NPQ, Winter 2010

BACK STORY: In 1989, Francis Fukuyama wrote a book about it being an era of not just the end of the Cold War, but the end of history, that is, “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” This issue discussed that viewpoint 20 years later, and also asserted that China was now rising as the superior civilization in a post-American civilization.

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From the beginning of conceptualizing and producing this cover, I had planned to use the modern city of Shanghai—with all of its new and magnificent buildings as a testimony to its success—emerging from a broken segment of the Berlin Wall. When I found the picture of the Chinese woman jumping for joy, I cut her out of the bigger picture and placed her in the center of the cover, as a symbol of gleeful China. I purposefully sized and positioned the type to emphasize “End of History.”