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- Verified Buyer
If one finds China confusing, that's because it is. I've read about fifteen books on modern 20th and/or early 21st century China. ( I graduated with a BA degree, major in History, from college in 1971. Since then at the age of 74, over the course of my lifetime, I've probably read about at least 3-400 history or geopolitical books, with an emphasis on the 20th and early 21st centuries; thus my perspective is that of the "amateur historian".) Within the last year or so I had read two more books on modern China: i.e. Kevin Rudd's "The Avoidable War, The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict between the U.S. and Xi Jinping's China" (2022); and Frank Dikotter's "China After Mao" (2022). I recalled that in about the year 2010, I had read a very good book, "China, Inc." (2005,2006), by Ted Fishman, which seemed to me to paint a somewhat different picture of the place; so I obtained this book, "China, Inc.", and re-read a lot of it- enough so that I feel somewhat competent to write this review, having already read the entire book 12-13 years ago. I don't think any of the three authors noted above would disagree with each other much, on the broad generalities of China's reality since Mao. Where the authors differ in my judgment is in their differing "perspectives" on the place. Rudd emphasizes the political and economic from the political perspective; Dikotter, the political and economic from the common human perspective; and Fishman (under consideration here) emphasizes the economic from the common human perspective. Our author here of "China, Inc.", Ted Fishman, quite simply, writes well. In addition to knowing what he's talking about as an economist and businessman in his own right, he also has a knack for succinct, accurate conceptualization. Consider this gem: ".....China is the world's workshop because it sits in a relatively stable part of the globe and offers the world's manufacturers a reliable, docile, and capable industrial workforce, groomed by government-enforced discipline....." In one simple sentence, Fishman has hit the nail on the head, as to why China has been attractive to the multi-national corporations, its workforce. Ironically the same communist party that has oppressed them, and wasted their abilities in its large experiments with an ineffective, centrally-planned, socialist economy, has also managed to discipline them, and condition them to accept orderly relations- the very sort of qualities large corporations like; and of course this large mass of human souls are quite eager and ready to accept just about any viable opportunities. Thus the "special economic zones" in and around the mega-cities of China's East coast fill up fast with global capital's manufacturers- comprising in its collective whole, a huge monstrosity of steel and concrete factories- a veritable "factory floor of the world". But this is not all; there is much, very much, small business erupting everywhere, both in the large cities and the countryside as well. Perhaps the crux of Fishman's thesis (and most observers would probably not much disagree with him) is that a great, formidable, capitalist-market economy has sprung up out of the bowells of China, in spite of, not because of the Chinese Communist Party. Fishman even titles one of his chapters, "The Revolution Against The Communist Revolution". Per Fishman: "Today, state-owned companies can claim only a one-fifth share of China's industrial production, The private sector now accounts for half of what China makes and about one-quarter of its GDP." The problem with this statement though (one which I think Fishman would acknowledge, because he describes it), is that China has so many "hybrid enterprises" that it's often difficult to tell where the state enterprise ends and the private enterprise begins. For instance, a state-owned factory may have one or two divisions, or sub-factories within it, who make and sell their goods on the open or black market to the highest bidders. My sense is that the gradual merging of state and private enterprise has enabled China to largely avoid the severe ravages to their people's health and welfare, that occurred in Russia in the 1990's with the collapse of communism and Yeltsin's "shock therapy". (See for instance David Satter's book on 1990's Russia, "Darkness at Dawn", 2003.) Another thing about Fishman's book- it is very good at describing the raw reality of people's everyday lives. To the extent that any book can be in a little over three hundred pages, "it's all there"- e.g. the tough young men taking the crowded trains from the countryside to the city in search of construction work; the manager of the clothing factory who admits that he prefers to higher young women as opposed to young men, not so much because the women have better manual dexterity, but because they are easier to control, whereas young men "fight"; the informal money lender who enforces the payment of his loan to the young aspiring businessman, who has migrated to the city to start his little, street-corner food-stand, not by breaking his bones, but by sending one of his enforcement men into the young man's parents' house back in the village, to sleep on the parents' living-room floor, until the debt is paid.... This is a good book, a large slice of modern Chinese life.
