China today is visible everywhere — in the news, in the economic pressures battering the globe, in our workplaces, and in every trip to the store. Provocative, timely, and essential — and updated with new statistics and information — this dramatic account of China’s growing dominance as an industrial superpower by journalist Ted C. Fishman explains how the profound shift in the world economic order has occurred — and why it already affects us all.

How has an enormous country once hobbled by poverty and Communist ideology come to be the supercharged center of global capitalism? What does it mean that China now grows three times faster than the United States? Why do nearly all of the world’s biggest companies have large operations in China? What does the corporate march into China mean for workers left behind in America, Europe, and the rest of the world?

Meanwhile, what makes China’s emerging corporations so dangerously competitive? What will happen when China manufactures nearly everything — computers, cars, jumbo jets, and pharmaceuticals — that the United States and Europe can, at perhaps half the cost? How do these developments reach around the world and straight into all of our lives?

These are ground-shaking questions, and China, Inc. provides answers.

Veteran journalist Ted C. Fishman shows how China will force all of us to make big changes in how we think about ourselves as consumers, workers, citizens, and even as parents. The result is a richly engaging work of penetrating, up-to-the-minute reportage and brilliant analysis that will forever change how readers think about America’s future.China has the world’s most rapidly changing large economy, and according to Ted Fishman, it is forcing the world to change along with it. “No country has ever before made a better run at climbing every step of economic development all at once,” he writes, in China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World. China is currently the largest maker of toys, clothing, and consumer electronics, and is swiftly moving up the ladder in car production, computer manufacturing, biotechnology, aerospace, telecommunications, and other sectors thanks to low-cost, high-tech factories. China is also where the world is investing. In 2004, for instance, the city of Shanghai alone attracted over billion in direct foreign investment, roughly the same amount as all of Indonesia and Mexico received. In tracing China’s ascendancy over the past 30 years (with annual growth of an astonishing 9.5 percent), Fishman presents a flood of facts, figures, forecasts, and anecdotes and examines the implications of this unprecedented growth for China, the U.S., and the rest of the world.

Calling China’s huge population “arguably the greatest natural resource on the planet,” Fishman details how hundreds of millions of peasants have migrated from rural to urban areas to find manufacturing jobs, providing an unlimited, low-wage workforce to power China’s economy. In the process, this shift has changed both Chinese culture and the global business climate in significant ways. Simply put, American companies can’t compete with wages as low as 25 cents an hour and lack of regulation and oversight, so are forced to move their operations to China or completely change the focus of their business. And it’s not just a problem for the U.S.–even Mexico is outsourcing to China. Though it remains to be seen whether this will truly be the “Chinese Century” as Fishman asserts, China, Inc. is a brisk and informative look at why so many American corporations, and American jobs, are heading to China. –Shawn Carkonen

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