and academic change described in the book, as well as to younger, post-Mao generations, who will enjoy its descriptions of the personalities and political forces that shaped the modern field of China studies.

With the death of Mao Tse-tung and the subsequent purge of the "Gang of Four," China's new pragmatic leaders have embarked on a crash program of national development known as the Four Modernizations, This program is geared to the primary objective of turning China into a major world economic and military power by the year 2000. In this book, the outgrowth of a major international conference on China's post-Maoist development, ten distinguished analysts examine one of the core issues in China's current modernization drive: the acquisition and use of modern industrial science and technology. The authors address the politics of China's technological modernization, the institutional structure of technological research, the purchase of foreign technology, constraints on technological absorption, the growth potential of China's critical energy sector, and the modernization of China's military establishment. Supplemented with brief commentaries by leading academic, government, and private sector contributors, their chapters provide an in-depth look at the process, problems, and prospects of China's widely heralded technological revolution.

This book addresses the politics of China's technological modernization, the institutional structure of technological research, and the purchase of foreign technology. It also addresses the growth potential of China's critical energy sector and the modernization of China's military establishment.

For almost two decades after Mao Zedong's death, an epic, no-holds-barred contest was waged in China between orthodox Marxists and reformers. With Deng Xiaoping's strong support, the reformers ultimately won; but they--and China--paid a heavy price. Here, Richard Baum provides a lively, comprehensive guide to the intricate theater of post-Mao Chinese politics. He tells the intriguing story of an escalating intergenerational clash of ideas and values between the aging revolutionaries of the Maoist era and their younger, more pragmatic successors. Baum deftly analyzes the anatomy of the reformers' ultimate victory in his brilliant reconstruction of the twists and turns of the reform process.

The intriguing narrative of one of astronomy's strangest searches for a planet that never existed.

Endoleaks and Endotension is an authoritative resource for vascular surgeons, interventional radiologists and cardiologists, vascular disease specialists, primary care physicians and internists, and students interested in endovascular aneurysm repair. It contains valuable guidelines from a widely respected team of international authorities on the subject.

The decade of the 1980s began in China with great expectations of the societal benefits of modernisation, and ended with gunfire in Tiananmen Square. This book, first published in 1991, presents essays that explore the political and economic reform policies that emerged in post-Mao China under Deng Xiaoping. In general, they conclude that the advent of partial marketization and structural reform tended to magnify structural contradictions rather than solve them.

The decade of the 1980s began in China with great expectations of the societal benefits of modernisation, and ended with gunfire in Tiananmen Square. This book, first published in 1991, presents essays that explore the political and economic reform policies that emerged in post-Mao China under Deng Xiaoping. In general, they conclude that the advent of partial marketization and structural reform tended to magnify structural contradictions rather than solve them.

For many centuries observers of the night sky interpreted the moving planets and the surrounding starry realms in terms of concentric crystalline spheres, in the center of which hung the Earth — the hub of creation. But with the discoveries of Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, astronomers were suddenly struck by a momentous truth: the solar system was neither small nor intimate, but extended an unfathomable distance toward countless even more distant stars. The endless possibilities of these astounding developments fired scientists' imaginations, leading both to further discoveries and to flights of fancy. While newly discovered facts are important and interesting, the quaint curiosities and spectral "ghosts" that led scientists astray have a fascination of their own. This is the subject of astronomer Richard Baum in this elegant narrative about the mysteries and wonders of celestial exploration. The fabled "mountains of Venus," a "city in the moon," ghostly rings around Uranus and Neptune, bright inexplicable objects seen near the sun, and the truth behind Coleridge's "Star dogged Moon" in his famous poem about the Ancient Mariner — these are just some of the intriguing twists and turns that astronomers took while investigating our starry neighbors. Baum vividly conveys the romance of astronomy at a time when the vistas of outer space were a new frontier and astronomers, guided only by imagination and analogy, set forth on uncharted seas and were haunted for a lifetime by marvels both seen and imagined.