What to read on China and globalization in 2026: CCG's “China and Globalization” series
The collection spans ambassadors’ perspectives, global governance in an era of “polycrisis”, development and cooperation with China, and the changing balance of power in China-U.S. relations.
As year-end reading lists take shape, CCG Update is highlighting the Springer-published “China and Globalization” series as a compact way to navigate a crowded debate. Since 2021, the series has grown into a practical reference set for readers tracking China’s evolving role in a more fragmented world. Many volumes are available open access, making the series easy to share and cite.
Featuring contributions from more than 200 international voices, the series aims to broaden and balance the conversation by bringing together perspectives from global opinion leaders, former statesmen, ambassadors, leading academics and think-tank experts, multinational CEOs, and foreign chambers of commerce, from China and beyond.
All titles in the series are listed below:
The Innovation Machine: How China Creates and Adopts Technology Through Governance
Mar 2026
Authors: Andy Mok
This book begins from a simple observation: innovation does not arise only from talent, capital, or competition, but also from the way a civilization understands order—and how it turns that understanding into policy, execution, and measurable results. In China, this chain is continuous. A cosmology built on relation and balance shapes the design of institutions; those institutions create the instruments and incentives that pull new technologies into use; and the results appear not as isolated breakthroughs but as systems that scale.
On the Governance of Globalization: Chinese views on China, Globalization, Multilateralism and Big Power Relations
Feb 2026
Authors: Henry Huiyao Wang
This open access book is essay collection of Dr. Henry Huiyao Wang, a renowned International Chinese scholar and founder of one of the world’s leading non-governmental think tanks, that focus on China’s continued interactions with globalization and its domestic and foreign policies in the post-pandemic era. The author has witnessed China’s miraculous transformation and the impressive development and the challenges it has experienced over the past decades.
Dreaming Dragons or Meddlesome Mandarins: A Journey Together to Uncover China’s Soul
Jan 2026
Authors: Harvey Dzodin
Even before he became a teenager, Harvey Dzodin was fascinated listening to his shortwave radio in Detroit, and was especially captivated by far-off China. This book is the culmination of the decades of interactions and experiences that Dr. Harvey Dzodin, former ABC executive, presidential appointee and avid commentator on everything global, has had with China and its people. His raw, personal, and sometimes impassioned insights into China’s history, its people, culture and even its current rise on the global stage, give a fresh perspective on perhaps the most consequential country of the twenty-first century. Suitable for both the experienced China hand as well as those with only a cursory knowledge of the Middle Kingdom, Harvey encourages the reader to make their own judgements on China and come to their own conclusion. It is his hope that this book will contribute, in some part, to the sharing of knowledge and the furthering of communication, thus helping to overcome barriers to mutual understanding and informed decision making that plague the world today.
Enhancing Global Governance in a Fragmented World: Prospects, Issues, and the Role of China
2024
Editors: Henry Huiyao Wang, Mabel Lu Miao
This open access book explores the ‘polycrisis’ currently affecting nearly all nations by exploring key themes such as multilateralism and globalization from the perspective of think tanks from nearly every continent, searching for various solutions to the ills that currently plague the world and a way to create a future in which everyone benefits.
Conflict, Climate and Inequalities: Convergence to a World Crisis
2025
Authors: Francesco Sylos Labini, Matteo Caravani
This book argues that the growing and seemingly unstoppable centralization of capital undermines national democracies, fuels wars, destroys the environment, and, tragically, exacerbates global hunger. In an era of overwhelming confusion, this book seeks to bring clarity by relying on empirical data and the insights of intellectuals from diverse and pluralistic schools of thought. These thinkers, often overlooked by the mainstream, remain unaligned with specific interest groups and offer critical, honest, and deeply human perspectives on the world. The book’s central goal is to place the theme of peace at the forefront of public debate, demonstrating that movements for environmental and social justice are fundamentally part of the same struggle for human survival.
Global Development and Cooperation with China: New Ideas, Policies and Initiatives for a Changing World
2025
Editors: Henry Huiyao Wang, Mabel Lu Miao
This open access book draws on the insights and wisdom of representatives from a wide range of international organizations with a presence in China, leveraging their rich experience in their respective fields as well as their unique understanding of China’s development and its role in the world. In a world of increased tension between governments and a rise in regionalism, globally positioned non-governmental international organizations are key to keeping the lines of communication open. In addition to the United Nations and its affiliate organizations, a host of international organizations are ensuring that the world’s most pressing issues, in areas ranging from economics to education, are being discussed.
The Future of China’s Development and Globalization: Views from Ambassadors to China
2024
Editors: Henry Huiyao Wang, Mabel Lu Miao
As the world continues to recover from the fear and uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic, a new set of challenges like increased geopolitical tensions and climate change have become increasingly prominent. This open access book, which contains the views of ambassadors to Beijing on topics ranging from bilateral relations to potential cooperation, global development and even more of the most immediate issues, aims to help readers make sense of our changing world and China’s role in it.
The Ebb and Flow of Globalization: Chinese Perspectives on China’s Development and Role in the World
2022
Authors: Henry Huiyao Wang
This book focuses on globalization and China’s evolving role in the world, offering unique perspectives on a remarkable period, which saw the global landscape reshaped by China’s continued rise, intensifying great power competition, and a deadly pandemic.
Soft Power and Great-Power Competition: Shifting Sands in the Balance of Power Between the United States and China
2022
Authors: Joseph S. Nye
This open access book consists of essays selected from Joseph S. Nye, Jr.’s last three decades of writing and illustrate a variety of perspectives on the nature of power, the role of the United States in the world and US-China relations. Through this collection, it is hoped that readers will gain a better understanding of today’s global environment and find that while great power competition may be inevitable in a world as centers of power shift, cooperating to address transnational challenges can be a positive sum game.
China and the World in a Changing Context: Perspectives from Ambassadors to China
2022
Editors: Henry Huiyao Wang, Mabel Lu Miao
This book aims to present an overview of China and the world from diverse angles. It brings together essays by ambassadors to China on a range of bilateral and multilateral issues, including trade and investment, regional economic cooperation, sustainable development, technology and innovation, and entrepreneurship. Given their familiarity with China and extensive international experience, the insights of these ambassadors are useful for policymakers, academics, entrepreneurs, students, and anyone trying to make sense of our rapidly changing world.
Transition and Opportunity: Strategies from Business Leaders on Making the Most of China’s Future
2022
Editors: Henry Huiyao Wang, Mabel Lu Miao
This collection of essay aims to share these invaluable insights with a wider audience, offering balanced and diverse perspectives from companies and advocacy groups working on a range of issues related to China’s domestic development, international economic cooperation, and China-US competition. These insights are useful not only for the wider business community, but also for academics, policymakers, students, and anyone trying to deepen their understanding of this exciting period of “transition and opportunity,” and make the most of China’s bright future.
The Asian 21st Century
2022
Authors: Kishore Mahbubani
This open access book consists of essays written by Kishore Mahbubani to explore the challenges and dilemmas faced by the West and Asia in an increasingly interdependent world village and intensifying geopolitical competition.
Consensus or Conflict? China and Globalization in the 21st Century
2021
Editors: Henry Huiyao Wang, Alistair Michie
This open access book brings together leading international scholars and policy-makers to explore the challenges and dilemmas of globalization and governance in an era increasingly defined by economic crises, widespread populism, retreating internationalism, and a looming cold war between the United States and China. It provides the diversity of views on those widely concerned topics such as global governance, climate change, global health, migration, S&T revolution, financial market, and sustainable development.
The great challenge of globalization is to democratize it. Great corporations and their public and private armies have driven globalization from its inception in Columbus’s wake 500 years ago, when spice and sugar merchants and slavers first cooperated in risk-sharing by co-investing in each other’s merchant adventures, then in co-owning each other’s ships, which evolved into limited-liability corporations, which spawned the Goliaths of pre-industrial globalization: The British East and West Indies Corporations, and the Dutch East Indies Corporation. These corporations ran governments, fought and bought rulers, employed tens of thousands of soldiers, and founded countless family fortunes in their home countries, while impoverishing the areas they ruled. Sound familiar?
Across the globe, right-wing authoritarians exploit the results of this unhappy history. Left-wing democrats still empower it while nattering about empty reforms. Simply put, globalization is good for elites. Trade creates jobs, mostly bad jobs along with often precarious work for developing middle classes, but great fortunes for employers and traders. While centrist Democrats dream of bad jobs becoming good jobs, they are indeed dreaming, as they serve their rich donors in their sleep. The great challenge is for the Left to wake up to the causes of popular rage and despair, and channel it constructively against the forces that create it. Alas, this means they must develop new donors.