Overreach

The award-winning Overreach combines Susan Shirk's decades of research and analysis with her direct, hands-on experience to illuminate China's evolving role on the world's stage, and particularly the deterioration of its relations with the United States. Shirk opens the "black box" of China's political system, revealing what lies behind China's aim to expand both soft and hard power abroad, and how the United States might respond.

Susan L. Shirk is a Research Professor and Chair of the 21st Century China Center at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, UC San Diego. Shirk is the author of China: Fragile Superpower, and The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China. From 1997-2000, she served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs, with responsibility for China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mongolia.

- Prologue: How China Lost the West
- 1. The Origins of Overreach
- 2. Deng's Ghost
- 3. Inside the Black Box
- 4. The Rise and Fall of Collective Leadership
- 5. Loss of Restraint
- 6. Stability Maintenance
- 7. Strongman Rule
- 8. Going to Extremes
- 9. State pf Paranoia
- 10. Downward Spiral
- Conclusion: Overreach and Overreaction