Of much interest to students of international trade, geopolitical strategy, and global economic trends.
A gimlet-eyed look at an economic miracle that may not be so miraculous after all.
China’s economic transformation since the death of Mao Zedong may be impressive. However, writes Roberts, who was a Beijing-based economics and business reporter for more than 20 years, it is incomplete, and inequality reigns. One element has been the termination of the agricultural communes of old in favor of private ownership of land, but in many instances, the effect was that farmers gave up their plots in order to move to the city and its greater opportunities. The government’s response, belatedly, was to impose controls on internal migration, meaning, in effect, that many Chinese were “illegal aliens” in their own country. Now that many farmers have left the city and returned to the countryside, it has “become apparent how much the cities and their urban residents had depended on them as restaurant cooks, waiters, and dishwashers, delivery people, drivers of Didi Chuxing (China’s version of Uber), proprietors of small shops and hairdressers, and household cleaners and nannies.” At issue is how those millions of people will make a living back home; so, too, is how money is distributed in China’s evolving financial system. Most credit is extended to state-owned enterprises, Roberts writes, crowding out private entrepreneurs. Indeed, even though government policy remains a variant on the “it’s a good thing to grow rich” slogans of old, self-employment is increasingly difficult, and the Chinese version of the “gig economy” seems to be rapidly failing. Deng Xiaoping’s version of trickle-down economics, with residents of the coasts becoming prosperous first and then people in the distant interiors following suit afterward, has not worked, either. The author concludes by noting that while the Chinese government has been able to take credit for the comparative economic successes of the past few decades, it is also vulnerable to attack “for misrule when living standards deteriorate,” to which the inevitable response will be more repression, not more economic freedom.
Of much interest to students of international trade, geopolitical strategy, and global economic trends.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-08937-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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