Once described by Naomi Klein as the “world’s leading no-nonsense revolutionary,” Walden Bello is one of the great critics of imperialism and corporate-led globalization.

A prolific writer and dogged activist, Bello has authored or coauthored more than twenty books since 1978 and stared down death threats and imprisonment for resisting human rights abuses in his native Philippines. Bello, a representative in the Philippines congress from 2009 to 2015, is currently a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

In his two new books, Bello confronts two of the most pressing questions in global politics today: what’s spurring the rise of the far right, and where is China heading? CounterRevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right, published earlier this month, is a comparative study of six cases “where counterrevolutionaries successfully gained political hegemony,” from Mussolini in the early 1920s to Duterte today. Paper Dragons: China and the Next Crash, released in August, looks at the financialization of the Chinese economy and argues that the ascendant superpower is a “prime candidate” for the next financial crash.