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
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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