|
How has an enormous country once hobbled
by poverty and Communist ideology come to be the supercharged
center of global capitalism? What does it mean that China
now grows three times faster than the United States? That
China uses 40 percent of the world's concrete and 25 percent
of its steel? What is the global impact of 300 million rural
Chinese walking off their farms and heading to the cities
in the greatest migration in human history? Why do nearly
all of the world's biggest companies now have large-scale
operations in China? What dies the corporate march into
China mean for workers left behind in America, Europe, and
the rest of the world?
Meanwhile, what makes China's emerging corporations
so dangerously competitive? What could happen when China
will be able to manufacture nearly everything --
computers, cars, jumbo jets, and pharmaceuticals -- that
the United States and Europe can, at perhaps half the cost?
How do these developments reach around the world and straight
into the lives of all Americans?
These are ground-shaking questions, and
China, Inc. provides answers.
Veteran journalist and former commodities
trader Ted C. Fishman paints a vivid picture of the megatrends
radiating out of China. Fishman's account begins with the
burgeoning output of China's vast low-cost factories and
the swelling appetite of its 1.3 billion consumers, both
of which are being driven by historically unprecedented
infusions of foreign capital and technological know-how.
Traveling through China's frenetic landscape of growth,
Fishman visits the factories, markets, streets, stores,
towns, and cities where the story of Chinese capitalism
is being lived by one-fifth of all humanity. Fishman also
draws on interviews with Chinese, American, and European
workers, managers, and executives to show how China will
force all of us to make changes in how we think about ourselves
as consumers, workers, citizens, and even as parents. The
result is a richly engaging work of penetrating, up-to-the-minute
reportage and brilliant analysis that will forever change
how readers think about America's future.
Ted C. Fishman's essays and reports have
appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Money,
Harper's, Worth, Esquire, USA Today,
GQ, Chicago magazine, and Business 2.0.
His commentaries have been featured on Public Radio International's
Marketplace. A former floor trader and member of
the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, he ran his own trading
firm until 1992. He lives in Chicago.
|
