Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
|||
Showing 1 - 4 of 4 matches in All Departments
What might COVID-19 mean for, and reveal about, China's place in the world? The coronavirus pandemic started in Wuhan, home to the leading lab studying the SARS virus and bats. Was that pure coincidence? This book explores what we know, and still don't know, about the origins of COVID-19, and how it was handled in China. We may never get all the answers, but much is already clear: China's record as the origin of earlier pandemics, and its struggle to bring contagious diseases under control; its history as both a victim of biological warfare and a developer of deadly bioweapons. When Covid broke out, Wuhan was building science parks to realise Beijing's ambitions in biotech research. Whoever achieves global leadership of the gene-editing industry stands to harvest great power and wealth. China has already challenged Western technological supremacy with 5G and in other industries. Yet this tiny, invisible virus has cruelly exposed a critical flaw in the Chinese political system: obsessive secrecy. The West wanted to trust the PRC, hoping that, as it prospered, it would become an open society. Made in China reveals how Beijing's leaders have betrayed that trust.
Communism was destroyed not from without, but from within--by a persistent failure to make its economic theories work in practice. But what exactly did go wrong with its central planning? Until the last moment, top western economists claimed that Communism was superior to western models. Even now, centralised Marxist planning retains its admirers, especially among the young. With the benefit of new archival research, we can finally grasp how falsified and manipulated statistics blindfolded Communist governments and confused western leaders, leading to staggering errors of judgement. Both sides believed that East Germany had a stronger economy than West Germany; that North Korea would overtake South Korea; that Mao's China was a paradise for its starving peasants. Those who warned that a dearth of reliable economic data would condemn central planning to irrational misallocation of investment and labour were ignored or belittled. But, ultimately, they were vindicated. Jasper Becker answers the big question: what accounts for the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union, China and everywhere else? And why don't present debates acknowledge that failure? This unconventional history of Communism and the Cold War explains why the same old clash of theories is continuing to shape the world today.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Chinese people suffered what may have been the worst famine in history. Over thirty million perished in a grain shortage brought on not by flood, drought, or infestation, but by the insanely irresponsible dictates of Chairman Mao Ze-dong's "Great Leap Forward," an attempt at utopian engineering gone horribly wrong.
What happens when a dictator wins absolute power and isolates a
nation from the outside world? In a nightmare of political theory
stretched to madness and come to life, North Korea's Kim Jong Il
made himself into a living god, surrounded by lies and flattery and
beyond criticism. As over two million of his subjects starved to
death, Kim Jong Il roamed between palaces staffed by beautiful
girls and stocked with expensive international delicacies. Outside,
the steel mills shut down, the trains stopped running, the power
went out, and the hospitals ran out of medicine. When the
population threatened to revolt, Kim imposed a reign of terror,
deceived the United Nations, and plundered the country's dwindling
resources to become a nuclear power. Now this tiny bankrupt nation
is using her nuclear capability to blackmail the United
States.
|
You may like...
Barbie - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-Ray
Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling
Blu-ray disc
|