Eamonn Fingleton, a prescient former editor for Forbes and the Financial Times, has been monitoring East Asian economics since he met supreme leader Deng Xiaoping in 1986 as a member of a top U.S. financial delegation. The following year he predicted the Tokyo banking crash... More
In recent years, popular wisdom has held that opening American markets to Chinese goods was the best way to promote democracy in Beijing---that the Communist Party’s grip would quickly weaken as increasingly affluent Chinese citizens embraced American values.
That popular wisdom was wrong. As Eamonn Fingleton shows in this devastating book, instead of America changing China, China is changing America. Although this process of reverse convergence has been swept largely under the carpet by knee-jerk globalists in the American press, Americans will soon be hearing much more about it. Nowhere is the pattern more obvious than in business. Many top American corporations---Boeing, AT&T, the Detroit automobile companies, among them—openly collaborate with the Chinese Communist Party. In a stunning rejection of Western values, Yahoo! even provided the Chinese secret police with vital evidence that resulted in a ten-year jail sentence for one of its Chinese subscribers, a brave young dissident, under draconian censorship laws. Selling the American national interest short, countless other corporations abjectly do Beijing’s lobbying in Congress.
This book---the culmination of twenty years of study---also breaks new ground by revealing the secret behind China’s phenomenal savings rate. Top leaders literally force the Chinese people to save through a highly counterintuitive---and, to ordinary citizens, virtually invisible---policy called suppressed consumption. This practice, which is to economics roughly what steroids are to sport, is fundamentally incompatible with Western ideas of fair global competition. It is reinforced by an Orwellian system of political control that, as Fingleton reveals, utilizes an ancient bureaucratic tool called selective enforcement---a form of blackmail that instills a silent reign of terror throughout Chinese society. Most worryingly, selective enforcement can readily be unleashed on any American corporation with interests in China---which is to say just about every member of the Fortune 500.
While the Chinese people’s rising affluence is, of course, an occasion for wholehearted rejoicing, Uncle Sam should give the Chinese power system a wide berth---lest he catch his coattails in the jaws of a dragon.
“Eamonn Fingleton demonstrates once again why his analyses of moderncapitalism deserve serious attention. As he has done before with Japan, heidentifies the elements of China’s business model that depart sharply from easy Western assumptions---and he lays out the consequences of seeing Chinathe way outsiders would like it to be, rather than the way it is.” ---James Fallows, Atlantic Monthly.“With capitalism spreading in China, the world expects communism to be swept away by democracy. Eamonn Fingleton expertly shows why it isnot to be. This book begins the understanding of the challenge the United States faces from an authoritarian China strengthened by capitalism.” ---Former Senator Ernest F. Hollings "The more heavily that U.S. media conglomerates invest in China, themore vulnerable they become to Chinese pressure to censor their U.S. reportage. As Eamonn Fingleton shows, what we don’t know can hurt us. This is a fascinating book with truly unique insights.” ---Pat Choate, author of Agents of Influence“Filling in the missing pieces of the puzzle that is China, Eamonn Fingleton’s riveting and provocative book is required reading for anyone who cares about the U.S.-China relationship.”---Senator Byron Dorgan “Eamonn Fingleton offers a compelling corrective to the naive and often self-interested view of U.S. elites that as China grows more capitalistic, it will necessarily grow more democratic.” ---Robert Kuttner, coeditor, The American Prospect“Fingleton brings his penetrating analytical skills to bear on every dimension of the U.S.-China economic relationship, even the uncomfortable facts that many policymakers prefer to ignore.”---Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur “Anyone who cares about the future of American industry needs to readthis book.”---Richard L. Trumka, secretary-treasurer, AFL-CIO
Eamonn Fingleton, a prescient former editor for Forbes and the Financial Times, has been monitoring East Asian economics since he met supreme leader Deng Xiaoping in 1986 as a member of a top U.S. financial delegation. The following year he predicted the Tokyo banking crash and went on in Blindside, a controversial 1995 analysis that was praised by J. K. Galbraith and Bill Clinton, to show that a heedless America was fast losing its formerly vaunted dominance in advanced manufacturing to Japan. His book In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity brilliantly anticipated the Internet stock crash of 2000. His books have been read into the U.S. Senate record and named among the ten best business books of the year by Business Week and Amazon.com.
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