China Shakes the World: A Titan's Rise and Troubled Future - and the Challenge for America - Hardcover

Kynge, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618705643 ISBN 13: 9780618705641

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006

Synopsis

An account by the former China bureau chief for the Financial Times analyzes China's economic rise and its impact on global affairs, assessing China's weaknesses--environmental pollution, crisis in social trust, weak financial system, and faltering government institutions--in terms of their disruptive effects on the world. 30,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

James Kynge, a journalist in Asia for two decades, is the former bureau chief of the Financial Times in Beijing. Fluent in Mandarin, he has visited every Chinese province and is the recipient of numerous journalism awards. He has spoken at the World Economic Forum and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and has appeared on CNN, the BBC, and National Public Radio.

Reviews

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.

A former bureau chief of the Financial Times in Beijing, Kynge demonstrates how China's thirst for jobs, raw materials, energy, and new markets--and its export of goods, workers, and investments--will dramatically reshape world trade and politics. China's appetite, though unpremeditated and inarticulate, has become a source of major change in the world. Napoleon said, "Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world." In the early days of the twenty-first century, China has started shaking the world with its prowess in manufacturing. Not all is rosy, however, because China has serious problems with its environmental resources, severe pollution, and institutionalized corruption within the government, the legal system, the police force, and the media. The question Kynge offers answers to is how the world will cope with China's extremes of both strength and weakness. Gail Whitcomb
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0618705643
• ISBN 13: 9780618705641
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 279