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Harold K. Jacobson and Michel Oksenberg bring their considerable knowledge of, respectively, international agencies and China to this study of the evolving relationship between the People’s Republic of China and the keystone international economic organizations (KIEQs): the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and its affiliated agencies, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).Until the early 1970s China was hostile toward the KIEOs, seeing them as instruments of capitalist exploitation. The change in that position, and the ensuing rapprochement between the two sides culminating in the negotiations and Chinese membership in the KEIOs, is an important subject. It is made immeasurably more significant by the extraordinary potential of China in the world economy. The different perspectives of the two authors permits this process to be analyzed from the point of view of both sides and to be informed by discussions and interviews with senior officers of the KIEOs and high Chinese officials.Among the questions addressed are: How and why did such a sharp change in the relationship between China and the KIEOs occur? What accounts for the Chinese decision to seek inclusion in the KIEOs? How did the KIEOs, and their most important members, the Western states, come to welcome China’s inclusion? What have the consequences of China’s involvement in the IMF and World Bank been for the two institutions and for China? What are the issues involved in China’s request for entrance in the KIEOs and full participation in the GATT? How will China’s involvement in the KIEOs affect the USSR’s involvement?Although the book deals with issues and events that predate the June, 1989, events in Tiananmen Square, the authors completed their manuscript after those events. They endeavor to interpret their observations in the light of the changed situation in China and the clear evidence that China has not yet settled into easy international participation with the Western states.

Chinese Boycotts versus Japanese Bombs highlights economic competition as a key to understanding how China and Japan, leading trade partners, slipped toward war in the early 1930s. It describes and evaluates the Nationalist Chinese government's “Revolutionary Diplomacy” — its own brand of foreign policy toward Japan in 1931-32. This approach, which utilized popular boycotts, strikes, and demonstrations, was both innovative and a reflection of Chinas profound anger toward Japan, brought about by the desperation of Chinese industrialists in the face of the efficiency of Japanese producers. Although the anti-Japanese acts failed to break Japanese economic dominion and halt Japanese aggression in Manchuria, the sanctions enticed the United States and England to enter the Chinese market and led them into the role of codefenders against Japan. Battered by the Chinese boycott, Japanese businesses demanded military intervention. In addition, internal domestic strife in China tempted the Japanese military into seizing Manchuria and making an attack on Shanghai in 1932, thus dashing any hope for a peaceable relationship between Japan and China. These events set the stage for what was to become the Asian arena of World War Il.

In 2004, the United States, five Central American countries, and the Dominican Republic signed the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), signaling the region’s commitment to a neoliberal economic model. For many, however, neoliberalism had lost its luster as the new century dawned, and resistance movements began to gather force. Contesting Trade in Central America is the first book-length study of the debate over CAFTA, tracing the agreement’s drafting, its passage, and its aftermath across Central America.

Rose J. Spalding draws on nearly two hundred interviews with representatives from government, business, civil society, and social movements to analyze the relationship between the advance of free market reform in Central America and the parallel rise of resistance movements. She views this dynamic through the lens of Karl Polanyi’s “double movement” theory, which posits that significant shifts toward market economics will trigger oppositional, self-protective social countermovements. Examining the negotiations, political dynamics, and agents involved in the passage of CAFTA in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, Spalding argues that CAFTA served as a high-profile symbol against which Central American oppositions could rally. Ultimately, she writes, post-neoliberal reform “involves not just the design of appropriate policy mixes and sequences, but also the hard work of building sustainable and inclusive political coalitions, ones that prioritize the quality of social bonds over raw economic freedom.”

How is the global economy affected by increased militarization, inequality between nations and classes, environmental degradation, and U.S. economic decline? What are the current debates and issues? Can free enterprise and government deregulation solve global economic problems? As the world's attention is focused on the global economy, 25 activist economists address these and many other questions. Essays in Creating a New World Economy describe in accessible language such complex topics as the international debt, Keynesianism, trade policy, immigration, and drug trade. In addition to analyzing current topics and debates, contributors also offer alternative strategies on topics frequently neglected in traditional economics curricula. Essays explain development strategies and markets in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Japan. For students, activists, and general readers, this timely collection explains national and international economic dilemmas that will increasingly challenge us in the next century.

A history of the Chicano community cannot be complete without taking into account the United States' domination of the Mexican economy beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writes Gilbert G. González. For that economic conquest inspired U.S. writers to create a "culture of empire" that legitimated American dominance by portraying Mexicans and Mexican immigrants as childlike "peons" in need of foreign tutelage, incapable of modernizing without Americanizing, that is, submitting to the control of U.S. capital. So powerful was and is the culture of empire that its messages about Mexicans shaped U.S. public policy, particularly in education, throughout the twentieth century and even into the twenty-first.

In this stimulating history, Gilbert G. González traces the development of the culture of empire and its effects on U.S. attitudes and policies toward Mexican immigrants. Following a discussion of the United States' economic conquest of the Mexican economy, González examines several hundred pieces of writing by American missionaries, diplomats, business people, journalists, academics, travelers, and others who together created the stereotype of the Mexican peon and the perception of a "Mexican problem." He then fully and insightfully discusses how this misinformation has shaped decades of U.S. public policy toward Mexican immigrants and the Chicano (now Latino) community, especially in terms of the way university training of school superintendents, teachers, and counselors drew on this literature in forming the educational practices that have long been applied to the Mexican immigrant community.