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Chinese aim for the Ivy League

The book spawned a genre, selling more than two million copies in China on the premise that any child, with the proper upbringing, could be Ivy League material.

Now, eight years after the publication of “Harvard Girl,” bookstore shelves here are laden with copycat titles like “How We Got Our Child Into Yale,” “Harvard Family Instruction” and “The Door of the Elite.”

Their increasing popularity points to the preoccupation – some might say a single-minded national obsession – of a growing number of middle-class Chinese parents: getting their children into America’s premier universities.

Read Chinese aim for the Ivy League from The IHT

Putin's Russia: Past Imperfect, Future Uncertain

This thoroughly revised and updated edition of the classic text provides the most current and authoritative assessment of Russia available. Distinguished scholars offer a full-scale assessment of Putin’s leadership, exploring the daunting domestic and international implications of Putin”s reign.

Read selected essays (on topics of domestic policy, the economy and foreign policy) from this books for free at Google Books. I particularly  impressed by Petrov and Slider’s essay, “Putin and the Regions”.

Ghosts of the South

It was over a lunch of Confederate fried steak in Columbia, S.C., that I realized something crucial about North and South. A passport ought to be required to travel from one to the other. Despite decades of economic and cultural homogenization, the regions remain as different as basketball and NASCAR. That thought occurred when my lunch partner, a man named Chris Sullivan, told me this: “To say the War Between the States was about slavery is like saying the Revolutionary War was about tea.” And he meant it, sure as the pear trees bloom in sun-washed Columbia, the South is rising once again…

The article

Response Sheet

Populism Lecture Series

Here are a series of lectures that I have devised. In creating these lectures I relied heavily on the scholarship of Duke University’s Lawrence Goodwyn and Richard Hofstadter.

Notes on Goodwyn’s Introduction to A Short History of Agrarian Revolt in America

The Alliance Develops a Movement Culture

Discovering the Limits of Populism in America

The Legacy and Irony of The Rise and Fall of Populism

My Class Lecture on Western Settlement and the Rise and Fall of Populism

Goodwyn’s book on Populism is available for free at here

Contradictions in China, and the rise of a family

The Lius are China’s first-generation billionaires, born into a world of Mao suits, food rations, price controls and Communist slogans. And the story of how they made their fortune is considered one of the guiding myths of China’s Communist party, a symbol of this country’s transformation over the last 30 years, since its unlikely embrace of capitalism. But their story also betrays the contradictions of modern China — a country where the average factory worker makes less than $50 a week.
“The puzzle is not why the Liu brothers succeeded, but why there are not more like them in China,” says Huang Yasheng, who teaches at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is an expert on Chinese entrepreneurs. “Rural China represents a vast pool of entrepreneurial capabilities and substantial business opportunities.”

As the global economy enters its first drastic downturn since China opened to the world, analysts say this country is searching for a more sustainable path to growth.

Read on from The IHT

Imperial Amnesia: Thematic U.S. Foreign Policy Reading

“The United States invaded a distant country to share the blessings of democracy. But after being welcomed as liberators, U.S. troops encountered a bloody insurrection. Sound familiar? Don’t think Iraq-think the Philippines and Mexico decades ago. U.S. President George W. Bush and his advisors have embarked on a historic mission to change the world. Too bad they ignored the lessons of history.”

Imperial Amnesia from Foreign Policy

Response Sheet

About the author: John B. Judis is an American journalist, is a senior writer at The National Journal and a former senior editor at The New Republic and contributing editor to The American Prospect.

Judis was born in Chicago. He attended Amherst College and received B.A. and M.A. degrees in Philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley.  Judis started reporting from Washington in 1982, when he became a founding editor and Washington correspondent for In These Times, ademocratic-socialist weekly magazine.

He has also written for GQ, Foreign Affairs, Mother Jones, The New York Times Magazine, and The Washington Post.

X + 9/11

George F. Kennan celebrated his 100th birthday earlier this year. The dean of U.S. diplomats is best known for his strategy of containment, which he first articulated in the so-called long telegram that he sent from Moscow in 1946—and soon thereafter unveiled in his 1947 article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published under the pseudonym “X.” Several conferences honoring Kennan have praised his enormous contribution to U.S. Cold War strategy, yet the most fitting tribute would be to apply his seminal theories to our present era—to examine the sources of terrorist conduct.

Read more from Robert L. Hutchings

Merkel counts her blessings

TO CALL her embattled would be to exaggerate. But Angela Merkel is undeniably under pressure. In the face of wobbly banks and a swooning economy, Germany’s chancellor has been found wanting. Other European leaders fume that she has done too little to boost the continent’s biggest economy. Business is baying for action. Much of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is eager to arm itself for next September’s federal election with tax cuts. The CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), agrees. But so far Ms Merkel has said no. The latest cover of Der Spiegel dubs her “timid Angela”.

Read on from the Economist

Survey of Russia

The Economist offers keen insights into Russia’s past, present and future in this 2008 survey. The introductory and concluding articles are especially noteworthy. Enjoy it here.

Russia's crumbling economy provides stiffest test yet for autocratic leader

Obeying orders from the top, Russian television has banned the use of words such as “crisis”, “decline” and “devaluation”. Coverage of the mayhem in the country’s stock market, where shares have fallen by 75 per cent since August, is scant.
Instead, just as in Soviet times, Russians are told how bad everything is in the West. The US, Russians are told, is in irreversible decline, while desperate Britons are throwing themselves into the Thames. The Queen, facing imminent penury, has been forced to pawn her diamonds and, according to one tabloid front page, we can no longer afford to bury our dead…

On November 4, Dmitry Medvedev, the protégé Mr Putin shoehorned into his old job as president in May, announced that he would seek a constitutional amendment extending the standard term of office from two consecutive terms of four years to two terms of six.

Read on…

Moral Dilemmas

Here is a list of several moral dilemmas. Your “assignment” is to consider each of them carefully. We will democratically decide which of these dilemmas we want to address when we next meet.
Of course, you are coridally invited to post some food for thought in response to any of these dilemmas in the comments link at the bottom of this post.

Enjoy.