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When the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia in 1975, they inherited a war-ravaged and internationally isolated country. Pol Pot's government espoused the rhetoric of self-reliance, but Democratic Kampuchea was utterly dependent on Chinese foreign aid and technical assistance to survive. Yet in a markedly asymmetrical relationship between a modernizing, nuclear power and a virtually premodern state, China was largely unable to use its power to influence Cambodian politics or policy. In Brothers in Arms, Andrew Mertha traces this surprising lack of influence to variations between the Chinese and Cambodian institutions that administered military aid, technology transfer, and international trade. Today, China's extensive engagement with the developing world suggests an inexorably rising China in the process of securing a degree of economic and political dominance that was unthinkable even a decade ago. Yet, China's experience with its first-ever client state suggests that the effectiveness of Chinese foreign aid, and influence that comes with it, is only as good as the institutions that manage the relationship. By focusing on the links between China and Democratic Kampuchea, Mertha peers into the \"black box\" of Chinese foreign aid to illustrate how domestic institutional fragmentation limits Beijing's ability to influence the countries that accept its assistance.

Today opponents of large-scale dam projects in China, rather than being greeted with indifference or repression, are part of the hydropower policymaking process itself. What accounts for this dramatic change in this critical policy area surrounding China's insatiable quest for energy? InChina's Water Warriors, Andrew C. Mertha argues that as China has become increasingly market driven, decentralized, and politically heterogeneous, the control and management of water has transformed from an unquestioned economic imperative to a lightning rod of bureaucratic infighting, societal opposition, and open protest. Although bargaining has always been present in Chinese politics, more recently the media, nongovernmental organizations, and other activists-actors hitherto denied a seat at the table-have emerged as serious players in the policy-making process. Drawing from extensive field research in some of the most remote parts of Southwest China,China's Water Warriorscontains rich narratives of the widespread opposition to dams in Pubugou and Dujiangyan in Sichuan province and the Nu River Project in Yunnan province. Mertha concludes that the impact and occasional success of such grassroots movements and policy activism signal a marked change in China's domestic politics. He questions democratization as the only, or even the most illuminating, indicator of political liberalization in China, instead offering an informed and hopeful picture of a growing pluralization of the Chinese policy process as exemplified by hydropower politics. For the 2010 paperback edition, Mertha tests his conclusions against events in China since 2008, including the Olympics, the devastating 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, and the Uighar and Tibetan protests of 2008 and 2009.

May Mayko Ebihara (1934-2005) was the first American anthropologist to conduct ethnographic research in Cambodia.Svayprovides a remarkably detailed picture of individual villagers and of Khmer social structure and kinship, agriculture, politics, and religion. The world Ebihara described would soon be shattered by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. Fifty percent of the villagers perished in the reign of terror, including those who had been Ebihara's adoptive parents and grandparents during her fieldwork. Never before published as a book, Ebihara's dissertation served as the foundation for much of our subsequent understanding of Cambodian history, society, and politics.