Mixing research with personal experience, Jin offers critical insights about the future of China and its global impact.
A respected academic provides a nuanced examination of China’s past, present, and future.
China has always been difficult for many Westerners to understand, but the issue has become increasingly crucial as the country’s global role has grown. Jin, who grew up in China and retains strong connections there, was educated in the U.S. and is now a professor at the London School of Economics. With this background, she is well qualified to play the role of cultural interpreter. She has a special interest in the problems now emerging in China as the society struggles to move from an unremitting focus on economic growth to quality-of-life and equity issues. Jin notes that China’s transition from an impoverished, rural country to a wealthy, urbanized society has been remarkably fast. The private sector has driven the growth, especially in the past two decades, but the government remains firmly in control, with a complex system of incentives, rules, easy credit, and government-owned enterprises. The author traces key policies since the time of Deng, and she delves into the impact of the “one-child policy,” an area often overlooked by armchair commentators. For the most part, the Chinese people are willing to accept government direction, including a high degree of personal surveillance and intervention in their lives. They value security over freedom and generally believe that China requires a powerful central authority. Significantly, the younger generation is in many ways more conservative than their parents despite their taste for Western brands and lifestyles. Jin acknowledges China’s incredible progress but wonders what the future holds. “China’s central leadership, which spurred the most successful economic growth story of our time, could also make choices that might have the opposite effect in the future,” she concludes. “The power of the state provides the system’s greatest potential and also poses its gravest inherent risk.”
Mixing research with personal experience, Jin offers critical insights about the future of China and its global impact.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9781984878281
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
A lively medley of readings from nearly 20 economists who have left their mark on Western civilization. In a landmark work on the evolution of economic thought published over 40 years ago, Heilbroner (Visions of the Future, 1995, etc.) felicitously dubbed fellow practitioners of the dismal science worldly philosophers. He now fulfills a longstanding ambition to provide a companion piece that allows influential figures from the distant and recent past to speak for themselves. While prototypical economists and their ideas occupy center stage, the author does not hesitate to offer either brief critiques or his own opinions on innovative canons and consequential schools of thought. The result is an agreeable guided tour that begins with the Judeo-Christian Bible (which took a decidedly dim view of wealth) and ends with Joseph Alois Schumpeter (the father of entrepreneurship theory). On his trek through time, Heilbroner presents Aristotle (no friend of commerce), early mercantile apologists (Richard Cantillon, Thomas Mun), and a brace of physiocrats (Franáois Quesnay, Anne Robert, Jacques Turgot) whose conviction that land was the source of all riches provided a bridge from prehistory to the classical era adorned by Adam Smith. Although the illustrious Scot is accorded pride of place, the author makes room aplenty for his intellectual heirs, including Thomas Robert Malthus, John Stuart Mill, and David Ricardo (a wildly successful securities speculator). In Heilbroner's compendium, John Maynard Keynes, along with Karl Marx (capitalism's hanging judge) and Thorstein Veblen (of conspicuous consumption fame), is in a class by himself. Judicious and generous selections from the key writings of masters of the economics game, complete with perceptive commentary from their latter-day Boswell.
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-393-03919-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The unremarkable record of a college dean's six-and-a-half years as a hostage of the Islamic Jihad in Beirut. Husband and wife Tom and Jean Sutherland, he the dean of agriculture and she an English teacher at the American University of Beirut, have turned Tom's 2,354-day hostage ordeal into a book to be read at your own risk. Tom is no Terry Anderson or Terry Waite (his longtime roommates in captivity), and At Your Own Risk offers neither the human nor the religious and political insights to compete with the more eloquent books covering the identical experience. The Sutherlands' suffering is real enough, but they come off as cool, petty, and humorless. They don't explain why Tom ignored warnings from the US government and accepted an administrative post at a campus in a virtual war zone, crawling with members of several Palestinian guerrilla groups with whom he seems at times to sympathize. But the dean is even a mediocre anti- imperialist. Deep in captivity, when we seek his profound ruminations about life, freedom, love, and war, we learn that Sutherland preferred the enhanced salary and prestige that American University offered over Colorado State University. In captivity, he is ``terribly worried about the impact of this whole thing on my career.'' While Jean is tirelessly meeting with government officials and attending yellow-ribbon-tying ceremonies for Tom, he is bemoaning his inferior chess game and his inability to read as well as Terry Anderson. The boredom is breached when the hostages get a radio, and there is a rare moment of emotion when Sutherland hears a birthday greeting from his family. Hungrier for attention than an Oprah guest, the finally freed Sutherland gushes, ``What an ovation! . . . it made up for all those years.'' Readers are likely to be embarrassed by the closing crescendo of self-congratulation.
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-55591-255-9
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Fulcrum
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
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