|
|
The Rise of A Hungry Nation: China Shakes The World (Hardcover)
by James Kynge
| Category:
China, History & Clture, Economic |
| Market price: ¥ 248.00
MSL price:
¥ 228.00
[ Shop incentives ]
|
| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
This is a great book about China and it's impact on the rest of the world - both positive and negative. |
| If you want us to help you with the right titles you're looking for, or to make reading recommendations based on your needs, please contact our consultants. |
Detail |
Author |
Description |
Excerpt |
Reviews |
|
|
|
Author: James Kynge
Publisher: Weidenfeld &Nicolson
Pub. in: March, 2006
ISBN: 0297852450
Pages: 256
Measurements: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00994
Other information: ISBN13: 8780297852452
|
|
Rate this product:
|
|
- Awards & Credential -
Winner of the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year 2006 Award.
|
|
- MSL Picks -
It has all happened so suddenly. Only a few years ago China loomed, for most of us, as a large but far-off presence. Now it affects almost everyting. The competition for our jobs, the prospects for our economies, the things we buy, the vanishing Amazon rainforest, the price of oil, the balance of power and many of the other trends that are remarking our worlds are, in someway, made in China.
This book elucidates China's rise from the inside out. It describes the people and the places behind the transformation of the world's most populous nation and shows how the emergence of an outsized appetite is convulsing the world. China Shocks the World recognises the manifold strengths of an industrializing power, but it also shows that not all Chinese graphs point upward. Infact, many of the influnces felt in Europe and America are manifestations of profound weaknesses.
Ultimately, though, the question raised by China's ascent comes down to compatibility. Can the West accommodate a country that is in character and convictions very different from the world create under Pax Americana since the end of World War Two.
(Quoting from The Publisher)
Target readers:
Businessmen, politicians, anyone who are interested in China's development.
|
|
James Kynge first went to China as an undergraduate in 1982, when he studied Chinese in a university located between the Yelow River and the birthplace of Confucius. In those days, the country was still in the easy stages of its long recovery from the excesses of Chinaman Mao's Cultural Revolution, and unauthorised contact between Chinese and foreigners was banned. Nevertheless, it was a formative experience. He returened to China soon after graduating from Edinburgh University in oriental language in 1985 and has lived and worked either in the mainland or in countries near it ever since.
During nineteen years as a journalist in Asia, he has spent over a decade reporting from China, lately as China Bureau Chief for the Financial Times from 1998 to 2005. His experience duringthat period, during which country shifted from the periphery to a central position in world affairs, inform the material in this book. he speaks fluently and has traveled all over country, visiting every province and region.
Kynge is the recipient of several awards for journalism, including a Business Journalist of the Year award (London) in 2004 and a European Online Journalism award in 2003. He is a regular speaker, leturer and broadcaster on China, featuring on the BBC, CNN, National Public Radio, Deutsche Welle and other broadcast media. He lives in Beijing with his wife and three children. This is his first book.
|
|
From Publishers Weekly
Since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, binding its billion-plus population more tightly to the global economic system, the Asian giant's prodigious appetite for food, technology and natural resources has dramatically accelerated profound changes already well underway across the planet. Kynge, the Financial Times's former Beijing bureau chief, makes the voracious "appetites" of the new China his constant concern, as he uncovers the sources of and limitations on the giant country's epochal growth. Beginning with a scene in Germany's postindustrial Ruhr—where a steel mill is sold, deconstructed and shipped more than 5,000 miles for reassembly near the banks of the Yangtze River - Kynge assesses the socioeconomic transformations of China's low "Industrial Revolution–era" labor costs and modern production technology at home and abroad. But for all its world-shaking potential, notes Kynge, "China's endowments are deeply lopsided." Key weaknesses - such as a shortage of arable land, serious environmental devastation and pollution, systemic corruption and a dearth of resources - are conversely helping to ensure that China will have to manage its growing hegemony in a symbiotic manner with partners on the economic and geopolitical playing fields. Despite the subtitle, and a chapter devoted to China's acquisition of U.S. technologies, Kynge focuses at least as much on China's significance for Western Europe. Overall, Kynge's crisp assessment of the dynamics involved is both authoritative and eye-opening.
Contents
Ackowwleages
China Shakes the World
Bibliography
Source
Index
|
By the time I got there, there was only a scar. A scar of ocher earth twenty-five times the size of a soccer field. A dozen excavators pawed
ponderously at the soil as if absently searching for something lost. The place where one of Germany's largest steel mills had stood since before World War Two was now reduced to a few mounds of twisted metal scrap. I approached a man in overalls by the side of the road. He was
hoisting a huge length of pipeline onto the back of a truck. After he had settled it in place, I called over to him. He said he had dislodged, lifted, and loaded fourteen pieces of pipe like this already and there were only three left, enough for another week's work. Then it would all be over. I asked him where the pipeline was going. He straightened his back and made as if to throw something in a gentle arc far into the distance. "China," he said. The rest of the equipment had gone earlier: the oxygen converters that were housed in a shed two hundred feet high, the hotrolling mill for heavy steel plates that stretched out over two-thirds of a mile, a sinter plant, a blast furnace, and a host of other parts. They had all been packed into wooden crates, inserted into containers, and loaded onto ships, and then they were unpacked at their destination, near the mouth of the Yangtze. There, on the flat alluvial bed of that mighty river, they had been reconstructed exactly - to the last screw - as they had been in Germany. Altogether, 275,000 tons of equipment had been shipped, along with 44 tons of documents that explained the intricacies of the
reassembly process.1 The man in overalls shook his head at the con- voluted nature of it all. "I just hope it works when they get it there," he said. The Thyssen Krupp steel mill in Dortmund once employed around ten thousand people. The communities of Horde and Westfalenhutte, where workshops clustered around smokestacks that could be seen from all over the city, had depended on them for generations. People had made iron here for nearly two hundred years, and when the drums of German conquest rolled in 1870, 1914, and 1939, it was this corner of the Ruhr Valley that supplied first Prussia and then the German empire with field guns, tanks, shells, and battleship armor. A pride in practical things was evident everywhere. A stumpy-looking iron blast furnace from the nineteenth century with a sign saying that it had been brought over from England stood as a monument by one of the gates of the former plant. Nearby, a plaque memorialized a local engineer.
But on a warm, bright afternoon in June 2004, Horde was clearly no longer the pounding heart of the Ruhr. The place looked laid-back, becalmed. A few people sat in the sun outside an ice cream shop on Alfred Trappen Street, digging to the bottom of their sundaes with long spoons. Up
the road, women fished into a wire basket outside Zeeman Textiel, a discount store, inspecting T-shirts for ninety-nine (euro) cents. There were three tanning salons in the vicinity and a tattoo parlor advertising its ability to emblazon ai, fu, and kang, the Chinese characters for "love," "wealth,"
and "health," on the bodies of its customers. But the tanning and tattoo places were shut.
I had come to Horde to try to understand how life was changing now that the steel plant was gone. But my inability to speak German was a
handicap. I tried calling on local officials, but they were unwilling to talk. People on the street, when approached, seemed to find my questions
unwarranted. So I went to the Lutheran church and phoned each of the five fathers listed in a leaflet, inviting them for a coffee. Pfarrer Martin Pense was busy, Pfarrer Klaus Wortmann was out of town, Pfarrer Bern Weissbach- Lamay did not answer, and Pfarrerin Angela Dicke would have been happy to help but it was a holiday, so . . . sorry. Pfarrer Sven Frohlich, a soft-spoken man, was ready to give me a few minutes on the phone.
The death of the steel mill, he said, had been the slow but inevitable result of a loss in competitiveness. In the early 1990s, when efficient South Korean steel plants were undercutting the world, Horde steelworkers were agitating for a thirty-five-hour work week. And the reunification of West and East Germany had taken its toll by forcing the government to raise taxes and by acting as a drag on overall economic activity. By the mid-nineties, the ultimate fate of the Horde plant had become an issue of debate. To start with, the management reacted as managements generally do, by agreeing to merge with a competitor to derive operational synergies, cost reductions, and improved competitiveness. But by the time world steel prices had slumped into a trough around the year 2000, such talk had died away. There seemed to be little that could be done. Pfarrer Frohlich said that nearly half the Lutheran church's congregation had moved away as thousands of steelworkers lost their jobs and the community, though not poor, had sunk into a kind of numbness.
Young people did not seem to feel the pull of religion in spite of the strenuous efforts, evident in the church newsletter, to lure them into all sorts of community activities. "Our identity is lost," said Frohlich. "And that is the most important thing that can be taken away from somebody. It could take more than a decade to recover it." According to Thyssen Krupp, the Horde plant would have been closed regardless of whether a buyer for it had been found. But others had their doubts. The Chinese pounced so quickly on the purchase, signing to buy it just one month after the plant was idled, that some in Horde suspected a sweetheart deal. Whatever the truth, the events that were to follow the Chinese acquisition stunned the local population. As if out of nowhere, nearly one thousand Chinese workers arrived. They bedded down in a makeshift dormitory in a disused building in the plant and worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week throughout the summer. Only later, after some of the German workers and managers complained, were the Chinese workers obliged to take a day off, out of respect for local laws. Their industriousness alone was enough to give the hardened workers of the Ruhr pause for thought. But there was something else. Locals started to notice the Chinese deconstruction teams high up - as high as two hundred feet above ground - on exposed walkways, swinging on ladders and clinging from scaffolding poles, all without the use of safety harnesses. The spectacle became a media sensation. Some referred to it as the "ultimate Chinese takeaway," and on the day that a reporter from Deutsche Welle, the German broadcaster, showed up, a Chinese worker was spotted dangling by a thin wire from the top of the 300-foot-high Horde Fackel smokestack. "Have the Chinese acrobats come to town?" he asked in his dispatch.
By the end of 2002, in less than one year, the Chinese had finished the dismantling job - a year ahead of the schedule that the Chinese had agreed on with Thyssen Krupp and a full two years faster than the German company had initially estimated the job would take. Shortly before it was time to leave, a diplomat from the Chinese embassy in Berlin arrived to address the laborers. "The Chinese are known in Germany for washing dishes and running restaurants," he said. "When our companies want to do business here we sometimes have to beg just for an appointment. But through your work you have earned the Chinese people some face."A few weeks after that, the workers pulled out, having invited local German officials and site managers to a banquet cooked in four different styles, reflecting the four hometowns of the deconstruction team chefs. The dormitories and kitchens they had been using for a year were left scrupulously clean and tidy, save for a single pair of black safety boots. These boots, it turned out, bore the brand name of Phoenix and were made in China.2 That was curious, said Germans who had worked at the steel mill, because the plant the Chinese had just taken away was also called Phoenix, in commemoration of the way that Dortmund had risen from the ashes of bombing raids in 1944. Nobody could tell, however, whether the single pair of forgotten boots was an oversight or an intentional pun.
Eighteen months after the Phoenix's migration, I stood in the bar in Zum Brauhaus, a hostel on Alfred Trappen Street. It was a simple place withpine tables, upright chairs, photographs of local soccer teams on the wall, and a one-armed bandit in the corner that had attracted the attention of a stolid woman who mechanically shoved coins into its slot. At a table behind her, a teenage girl with a blank expression sipped a pint of lager. I stood by the bar, where the woman serving drinks introduced me to a man called John. He had been born and brought up in Britain, in the northern industrial town of Bolton, and had been posted to Germany with the British Army a few years after the war. He married a German girl and they moved to Dortmund, her hometown, after he left the army. He had worked in the steel mill for more than twenty years, but now that it had gone, he took a philosophical view of its departure. The Chinese economy was booming, whereas Germany's had reached a plateau. If the Chinese could put the Horde plant to profitable use, then maybe it was a good thing that they had bought it, he said.
But there was no denying that the Phoenix's loss was keenly felt. You could see the psychological displacement in a small park at th...
|
|
|
|
|
