A brief but thorough—and thoroughly sensible—business resource.
A practical guide to navigating the ever changing business climate in China.
According to Chao, the last decade has ushered in seismic change for China’s business environment—the growth of e-commerce, a burgeoning middle class, and a more globalized outlook have resulted in a rewriting of the old rules. As a consequence, there is a wealth of opportunities in China not just for colossal multinational corporations, but also for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that previously found the nation a prohibitively costly and complex environment. The author demythologizes the cultural barriers to doing business in China; he debunks the “half-truths and sweeping generalizations” about the value of keeping face and the indispensability of special favors and connections, and he puts into context the emphasis placed on trust and the understanding of the local ceremony. In short, Chao contends that an unnecessary preoccupation with cultural rectitude detracts from more conventionally sound business practices. Still, he avers, there is a real cultural and linguistic divide that renders a foreigner’s instincts all but useless: “Westerners may be able to make instinctive decisions when dealing with their fellow countrypeople [sic], but they lack the experience needed to make similar judgments about Mainland Chinese.” The author provides a surfeit of actionable counsel, including how to determine whether one’s business is a good fit for China, how to understand and make legal contracts, and how to negotiate effectively. Also, this second edition adds Chao’s prognostications regarding China’s future, which the author envisions as brimming with both considerable progress and social unrest. Chao has over 20 years of experience working as a consultant to SMBs in China, and his long-accumulated wisdom is evinced on every page and consistently delivered in easily accessible prose. He furnishes a helpful combination of cultural context and pragmatic advice and paints a picture of China markedly divergent from conventional orthodoxy. His points are frequently illustrated with personal anecdotes, which make the book not only easier to understand, but also a more companionable read. And Chao radiates a healthy humility about his conclusions, especially given the protean nature of Chinese society. “My book will probably be just as funny and antiquated 10 years from now; a source for jokes for the new 20-somethings going to China.” Even those not interested in business per se but looking for a synoptic primer on Chinese culture will find Chao’s book appealing. He anatomizes with great subtlety the current generation’s uneasy juxtaposition between the old and the new, between the modern world eating up the horizon and the hold of an ancient tradition slow to concede ground. For example, contracts matter—you shouldn’t do business without them—but often the Chinese don’t interpret them as decisive and unashamedly revise them post-agreement. Chao’s rendering of China is cleareyed and relentlessly empirical, reporting from the inside the new way of doing business and the new opportunities consequently generated.
A brief but thorough—and thoroughly sensible—business resource.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5320-5271-2
Page Count: 238
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
