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In the Jaws of the Dragon: America's Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony
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Product Description
In recent years, popular wisdom has held that opening American markets to Chinese goods was the best way to promote democracy in Beijing---that the Communist Party’s grip would quickly weaken as increasingly affluent Chinese citizens embraced American values.
That popular wisdom was wrong. As Eamonn Fingleton shows in this devastating book, instead of America changing China, China is changing America. Although this process of reverse convergence has been swept largely under the carpet by knee-jerk globalists in the American press, Americans will soon be hearing much more about it. Nowhere is the pattern more obvious than in business. Many top American corporations---Boeing, AT&T, the Detroit automobile companies, among them—openly collaborate with the Chinese Communist Party. In a stunning rejection of Western values, Yahoo! even provided the Chinese secret police with vital evidence that resulted in a ten-year jail sentence for one of its Chinese subscribers, a brave young dissident, under draconian censorship laws. Selling the American national interest short, countless other corporations abjectly do Beijing’s lobbying in Congress.
This book---the culmination of twenty years of study---also breaks new ground by revealing the secret behind China’s phenomenal savings rate. Top leaders literally force the Chinese people to save through a highly counterintuitive---and, to ordinary citizens, virtually invisible---policy called suppressed consumption. This practice, which is to economics roughly what steroids are to sport, is fundamentally incompatible with Western ideas of fair global competition. It is reinforced by an Orwellian system of political control that, as Fingleton reveals, utilizes an ancient bureaucratic tool called selective enforcement---a form of blackmail that instills a silent reign of terror throughout Chinese society. Most worryingly, selective enforcement can readily be unleashed on any American corporation with interests in China---which is to say just about every member of the Fortune 500.
While the Chinese people’s rising affluence is, of course, an occasion for wholehearted rejoicing, Uncle Sam should give the Chinese power system a wide berth---lest he catch his coattails in the jaws of a dragon.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #433980 in Books
- Published on: 2008-03-04
- Released on: 2008-03-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 368 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780312362324
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
America's fate looks dicey in the showdown with the Chinese juggernaut, warns this vigorous jeremiad. Fingleton (In Praise of Hard Industries) argues that China's "East Asian" development model of aggressive mercantilism and a state-directed economy "effortlessly outperforms" America's fecklessly individualistic capitalism. Nor will economic development democratize a "quasi-fascist" Confucian culture. More likely, Fingleton contends, is "the Confucianization of America" as Chinese wealth subverts American politics and media. Fingleton's brief against Confucian societies can seem vague and paranoid; fortunately, his economic analysis is incisive. His most telling critique is of American business elites and policymakers, who have wrecked the U.S. economy, he insists, by promoting laissez-faire nostrums, free trade and a hollowed-out service economy. More compelling than Fingleton's exaggerated dread of the Confucian dragon is his well-supported case for economic nationalism.
Review
“Eamonn Fingleton demonstrates once again why his analyses of modern
capitalism deserve serious attention. As he has done before with Japan, he
identifies the elements of China’s business model that depart sharply from
easy Western assumptions---and he lays out the consequences of seeing China
the way outsiders would like it to be, rather than the way it is.” ---James Fallows, Atlantic Monthly.
“With capitalism spreading in China, the world expects communism to
be swept away by democracy. Eamonn Fingleton expertly shows why it is
not to be. This book begins the understanding of the challenge the United States faces from an authoritarian China strengthened by capitalism.” ---Former Senator Ernest F. Hollings
"The more heavily that U.S. media conglomerates invest in China, the
more vulnerable they become to Chinese pressure to censor their U.S. reportage. As Eamonn Fingleton shows, what we don’t know can hurt us. This is a fascinating book with truly unique insights.” ---Pat Choate, author of Agents of Influence
“Filling in the missing pieces of the puzzle that is China, Eamonn Fingleton’s riveting and provocative book is required reading for anyone who cares about the U.S.-China relationship.”---Senator Byron Dorgan
“Eamonn Fingleton offers a compelling corrective to the naive and often self-interested view of U.S. elites that as China grows more capitalistic, it will necessarily grow more democratic.” ---Robert Kuttner, coeditor, The American Prospect
“Fingleton brings his penetrating analytical skills to bear on every dimension of the U.S.-China economic relationship, even the uncomfortable facts that many policymakers prefer to ignore.”---Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur
“Anyone who cares about the future of American industry needs to read
this book.”---Richard L. Trumka, secretary-treasurer, AFL-CIO
About the Author
Eamonn Fingleton, a prescient former editor for Forbes and the Financial Times, has been monitoring East Asian economics since he met supreme leader Deng Xiaoping in 1986 as a member of a top U.S. financial delegation. The following year he predicted the Tokyo banking crash and went on in Blindside, a controversial 1995 analysis that was praised by J. K. Galbraith and Bill Clinton, to show that a heedless America was fast losing its formerly vaunted dominance in advanced manufacturing to Japan. His book In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity brilliantly anticipated the Internet stock crash of 2000. His books have been read into the U.S. Senate record and named among the ten best business books of the year by Business Week and Amazon.com.
Customer Reviews
A timely and important book - will change your view of world politics and economics
Eamonn Fingleton has more than twenty years of experience on the ground in Asia and he has brought his wealth of knowledge about the region to his latest book, In the Jaws of the Dragon. Far from integrating smoothly into a democratic capitalist world order, China, Japan and other Asian countries are going their own way with their own economic and political model - with authoritarianism and bureaucratic control of the economy and the general population a centerpiece.
Apologists for globalization like Thomas Friedman write from 30,000 feet and conclude all is well in the new flat world, but on the ground Fingleton makes clear in this book that China is following in the footsteps of Japan (with the aid of the Japanese, in fact, directly for "reformer" Deng Xiaoping's rise to power) towards a new form of capitalism that is on a collision path with the west. American readers will be surprised and should be concerned about Fingleton's detailed discussion of the long standing and very close relationship between Japan and China. We are seeing the emergence on a world scale of a major competitor and possible rival for global leadership in East Asia.
Particularly interesting to me in In the Jaws of the Dragon is Fingleton's discussion of the state's suppression of consumption in order to accumulate capital wealth controlled by the government. China, for example, recently renewed its "one child per family" policy - an ultimate form of suppression of consumption. Similarly, the Chinese regime continues to outlaw the formation of genuine trade unions and the right to strike which leads to artificially low wages.
While some in policy circles argue that China's admission into the WTO heralds an era of openness to western investment, Fingleton argues that this is not the case. My own research on the reform of state owned enterprises, like PetroChina, confirms this view. The goal of the regime, in my view, is to navigate an evolution to a more competitive economy but not a democratic society. The party shows no sign of giving up control and the variety of measures it uses to control access to its markets reinforces this approach.
This book is a must read on China as we approach the Olympics and as demonstrations for the independence of TIbet have now broken out in Lhasa. But I would also highly recommend this book for adoption in high school, college or graduate school level courses on Asia, globalization or international politics or economics.
The Disturbing Reality
A veritable page-turner for anyone interested in the worst political mistakes of the modern West. Opening up American markets to communist China has not fostered the spread of a democratically inclined spirit but has had devastating effects on the U.S. economy that can no longer be ignored. Jaws should be mandatory reading for anyone with even a passing interest in the impending economic crisis that looms large on the Western horizon. Fingleton's conclusions are elegant, his evidence compelling, and the relevance of his book immeasurable.
Read carefully and think
The world is seldom a simple as it appears on the surface, especially when one is deeply involved with a civilization that is not one's own. As someone who has spent well over two decades involved with Asia and nearly four decades involved internationally, this lesson has been driven home over and over again.
I find that in his new book Eamonn Fingleton, as usual, provokes deep re-examination of all the things that we think we know, that may not be what they seem. For this reason alone (and that is not the only reason), this book is worth careful reading and reflection. The issues he discussed are among the most important we face as an economy and as a nation.
