With countries around the world in and out of lockdown due to COVID-19, this summer has provided an opportunity for many to catch up on some good books.

So if you’re looking for recommendations, look no further than the FCC’s long list of distinguished Zoom guests. From Noam Chomsky to Lingling Wei – themselves celebrated authors – we’ve collated a list of recommended summer reads as endorsed by our guest speakers.

Noam Chomsky

The world’s most influential public intellectual and linguist joined a Zoom webinar on August 7. He recommended two of his own books that examine the media: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, and Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies 

Mary E. Gallagher

Mary E. Gallagher, professor at The University of Michigan and director of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, joined a panel discussion on August 12 on the new China-U.S. Cold War. Her recommended reads exploring American history were Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild, and The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (Chicago Studies in American Politics) by Katherine J. Cramer.

Bonnie Glaser

Bonnie Glaser, senior adviser for Asia and the director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), appeared on a panel discussion on August 12 on the new China-U.S. Cold War. She recommended reads exploring American history. Her recommendations, which focused on China, were China’s Western Horizon: Beijing and the New Geopolitics of Eurasia by Daniel Markey; Superpower Interrupted: The Chinese History of the World by Michael Schuman; and The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu.

Stan Grant

Award-winning journalist and filmmaker, Stan Grant, appeared via Zoom on August 18, and recommended the following books: The Light That Failed: Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy  by Stephen Holmes and Ivan Krastev, Without God: Michel Houellebecq and Materialist Horror by Louis Betty, and The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century by Vladimir Tismaneanu.

Garry Kasparov

Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion, democracy campaigner and author of Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins, was our special guest on August 27 when he discussed China and U.S. politics. He was reading three books: Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold and Heroes: Mortals and Monsters, Quests and Adventures by Stephen Fry and Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts.

Kishore Mahbubani

Kishore Mahbubani, Asia scholar and author of Has China Won?: The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy, recommended A Different Sky by Meira Chand, a book that tells the story of his home country, Singapore, when he joined us on August 10.

Suzanne Nossel

Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America and author of Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All, appeared by Zoom on August 5 and recommended a book by our guest from a month earlier, John Bolton – The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir . She also endorsed Intimations: Six Essays by Zadie Smith.

Admiral Bill Owens

Admiral Bill Owens, formerly the vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, revealed he was reading America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy when he appeared at a September 2 webinar.

Brian Stelter

Appearing via Zoom on September 8, CNN’s Reliable Sources anchor said he’d be reading Bob Woodward’s new book, Rage, and No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer.

Joseph Stiglitz

The winner of 2001’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics appeared via Zoom on September 15 and recommended his most recent book, People Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent; and Paul Begala’s You’re Fired: The Perfect Guide to Beating Donald Trump.

Lingling Wei

Lingling Wei, Wall Street Journal reporter and author of Superpower Showdown: How the Battle Between Trump and Xi Threatens a New Cold War, admitted during an August 12 panel discussion that lockdown had introduced her to the children’s classic, The Lorax (Classic Seuss) by Dr Seuss. She was also reading Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang.

The issue of Taiwan’s political status is the bigger threat to an already tense relationship between China and the United States, even more so than sovereignty of the South China Sea, according to a former top U.S. military official.

Admiral Bill Owens talks to FCC President Jodi Schneider on September 2.

Admiral Bill Owens, formerly the vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an FCC webinar on Sept. 2 that Taiwan independence was more serious to China than issues in the South China Sea and the trade war with the U.S.

The claim comes the day after Beijing warned the United States to stop building its diplomatic relationship with Taiwan, branding the U.S.-Taiwan Relations Act as “illegal” and “invalid”. Taiwan is embroiled in a decades-long dispute with China over whether it will be repatriated with the mainland. The country is currently led by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which favours independence from China.

“Of course we should all be worried about what might happen in the South China Sea. A skirmish of some kind can turn into something that is much more serious,” said Owens, adding: “But in terms of the sheer seriousness of the way the government in Beijing takes the issue of Taiwan versus the issue of the South China Sea, I think they view Taiwan as much more important than the South China Sea.

“It’s all about Taiwan. It’s about what happens in Taiwan,” said Owens, who retired in 1996 after 35 years in the Navy. “The Chinese have said in many many ways… if there is a declaration of independence in Taiwan, we will take military action to preclude that from happening. Those are pretty serious words.”

If military action were to occur between the U.S. and China over Taiwan “our world will never be the same”, Owens said, adding that he hoped to see “appropriate diplomacy between the U.S. and China behind the scenes”, whether that be with the Trump administration or a Biden government.

In his new book, China-US 2039: The Endgame? Building Trust Over Future Decades, Owens, who embarked on a career in business after retiring from the military and founded Red Bison Technology Group in 2015, puts forward several policy recommendations that could steer the two countries away from conflict.

He argued that thinking long term – “the Chinese do this very well” – is the key to cementing closer diplomatic relations and suggested that over the next 20 years, America and China could achieve improved ties.

Owens, whose 35-year service in the U.S. Navy included participation in Vietnam and Desert Storm, spoke about Hong Kong’s recently enacted national security law and said it was his view that China wanted the city to remain a thriving international financial hub.

“I think Hong Kong has always needed a form of a national security law like some of the things that are in the national security law that was forced on Hong Kong by the Chinese. It’s too bad it had to happen that way and I think from the West standpoint I would pray that a year from now we will not see as many issues of China interfering in Hong Kong as much of the Western press would have us believe,” he said.

Owens said he thinks the Chinese government understands “the great importance of Hong Kong in the international trade and monetary systems”.

“I couldn’t imagine that they would want to do anything that looks like a Tiananmen Square or an involvement that seems too much,” he said.

Responding to a question about whether President Donald Trump could be removed from the White House by force if he were to lose in November and contest the results of the presidential election, Owens pointed to non-military tools to potentially remove the president.

“I’m sure the Joint Chiefs all feel … that it is there to serve the nation – it’s not a Trump military or a Biden military, it’s a U.S. military and it will be very difficult to get them to do anything that is viewed as political. So I pray that what you suggest doesn’t happen,” he said.

When asked who was winning the 5G race – America or China – Owens, a former CEO of telecoms firm, Nortel, said he thought “it’s a tie” but made an impassioned case for the implementation of Wi-Fi worldwide.

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Leaving Hong Kong would be a “wise choice” for the city’s prominent pro-democracy activists rather than face prison or worse, says former chess world champion turned democracy campaigner Garry Kasparov.

Garry Kasparov talks to FCC first-vice president, Eric Wishart.

Speaking at an FCC webinar on August 27, Kasparov – himself exiled from his home country of Russia – said he hoped that a new wave of democracy movements around the world would make it safe for activists to return and rebuild Hong Kong.

Kasparov, who at the age of 22 became the world’s youngest ever chess champion, is a vocal human rights activist and was one of the first prominent Soviets to call for democratic reform. He was an early supporter of Boris Yeltsin’s push to break up the Soviet Union.

A fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kasparov left his home in Moscow to live in New York following a crackdown on dissidents in Russia.

He was speaking in a week that saw two Democratic Party lawmakers – Lam Cheuk-ting and Ted Hui – arrested in connection with last year’s pro-democracy demonstrations.

Kasparov, chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, said he hoped to see a “new wave of democracy movements” that would bring dictatorships to an end. This, he said, could herald a new era for Hong Kong.

When asked whether pro-democracy activists should seek exile, Kasparov said when he “recognised it would be jail or worse”, he left Russia.

He added: “The prominent people who believe they can play a role in rebuilding Hong Kong, I would say probably it’s a wise choice (to leave). China’s regime is not at the stage where they care about creating martyrs. You stay there, you fight, you’ll be in jail – you mentioned mainland China – maybe you will die.

“So I think it’s important that the core of this group is preserved because there will be a moment – maybe sooner than we think because as we can see in Belarus, these regimes are not stable and Putin now is experiencing great problems. Hopefully now … you see this the trend is going back to the eighties like a pendulum of history when we have a new wave of democracy movements around the world and when we’ll see these dictatorships are losing the momentum that unfortunately they gained on the geopolitical stage. Then I wish there will be enough people in Hong Kong to come back.”

Describing himself as “an incorrigible optimist by nature”, Kasparov said he believed “that China will also be free”.

Kasparov spoke about his desire to see President Donald Trump lose the November election. He discussed Trump’s close relationship with Putin – “please don’t call him president – he is what he is: a dictator” – comparing it to a KGB handler and his asset. He said he suspected that Trump’s connections to Russia “started much earlier than 2008/2009 when Russian money saved his crumbling empire from collapse”.

However, he was adamant that he would not visit Hong Kong in the future.

“I think that Hong Kong might not be on my travel list… I doubt very much in the foreseeable future I’ll be able to set my foot on Chinese soil or the soil controlled by the Chinese Communist Party,” he said.

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The prospect of an indigenous Australian becoming prime minister or “anywhere near” is a long way off, according to award-winning journalist and author, Stan Grant.

Discussing the recent announcement of US Senator Kamala Harris as presidential hopeful Joe Biden’s running mate, the broadcaster said that while there were similarities between America’s struggle with racism and that of his own country, the chances of an Aborigine taking high office were remote.

“It has taken over 100 years for an indigenous person to make a federal government minister. There are now a few more indigenous represented at state and federal level, but we’re a long way from getting to the point where an indigenous politician would get anywhere near becoming prime minister in Australia,” he said, adding: “It’s something I can’t even envisage at the moment.”

Talking to CNN anchor, Kristie Lu Stout, he said the appointment of Harris, the daughter of African-American and Asian immigrants, was an “extraordinary achievement” and “a reflection, I think, of America’s journey”.

Grant, who recently became the first indigenous host in the 59-year history of the ABC Four Corners documentary program, shared his experiences of racism growing up and discussed what the Black Lives Matters movement means to indigenous Australians.

He said Americans and Australians share a history of institutionalised and structural racism that limits opportunities in life and places first nation people on the margins of society. The killing of George Floyd during his arrest in Minnesota sparked a global outrage that kicked off protests in several countries. For Grant, who has been at the forefront of the fight for the rights of indigenous Australians for decades, it was a pivotal moment.

“That experience of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter spoke to me very personally. It spoke to our shared history,” he said.

Grant told of his own experiences of racism growing up in Australia, where, as part of a group of Aboriginal school children, he was told by his headmaster that he’d never amount to anything. After relocating to Canberra, he and his siblings found themselves “in a world that was overwhelmingly white”.

And those in power in Australia are still overwhelmingly white, Grant said, pointing to institutions from government to media. Yet he said even today, to discuss racism in Australia was “a difficult conversation”.

“It’s a country where people come to escape history, not to confront history,” he said. “Yet if we don’t do that as a nation then we are forever diminished. You cannot keep people in chains forever and not think that at some point it isn’t going to come to the surface, and that’s what we’re seeing in the United States.”

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A win by Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala D. Harris in November would likely not change America’s tough line toward China, but the tone would soften and the U.S. would seek more allies against Beijing, according a panel of experts at an FCC webinar.

The three August 12 panelists – political scientist Mary E. Gallagher, journalist Lingling Wei and Asia expert Bonnie Glaser – all agreed that although presidential hopeful Biden was unlikely to dramatically change some policies if he were elected, his administration could move to stabilise the frail relationship.

The three were speaking the day after Biden announced Senator Kamala D. Harris as his running mate. She is the first Black woman and the first Asian American to appear on a major-party presidential ticket.

Relations between the United States and China have soured since President Donald Trump took office, resulting in a trade war, tit-for-tat expulsions of journalists, and more recently, sanctions over the new national security law in Hong Kong.

Wei, an award-winning correspondent for the Wall Street Journal who herself became a casualty of the deteriorating relations when she was expelled from China earlier this year along with colleagues, warned that Trump’s final days in office posed a major threat to relations with China.

“I think Beijing welcomes a Biden administration. The next 90 days… are going to be the most dangerous time for China,” said Wei, the co-author of a book on Sino-U.S. relations, Superpower Showdown. “The South China Morning Post story about Xi Jinping instructing the Chinese military not to fire the first shot, I think that’s really a sign of how nervous the leadership is about this whole relationship completely getting out of control. They’re trying very hard to show restraint.”

Gallagher, a professor at The University of Michigan, has been director of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies since 2008, said: “I think it’s a super exciting ticket and I love that a black Jamaican Asian child of immigrants is the safe choice for Joe Biden. One thing that will be different and I would certainly advise is to stop thinking about China as the Soviet Union. It is nothing like the Soviet Union, it is not going to disappear. When we talk about the Cold War, it ended when the Soviet Union disappeared. China is not going to disappear.”

She added that she would advise the Biden administration to “stand up to China on human rights issues and freedom of expression and freedom of speech”.

Biden would not be seen “on a daily basis hammering China” in the way that Trump has, said Glaser, adding that a sustained dialogue mechanism would likely be restructured under Biden in an “effort to resurrect some cooperation with China”.

Echoing Wei’s warning over the run-up to the November election, Glaser said that U.S. pressure on China would increase now that Trump has declared he no longer has a good relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“Now he’s really taken the gloves off, and this has enabled other people in the administration to do things, for example, regarding Xinjiang and Hong Kong that the president was not on board with when the trade negotiations were going on. In that period, we’re going to see a lot more ramping up of pressure,” she predicted.

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Hong Kong has become a political football between China and the West, according to author and Asia scholar, Kishore Mahbubani.

It would be a “huge mistake” for China to try to eradicate what makes Hong Kong so special, he told an August 10 FCC webinar, and China must act with restraint as the West weighs in on the row over the national security law.

“Hong Kong has become a political football … when players play football they get a lot of fun kicking the ball but after a while the ball breaks down. It’s important for Hong Kong to steer itself out of being a political football as soon as possible,” he said.

Prof Mahbubani, a distinguished fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, said that although Hong Kong was a “piece of treasure” to China, the people of the city “should not force the leaders to choose between the interests of 1.4 billion people in China and 7 million people in Hong Kong”.

When asked if he thought China was trying to eradicate Hong Kong’s culture and identity, Prof Mahbubani warned it would be a “huge mistake” on China’s part.

“Even though the Chinese have tried very hard to get Shanghai to grow as a financial centre, you can see that Shanghai just cannot keep doing what Hong Kong is doing. Hong Kong is really at the end of the day a piece of treasure for China and it will be huge mistake for China to destroy that culture, that separateness.

“For the same reason, I think it’s also a huge mistake in the West – the United States and U.K., and all – to continue using Hong Kong as a political football. It’s in the global interest for Hong Kong to be one step in, one step out as part of the One Country, Two Systems framework. We should globally recognise that it’s good for China, good for the West and good for the rest of the world,” he said.

Prof Mahbubani’s latest book, Has China Won? analyses the tensions between the United States and the world’s second largest economy. In it, he argues that the real question – “one that never surfaces in America” – is whether the United States can lose.

“America has got so used to winning the idea of losing doesn’t come up,” he said, adding that 100 years of growth into the world’s largest economy had made the country complacent. His book, which he said he hoped the Trump and subsequent Administration would read, would help them to “at least think about the possibility of being number two”.

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The removal of pro-democracy books from Hong Kong libraries following the implementation of the national security law was alarming, says the author of a new book on free speech.

Suzanne Nossel told an FCC webinar that PEN America – a non-profit organisation that defends free expression and of which she is CEO – had been documenting events in the city in recent years and that she was saddened to see Hong Kong’s “vibrant intellectual life… steadily shut down”.

The author of Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All, noted that we are in “a moment of global retreat for democracy and freedom”, naming other countries, including the Philippines where freedom of speech and press freedom under threat. Maria Ressa, a regular FCC speaker and founder of the news website Rappler, is currently appealing a conviction for cyber libel there.

The effect of the ongoing encroachment on free expression in Hong Kong would inevitably make it difficult to sustain any space for open dialogue in the city, she added.

In her book, Nossel addresses call outs, cancel culture, cultural appropriation, online content moderation, how to address hateful speech, and why we need to do more to amplify lesser heard voices. She outlines principles for how curb hate speech while protecting freedom of speech. One example is how to apologise having published or spoken a controversial opinion that has offended others.

“A genuine apology can go a long way and it should count for a lot,” she said, touching on the current trend of cancel culture that has resulted in the resignations of several high-profile media figures responsible for publishing controversial op-eds.

Nossel, who served in the Obama and Clinton administrations, criticised President Donald Trump for his inflammatory rhetoric around race and women, and addressed the “catalytic sea change” among Americans, sparked by the death of George Floyd.

You can watch the video here

Improved relations between the United States and China is vital to global stability, according to economist and author, Professor Jeffrey Sachs.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs is interviewed by Club President, Jodi Schneider.

Speaking during a July 20 FCC webinar on how global cooperation is needed to solve some of the challenges currently facing us, Prof. Sachs said that if former Vice President, Joe Biden, were to win November’s election, he would advise him to work on relations between the world’s two largest economies.

“I think the U.S./China relations are so vital for the world that it’s extremely important to set in place a thorough and high-level, extensive and serious interaction between the two countries,” Prof Sachs said. “Between the U.S. and China, the world is at stake.”

Prof. Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University in New York, opened the discussion with the assertion that if President Donald Trump were reelected, the world would likely spiral out of control. Referring to the president on several occasions as ‘mentally ill’, Prof. Sachs said Trump’s ‘dangerous view of the world’ had spilled into global politics, leading to polarisation instead of the cooperation needed to face into current issues including the coronavirus pandemic.

“We cannot have [global] cooperation with Trump as president,” he said, adding that America’s ‘unilateral attacks’ on China meant ‘there can be no deal-making’.

Trump had shown ‘zero restraint’ in governance over the last three years, relying on executive orders and emergency decrees as he frequently bypassed the Senate, Prof. Sachs said. When asked whether he had considered any ‘nightmare scenarios’ of what Trump might do in his final days in office should he accept defeat at the election, Prof. Sachs answered: “Given his psychopathology, he is capable of lashing out in a serious way.” He speculated that this could be in the form of sparking a diplomatic crisis or making an international declaration of war.

Prof. Sachs, a best-selling author and former adviser to three United Nations Secretaries-General, attacked Trump for his Administration’s slow and chaotic response to the COVID-19 outbreak, which at the time of writing was responsible for the deaths of more than 140,000 American citizens.

“Our country was completely incapable of addressing the epidemic,” he said, adding: “Trump, because he is a mentally ill man, he is truly incompetent because everything is viewed through the lens of ‘how does this look on the daily news?’”.

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