Product Description

"Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world." Napoleon's words seem eerily prescient today, as the shock waves from China's awakening reverberate around the globe. Award-winning journalist James Kynge takes measure of the tremors made as China's ravenous hunger for jobs, raw materials, energy, and food — and its export of goods, workers, and investments — drastically reshapes world trade and politics. Through dramatic stories of the people who are driving China's transformation — entrepreneurs and visionaries, factory workers and store clerks — Kynge describes the breakneck rise of China, the extraordinary problems the country now faces, and the consequences of both.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6223 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
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.

From Booklist
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

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.

Customer Reviews

Great Book On China's Economic Miracle
The book is not difficult and it is not complex, but it is dense in the sense it is packed with so much insight and value. I started out putting post-its on the pages I thought I would want to refer to again later, but had to stop when it became clear I was "post-itting" (if that is not a word, it certainly should be) just about every other page.

This book is unsurpassed in analyzing China's impact on the world. Through real world examples, it captures just how different China is in its business conduct just how strange a trading partner China is, and how it resembles no other great power. Kynge beautifully weaves China's contradictions into a tapestry that allows us to understand it, as best as is possible.

Though this book is in many ways a "big-think" book, it is nonetheless absolutely relevant to those doing business in or with China. It provides the best macroeconomic analysis of China I have yet seen and, by doing so, it provides invaluable knowledge of how to adjust/position your business to compete.

great book
Must-read if you want to learn more about China's recent economic growth. Kynge's anecdotal style really brings home the reality of China's economic boom that you only hear in the abstract in the US media.

Good perspective on China in relation to the world
Writing this in 2008, May, I have to say that I enjoyed the book, it left me with an idea of China's position in the world, but also on how few I know about such a great and big country. It states facts, and very little opinions, and some of the facts are individual stories from which you have to draw your own conclusions.

Anyway, as a big country, I finish the book feeling the need to read and know way more about China, geography, history, different peoples; but if books sizes relate to the country size and history, we may talk thousands of pages!

The book suffer the couple of years since the edition, and one misses more actual stories and references to recent news.