Book talk: Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy.

Wild Ride is a tour-de-force journey through the rise and fall of the Chinese economy since the 1980s from a writer who witnessed it all up close. From the early transition of stagnation of the 1980s to the euphoria of the 1990s when investors hankered after a market of a billion people to the closing of the economy in the past decade, Anne Stevenson-Yang reveals the challenges of doing business in China.

This talk is based on the author’s newly published book, The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle Class. The book argues that the Bolsheviks failed to obliterate the social structure of Tzarist Russia, and that these divisions continue to have implications for understanding popular support for autocracy in Putin’s Russia. The author makes this argument by analysing the transition of Tzarist Russia’s educated proto-bourgeoisie into modern high human capital status groups.

A lot has been written about the 2019 protests in Hong Kong and the aggressive police crackdown offered in response. Much less has been written about the more severe assault on liberal values and institutions that followed. In his new book Professor Davis takes a forensic look at both the growing Beijing intervention in Hong Kong affairs from the handover forward and its culmination in the more severe crackdown that followed the 2019 protests, the 2020 passage of the National Security Law, and the 2021 Beijing imposition of a patriots-only electoral system.

Fascism first emerged in Italy in 1919 and the National Fascist Party (PNF) was founded in 1921. It spread in various forms to many other countries and over different continents; its German mutation caused WWII and was defeated after millions of deaths. However, to what extent was Fascism really defeated? Contemporary political events show that anti-democratic ideologies hardly disappear, and ideological networks – even if composed only by a scant minority – can survive as karst rivers, that continue irrigating parts of the society and re-emerge on the surface at specific critical junctures.

While international donors have invested increasingly in the production of gender data in low- and middle-income countries, these investments only translate into impact in the lives of women and girls if this data is used and used effectively. However, little is known about whether and under what conditions gender data informs policy-making in low- and middle-income settings.