This book would not have been written without a generous research grant from the Smith Richardson Foundation. We also thank the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University and the George H. W. Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University for financial support.
We are grateful to the coauthor of The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress, Robert S. Ross, and to its publisher, Steve Forman of W. W. Norton, for permission to embark upon a second edition, which evolved into this book. Steven I. Levine was involved in drafting some of the chapters in the early stages of the first edition, and some of his distinctive language survives into this book. He also gave valuable comments on the whole manuscript. The following individuals provided much appreciated comments or other help with various chapters: Robbie Barnett, Michael Beckley, Dennis Blasko, Richard Bush, Chang Kuei-min, Roger Cliff, Cortez Cooper, Paul Godwin, David Kang, Hua-Yu Li, Frank Miller, Andrew Oros, Joanne Estrallita Ou, Alexander Pantsov, Morris Rossabi, Tetsuo Shibata, Shiau-chi Shen, Su Chi, Larry Wortzel, and Zong Hairen.
We also thank Victor Alfaro, Rouben Azizian, Alice Ba, Rommel Banlaoi, Samuel Berkowitz, Jae Ho Chung, Yong Deng, Bruce Dickson, Charles Hooper, Roy Kamphausen, Heung Kyu Kim, Taeho Kim, Heino Klink, Mohan Malik, Evan Medeiros, Lyle Morris, Ren Mu, Ian Storey, and Suisheng Zhao. We appreciate the help of numerous experts inside China who agreed to be interviewed by Andrew Scobell, but who must remain anonymous. In addition, Scobell thanks Professor Zhu Feng of Peking University for graciously hosting him during an extended research visit to China in 2008.
We are indebted to a group of resourceful research assistants who made significant contributions at various phases of this project: Serena Ho, Chiu-yi Ko, Brandon Krueger, Cynthia Lee, Daniel Paluch, Nicholas Reves, Cristine Salo, and Gregory Stevenson. We are grateful to students in Andrew Nathan’s Chinese foreign policy class in spring 2011, who caught typos and made other suggestions and corrections.