China and the Shaping of Indonesia provides a meticulous account of versatile interplay between knowledge, power, ethnicity, and diplomacy in the context of Sino-Indonesian interactions between 1949 and 1965. Taking a transnational approach that views Asia as a flexible geographical and political construct, this book addresses three central questions. First, what images of China were prevalent in Indonesia, and how were narratives about China construed and reconstructed? Second, why did the China Metaphor — the projection of an imagined foreign land onto the local intellectual and political milieu — become central to Indonesians’ conception of themselves and a cause for self criticism and rediscovery? Third, how was the China Metaphor incorporated into Indonesia’s domestic politics and culture, and how did it affect the postcolonial transformation, the fate of the ethnic Chinese minority, and Sino-Indonesian diplomacy? Employing a wide range of hitherto untapped primary materials in Indonesian and Chinese as well as his own interviews, Hong Liu presents a compelling argument that many influential politicians and intellectuals, among them Sukarno, Hatta, and Pramoedya, utilized China as an alternative model of modernity in conceiving and developing projects of social engineering, cultural regeneration and political restructuring that helped shape the trajectory of modern Indonesia. The multiplicity of China thus constituted a site of political contestations and intellectual imaginations. The study is a major contribution both to the intellectual and political history of Indonesia and to the reconceptualization of Asian studies; it also serves as a timely reminder of the importance of historicizing China’s rising soft power in a transnational Asia.

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The author of this book is the original proponent of China’s exchange rate system reform announced in 2005. This book will discuss

• The transitional, medium-term and long-term designs of the reform;
• China’s achievements and mistakes on the reform;
• China’s banking reform and its lessons to other emerging economies;
• Maintaining a certain trade surplus as a dynamically optimal choice for China;
• China’s stock market bubble and the gradual bubble squeezing strategy;
• China’s property inflation and its solution;
• China’s fiscal and monetary policies during and after the global financial tsunami;
• Risk of global asset inflation, CPI inflation and cycle of exchange rate after the financial tsunami; and
• Likelihood of an asset bubble and then a crisis in economies outside the US during the overheated phase of the recovery.

Through these discussions, the author hopes to share his knowledge on macroeconomic policy management accumulated over the past thirty five years. In particular, he would like to share his insights on macroeconomic policy management before, during and after the asset inflation era or the crisis period. He would also like to warn policy makers and financial investors on the likelihood of an asset bubble and then a crisis in economies outside the US. The author hopes this book could eventually stimulate the emergence of “macroeconomic policy management” as a new and important discipline in economics.

While the focus of the book is on macroeconomic policy management, it also discusses important lessons and strategies on share and property investments.  Thus, economists, policy makers, central bank officials, economics students, business and finance professionals, individual investors and academia in other disciplines will find the book useful.

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