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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #178065 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-11
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Download Description
"China today is visible everywhere -- in the news, in the economic pressures battering america, in the workplace, and in every trip to the store. provocative, timely, and essential, this dramatic account of china's growing dominance as an industrial super-power by journalist Ted C. Fishman explains how the profound shift in the global 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? That China uses 40 percent of the world's concrete and 25 percent of its steel? What is the global impact of 300 million rural Chinese walking off their farms and heading to the cities in the greatest migration in human history? Why do nearly all of the world's biggest companies now have large-scale 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 could happen when China will be able to manufacture 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 the lives of all Americans? These are ground-shaking questions, and China, Inc. provides answers.Veteran journalist and former commodities trader Ted C. Fishman paints a vivid picture of the megatrends radiating out of China. Fishman's account begins with the burgeoning output of China's vast low-cost factories and the swelling appetite of its 1.3 billion consumers, both of which are being driven by historically unprecedented infusions of foreign capital and technological know-how. Traveling through China's frenetic landscape of growth, Fishman visits the factories, markets, streets, stores, towns, and cities where the story of Chinese capitalism is being lived by one-fifth of all humanity. Fishman also draws on interviews with Chinese, American, and European workers, managers, and executives to show 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. "

Amazon.com
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

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.

Customer Reviews

A warning to the US
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
Great service, the book came in perfect condition and just in time to use for my paper. Thanks :-) !!!

Previewing The Chinese Century
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.