One of my newly adopted habits, as I discussed in my “Good Habits” post a few days ago, is to read a chapter a day from a book that covers something I want to know more about. Given the major role China plays in how the world is evolving, I had become fairly current on the Chinese economy, but I had no in-depth knowledge of the country itself.
I still don’t, really. What I do have is a much better sense of the political and historical context in which China makes decisions. I would describe Henry Kissinger’s On China as applied history—history applied to an understanding of how a country is likely to act in the future . . . and why. In that sense, it succeeds well.
