Prem Shankar Jha has taught as a Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. He has also been a Visiting Fellow at Nuffi eld College, Oxford, 1976–77; Visiting Fellow of the Centre for International Studies, Harvard University 1995, and of the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, 2006–07. He has also been Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia (Government department) from 1997 to 2000.

Prem Shankar Jha did an MA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Magdalen College, Oxford, UK in 1961. After working for fi ve years for the United Nations Development Programme, in New York, Damascus and Syria, he returned to India to pursue a career in journalism. He has been the Editor of The Economic Times, The Financial Express, and Delhi’s main paper, The Hindustan Times. He was Economic Editor of the Times of India from 1981 to 1986.

In 1990, he was the Information Adviser to the Prime Minister of India, V. P. Singh. Currently, he is a columnist for Outlook; The Hindustan Times, The Deccan Herald and Dainik Bhaskar (Hindi). He is a prolifi c author with many books to his right: India: A Political Economy of Stagnation (1980); In the Eye of the Cyclone: The Crisis in Indian Democracy (1993); A Jobless Future: Political Causes of Economic Crisis (India) (2002); The Perilous Road to the Market: A Political Economy of Reform in Russia, India and China (2002); Kashmir 1947- The Origins of a Dispute (2003). His most recent book, The Twilight of the Nation State: Globalisation Chaos and War was published in 2006, by Pluto Press, London, Sage Publications, India and the University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbour, Michigan, US.

Managed Chaos reads into the resounding events of Chinese politics and economy, ending the schizophrenia that the readers have lived with. It delves deep into both elements: the economic narrative that China has sustained a near 10 percent growth rate for 30 years and the political narrative that China is an increasingly fragile state, trapped in an incomplete transition from a totalitarian to a democratic market economy. For the first time, in his reading of China, the author consolidates this paradox by inferring that the cause behind both the growth and the political discontent is the politics of China.