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
Consuming more now and enjoying it less? In this heavily researched but accessible work, Schor (Women’s Studies/Harvard; The Overworked American, 1992) tells us how and why this is so and what we might do about it. “See-want-borrow-and-buy” is Schor’s succinct summation of American spending habits. As status and identity become increasingly indistinguishable, our very sense of worth becomes invested in what we buy. We spend billions for status. Given identical pairs of jeans, identical tubes of lipstick, we will more than likely buy, at a much higher price, the item with the designer label. Yet, such spending is self-defeating and never-ending. We no longer wish simply to keep up with our neighbors, but to emulate the spending habits of the richest 20 percent of Americans (television is the main vehicle through which we know what they buy). As their consumption increases, then, so does ours. The result of this endless game of catch-up is Americans working more, going increasingly into debt, but finding themselves no more happy or contented, in fact often a great deal less so. Further, as we spend privately our support for collective consumption—on education, social services, public safety—diminishes, further eroding our sense of well-being. It’s possible, but not easy given how natural it seems, to get out of this cycle of self-defeating consumption. Millions of Americans, whom Schor terms “downshifters,” have opted to work, earn, and consume less and in the process created richer, more meaningful lives. Schor supports all of these findings with abundant, perhaps overabundant, survey data. Missing, though, is a consideration of why consumption is so deeply ingrained in us, what’s lacking in our collective lives that leads to such compensatory consumption. She discusses fears of downward mobility but never really develops this theme. Despite some shortcomings, this is an important analysis of who, or perhaps what, we are. It deserves and will surely gain a wide audience. ($100,000 ad/promo; author tour; radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-465-06056-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A well-researched, albeit dry and repetitive chronicle of the decline of one of America's most famous ``independents.'' Ward (History/Univ. of Tennessee) takes the reader on a 60- year historical ride, from Packard's introduction of the Model A in 1899 to its dissolution in 1958. It is a tragic journey, and Ward meticulously traces the financial mishaps culminating in the Packard's fall. Still, many questions remain unanswered. Should Packard have abandoned its centralized paternalistic management structure? Did Packard wait too long in seeking out strategic alliances (and possible merger) with other independents? Was it a mistake for Packard to compete with the Big Three in the ``economy'' class market? After stating in the opening pages that Packard's failure was caused by ``unforeseeable and uncontrollable events,'' the author presents mounds of company data supposedly impacting on Packard's demise, most of which could easily have been relegated to a few charts and graphs. And many of the factors are not firm-specific: For example, Packard was not the only industrial corporation that was adversely affected by postWW II price controls, raw material shortages, inflationary pressures, and labor unrest. The most interesting passages are ancillary to the book's central themethe intriguing bits and pieces of information relating to automotive personalities, e.g., George Mason's role in the formation of the American Motors Corporation, the infighting at Ford between ex-Packard president James J. Nance and soon-to-be secretary of defense Robert McNamara, and, probably the most unusual, the fact that Robert Teague, one of Studebaker-Packard's most innovative designers, played a girl in a few television episodes of Our Gang. At the end, one is left without an inkling as to whether Packard's collapse was an inevitable consequence of the radical industrial changes America experienced over the last century or merely an unfortunate series of avoidable managerial blunders. (51 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8047-2457-1
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Stanford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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