Charm Offensive: How China's Soft Power is Transforming the World By Joshua Kurlantzick, Yale University Press, May 28, 2007, 320 pages A recent addition to the spate of books dealing with "the rise of China", Charm Offensive separates itself from other titles in the sub-genre by focusing on China's increasing use of "soft" power - including diplomacy, trade and cultural exchanges - in dealing with neighbouring nations and beyond. China uses these foreignpolicy tools, Kurlantzick argues, to brand itself abroad as a model of success for countries of the developing world. The book is an "eye-opening" account of an underreported trend, writes noted China scholar Orville Schell. Harvard University professor Joseph Nye calls it "fascinating ... a must-read for anyone interested in the future of American foreign policy." Kurlantzick is a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC and a correspondent for the American current affairs magazine The New Republic.

Clearing the Air: The Health and Economic Damages of Air Pollution in China By Mun S. Ho and Chris P. Nielsen (eds), The MIT Press, 392 pages China's air pollution problem, a painfully evident reality for anyone who has breathed in a Chinese city, gets a hard look in Clearing the Air. The book is a quantitative study of the effects of air pollutants - both locally-polluting particulates and more broadly damaging greenhouse gases - on China's economy, broken down sector by sector. "There is no such detailed, comprehensive analysis of this topic," writes Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba. Not content to simply describe the situation, editors Ho and Nielsen (fellows at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and Centre for the Environment, respectively) make policy prescriptions for reducing the scope of the problem. The book bucks the conventional thinking that reducing fossil fuel consumption will necessarily entail serious setbacks in economic growth and development in arguing that "green" taxes would in fact bolster the economy.