I just finished reading China Shakes the World: A Titan’s Rise and Troubled Future – and the Challenge for America, a book by James Kynge, the Financial Times’s former Beijing bureau chief.
This book focuses on China’s economic development since the cultural revolution and Kynge taps on his vast experience and network in China to bring us one of the most insightful stories of the rise of this nation.
He illustrates his points using interesting examples on how the growth of China affects both itself internally and also how it affects others on a global scale. One interesting example was how a Chinese steel company bought a German steel mill, dismantled it, shipped it halfway around the world and reassembled it at the banks of the Yangtze river.
Every example is backed by human stories and interviews reflecting the impact of China on the lives of people around the world, from the German steel mill worker who has now lost his job, to the mom and pop store owner in the American mid-west who is losing business to mega wholesalers like Wal-Mart, whose rise was made possible by the low cost of manufacturing in China. Besides profiling those negatively affected, Kynge also tells the rags to riches stories of many of China’s eentrepreneurs, including the story of the CEO of Lenovo, who started off as a salesman for the computer manufacturing division of IBM but ending up buying that very division for his own company.In the first half of the book, Kynge explains the basis behind the phenomenal rise of China over the last few years – how the communist government started opening China up to capitalism, the presence of a near infinite amount of cheap manpower, the ingenuity of the Chinese with how they managed to catch up on decades of lost time in technological advancement and how the Chinese acquired the resources they needed for their unprecedented rate of development. Kynge then turns his focus on the challenges China will face and how those challenges might hinder the future development of China. These challenges include the almost irreversible damage done to the environment, the lack of intellectual property protection and the inherent distrust of “outsiders” by the Chinese people.
I highly recommend this book for anyone with an interest in China. Even if you are not, you might still want to put this on your reading list. As Napoleon said, “Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.”
