A disturbing, insightful book about China’s hidden, multitiered war—and how the West can fight back.
A penetrating study of Beijing’s strategy to become the dominant global power.
There was a time when Western leaders thought that engagement with China would eventually lead to that country becoming more liberal, open, and even democratic. Looking back, that view seems hopelessly naïve. Allen, the China reporter for Axios, has been observing and writing about the country for a long time, and her book is a deep dive into how China is constantly maneuvering to expand its global influence, with an ever growing list of “core interests.” The central weapon is the government’s control of access to China’s enormous market, which it can lock down through punitive tariffs, bureaucratic delays, or outright bans. Nearly every country in the world has felt China’s heavy hand. Any Western company wanting to do business in China has to accept Beijing’s censorship and avoid controversial statements. At the same time, Chinese companies are effectively under government control, propagating the official line. In an incisive analysis, Allen examines China’s covert penetration of the American political system and international agencies such as the World Health Organization. She believes that Beijing has overplayed its hand and is widely seen as an arrogant bully, which gives the West the opportunity to respond at many levels. She makes a series of useful proposals, but a crucial requirement is a change in attitude in the U.S. The left and the right have a surprising amount in common on this issue and should work together instead of making narrow-minded attacks on each other. Allen has shown remarkable courage in writing this book, as the tentacles of the Beijing government are long, powerful, and patient. Hopefully, her work will find its way to policymakers in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.
A disturbing, insightful book about China’s hidden, multitiered war—and how the West can fight back.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9780063057418
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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