This is a best-seller in China and a geopolitical book for our times. As a leading thinker from China, Zhang Weiwei provides an original, comprehensive and engrossing study on the rise of China and its effective yet controversial model of development, and the book has become a centerpiece of an unfolding debate within China on the nature and future of the world's most populous nation and its possible global impact. China's rise, according to Zhang, is not the rise of an ordinary country, but the rise of a different type of country, a country sui generis, a civilizational state, a new model of development and a new political discourse which indeed questions many of the Western assumptions about democracy, good governance and human rights. The book is as analytical as it is provocative, and should be required reading for everyone concerned with the rise of China and its global implications.

Zhang Weiwei is a professor of international relations at Fudan University and a senior research fellow at the Chunqiu Institute, China. He is concurrently a senior fellow at the Centre for Asian Studies, Geneva, and a visiting professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations. He has written extensively in English and Chinese on China's economic and political reform, China's development model and comparative politics. He worked as a senior English interpreter for Deng Xiaoping and other Chinese leaders in the mid-1980s.