China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World - Hardcover

Fishman, Ted C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743257529 ISBN 13: 9780743257527

Publisher: Scribner, 2005

Synopsis

Predicting economic challenges that the author believes will occur as a result of China's growing ability to produce U.S. products more cheaply, an economic analysis draws on hundreds of interviews with Chinese, American, and European workers and businesspeople that draw conclusions about China's future as a superpower. 75,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Ted C. Fishman's essays and reports have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Money, Harper's, Worth, Esquire, USA Today, GQ, Chicago magazine, and Business 2.0. A former floor trader and member of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, he ran his own trading firm until 1992. A graduate of Princeton, he lives in Chicago.

Reviews

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.

China has become the world's largest maker of consumer electronics, manufacturing more TVs, DVD players, and cell phones than any other country. It also is the leader in making shoes, clothes, and toys. The country is buying oil fields around the world and signing oil and gas-supply deals with Saudi and Russian companies. It is buying enormous amounts of steel and scrap metal to fashion into products sold globally. Fishman points out that more than 70 percent of the merchandise sold in Wal-Mart stores is made in China, and that it is not only China's big companies and its government's grand designs that are changing the world but also the millions of modest enterprises that reach deep into China to make what the world wants. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, Fishman has scrupulously examined the impact of China's phenomenal growth in this important book. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0743257529
• ISBN 13: 9780743257527
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352