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 (ZT)A well balanced view of China from a American's eyes |
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youhighness
头衔: 海归中尉
性别: 
加入时间: 2006/10/14
文章: 783
来自: 哲里木盟科尔沁左翼中旗木里图苏木爱搞不搞嘎查
海归分: 5798
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作者：youhighness 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
I watched the talkshow traiiler of this guy and his book. He stayed in China 10 years from 1981 to 1991 as a history student in Nanjing Uni. and after that, he went back to China numerious times. I saw him more has a Chinese thinking logic than a American's.
The talk show trailer is available at link below.
https://www.la18.tv/Video.aspx?vid=8df40086-447d-4888-9159-3f617466c89d
(ZT)Tempered view of China’s might
Tempered view of China’s might
By Andrew Hill
Published: October 31 2006 16:57 | Last updated: October 31 2006 16:57
James Kynge recalls how his wife fed him honey sandwiches in their kitchen to calm his nerves as he worked out how to write a book on China, the country that has fascinated him since he first visited as a student in 1982.
That Mr Kynge offered this homely insight in front of an audience of top Manhattan executives after receiving the award last week for best business book of 2006 is a measure of the British author’s self-deprecating style.
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It is also an indication of how different China Shakes the World is from The World is Flat, which won last year’s Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.
Both books are about important forces sweeping the world of business. Yet while Tom Friedman, author of The World is Flat, offers a bullish – and polarising – vision of globalisation, Mr Kynge says he deliberately sought to avoid the straitjacket of polemic, which he feels would have misrepresented the complexity of his topic.
As he states in the introduction to the book: “The rise of great powers and their subsequent decline from eminence . . . can rarely be traced in a simple, linear fashion. They are full of twists and turns, false dawns and deceptive signals.”
Appropriately for a former FT reporter, Mr Kynge started with what he calls “a whole series of different stories”, which he only later shaped into a narrative, under pressure from his publisher.
The book begins, for example, not in China, but in Dortmund, at the site of a Thyssen Krupp steel mill that has just been dismantled, piece by piece, and then shipped to China for reassembly.
As a symbol of the threat from China, this is a potent one. As Larry Summers, former US treasury secretary, put it in a speech at last week’s book award ceremony: “There’s a vast world of people in Düsseldorf, in Detroit . . . who fear the prospect of competing with India and China on cost.”
But in person, Mr Kynge is eager to dispel some of that fear. He understands why the developed world feels threatened – not just directly, by manufacturing competition, but indirectly, by such unintended consequences of growth as pollution – but he also sees clearly the potential benefits of China’s rise. Asked to identify some of the forces that have developed since the book was published, he settles on the imminent impact of the Chinese middle class.
“Those people are beginning to spend abroad and whether it is real estate in Vancouver, or San Francisco, or on the west coast of Australia, or in London or in New York, or whether it is antiques, or stocks, or luxury branded goods, we are starting to see a trend that will again shake the world.
“Chinese spending power will hit us in about two to three years and at that point perhaps a lot of people who worry about big trade surpluses that China has with the world will begin to feel more sanguine.”
Some Chinese developments, while painted as power-plays, are signs of the country’s weaknesses, he argues. For instance, many commentators have drawn parallels between Chinese companies’ expansion abroad – Lenovo’s purchase of IBM’s personal computer business, or the acquisition by TCL, an electronics group, of Thomson of France and Schneider of Germany – and corporate Japan’s foreign bidding spree in the 1980s. But Mr Kynge says China’s bids for foreign companies are mostly defensive: “Manufacturing in China is a brutal market with wafer-thin margins and when these companies go abroad, they need to, because they’re being killed at home.”
Mr Kynge does, however, fear that some of the stand-offs between China and developed countries will provoke a protectionist backlash within China that will set back global growth and prosperity. To reduce such risks, Mr Kynge believes governments and multi-national businesses need to work more directly to help solve China’s problems in China and to alleviate the impact of Chinese competition on, say, smaller enterprises and middle-income workers at home.
That is a more nuanced vision than the one espoused by Mr Friedman and supporters of an adapt-or-die attitude to globalisation. But Mr Kynge’s view of Chinese expansion is not uniformly rosy. He gives a clear sense, both in his book and in his conversation, that the inexorability of Chinese growth is bound to provoke dangerous geopolitical tensions. China’s appetite for natural resources, from oil to iron ore, is “indiscriminate and inarticulate”, he says. “I don’t see any malevolent intent behind China’s moves to places like Sudan and Venezuela and Iran. For the Chinese, it’s a simple equation. But if you’re sitting in Washington, looking at the Chinese becoming the biggest investor in a place like Sudan, propping up a government that the US regards as a rogue state, then it’s highly problematic.”
Structural and political differences will lead to a “race to the bottom”, Mr Kynge believes, as China’s unconditional promises of investment in developing countries undermine the loftier principles of western investors. In part, this is one inevitable outcome of the clash between the one-party communist system, projecting its market distortions on the outside world, and western democracy’s expectations (one of the chapters of China Shakes the World is entitled “Communism vs Democracy”).
But it pains Mr Kynge that such clashes dominate the world’s headlines. They represent a top-down view of the country at odds with Mr Kynge’s experience of the Chinese people, whom he describes as being “on a quest for spiritual development as great as their quest for material development”.
“It’s sometimes frustrating that the view of China in the west is dominated by public-to-public transactions, which are highly stressful and give the impression that the government of China is chauvinistic,” he says, with characteristic understatement. “The people of China aren’t like that.”
James Kynge on the difficulties of writing about China
“I didn’t want to subject all of the complexities and all of the contradictory trends in China to a simple linear argument. I think to do that, or to attempt to do that, really would be a fruitless quest. China is so huge and there are so many different realities all at play at the same time . . . So I decided to split the book into pluses and minuses.
“If there is a watershed in the book, it comes about halfway, when I’ve finished talking about all of China’s strengths and how those are projected into the wider world and are causing great competitive challenges for Europe and America and I start to talk about how China has weaknesses to balance its strengths. I felt it was just impossible to have one single thing to say about China: you have to give the whole picture.
“I reached the end of the book and felt ‘I have to say something big here; I have to call it’. And actually, those who do reach the end of the book will find that I duck that: I don’t call whether or not China is going to be a threat to the west, whether or not the west is going to turn against China . . . because it would a bit like predicting the Mets against the Yankees – I have no basis on which to make a prediction like that. It’s just more responsible to set out some of the evidence and let people decide.”
“China is such a fast-moving story, so I tried to delve back into history, to give it context and talk about the more immutable trends . . . and in that way to insulate myself and the book against the shifting sands of globalisation, which move so quickly
作者：youhighness 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 (ZT)A well balanced view of China from a American's eyes -- youhighness - (8096 Byte) 2006-11-02 周四, 03:18 (2018 reads)
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