A nuanced yet accessible primer on the forces that shape Chinese economic policies.
A former business executive surveys the history of Chinese economic growth.
As a marketing executive with Comcast and other television broadcast providers, Taylor struggled to make inroads with the “American Chinese” customer. Recognizing the general ignorance of Western advertisers regarding Chinese consumers, the author came to understand that the Confucian value of frugality requires businesses to prioritize the value of their products. Combining her decades of experience in the business sector with subsequent research and trips to China, Taylor offers American readers a primer on understanding Chinese economic growth and its underlying ideological basis. While much of the last half century has been shaped by Chinese/U.S. coexistence (in which “America provided the innovative breakthroughs” and China dominated manufacturing “by creating and controlling the world’s largest factory floor”), the two nations are divided by their underlying ideologies, asserts the author. While the American free enterprise system prioritizes capitalism and democracy, China’s economic philosophy, per Taylor, combines state capitalism with censorship and “digitally managed authoritarianism.” Divided into three parts, the book begins with an overview of Xi Jinping, who joins Deng Xiaoping as the major architect of China’s post-Mao economic boom. Leveraging his personal backstory, Xi tapped into a national hunger for the “Chinese Dream,” promising a new era of status and economic prosperity to a growing middle class. The book’s second section takes readers through a history of China from the Qing Dynasty (whose imperial might gave way to a “Century of Humiliation” at the hands of Western colonizers) to the economic programs of Mao, Deng, and Xi. Behind the Chinese Dream, Taylor notes, is an emphasis on “saving face” as Chinese leaders harken back to a pre-colonial era of Chinese cultural, political, and regional supremacy. The book’s final section offers a multi-chapter analysis of contemporary China, surveying the intersection of economic expansion with environmental degradation, human reproductive policies, and other issues.
This is a well-researched, insightful commentary on Chinese economic history and philosophy, informed by Taylor’s business savvy and supported by more than 500 endnotes. The author balances her keen observations with an accessible writing style. The text (minus endnotes) comes in at just over 200 pages and is accompanied by a wealth of graphs, charts, and other visual aids. Equally valuable is the book’s robust appendix, which features case studies on the Chinese production of entry-level sport utility vehicles and the clashes between globalism and censorship that characterize China’s relationships with Hollywood and the National Basketball Association. A selection of essays highlights the myriad of strategies, follies, and contradictions that drive Chinese economic policies. The author should be particularly commended for her emphasis on nuances that challenge broad Western assumptions about Chinese worldviews. Taylor’s analysis of Chinese communist leaders, for example, reveals striking differences between the outlooks of Mao and his successors, who were willing to accept economic inequalities as a mainstay of the national economy (“Some will get rich first,” the communist leader Deng once proclaimed as he embraced consumerism). The author also makes a convincing argument that it is imperative for Western businesses and policymakers to understand the ideologies that drive Chinese leaders as the world enters into a fourth industrial revolution centered on technology, global trade, and information.
A nuanced yet accessible primer on the forces that shape Chinese economic policies.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9798990803909
Page Count: 338
Publisher: TGM
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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