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China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World | 
 enlarge | Author: Ted C. Fishman
Publisher: Scribner
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy New: $3.88
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Rating:  82 reviews
Sales Rank: 406680
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 1.1
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.951
ASIN: B000W3W99U
Publication Date: April 11, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
China has the world's most rapidly changing large economy, and according to Ted Fishman, it is forcing the world to change along with it. "No country has ever before made a better run at climbing every step of economic development all at once," he writes, in China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World. 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. Calling China's huge population "arguably the greatest natural resource on the planet," 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. In the process, this shift has changed both Chinese culture and the global business climate in significant ways. 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. And it's not just a problem for the U.S.--even Mexico is outsourcing to China. Though it remains to be seen whether this will truly be the "Chinese Century" as Fishman asserts, China, Inc. is a brisk and informative look at why so many American corporations, and American jobs, are heading to China. --Shawn Carkonen
Product Description
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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| Customer Reviews: Read 77 more reviews...
 Rapid Rise to Super Power September 10, 2008
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
A Challenging Portrait August 11, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
 A warning to the US July 6, 2008
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.
Great service May 18, 2008
Great service, the book came in perfect condition and just in time to use for my paper. Thanks :-) !!!
 Previewing The Chinese Century April 21, 2008
Never mind what Ross Perot once said about that "sucking sound" coming from Mexico. Now it's coming from across the Pacific Ocean, where the world's most populous nation puts their Communist heel to the capitalist pedal, leaving everyone else behind.
That's a slightly overstated version of the premise offered by Ted C. Fishman in "China, Inc." a 2005 examination of the Chinese challenge to American economic hegemony. Fishman makes a solid argument for China's more-than-likely eventual supremacy. Yet for all the compelling points he makes, his dry and detached writing style makes it hard to care about the advancing macroeconomic apocalypse.
That's especially true in the first half of the book, when Fishman takes us to Shanghai, a southern city growing so fast an entire floor of one skyscraper houses, in its entirety, a scale model of the city.
"The banks of the Huangpu River running through Shanghai don't just bend," he writes at the outset, setting an early benchmark for clumsy prose. "They mindbend." Bad puns co-exist with shallow observations; a subchapter entitled "Shanghai Sex and the City" informs us that Chinese men like the company of hot young women.
An utterly mundane shopkeeping family, the Lis, is discussed in detail, to the point where Fishman seems to have interviewed no other Chinese. Instead, he presents the world's largest national population in bold strokes: "Now energy is Shanghai's drug, craved more powerfully by a population pouring into the city to seize its supercharged moment. Shanghai's young glow with an optimism..." And so on.
But Fishman has a point regarding the co-existence of the Chinese economy with the United States, and after getting past the first 100 pages, he makes them with a care and urgency that belies the book's soporific start. China's low-cost manufacturing operations are not just changing the playing field in the ways Perot once envisioned Mexico would. It's also creating what Fishman calls "the China price," setting a price benchmark so low that manufacturers in other low-cost sectors of the globe must do likewise. Fishman notes there is a real benefit and cost to this, which he explains quite well.
Meanwhile, the Chinese appetite for spiraling U.S. debt has resulted in a kind of Catch-22 suicide pact: "Without the United States to buy Chinese goods, China cannot sustain its growth; without China to lend money to the United States, Americans cannot spend," Fishman notes. "Without the twin engines of the United States and China stoking the fortunes of other nations, the rest of the world might also sputter."
Throughout, Fishman makes interesting side points; some of the best of which come in his endnotes and footnotes. It's surprising how much better Fishman reads when he is condensing his points rather than expanding upon them.
Those arguing Fishman is making a case for shutting China out of the U.S. market aren't reading his book. He even makes a case for intellectual piracy, the truest black mark in China's rise, as just desserts for a century of harsh colonial treatment by the West. "China, Inc." seems solid and fair that way, like a government white paper. Pity it reads a lot like one, too.
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