A nuanced yet accessible primer on the forces that shape Chinese economic policies.
A former business executive surveys the history of Chinese economic growth.
As a marketing executive with Comcast and other television broadcast providers, Taylor struggled to make inroads with the “American Chinese” customer. Recognizing the general ignorance of Western advertisers regarding Chinese consumers, the author came to understand that the Confucian value of frugality requires businesses to prioritize the value of their products. Combining her decades of experience in the business sector with subsequent research and trips to China, Taylor offers American readers a primer on understanding Chinese economic growth and its underlying ideological basis. While much of the last half century has been shaped by Chinese/U.S. coexistence (in which “America provided the innovative breakthroughs” and China dominated manufacturing “by creating and controlling the world’s largest factory floor”), the two nations are divided by their underlying ideologies, asserts the author. While the American free enterprise system prioritizes capitalism and democracy, China’s economic philosophy, per Taylor, combines state capitalism with censorship and “digitally managed authoritarianism.” Divided into three parts, the book begins with an overview of Xi Jinping, who joins Deng Xiaoping as the major architect of China’s post-Mao economic boom. Leveraging his personal backstory, Xi tapped into a national hunger for the “Chinese Dream,” promising a new era of status and economic prosperity to a growing middle class. The book’s second section takes readers through a history of China from the Qing Dynasty (whose imperial might gave way to a “Century of Humiliation” at the hands of Western colonizers) to the economic programs of Mao, Deng, and Xi. Behind the Chinese Dream, Taylor notes, is an emphasis on “saving face” as Chinese leaders harken back to a pre-colonial era of Chinese cultural, political, and regional supremacy. The book’s final section offers a multi-chapter analysis of contemporary China, surveying the intersection of economic expansion with environmental degradation, human reproductive policies, and other issues.
This is a well-researched, insightful commentary on Chinese economic history and philosophy, informed by Taylor’s business savvy and supported by more than 500 endnotes. The author balances her keen observations with an accessible writing style. The text (minus endnotes) comes in at just over 200 pages and is accompanied by a wealth of graphs, charts, and other visual aids. Equally valuable is the book’s robust appendix, which features case studies on the Chinese production of entry-level sport utility vehicles and the clashes between globalism and censorship that characterize China’s relationships with Hollywood and the National Basketball Association. A selection of essays highlights the myriad of strategies, follies, and contradictions that drive Chinese economic policies. The author should be particularly commended for her emphasis on nuances that challenge broad Western assumptions about Chinese worldviews. Taylor’s analysis of Chinese communist leaders, for example, reveals striking differences between the outlooks of Mao and his successors, who were willing to accept economic inequalities as a mainstay of the national economy (“Some will get rich first,” the communist leader Deng once proclaimed as he embraced consumerism). The author also makes a convincing argument that it is imperative for Western businesses and policymakers to understand the ideologies that drive Chinese leaders as the world enters into a fourth industrial revolution centered on technology, global trade, and information.
A nuanced yet accessible primer on the forces that shape Chinese economic policies.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9798990803909
Page Count: 338
Publisher: TGM
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
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
PERSPECTIVES
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