Purchase
The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage
Penguin Press
March 2008
On Sale: April 3, 2008
352 pages
ISBN: 1594201579
EAN: 9781594201578
Hardcover
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction Political
In The China Price, acclaimed Financial Times correspondent
Alex Harney uncovers the truth about how China is able to
offer such amazingly low prices to the rest of the world.
What she has discovered is a brutal, Hobbesian world in
which intense pricing pressure from Western companies
combines with ubiquitous corruption and a lack of
transparency to exact an unseen and unconscionable toll in
human misery and environmental damage. In a way, Harney shows, what goes on in China is
inevitable. In a country with almost no transparency, where
graft is institutionalized and workers have little recourse
to the rule of law, incentives to lie about business
practices vastly outweigh incentives to tell the truth.
Harney reveals that despite a decade of monitoring
factories, outsiders all too often have no idea of the
conditions under which goods from China are made. She
exposes the widespread practice of using a dummy or model
factory as a company's false window out to the world,
concealing a vast number of illegal factories operating
completely off the books. Some Western companies are better
than others about sniffing out such deception, but too many
are perfectly happy to embrace plausible deniability as
long as the prices remain so low. And in the gold-rush
atmosphere that's infected the country, in which everyone
is clamoring to get rich at once and corruption is rampant,
it's almost impossible for the Chinese government's own
underfunded regulatory mechanisms to do much good at all. But perhaps the most important revelation in The China
Price is how fast change is coming, one way or another. A
generation of Chinese flocked from the rural interior of
the country to its coastline, where its factory work
largely is, in the largest mass migration in human history.
But that migration has slowed dramatically, in no small
part because of widespread disenchantment with the way of
life the factories offer. As pollution in China's
industrial cities worsens and their infrastructure buckles,
and grassroots activism for more legal recourse grows,
pressures are mounting on the system that will not
dissipate without profound change. Managing the violence of
that change is the greatest challenge China faces in the
near future, and managing its impact on the world economy
is the challenge that faces us all.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
| 
© 2003-2025 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy