From Publishers Weekly
A lively, fact-packed account of China's spectacular, 30-year transformation from economic shambles following Mao's Cultural Revolution to burgeoning market superpower, this book offers a torrent of statistics, case studies and anecdotes to tell a by now familiar but still worrisome story succinctly. Paid an average of 25 cents an hour, China's workers are not the world's cheapest, but no nation can match this "docile and capable industrial workforce, groomed by generations of government-enforced discipline," as veteran business reporter (and Chicago Mercantile trading firm founder) Fishman characterizes it. Since Mexican wages were (at the time) four times those of China, NAFTA's impact has been dwarfed by China's explosive growth (about 9.5% a year), and corporations and entrepreneurs operating in China have few worries about minimum wages, pensions, benefits, unions, antipollution laws or worker safety regulations. For the U.S., Fishman predicts more of what we're already seeing: deficits, declining wages and the squeezing of the middle class. His solutions (revitalize education, close the trade gap) are not original, but some of his statistics carry a jolt: since 1998, prices in the U.S. have risen 16%, but they've fallen in nearly every category where China is the top exporter; a pair of Levis bought at Wal-Mart costs less today, adjusted for inflation, than it did 20 years agothough the company no longer makes clothes in China. First serial to the New York Times Magazine; author tour.(Feb.)
Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
著者について
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. A former floor trader and member of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, he ran his own trading firm until 1992. A graduate of Princeton, he lives in Chicago.
