An excellent comprehensive study from an expert on the subject.
A veteran U.S. trade negotiator offers a cogent overview of how the U.S. grievously misjudged China’s response to globalization.
When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, many observers had high hopes that it would become what former deputy secretary of state Robert Zoellick described as “a responsible stakeholder in the global system.” Indeed, how could the internet allow China to be anything but more liberal and democratic? In a well-rendered, layered narrative, Prestowitz carefully examines the naïve expectations by U.S. and other Western leaders going back to the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989—a clear red flag that was swiftly ignored in the rush to do business with the authoritarian state. As a labor, trade, and commerce expert, the author deftly sifts through the evidence over the decades to record how China systematically rejected attempts by liberal leaders to manipulate it for their profit. Meanwhile, in less than a decade after 2001, the Chinese managed to quadruple GDP via policies that “protected and subsidized investment aimed at developing indigenous capacity in industries characterized by economies of scale and rapid technological advances in the context of potentially large export markets.” Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore had deployed similar strategies, all of which defied the “expectations of Anglo-American economists, journalist, and trade officials.” China was clearly not going to become a responsible “stakeholder.” Under President Xi Jinping, writes Prestowitz, “China seems to be determined to resurrect the old Middle Kingdom as the new world hegemon.” The Chinese leadership grasps their importance in the complex game of global trade, and they are working hard on the highly ambitious One Belt One Road project. Most alarming, notes the author, is the infiltration of the Communist Party into every aspect of Chinese life. Prestowitz doesn’t just point out problems; he offers a detailed, 25-page “Plan for America.”
An excellent comprehensive study from an expert on the subject.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-300-24849-4
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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