Books in the The Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures series

Poetic paintings--works done in response to lyric poems or as pictorial equivalents to them--compose a major category of East Asian art. In this beautifully illustrated book James Cahill, looks at three exemplary traditions in this genre.

The relationship between China and Japan remains among the most significant of all the world's bilateral affairs-yet it is also the most tortured and the least understood. Akira Iriye adds brilliant clarity to the past century of Chinese-Japanese interactions in this masterful interpretive survey.

Joshua Fogel offers an incisive historical look at Sino-Japanese relations from three different perspectives. Introducing the concept of "Sinosphere" to capture the nature of Sino-foreign relations both spatially and temporally, Fogel presents an original and thought-provoking study on the long, complex relationship between China and Japan.

The Chinese overseas now number 25 to 30 million, yet the 2,000-year history of the Chinese's attempts to venture abroad and the underlying values affecting that migration have never before been presented in a broad overview. In pursuing this story, international scholar Wang Gungwu uncovers some major themes of global history.

Accounts of China's global rise emphasize economics and politics, largely neglecting the cultivation of China's people. This title by focusing on the decade since 2000, and especially 2004 - 09, argues that the vital politics of population has been central to the globalizing agenda of the reform state.

Woodside offers an overview of the bureaucratic politics of preindustrial China, Vietnam, and Korea. He focuses on the political and administrative theory of the three mandarinates and their long experimentation with governments recruited in part through meritocratic civil service examinations.

The doyen of Confucian studies in America here constructs a magisterial overview of 3,000 years of East Asian civilizations, principally in the form of dialogues among the major systems of thought that have dominated the Asian world's historical development.

Vogel brings masterly insight to the underlying question of why Japan and the little dragons-Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore-have been so extraordinarily successful in industrializing while other developing countries have not.

Blending political, cultural and economic perspectives, this text traces the evolution of Asian countries in the 20th century. Its aim is to determine the mix of culture, experience, scale, timing, leadership and policy that shapes individual developing nations.

In the early 1960s fewer than five percent of Japanese owned automobiles, China's per capita income was among the lowest in Asia, and living standards in rural South Korea put it among the world's poorest countries. Today, these are three of the most powerful economies on earth. Dwight Perkins draws on extensive experience in the region to explain how Asia sustained such rapid economic growth in the second half of the twentieth century. East Asian Development covers Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, as well as Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and China--a behemoth larger than the other economies combined. While the overall picture of Asian growth is positive, no single economic policy has been effective regionwide. Perkins uncovers why some initially egalitarian societies have ended up in very different places, with Japan, for example, maintaining a modest gap between rich and poor while China has become one of Asia's most unequal economies. With Korean and Japanese growth sluggish and China losing steam, Perkins asks whether this is a regional phenomenon or typical of all economies at this stage of development. His inquiry reminds us that the uncharted waters of China's vast economy make predictions speculative at best.

The eighteenth century witnessed the rise of the China market and the changes that resulted in global consumption patterns, from opium smoking to tea drinking. In a valuable transnational perspective, Blusse chronicles the economic and cultural transformations in East Asia through three key cities-Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia.

In this meditation on the relationship between East Asia and the United States, Warren I. Cohen examines how cultural influences have transformed - and benefited - both Asians and Americans.