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Title: The China Dream: The Quest for the Last Great Untapped Market on Earth by Joe Studwell ISBN: 0-8021-3975-2 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: April, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.82 (11 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: China's roaring nineties - the best assessment in print
Comment: Joe Studwell, a British freelance journalist who lived in and reported from China from 1991 until 1999, has written one of the best-informed insiders' books about the Chinese economy in the boom years of the 1990s that is on the market. The book is excellently researched, well documented (60 pages of notes accompany 300 pages of text) and profits from a wealth of experience gathered "on the ground."
The main thesis of the book is that many big Western companies substitute a blurry, optimistic picture of a vast potential market for a balanced view based on hard data. When it comes to China, wishful thinking replaces critical distance and realistic assessment.
One thing that "The China Dream" explains very clearly is the extent to which two economies in China exist parallel to each other. One is the old socialist economy that is protected from change and the market forces. The other is a vibrant, export -oriented economy of manufacturing plants that assemble goods under the management of mostly Taiwanese and Hong Kong companies. The latter is the poster child for China, but the former continues to gobble up the people's savings to churn out the products that the planners want to see. Stripped of the success story of the export-oriented manufacturing companies, China's economy looks like a disaster waiting to happen.
Studwell is not a China-basher. He admires the stamina and determination of the small entrepreneurs in China who manage to hold their ground against a rapacious bureaucracy, the lack of credit from state-owned banks and the dumping strategies of pampered state-owned enterprises.
Earlier reviewers have criticized "The China Dream" as biased and uninformed (no CEO interviews). Having worked in China for three years, my impression is that Joe Studwell has a very solid grasp of the economic and political realities in the People's Republic of China, and that there is no point in listening to the rosy projections of CEOs and foreign luminaries who were "toured about in government limousines and fed an endless diet of spurious statistics"(255).
In a nutshell: This book is absolutely recommended reading for anyone who wishes to work in China or just wants to know what to make of all the praise lavished on a socialist developing country.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Superb Antidote to the China Hype
Comment: There's an incredible amount of hype about China's economic market. Its huge population, high-skilled low-wage work force, and relative political stability for a developing country all act as a powerful lure to multinationals eager to set up shop and begin selling to one-quarter of the world's population. Under tough negotiations from Chinese officials, these companies tend to give away the kitchen sink to ensure they get access to the huge market. But what do they get in return?
Joe Studwell does a service to the informed public by clearly demonstrating that almost all the businesses who have gone to China have gotten next to nothing for their technology transfers, special fees, and tremendous time and effort they've dedicated to the market. Almost uniformly, they have high-balled their expected sales and profits from the Middle Kingdom and found immense barriers such as unseen regulations and fees, corrupt officials, unenforced laws, local spin-offs to their products, etc., that should have sent them packing. Yet almost all of them push on, undeterred.
As Studwell explains, the reason for this is an old phenomenon among Western businessmen he calls "The China Dream." Despite continual setbacks, these hard-headed businessmen are too attracted to the possibility that they have something to sell that even a small percentage of Chinese may want to buy. Those huge potential numbers are too much of an enticement to businesses to easily let go of their foothold in China.
But Studwell's book is more than just about the experience of foreign businessmen in China. It also shows that the China market is becoming a trap for the Chinese people themselves. They work hard and save, and the government confiscates and then destroys their money by trapping it in state-owned banks that are insolvent because they lend to state-owned enterprises that are unproductive.
"The China Dream" is well-written and informative. Its thesis is provocative, but well supported. Studwell argues there is no rational basis for much of China's economic success and that most of its market is as closed and overregulated as the Soviet Union's. This book should be required reading for every CEO of a multinational who dreams of selling in China.
Rating: 4
Summary: "The China Reality"
Comment: An excellent book outlining the history of china in relation to its economic structure and trade development, covering the previous few centuries up to the present. Unfortunately it is the same old story inherent in any mania , value goes out of the window and the ability to analyse is crowded out by greed.
I love the frank account of the CEO's absurd optimism about china in the face of so much contrary evidence. China will one day be the largest economic power in the world and its domestic market will eventually become highly developed, unfortunately this cannot happen in the present repressive climate.
I would like to have been furnished with 1 or 2 maps as being a rather ignorant westerner in relation to china's geography, i found placing the different areas a little difficult. However this does not really detract from this being an excellent book and a must read for those who wish to view some contrary opinion about china. This is very welcome instead of the glowing clap trap we are pushed in the west.
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Title: Integrating China into the Global Economy by Nicholas R. Lardy ISBN: 0815751354 Publisher: Brookings Institution Press Pub. Date: 01 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Coming Collapse of China by Gordon G. Chang ISBN: 037550477X Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 31 July, 2001 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: China Dawn: The Story of a Technology and Business Revolution by David Sheff ISBN: 0066621194 Publisher: HarperBusiness Pub. Date: 04 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Chinese Business Etiquette: A Guide to Protocol, Manners, and Culture in the People's Republic of China (A Revised and Updated Edition of "Dealing with the Chinese") by Scott D. Seligman ISBN: 0446673870 Publisher: Warner Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.99 |
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Title: Understanding China: A Guide to China's Economy, History, and Political Culture by John Bryan Starr ISBN: 0809094894 Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub. Date: 01 February, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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