Gregory Chow: China's Economic Transformation
Barry Naughton: The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth
This comprehensive overview of the modern Chinese economy by a noted expert on China's economic development offers a quality and breadth of coverage not found in any other English-language text. In The Chinese Economy, Barry Naughton provides both an engaging, broadly focused introduction to China's economy since 1949 and original insights based on his own extensive research. The book will be an essential resource for students, teachers, scholars, business people, and policymakers. It is suitable for classroom use for undergraduate or graduate courses.
After presenting background material on the pre-1949 economy and the industrialization, reform, and market transition that have taken place since, the book examines different aspects of the modern Chinese economy. It analyzes patterns of growth and development, including population growth and the one-child family policy; the rural economy, including agriculture and rural industrialization; industrial and technological development in urban areas; international trade and foreign investment; macroeconomic trends and cycles and the financial system; and the largely unaddressed problems of environmental quality and the sustainability of growth.
The text is notable also for placing China's economy in interesting comparative contexts, discussing it in relation to other transitional or developing economies and to such advanced industrial countries as the United States and Japan. It provides both a broad historical and macro perspective as well as a focused examination of the actual workings of China's complex and dynamic economic development. Interest in the Chinese economy will only grow as China becomes an increasingly important player on the world's stage. This book will be the standard reference for understanding and teaching about the next economic superpower. (****)
Stephanie Donald: The State of China Atlas: Mapping the World's Fastest Growing Economy
China is the world's fastest-growing economy and the second-largest trading nation. With its entrepreneurial outlook and population of 1.3 billion, it offers unique opportunities for domestic and overseas investors. This dynamic volume provides an abundance of information on China's new wealth, growing unemployment, migration to the cities, and trade disputes. It dramatically reveals China's clashes of priorities: between population growth and the one-child family policies; human rights and political stability; energy needs and the environment. Maps and graphics beautifully illustrate current trends in areas such as the gender gap, national minorities, traffic, investment, marriage and divorce, education, tobacco trade and use, religion, AIDS and SARS, ageing and dependency, and cell phone use.
(***)
Minxin Pei: China's Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy
(***)
James Mann: The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression
In The China Fantasy, bestselling author James Mann examines the evolution of American policy toward China and asks, Does it make sense? What are our ideas and hidden assumptions about China? In this vigorous look at China’s political evolution and its future, Mann explores two scenarios popular among the policy elite. The Soothing Scenario contends that the successful spread of capitalism will gradually bring about a development of democratic institutions, free elections, independent judiciary, and a progressive human rights policy. In the Upheaval Scenario, the contradictions in Chinese society between rich and poor, between cities and the countryside, and between the openness of the economy and the unyielding Leninist system will eventually lead to a revolution, chaos, or collapse.
Against this backdrop, Mann poses a third scenario and asks, What will happen if Chinese capitalism continues to evolve and expand but the government fails to liberalize? What then and why should this third scenario matter to Americans? Mann explores this alternate possibility and—in this must-read book for anyone interested in international politics—offers a startling vision of our future with China that will have a profound impact for decades to come. (****)
George, Zhibin Gu: "China and the New World Order: How Entrepreneurship,Globalization, and Borderless Business Are Reshaping China and the World"
(***)
Robert G. Sutter: China's Rise in Asia: Promises and Perils
In this first sustained, single-authored assessment of China's expanding influence in Asia in the post Cold War period, respected analyst Robert Sutter draws on his extensive experience to explore the current debate on China's military and economic rise and its meaning for U.S. interests. Examining in detail China's current and historical relations with the key countries of Asia, he finds a range of motivations underlying China's recent initiatives. Some incline Chinese policy to be cooperative with the United States, others to be competitive and confrontational. Sutter's nuanced study shows that U.S. influence continues to dominate Asia and plays a critical role in determining China's cooperative or confrontational approach. He argues that the Bush administration's policies of firmness and cooperation have encouraged China to stay on a generally constructive track in the region. (****)
Avery Goldstein: Rising To The Challenge: China's Grand Strategy And International Security (Studies in Asian Security)
China’s increasing economic and military capabilities have attracted much attention in recent years. How should the world, especially the United States, respond to this emerging great power? A sensible response requires not only figuring out the speed and extent of China’s rise, but also answering a question that has received much less attention: What is China’s grand strategy?
This book describes and explains the grand strategy China’s leaders have adopted to pursue their country’s interests in the international system of the 21st century. The author argues that their strategy is designed to foster favorable conditions for continuing China’s modernization while also reducing the risk that others will decide a rising China is a threat that must be countered. Why did China’s leaders settle on this grand strategy and what are its key elements? What alternatives were available? Is the current approach yielding the results China anticipated? What does this grand strategy imply for international peace and security in the coming years—and, most critically, what are the prospects for an increasingly prominent China and a dominant United States to rise to the challenge of managing their inevitable disagreements? (***)
var: Power Shift: China and Asia's New Dynamics
The dynamics of international relations in Asia are undergoing broad and fundamental changes that are reverberating around the world. Primary among the catalysts of change in the region is the rise of China as the engine of regional economic growth, as a major military power, as a significant voice in regional diplomacy, and as a proactive power in multilateral institutions. With in-depth assessments by seventeen of the world's leading experts on China's foreign relations, this groundbreaking volume offers the most timely, up-to-date, and comprehensive analysis of China's emerging influence on international relations in Asia.
The contributors explore the various dimensions of China's rise, its influence on the region, the consequences for the United States, and alternative models of the evolving Asian order. What emerges is a clear picture of China increasingly at the center of the regional web; while North Korean and Taiwan could erupt in conflict, the predominant trend in Asia is the creation of an extensive web of mutual interdependence among states and non-state actors. Providing the best overview we currently have of the changing political balance on the Asian continent, this accessible volume will be essential reading for anyone concerned with contemporary Asian affairs. (***)
var: New Directions in the Study of China's Foreign Policy
This book brings together several generations of specialists in Chinese foreign policy to present readers with current research on both new and traditional topics. The authors draw on a wide range of new materials—archives, documents, memoirs, opinion polls, and interviews—to examine traditional issues such as China's use of force from 1959 to the present, and new issues such as China's response to globalization, its participation in several international economic institutions, and the role of domestic opinion in its foreign policy.
The book also offers a number of suggestions about the topics, methods, and sources that the Chinese foreign policy field needs to examine and address if it is to grow in richness, rigor, and relevance. (****)
Jonathan D. Spence: The Search for Modern China
From Publishers Weekly
Spence advocates democracy in China and presents contemporary views of its oppressive history, including Chiang Kai-Shek's fascist supporters and the bloodbath known as the Cultural Revolution. "A splendid achievement, this sweeping . . . epic chronicle compresses four centuries of political and social change into a sharply observant narrative," said PW . Photos.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. (***)
Ted C. Fishman: China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World
From Publishers Weekly
A lively, fact-packed account of China's spectacular, 30-year transformation from economic shambles following Mao's Cultural Revolution to burgeoning market superpower, this book offers a torrent of statistics, case studies and anecdotes to tell a by now familiar but still worrisome story succinctly. Paid an average of 25 cents an hour, China's workers are not the world's cheapest, but no nation can match this "docile and capable industrial workforce, groomed by generations of government-enforced discipline," as veteran business reporter (and Chicago Mercantile trading firm founder) Fishman characterizes it. Since Mexican wages were (at the time) four times those of China, NAFTA's impact has been dwarfed by China's explosive growth (about 9.5% a year), and corporations and entrepreneurs operating in China have few worries about minimum wages, pensions, benefits, unions, antipollution laws or worker safety regulations. For the U.S., Fishman predicts more of what we're already seeing: deficits, declining wages and the squeezing of the middle class. His solutions (revitalize education, close the trade gap) are not original, but some of his statistics carry a jolt: since 1998, prices in the U.S. have risen 16%, but they've fallen in nearly every category where China is the top exporter; a pair of Levis bought at Wal-Mart costs less today, adjusted for inflation, than it did 20 years ago—though the company no longer makes clothes in China. First serial to the New York Times Magazine; author tour.(Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (***)
C. Fred Bergsten: China The Balance Sheet: What the World Needs to Know Now About the Emerging Superpower
C. Fred Bergsten, Bates Gill, Nicholas R. Lardy and Derek Mitchell are the principal authors of this investigative analysis, full of new information and perspectives on China, the result of a year-long task force jointly sponsored by CSIS and IIE, to which distinguished China experts have contributed. It is accessible, narrative-driven, filled with facts, but written for the general reader. The expert judgments presented in China: The Balance Sheet will inform policymakers in Washington, scholars and the business community for years to come. (*****)
Rick Yan: Harvard Business Review on Doing Business in China (Harvard Business Review Paperback Series)
he 50th title in the HBR paperback series highlights what every company must know to successfully enter and compete in the world’s fastest-growing economy
The potential opportunity in China is huge: it is home to a quarter of the world’s population, domestic consumer spending in China is growing by up to 10% a year, and relaxed regulatory restraints have opened China up to unprecedented levels of foreign investment.
This book will help multinational corporations and the managers who work in them understand the implications of China’s current stage of development and develop strategies for effectively competing in this environment. (***)
Peter Navarro: The Coming China Wars: Where They Will Be Fought and How They Can Be Won
From Publishers Weekly
In this comprehensive, contemporary look at the awakening giant that is China, Peter Navarro describes an emerging power beleaguered by both internal and external threats-if the Japanese don't get them, AIDS and SARS will. This will reassure those readers who are increasingly convinced that the Chinese will eat us for lunch. However, as Navarro points out, China's human and natural resources make her a formidable global player-and her native, amoral ruthlessness suggests she will win. Still, as a nation undergoing its Industrial Revolution in the Information Age, China has her problems transitioning from Communism to capitalist imperialism, as seems to be her goal. True, government and industry have forged strong bonds (that allow them to exploit slave labor and ignore environmental and economic constraints that hamper other nations), but like any modern nation, China is paying the price of competing in a global economy: pollution; rapacious private medical care expenses; an aging, under-pensioned population; international tensions; and a large and disgruntled peasant working class. Navarro, whose inclination to breathless hyperbole makes even a chapter on dam construction exciting, tellingly devotes 10 chapters to China's problems and one to their solution-essentially tired policy prescriptions (wean the U.S. from oil dependence and cheap Chinese imports). This informative book will teach readers to understand the dragon, just not how to vanquish it.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
(**)
James Kynge: China Shakes the World: A Titan's Rise and Troubled Future -- and the Challenge for America
From Publishers Weekly
Since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, binding its billion-plus population more tightly to the global economic system, the Asian giant's prodigious appetite for food, technology and natural resources has dramatically accelerated profound changes already well underway across the planet. Kynge, the Financial Times's former Beijing bureau chief, makes the voracious "appetites" of the new China his constant concern, as he uncovers the sources of and limitations on the giant country's epochal growth. Beginning with a scene in Germany's postindustrial Ruhr—where a steel mill is sold, deconstructed and shipped more than 5,000 miles for reassembly near the banks of the Yangtze River—Kynge assesses the socioeconomic transformations of China's low "Industrial Revolution–era" labor costs and modern production technology at home and abroad. But for all its world-shaking potential, notes Kynge, "China's endowments are deeply lopsided." Key weaknesses—such as a shortage of arable land, serious environmental devastation and pollution, systemic corruption and a dearth of resources—are conversely helping to ensure that China will have to manage its growing hegemony in a symbiotic manner with partners on the economic and geopolitical playing fields. Despite the subtitle, and a chapter devoted to China's acquisition of U.S. technologies, Kynge focuses at least as much on China's significance for Western Europe. Overall, Kynge's crisp assessment of the dynamics involved is both authoritative and eye-opening. (Sept. 27)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (****)
Will Hutton: The Writing on the Wall: Why We Must Embrace China as a Partner or Face It as an Enemy
An enlightened critique of the prevailing apocolyptic view of China's rise as an economic and military juggernaut. Hutton examines the contradictions and dysfunctions in China and suggests a nuanced way forward that eschews fearmongering. (*****)
Recent Comments