Andrew J. Nathan

It is well known that the populations of China and Japan are aging. But this book shows that the same is true throughout Asia—except in the poorest countries, where life expectancies are low. According to the book’s authors, by 2050, the portion of Asians over age 65 will range from 14 percent, in India, to 38 percent, in Japan. In the United States, the figure will be about 20 percent.

In early 2009, during the closing weeks of the Sri Lankan civil war, the Tamil Tigers—a militant group that had waged a bloody, decades-long campaign to win independence for Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority—herded 300,000 Tamil civilians into a shrinking redoubt on the island’s northeast coast, forcing them to serve as human shields against the encroaching Sri Lankan army. Weiss, a UN official in Colombo at the time, provides harrowing details, as well as insight into the decades of brutal conflict that brought the two sides to the point where they were willing to commit war crimes.

Recent power struggles in China have generated torrents of leaks and rumors. The sources, always obscure, apparently seek to influence the course of the struggles by outing secrets and maligning reputations. In the case detailed in this book, they succeeded.

This addition to the venerable Introduction to Asian Civilizations series marks a major step in the maturation of Vietnam studies in the American academy. The book translates excerpts from more than 200 texts, many previously unavailable in Western languages, dating from the year 297 to 1991.

For decades, Japan avoided widespread poverty through a system of guaranteed lifetime employment, which made a European-style social welfare system unnecessary. But lifetime employment rested on a substructure of gender discrimination.

The Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea produces valuable research that sheds light on life in the “hermit kingdom.” These three recent reports reveal North Korea’s extraordinary system of repression.

As China grows, White argues, no one can be sure that the Chinese “will settle for as little as an equal share in the leadership of Asia.”

The politicization of prosecutions for corruption in China makes official data untrustworthy, but Wedeman has still found plausible ways to assess different types of corruption and their frequency.

Moon, a well-known scholar, served as an adviser to Kim Dae-jung, South Korea’s president from 1998 until 2003, and to Roh Moo-hyun, who held the presidency from 2003 until 2008. The two presidents tried to thaw relations with Pyongyang, build trust, and create conditions for gradual change in the North’s political and economic systems that might lead to coexistence and eventually to peaceful unification. Moon blames U.S. President George W. Bush for disrupting those efforts before they had a chance to build on what he claims were initial successes.

The politicization of prosecutions for corruption in China makes official data untrustworthy, but Wedeman has still found plausible ways to assess different types of corruption and their frequency. Nee and Opper come at the question of business-government relations in China from a different angle, but their findings converge with Wedeman’s. Their main point is that the Chinese market economy was created not from above, by the state, but from below, by entrepreneurs.

Hamilton-Hart raises a fascinating, overlooked question: Why is the United States widely viewed as a benign power in Southeast Asia, its presence welcomed rather than feared despite the many violent, selfish, and unwise things it has done over the years?

Six years ago, the overthrow of the Nepalese monarchy and a negotiated peace brought the self-declared (but not Chinese-endorsed) Maoist insurgents into government in Nepal. Today, the country is stuck. The book’s deeply informed contributors from the diplomatic, nongovernmental organization, academic, and journalistic worlds look hard for rays of hope, but they find few.