China Inc or Report from Engine Co 82

China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World

Author: Ted C Fishman

China today is visible everywhere -- in the news, in the economic pressures battering america, in the workplace, and in every trip to the store. provocative, timely, and essential, this dramatic account of china's growing dominance as an industrial super-power by journalist Ted C. Fishman explains how the profound shift in the global 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? That China uses 40 percent of the world's concrete and 25 percent of its steel? What is the global impact of 300 million rural Chinese walking off their farms and heading to the cities in the greatest migration in human history? Why do nearly all of the world's biggest companies now have large-scale 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 could happen when China will be able to manufacture 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 the lives of all Americans?

These are ground-shaking questions, and China, Inc. provides answers.Veteran journalist and former commodities trader Ted C. Fishman paints a vivid picture of the megatrends radiating out of China. Fishman's account begins with the burgeoning output of China's vastlow-cost factories and the swelling appetite of its 1.3 billion consumers, both of which are being driven by historically unprecedented infusions of foreign capital and technological know-how. Traveling through China's frenetic landscape of growth, Fishman visits the factories, markets, streets, stores, towns, and cities where the story of Chinese capitalism is being lived by one-fifth of all humanity. Fishman also draws on interviews with Chinese, American, and European workers, managers, and executives to show 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.

The New York Times - William Grimes

Mr. Fishman describes China's miracle economy with a mixture of fear and admiration. He is a lively writer, and some of his most vivid pages are devoted to the wrenching transformations brought about by the government's controlled experiment in free enterprise. He paints a neon-lit portrait of Shanghai, the showcase city of the new China. He also walks through the market stalls and factory floors of new super-cities like Shenzhen, a fishing town of 70,000 20 years ago that now has 7 million people, making it larger than Los Angeles or Paris, swelled by migrants from the countryside looking for a better life in the city. They are part of the largest human migration in history, a tide estimated to be as high as 300 million Chinese who account for the dynamism of the Chinese economy.

Publishers Weekly

A lively, fact-packed account of China's spectacular, 30-year transformation from economic shambles following Mao's Cultural Revolution to burgeoning market superpower, this book offers a torrent of statistics, case studies and anecdotes to tell a by now familiar but still worrisome story succinctly. Paid an average of 25 cents an hour, China's workers are not the world's cheapest, but no nation can match this "docile and capable industrial workforce, groomed by generations of government-enforced discipline," as veteran business reporter (and Chicago Mercantile trading firm founder) Fishman characterizes it. Since Mexican wages were (at the time) four times those of China, NAFTA's impact has been dwarfed by China's explosive growth (about 9.5% a year), and corporations and entrepreneurs operating in China have few worries about minimum wages, pensions, benefits, unions, antipollution laws or worker safety regulations. For the U.S., Fishman predicts more of what we're already seeing: deficits, declining wages and the squeezing of the middle class. His solutions (revitalize education, close the trade gap) are not original, but some of his statistics carry a jolt: since 1998, prices in the U.S. have risen 16%, but they've fallen in nearly every category where China is the top exporter; a pair of Levis bought at Wal-Mart costs less today, adjusted for inflation, than it did 20 years ago-though the company no longer makes clothes in China. First serial to the New York Times Magazine; author tour. (Feb.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

As China starts making more stuff more cheaply, how will the rest of the world stay afloat financially? Journalist Fishman is facing a six-city author tour. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Will China soon own the world? Perhaps. "The opportunities now in China are too big to miss," writes business journalist Fishman in his timely look at the Pacific Rim's most powerful economic tiger. The national economy is expanding at annual rates (officially, 9.5 percent) that seem scarcely imaginable and scarcely sustainable. The impetus behind that growth is simple, the author notes: With a population of somewhere between 1.3 and 1.5 billion, the number of new businesses launched in the last generation exceeds 120 million, while the number of workers who have left the countryside to work in the cities exceeds the entire US workforce. China's growth is without equal in modern history, Fishman argues, and it has disturbing implications for workers in the US and Europe. China is not only capturing more and more of the world's market share in consumer goods, it's making increasing inroads into the more significant trade in "the infinite number and variety of components that make up everything else that is made," from gaskets to bolts to computer chips. Yet another great economic engine is small business; hundreds of millions of small concerns are on hand in China to provide whatever the market is calling for-never mind that those goods are so often cheap and of low quality. (Where, after all, would WalMart be without China?) Fishman is a little alarmed by China's growth, but also ready to comfort readers with the prospect of ever-falling prices thanks to its abundant low-wage labor pool. He is more alarmed, however, at a seeming codependency that is emerging, in which Americans buy Chinese goods with money that is in essence on loan from China. "The United States," he warns, "cannot takeon ever-bigger debt and amass huge trade deficits indefinitely."A thought-provoking and accessible forecast of strange times to come. First serial to the New York Times Magazine; author tour. Agent: Sloan Harris/ICM

Table of Contents:

	Introduction : the world shrinks as China grows	1
Ch. 1	Taking a slow boat in a fast China	19
Ch. 2	The revolution against the communist revolution	37
Ch. 3	To make 16 billion socks, first break the law	53
Ch. 4	Meet George Jetson, in Beijing	77
Ch. 5	Chairman Mao sells soup	123
Ch. 6	Through the looking glass	137
Ch. 7	The China price	177
Ch. 8	How the race to the bottom is a race to the top	203
Ch. 9	Pirate nation	231
Ch. 10	The Chinese-American economy	253
Ch. 11	The Chinese century	271
Ch. 12	One last story	297

See also: Macroeconomics or Nonprofit Strategic Positioning

Report from Engine Co. 82

Author: Dennis Smith

Report from Engine Co. 82 is the story of one company of New York firefighters battling unimaginable death and destruction every day.

Dennis Smith worked as a firefighter in the South Bronx of New York City, and the graphic detail and gripping prose of this firefighting classic drives the most important, accomplished, terrifying book ever published on firefighting. With over two million copies in print, this book struck a nerve within the nation when it was first published thirty years ago. In our troubled times, it gains even greater resonance for those trying to make sense of the deaths of so many New York firefighters on September 11 and for those inspired by the tireless work of firefighters and other rescue personnel in the aftermath of the destruction. Dennis Smith describes the bravery, heroism, camaraderie, and unflinching courage of New York's bravest, demonstrating how firefighters everywhere have become the most respected of American heroes.

Library Journal

In 1972, Emergency, a show about the Los Angeles Fire Department, debuted on network TV. That same year, Smith, a New York City fireman, published this book about life in what was the busiest fire station in the country. It is the diary of a fireman in a station with over 700 calls per month. From the life and death heroics of firefighting to the frustration of false alarms and garbage fires, Smith ably shares his life at Engine Co. 82. Written during a period of civil unrest, the work captures the spirit of that time and shows how the social problems of the era affected the lives of the firemen whose duty was to protect all the citizens in their district. The author paints a portrait of the fire house: the drills, the off-color jokes, the male-bonding that occurs when men know their lives will often be in the hands of their buddies. Adam Henderson does a great job with the various New York City accents. Highly recommended for all public libraries.-Theresa Connors, Arkansas Tech Univ., Russellville Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.