A favorite icon for cigarette manufacturers across China since the mid-twentieth century has been the panda, with factories from Shanghai to Sichuan using cuddly cliché to market tobacco products. The proliferation of panda-branded cigarettes coincides with profound, yet poorly appreciated, shifts in the worldwide tobacco trade. Over the last fifty years, transnational tobacco companies and their allies have fueled a tripling the world's annual consumption of cigarettes. At the forefront is the China National Tobacco Corporation, now producing forty percent of cigarettes sold globally. What's enabled the manufacturing of cigarettes in China to flourish since the time of Mao and to prosper even amidst public health condemnation of smoking?
In Poisonous Pandas, an interdisciplinary group of scholars comes together to tell that story. They offer novel portraits of people within the Chinese polity—government leaders, scientists, tax officials, artists, museum curators, and soldiers—who have experimentally revamped the country's pre-Communist cigarette supply chain and fitfully expanded its political, economic, and cultural influence. These portraits cut against the grain of what contemporary tobacco-control experts typically study, opening a vital new window on tobacco—the single largest cause of preventable death worldwide today.

Chinese politics are at a crossroads as President Xi Jinping amasses personal power and tests the constraints of collective leadership.
In the years since he became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, Xi Jinping has surprised many people in China and around the world with his bold anti-corruption campaign and his aggressive consolidation of power.
Given these new developments, we must rethink how we analyze Chinese politics—an urgent task as China now has more influence on the global economy and regional security than at any other time in modern history.
examines how the structure and dynamics of party leadership have evolved since the late 1990s and argues that "inner-party democracy"—the concept of collective leadership that emphasizes deal making based on accepted rules and norms—may pave the way for greater transformation within China's political system. Xi's legacy will largely depend on whether he encourages or obstructs this trend of political institutionalization in the governance of the world's most populous and increasingly pluralistic country.
Cheng Li also addresses the recruitment and composition of the political elite, a central concern in Chinese politics. China analysts will benefit from the meticulously detailed biographical information of the 376 members of the 18th Central Committee, including tables and charts detailing their family background, education, occupation, career patterns, and mentor-patron ties.

Understanding the young adults who came of age during the rise of China's economic and global powerThis book by a prominent Chinese sociologist explores how China's youth will influence the country's future. Focusing on millennials--those born between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s--the book examines the status, lifestyles, attitudes, values, and behaviors of this key segment of the country's population. Li Chunling's study presents a native Chinese perspective on the increasingly diverse generation that at some point will assume leadership of the country.Among the key questions addressed in the book are: How do Chinese millennials differ both from preceding generations in China and from their counterparts around the world? How can current and future relations between Chinese millennials and the Chinese government be assessed? And, what are the factors or fault lines that have shaped the intra-generational differences among China's young people?Members of this age cohort are extraordinary, and in some respects unique, in contemporary China. Their ascent has accompanied five historic and far-reaching developments. These include China's rapid economic rise, the adoption of the one-child-per-family policy, the largest domestic rural-to-urban migration in Chinese history, the opening of extensive educational opportunities abroad, and the arrival of the digital era. Young Chinese citizens have developed a comprehensive understanding of the world much faster than previous generations; millennials see themselves not as extensions of the past, but rather as the innovators of the country's future.Through expansive and in-depth empirical research on Chinese millennials and younger age cohorts (people in their late teens and early 20s), Dr. Li's book illustrates how China's younger adults reflect the growing diversity and persistent inequality in society. The book also explores how their distinct characteristics and views will shape the country's trajectory. For the outside world, developing a better understanding of this unique generation is an urgent task, given that China now has more influence on the global economy and regional security than at any other point in modern history.

This evocative exploration of the profound changes overtaking China examines the major dilemmas the country confronts: official corruption, growing disparities between rich and poor, the halting reform of state-owned enterprises, transportation and infrastructure bottlenecks, and environmental degradation. Shanghai-born and Western-educated, Cheng Li provides the unique dual perspective of a local resident and a political scientist who returned to his homeland to observe its remarkable social transformations. His sympathetic yet clear-eyed account provides the reader with the sounds and smells, tastes and textures of a country enduring the pangs of rapid reform.

Drawing on literary, cinematic, scientific, archival, and digital media sources, Cheng Li investigates the emergence, evolution, and devolution of conservationist ideas, showing that they acquired their value and assumed their power precisely because of their malleability and adaptability.