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China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World
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Manufacturer: Scribner
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.951
EAN: 9780743257350
ISBN: 0743257359
Label: Scribner
Manufacturer: Scribner
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 368
Publication Date: 2006-04-11
Publisher: Scribner
Studio: Scribner
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Editorial Reviews:
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China today is visible everywhere -- in the news, in the economic pressures battering the globe, in our workplaces, and in every trip to the store. Provocative, timely, and essential -- and updated with new statistics and information -- this dramatic account of China's growing dominance as an industrial superpower by journalist Ted C. Fishman explains how the profound shift in the world economic order has occurred -- and why it already affects us all. How has an enormous country once hobbled by poverty and Communist ideology come to be the supercharged center of global capitalism? What does it mean that China now grows three times faster than the United States? Why do nearly all of the world's biggest companies have large operations in China? What does the corporate march into China mean for workers left behind in America, Europe, and the rest of the world? Meanwhile, what makes China's emerging corporations so dangerously competitive? What will happen when China manufactures nearly everything -- computers, cars, jumbo jets, and pharmaceuticals -- that the United States and Europe can, at perhaps half the cost? How do these developments reach around the world and straight into all of our lives? These are ground-shaking questions, and China, Inc. provides answers. Veteran journalist Ted C. Fishman shows how China will force all of us to make big changes in how we think about ourselves as consumers, workers, citizens, and even as parents. The result is a richly engaging work of penetrating, up-to-the-minute reportage and brilliant analysis that will forever change how readers think about America's future.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: China's Recent Winning Hands
Comment: China, Inc. is primarily a compendium of facts, figures, stories, and statements that give the reader a sense of the amazing and overwhelming growth and change that is taking place in China. It is worth absorbing all the information to better understand the economic forces that are changing our lives, and those of people throughout the world, in irreversible ways. And the reader is left with the correct impression that this is only the beginning. What product will NOT be made in China in a few years? In the long run, other than natural resources, what CAN we sell back to China so they don't use all those dollars to simply purchase large pieces of America? Political and economic realities aside, we have to be impressed with the accomplishments of the people of China. Motivated by a desire for a better life the Chinese people are creating a new society at warp speed using an almost-forgotten tool: Hard Work. Members of Western entitlement societies may want to sit up and take notice. The author points out that the jury is still out on how China's capitalist-like economic life ultimately will affect the monolithic political structure of the country. In the competitive international marketplace, there will be winners and losers. For now, the Chinese are on a winning streak, and our response should be more than complaints that they don't always play by the rules. Americans are losing high-paying manufacturing jobs to China, while "saving money" buying more goods imported from China. This book is worth reading.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Rapid Rise to Super Power
Comment: Ted C. Fishman, author of China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World, like Ted Plafker and James McGregor, is a journalist who spent valuable time in China and then wrote a very insightful book to share his findings.
Fishman focuses in on China's shift from empire to poverty-stricken amongst third-world countries to an industrial super-power. The author also focuses on the threat to the Western world of China's emergence as a global economic power.
He discusses the challenge of trying to compete with China on pricing because its enormous labor supply allows it to price its products 30% to 50% less than what they could be produced for in the U.S.
Fishman also does a wonderful job describing the entrepreneurial spirit of the Chinese people - a quest for success and quick payoffs and determined pursuit of opportunities.
The book also takes a tough look at such issues as the failure to adequately protect intellectual property, pollution, and limited currency conversion from the Yuan.
China Inc. is multi-dimensional in content but yet very easy to read.
By Gunjan Bagla
Author of Doing Business in 21st Century India
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Challenging Portrait
Comment: Fishman's book is aimed at people who have not closely followed China's recent economic miracle. It provides both statistical, eyewitness, and anecdotal information about the size, breadth, and seeming inevitability of the impact of China's booming manufacturing economy in the entire world. These impacts include everyone from rural Chinese who are engaged in an urban migration of unprecedented proportion to third-world businesses whose low wages and efficiency are not enough to stave off aggressive Chinese competitors to multinational business executives who are impelled to quickly get into the China game. The totality of all the facts is a bit overwhelming.
While the waxing of economic might brings with it greater political power, the reader can only wonder how this power will be used. Certainly it will be used to continue to feed the economic machine, but what is left of the almost 60-year-old revolution? It seems it is only a latent Chinese nationalism, and no longer a Communist agenda. The author seems to suggest that America's and the world's greatest anxiety should be over getting out-hustled by Chinese entrepreneurs who at first worked around a government hostile to private enterprise and now work in concert with a government committed to build world-class prosperity by every means of fair and unfair competition. It raises the question of how we expect American companies to compete when they face burdensome regulations, high labor and benefit costs, indifferent employees, and costly consumer lawsuits.
Fishman's work is thought-provoking, but does not go too far at suggesting where current trends may be taking us all. Perhaps no one really knows, since extrapolating trend lines indefinitely always leads to error. While free trade produces efficiencies that lift everyone's standard of living, it also is likely to levelize our incomes. While the Chinese will move to a more prosperous lifestyle in emulation of the West, our lifestyle may change to become more like that of the Chinese. In a few years an updated account by Mr. Fishman would be an interesting new snapshot.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A warning to the US
Comment: China has the world's most rapidly changing large economy, Fishman details how hundreds of millions of peasants have migrated from rural to urban areas to find manufacturing jobs, providing an unlimited, low-wage workforce to power China's economy. "No country has ever before made a better run at climbing every step of economic development all at once," he writes, in China, Inc. China invites large corporations to manufacture their products in their country--simply put, American companies can't compete with wages as low as 25 cents an hour and lack of regulation and oversight, so are forced to move their operations to China or completely change the focus of their business. Once the companies are in China, within a few months are the Chinese are copying and competing against the same companies they attracted.
China is currently the largest maker of toys, clothing, and consumer electronics, and is swiftly moving up the ladder in car production, computer manufacturing, biotechnology, aerospace, telecommunications, and other sectors thanks to low-cost, high-tech factories. China is also where the world is investing. In 2004, for instance, the city of Shanghai alone attracted over $12 billion in direct foreign investment, roughly the same amount as all of Indonesia and Mexico received. In tracing China's ascendancy over the past 30 years (with annual growth of an astonishing 9.5 percent), Fishman presents a flood of facts, figures, forecasts, and anecdotes and examines the implications of this unprecedented growth for China, the U.S., and the rest of the world. A great read and again exposes some of the themes brought brilliantly by Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great service
Comment: Great service, the book came in perfect condition and just in time to use for my paper. Thanks :-) !!!
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